Haha, I love when people tell others they need to do research when they actually need to do some of their own.
Multiple different types of pancreatic cancer. See my above post. Adenocarcinoma = really bad. Neuroendocrine tumor = variable, but often curable.
The "death sentence" pancreatic cancer you are thinking of is pancreatic adenocarcinoma, which arises from the ducts, usually isn't detected until it has metastasized, and yes, has an average life span measured in months.
Jobs had a neuroendocrine cancer, which arises from the islet cells, is generally detected earlier because it causes a variety of symptoms (too much insulin which leads to hypoglycemia, etc), and has a varying but generally fairly good prognosis. In fact in some cases, surgeons can just "shell" the thing out of the pancreas and done. Other options can include an interventional radiologist embolizing the artery that supplies the tumor, killing it.
I don't know his level of metastasis at detection, but a full science approach here would almost certainly have saved him.
Android: Highly likely to be the most popular smartphone OS among slashdot readers.
Cyanogenmod: One of the most popular (if not the most popular) ROMs for Android.
Not so obscure.
I agree, and I always wondered why that is, why AYB is still so memorable. I'm assuming because AYB was created in the days when memes were rare entities and thus is perhaps a prototype.
Now, well, yeah. I can't even keep track of knowyourmeme.com anymore.
I agree, the title "Worst company in America" is definitely worded badly. It's from the Consumerist, which means it's the company with the "worst customer service" or "worst attitude toward consumers" or something along those lines, basically. The investment banks causing the mortgage crisis may have great customer service, who knows? Most Americans don't deal with them on a daily basis, so they're not ever going to win this poll. And BP is not an American company anyway, but no one was complaining how they treated customers. Regardless if most of them are conscious of it are not, EA systematically treats their customers like resources to be mined rather than partners in a mutually beneficial relationship. No one (or at least no one significant) there understands the golden goose principle.
If you've seen The Wire, it reminds me of when Avon Barksdale is at a party at a club and two guys walk in high (his customers most likely) and he looks at them in utter disgust, then has them thrown out. That's why you have been winning this poll, EA. You're the supplier, and we're the junkies, and since there is a cohort of "addict" customers that will continue to purchase your product regardless of how you treat them, you maintain the status quo.
Yeah, the real genius of the infectious disease docs is not the routine viral/bacterial check, nor the pharmacology. It's the advanced and rare stuff that have subtle manifestations, and dealing with all the co-morbidities.
His point, I believe, is "flagrantly wrong" diagnoses are flagrant/obvious enough (such as diagnosing growth plate fracture in an 80 year old or prescribing amputation for pneumonia for instance) that the doctor can then override/run the program again/change parameters/etc. As another resident, I concur with the sentiment.
You're right, if the algorithm was subtly wrong 1% of the time, there would be a high chance of overturning a correct diagnosis.
What did you have, if I may ask, that a computer diagnosed you and your medical team rejected that diagnosis?
Not to nitpick, but no one substituted the word "Germany" for "US." I feel a bit queasy when people substitute the phrase " 'Germany' for 'US' " for " 'US' for 'Germany.' "
Yes, we have a 256-slice scanner that we routinely use. It is excellent for cardiac studies, where speed of scanning is important to reduce motion artifact from cardiac motion.
It would be nice if we could just memorize and recall anything with little effort, but alas, no. The brain is naturally going to gravitate to the most efficient (for itself) solution. The brain's job is twofold: to store information as memories and process it/try to optimize that as well as it can. The thing is, once we know where to find information, we know not to rely on our imperfect memory and just learn the location of that info.
If you had a source of information (say a train timetable) and you knew that you would have access to that timetable via your smartphone at any time, you are going to spend little if any effort on memorizing that timetable (assuming you needed to know more than just 1-2 arrival times). What you will memorize extremely well though, is that reference - the address of the timetable on the internet or the location of the file on your phone.
I really really want to find the study, but I can't at the moment; anyway, it's a fairly logical conclusion. Give two groups a bunch of information they need to regurgitate on an exam. Tell the control group that they will not have access to the information after the time is up, and then store it in a file cabinet. Tell the test group that they will have access to the information (provided they can remember where the information was stored). The control group obviously can give much more information by memory, but they couldn't tell you which drawer of the cabinet it was in. The test group doesn't remember a whole lot, but remembers exactly which drawer and what the folder looked like that the information was stored in. And then the test group obviously does much better on the actual exam at the end; they have all the info.
There is no reason genetically to suggest that we are getting "dumber" in any way. We are the same species we have been for thousands of years. Our information structure is changing rapidly however, and it is interesting to see how we are adapting to it.
Your point was that these kids are all going to be led away from whatever they find on Google. But, as someone else pointed out, that's way more information (more viewpoints, etc) than was available to previous generations.
Ahh, but who says the acqusition of Writely, Keyhole, etc. wasn't fueled by someone's personal time project at the Googleplex?
I can imagine some python coder using Writely on some of their personal time, and going, "This is sweet! We should totally acquire this company and make it Google Docs!" And then they start that ball rolling and help with the coding to convert the app. Or if not some lowly code monkey, maybe someone in high level management/acquisitions. They get their 8 hours a week too, right?
Sorry... also... why don't you think a species seeded with 40,000 people would survive to the Stone Age? Remember, their reproductive parts are intact, and they can mate with the natives as well. They have advanced knowledge about biology and thus food science, and, barring something like a meteor impact, I don't see why the long-term death rate would surpass the birth rate.
Sure we caught that. And for all we know Baltar made a wonderful little farm with Caprica Six and they had a few babies together, but obviously that didn't start the agricultural revolution.
Sorry, I was admittedly not totally clear. So I said even Gaius was going to start farming, i.e. as an extreme example (even Gaius, a scientist who abhors the "farming" part of his past, is going to start farming). They wisely didn't tell us how many people were going to begin farming, but uh... what else are they going to do? Assuming these colonists are from a civilization even more advanced than ours, there would be a negligible number that know how to hunt their own food. Most likely, the easiest thing for them to do would be to gather and... plant the seeds from the foods they gather. Probably almost everyone would know how to domesticate plants, and animals that would let them. They come from a different paradigm, one where they KNOW what will happen when they plant something, rather than being forced to discover it due to population pressures.
Yes, the 'agricultural revolution' does refer to the time when population pressures in an area with relatively easily domesticable plants and/or animals force that population to invent the concept of 'food storage' to survive... and not when randomly scattered people around the world mysteriously began doing it all simultaneously. So I probably should have said "an agricultural revolution" rather than "the agricultural revolution."
It's easy to just sit back and go... "well, 150,000 years is such a long time... the knowledge would just have... faded away..." But, really, is that what would have happened? Maybe I'm the only one here (though in the company of Slashdot readers, I somehow doubt it), but I simply can't forget my knowledge of the world. Let's stop thinking in broad nebulous concepts, and actually take this step by step, i.e. less in terms of Civilization and more in terms of The Sims. Let's say I was one of the colonists. I'm sick of the war, I'm sick of eating algae, I'm sick of being on a space ship. No doubt the live-with-nature lifestyle would have appealed to me. So, I take a small group and we go off in Africa somewhere to live among pre-verbal humans. I'm sorry, but I can't degenerate to that level though. Not won't, but can't. I have not been physically trained my entire life to be a hunter. I don't have those skills, and neither does my group. I might eschew all technology, but I can't forget the scientific knowledge that I have. I can't forget the language that I can use.
I, personally, (and among 40,000 people I'm sure there's at least one person who feels the same way) would start applying my knowledge to my survival. Assuming they don't kill me outright, where the natives could teach me, I would learn from them. Where I could teach them, I would do so. If some manner of communication could be established, I would teach them about the sun, the stars, the moon. I would even teach them basic biology and animal husbandry. I would even possibly do some basic Newtonian physics if they could handle that. Why wouldn't I? I have no reason to lie or to make up myths or to adopt theirs, nor do I have any reason to lie to my offspring when I know perfectly well the reason that the sun disappears for about 12 hours every day. And I can't see any reason why they would lie to theirs either, when it really is the only thing that satisfies the ever-present human questions about their world.
I don't want the whole Cylon mistake to happen again, but so then what do I do about that? Do I just somehow knock my head against a rock until the facts I know about the universe fall out? Maybe the other 39K people would just assimilate and deny the truths they not only have been taught but have experienced. But not me - you can disagree with everything I have said up to now, but at least know this: all I'm saying is what I personally would do. And though I'm not arrogant enough to assume everyone would be the same, I believe that at least a small subset would be of that mindset. I don't expect this to be fully understood on, e.g. a Myspace comment page. But, I do expect this to be understood by Slashdot readers. At least.
I find it rare that I ever chime in with someone using all caps in their post... but I couldn't agree more. This is exactly how I felt after seeing the finale.
Really? All 40 thousand survivors + whatever Cylons there were are just going to give up their understanding about the entire universe and not teach it to their children or leave some sort of octagonal stone/metal records behind? I can understand Lee Adama (a non-scientist soldier who was just fed up with the war and all and blamed the existence of nuclear bombs on the evil SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY) deciding to go all hermit-action. I can even understand a majority of the uneducated masses doing that. But everyone? Really? I mean, after basically insinuating that Doc Cottle was the sole physician in the fleet they pulled a frakking neurosurgeon (John Hodgman you rule) out of their ass in the final season. We have to assume there are quite a few educated others in the fleet that, even if they wouldn't be super excited about building a modern city right away, would at least be able to separate the evils of the application of technology (war and such) from the advantages that come from understanding the world around them. The Adamas can drive all their technology and records and books into the sun, but they can't take away all these people's lifetime education. Even Gaius Baltar is going to start farming... did anyone catch that? That's right, the agricultural revolution actually started 140,000 years before you think it did.
I mean, where do you draw the line at where "technology" is, anyway? What, are they going to take away the hunting spears from the native humans and say "NO! TECHNOLOGY BAD!" After really liking the whole series for four seasons, like the parent post says, they pull classic hippie / not-thinking-the-concept-through / technology-and-science-is-inferior-to-"nature"-even-though-it's-a-part-of-it crap.
It's not a re-imagining. It's a cashing-in on the name value of the original concept.
I don't get what is inaccurate about any series branding itself a re-imagining. Or I guess, perhaps I can't glean your definition of what you think a "re-imagining" is from your comment. I accept the definition that the production company uses just fine; it is an original series with imaginary settings and characters (i.e. fiction), based on a previous series with imaginary settings and characters. It is re-imagined because the settings, characters, and story have been tweaked/added/removed to the point where some significant actual imagination is required. The Star Wars trilogy thing was not a re-imagining, and no one ever claimed as such, it being a form of (mild) re-make. Same characters, same universe, same story, just a slightly altered storytelling medium.
You are right that it absolutely is a cashing-in on the name value of the original concept. No one is doubting that. But, they were honest about that up front anyway. They said this is a re-imagining of the original series. Therefore, they are explicitly using whatever power the brand name Battlestar Galactica had to market their product. No need to go into the importance of brand naming; I think we all understand how powerful that is. It is a gamble though. By using the name, you are inviting comparisons to the source material with every review and every viewing by anyone who has seen the original. Since the critical consensus was that the 2004 BSG was quite superior to the 1978 BSG, the gamble paid off quite nicely. For another example of this, see Star Trek (2009) (not saying that was vastly superior, but just that the gamble paid off there as well).
Part of the gamble is, of course, the "veneers" that tie it to the original work have to be obvious enough to justify using the same name. I can't just make a video of me making a turkey sandwich, upload it to YouTube and call it a re-imagining of Batman. The critical/public consensus here though was that there was enough similarities (a space ship called Galactica lead by a man named Adama guiding/accompanying the last remnants of the human race to a new homeworld while being pursued by a cyborg race called Cylons, among many other themes) to justify the name.
So you're right about the using the name value. But since that happens all the time every single day in a society with any semblance of a free market, you need to go farther and explain why that is bad. Since tropes are re-used over and over throughout all fiction, just saying "same name!" is not sufficient as a criticism.
Slashdot Mirror
Seconded for Netvibes. Been using it since I heard about the iGoogle shutdown, and haven't gone back. I really like it.
Haha, I love when people tell others they need to do research when they actually need to do some of their own.
Multiple different types of pancreatic cancer. See my above post. Adenocarcinoma = really bad. Neuroendocrine tumor = variable, but often curable.
The "death sentence" pancreatic cancer you are thinking of is pancreatic adenocarcinoma, which arises from the ducts, usually isn't detected until it has metastasized, and yes, has an average life span measured in months.
Jobs had a neuroendocrine cancer, which arises from the islet cells, is generally detected earlier because it causes a variety of symptoms (too much insulin which leads to hypoglycemia, etc), and has a varying but generally fairly good prognosis. In fact in some cases, surgeons can just "shell" the thing out of the pancreas and done. Other options can include an interventional radiologist embolizing the artery that supplies the tumor, killing it.
I don't know his level of metastasis at detection, but a full science approach here would almost certainly have saved him.
I felt this cracked.com article was pertinent here. When dealing with your own/loved one's impending/recent death, usually moping about thinking about it is not very helpful.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-no-one-tells-you-about-dealing-with-death/
Also, read the top comments. It was quite a good one.
He didn't skip it because he did care about your post. No irony there.
Android: Highly likely to be the most popular smartphone OS among slashdot readers.
Cyanogenmod: One of the most popular (if not the most popular) ROMs for Android.
Not so obscure.
I agree, and I always wondered why that is, why AYB is still so memorable. I'm assuming because AYB was created in the days when memes were rare entities and thus is perhaps a prototype.
Now, well, yeah. I can't even keep track of knowyourmeme.com anymore.
If you've seen The Wire, it reminds me of when Avon Barksdale is at a party at a club and two guys walk in high (his customers most likely) and he looks at them in utter disgust, then has them thrown out. That's why you have been winning this poll, EA. You're the supplier, and we're the junkies, and since there is a cohort of "addict" customers that will continue to purchase your product regardless of how you treat them, you maintain the status quo.
Yeah, the real genius of the infectious disease docs is not the routine viral/bacterial check, nor the pharmacology. It's the advanced and rare stuff that have subtle manifestations, and dealing with all the co-morbidities.
His point, I believe, is "flagrantly wrong" diagnoses are flagrant/obvious enough (such as diagnosing growth plate fracture in an 80 year old or prescribing amputation for pneumonia for instance) that the doctor can then override/run the program again/change parameters/etc. As another resident, I concur with the sentiment. You're right, if the algorithm was subtly wrong 1% of the time, there would be a high chance of overturning a correct diagnosis. What did you have, if I may ask, that a computer diagnosed you and your medical team rejected that diagnosis?
Not to nitpick, but no one substituted the word "Germany" for "US." I feel a bit queasy when people substitute the phrase " 'Germany' for 'US' " for " 'US' for 'Germany.' "
Guys, guys! Mars is where all the information on how to make mass effect fields is buried. So getting back should be really fast and easy.
The word "stealing" may have various and sundry meanings, but the legal definition of theft does not.
Yes, we have a 256-slice scanner that we routinely use. It is excellent for cardiac studies, where speed of scanning is important to reduce motion artifact from cardiac motion.
It would be nice if we could just memorize and recall anything with little effort, but alas, no. The brain is naturally going to gravitate to the most efficient (for itself) solution. The brain's job is twofold: to store information as memories and process it/try to optimize that as well as it can. The thing is, once we know where to find information, we know not to rely on our imperfect memory and just learn the location of that info.
If you had a source of information (say a train timetable) and you knew that you would have access to that timetable via your smartphone at any time, you are going to spend little if any effort on memorizing that timetable (assuming you needed to know more than just 1-2 arrival times). What you will memorize extremely well though, is that reference - the address of the timetable on the internet or the location of the file on your phone.
I really really want to find the study, but I can't at the moment; anyway, it's a fairly logical conclusion. Give two groups a bunch of information they need to regurgitate on an exam. Tell the control group that they will not have access to the information after the time is up, and then store it in a file cabinet. Tell the test group that they will have access to the information (provided they can remember where the information was stored). The control group obviously can give much more information by memory, but they couldn't tell you which drawer of the cabinet it was in. The test group doesn't remember a whole lot, but remembers exactly which drawer and what the folder looked like that the information was stored in. And then the test group obviously does much better on the actual exam at the end; they have all the info.
There is no reason genetically to suggest that we are getting "dumber" in any way. We are the same species we have been for thousands of years. Our information structure is changing rapidly however, and it is interesting to see how we are adapting to it.
Your point was that these kids are all going to be led away from whatever they find on Google. But, as someone else pointed out, that's way more information (more viewpoints, etc) than was available to previous generations.
We're so close. We just need a couple hundred thousand more participants:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/6000-runners-fail-to-discover-cure-for-breast-canc,176/
Huh? Did this comment time travel from 2009?
Except brain cells aren't replaced.
The average Kim, you insensitive clod!
Ahh, but who says the acqusition of Writely, Keyhole, etc. wasn't fueled by someone's personal time project at the Googleplex? I can imagine some python coder using Writely on some of their personal time, and going, "This is sweet! We should totally acquire this company and make it Google Docs!" And then they start that ball rolling and help with the coding to convert the app. Or if not some lowly code monkey, maybe someone in high level management/acquisitions. They get their 8 hours a week too, right?
Oh I know. Believe me, I not only caught your sarcasm but felt it with you.
Sorry... also... why don't you think a species seeded with 40,000 people would survive to the Stone Age? Remember, their reproductive parts are intact, and they can mate with the natives as well. They have advanced knowledge about biology and thus food science, and, barring something like a meteor impact, I don't see why the long-term death rate would surpass the birth rate.
Sure we caught that. And for all we know Baltar made a wonderful little farm with Caprica Six and they had a few babies together, but obviously that didn't start the agricultural revolution.
Sorry, I was admittedly not totally clear. So I said even Gaius was going to start farming, i.e. as an extreme example (even Gaius, a scientist who abhors the "farming" part of his past, is going to start farming). They wisely didn't tell us how many people were going to begin farming, but uh... what else are they going to do? Assuming these colonists are from a civilization even more advanced than ours, there would be a negligible number that know how to hunt their own food. Most likely, the easiest thing for them to do would be to gather and... plant the seeds from the foods they gather. Probably almost everyone would know how to domesticate plants, and animals that would let them. They come from a different paradigm, one where they KNOW what will happen when they plant something, rather than being forced to discover it due to population pressures.
Yes, the 'agricultural revolution' does refer to the time when population pressures in an area with relatively easily domesticable plants and/or animals force that population to invent the concept of 'food storage' to survive... and not when randomly scattered people around the world mysteriously began doing it all simultaneously. So I probably should have said "an agricultural revolution" rather than "the agricultural revolution."
It's easy to just sit back and go... "well, 150,000 years is such a long time... the knowledge would just have... faded away..." But, really, is that what would have happened? Maybe I'm the only one here (though in the company of Slashdot readers, I somehow doubt it), but I simply can't forget my knowledge of the world. Let's stop thinking in broad nebulous concepts, and actually take this step by step, i.e. less in terms of Civilization and more in terms of The Sims. Let's say I was one of the colonists. I'm sick of the war, I'm sick of eating algae, I'm sick of being on a space ship. No doubt the live-with-nature lifestyle would have appealed to me. So, I take a small group and we go off in Africa somewhere to live among pre-verbal humans. I'm sorry, but I can't degenerate to that level though. Not won't, but can't. I have not been physically trained my entire life to be a hunter. I don't have those skills, and neither does my group. I might eschew all technology, but I can't forget the scientific knowledge that I have. I can't forget the language that I can use.
I, personally, (and among 40,000 people I'm sure there's at least one person who feels the same way) would start applying my knowledge to my survival. Assuming they don't kill me outright, where the natives could teach me, I would learn from them. Where I could teach them, I would do so. If some manner of communication could be established, I would teach them about the sun, the stars, the moon. I would even teach them basic biology and animal husbandry. I would even possibly do some basic Newtonian physics if they could handle that. Why wouldn't I? I have no reason to lie or to make up myths or to adopt theirs, nor do I have any reason to lie to my offspring when I know perfectly well the reason that the sun disappears for about 12 hours every day. And I can't see any reason why they would lie to theirs either, when it really is the only thing that satisfies the ever-present human questions about their world.
I don't want the whole Cylon mistake to happen again, but so then what do I do about that? Do I just somehow knock my head against a rock until the facts I know about the universe fall out? Maybe the other 39K people would just assimilate and deny the truths they not only have been taught but have experienced. But not me - you can disagree with everything I have said up to now, but at least know this: all I'm saying is what I personally would do. And though I'm not arrogant enough to assume everyone would be the same, I believe that at least a small subset would be of that mindset. I don't expect this to be fully understood on, e.g. a Myspace comment page. But, I do expect this to be understood by Slashdot readers. At least.
I find it rare that I ever chime in with someone using all caps in their post... but I couldn't agree more. This is exactly how I felt after seeing the finale.
Really? All 40 thousand survivors + whatever Cylons there were are just going to give up their understanding about the entire universe and not teach it to their children or leave some sort of octagonal stone/metal records behind? I can understand Lee Adama (a non-scientist soldier who was just fed up with the war and all and blamed the existence of nuclear bombs on the evil SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY) deciding to go all hermit-action. I can even understand a majority of the uneducated masses doing that. But everyone? Really? I mean, after basically insinuating that Doc Cottle was the sole physician in the fleet they pulled a frakking neurosurgeon (John Hodgman you rule) out of their ass in the final season. We have to assume there are quite a few educated others in the fleet that, even if they wouldn't be super excited about building a modern city right away, would at least be able to separate the evils of the application of technology (war and such) from the advantages that come from understanding the world around them. The Adamas can drive all their technology and records and books into the sun, but they can't take away all these people's lifetime education. Even Gaius Baltar is going to start farming... did anyone catch that? That's right, the agricultural revolution actually started 140,000 years before you think it did.
I mean, where do you draw the line at where "technology" is, anyway? What, are they going to take away the hunting spears from the native humans and say "NO! TECHNOLOGY BAD!" After really liking the whole series for four seasons, like the parent post says, they pull classic hippie / not-thinking-the-concept-through / technology-and-science-is-inferior-to-"nature"-even-though-it's-a-part-of-it crap.
It's not a re-imagining. It's a cashing-in on the name value of the original concept.
I don't get what is inaccurate about any series branding itself a re-imagining. Or I guess, perhaps I can't glean your definition of what you think a "re-imagining" is from your comment. I accept the definition that the production company uses just fine; it is an original series with imaginary settings and characters (i.e. fiction), based on a previous series with imaginary settings and characters. It is re-imagined because the settings, characters, and story have been tweaked/added/removed to the point where some significant actual imagination is required. The Star Wars trilogy thing was not a re-imagining, and no one ever claimed as such, it being a form of (mild) re-make. Same characters, same universe, same story, just a slightly altered storytelling medium.
You are right that it absolutely is a cashing-in on the name value of the original concept. No one is doubting that. But, they were honest about that up front anyway. They said this is a re-imagining of the original series. Therefore, they are explicitly using whatever power the brand name Battlestar Galactica had to market their product. No need to go into the importance of brand naming; I think we all understand how powerful that is. It is a gamble though. By using the name, you are inviting comparisons to the source material with every review and every viewing by anyone who has seen the original. Since the critical consensus was that the 2004 BSG was quite superior to the 1978 BSG, the gamble paid off quite nicely. For another example of this, see Star Trek (2009) (not saying that was vastly superior, but just that the gamble paid off there as well).
Part of the gamble is, of course, the "veneers" that tie it to the original work have to be obvious enough to justify using the same name. I can't just make a video of me making a turkey sandwich, upload it to YouTube and call it a re-imagining of Batman. The critical/public consensus here though was that there was enough similarities (a space ship called Galactica lead by a man named Adama guiding/accompanying the last remnants of the human race to a new homeworld while being pursued by a cyborg race called Cylons, among many other themes) to justify the name.
So you're right about the using the name value. But since that happens all the time every single day in a society with any semblance of a free market, you need to go farther and explain why that is bad. Since tropes are re-used over and over throughout all fiction, just saying "same name!" is not sufficient as a criticism.