I have been wondering about the safety of the Mandarin Oranges I have been buying (in cups) at the grocery store. They say product of China right on the package (regardless of whether they are name-brand or store-brand); maybe I'll switch to pears and/or peaches instead.
Most of the major initial contribution to the life sciences were made by physician-scientists.
That is an objective statement. I would say a fair number, but that depends on where we draw the lines for "major" and "initial".
I can tell you that it is essentially impossible to "memorize textbooks and regurgitate on command" without building a mental model of the underlying biology or physiology.
I know a lot of med students, and I went to undergrad with a lot of pre-med students. Virtually none of them actually learned the material they went through in undergrad or in their first two years of med school; they relied on memorization instead. For better or for worse (I vote for the latter) this is exactly how the system is structured for them.
I would say that any medical program that doesn't promote critical thinking and scientific literacy is a program in need of reform.
I agree. However you are calling for the reform of every medical school in the country, as well as every pre-med program and the MCAT itself. AMCAS will not stand for that. They believe in their system whole-heartedly and believe that it creates the greatest physicians on earth.
Who does csh-2.mit.edu belong to at MIT? For a school that large there is a very good chance that it belongs to someone who is not necessarily well versed in network security. It is entirely possible that the system was compromised because of an exploit that an admin would consider "obvious" for whatever OS was running on it.
Medicine requires a lot of memorization and regurgitation - physicians have to apply their natural pattern-matching skills to research a huge database
Fixed that for 'ya.
Medicine, in a way is much harder than the normal problem-set of engineers.
Not really. Engineering actually requires logic and analysis. Medicine is 99% memorization and regurgitation.
(ever seen the size of a Cardiology textbook?)
In fact, yes I have. Last one I saw wasn't that much larger than the Organic Chemistry book I used in undergrad - which a bunch of annoying pre-med students committed to memory so they wouldn't have to actually learn the material.
than physicians wouldn't be recruited among the very best student
Physicians are not recruited from the very best students. They haven't been for quite some time. AMCAS is more interested in students who can memorize and regurgitate tons of information, and doesn't care who actually knows the material. The MCAT test is structured for the same purpose. The methods used to select med students are amongst the worst conceivable strategies for actually selecting "among the very best student" - unless of course what you actually want is an automaton.
In what way is slashdot major anything any more? I don't even remember the last time that a site was slashdotted as a result of being featured on the front page. I'm actually (pleasantly) surprised to see that slashdot has gone roughly a full two days without a story about facebook (or facebook boy) on the front pgae. We were really scraping the bottom of the barrel when slashdot was running 2-3 facebook stories every day.
Nonetheless, readership is down, membership is down, front page stories are less frequent, traffic is decreased... and the remaining users are often here just to complain about how much better this site used to be.
So there is more time for the material that is better then art history or music
In the case of the program I went through, at least, that won't do it. We had 4xxx level courses required for graduation that had as prerequisites full-year 3xxx-level course, which themselves had full-year 2xxx-level courses as prereqs, which themselves has full-year 1xxx-level courses as prereqs. Hence no matter how many liberal arts requirements you drop, you still can't get through the program in less than four years. Most of the required full-year courses could only be started in the fall and finished in the spring, so even taking summer courses wasn't going to get around the fact that the program was impossible to finish in less than four years (though summer courses were helpful to reduce the load a bit for the fall and spring semesters).
And for the record I never took an art history or music course. I fulfilled my history requirement with "history of science" courses. The easiest course I ever took was a PhyEd course, but it was only for one credit. Even the electives I took through the geology dept were 2xxx level or above and had significant enough writing requirements to be certified by the school as "writing intensive".
Medicine is not a science, at least not the way it is taught now. Science requires critical thinking, medicine is taught with the aim of producing automatons. The whole process of creating a physician is structured that way from the MCAT to the day they take the oath and beyond. We are not producing scientists or engineers in our medical schools, we are making robots who go through paces and follow programs. Even more so, we are producing people who are paid to memorize text books and regurgitate on command. >99% of med students in this country can't tell you how most of what the learned in school works, they only know if it works.
It is no small wonder there are so many health care applications of IBM's Watson...
I love that when I saw your message it was scored (+1, troll). If ever a message deserved to be scored (+5, troll), it was yours. You will, of course, most likely end up (+4, insightful) which is a good consolation prize but not as fitting.
Thing is, if you can take your STEM major over here in 4 years, or over there in 5, who's going to opt for the 5 year program? What will the outside world think if it took you 25% longer to reach the same goal?
I took more than 4 years to do my BS. I have received no significant criticism for that - certainly have not been passed over for any jobs as a result - and generally congratulated on making a wise choice when I point out that by extending it I finished with zero student loan debt.
I want someone who took stimulants and got it done in 3...
The program I went through would not be doable in 3 years, regardless of the level of drugs one is willing to take to forego sleep. The last courses I took included full-year 4xxx level with 3xxx level prereqs. The 3xxx level prereqs were full year courses with 2xxx-level prereqs that were also one-year courses, with prereqs of (you guessed it) one-year 1xxx level courses. Hence while some 4 year programs can be done in 3 years, the one I went through could not.
Problem is the longer the program the more expensive the cost is to the student.
That is true to a point. Taking a four-year program and making it into a five-year program does not, however, mean that it automatically becomes 25% more expensive in the end. If the problem is the timing of courses as opposed to the course load and credit requirements, you could make the 4-to-5 transition without incurring additional tuition costs (of course, this assumes no tuition increases from the institution over the time period, which is seldom likely).
However, if the program goes from 4 years to 5 years, and doesn't necessarily require the same back-breaking credit loads in the last years, the student could also potentially find a paying lab position during those last years to help offset the costs, and potentially finish with less debt than they might have had otherwise in a four-year track. I say this as someone who finished a BS in 5.5 years but graduated with zero student loan debt.
There is too much material for many programs to adequately cover in four years. Of course, part of this is because of the lack of good science and math curriculum in American high schools, but part of it is just the volume of material needed to adequately call someone "educated" in a STEM field.
The particular science I majored in had a very poor record for students finishing in four years, in part because there were three years of prerequisite work before you could take the most critical courses of the subject.
From my perspective, we either should start accepting that some programs need to take 5 (or more) years, or start doing more joint BS/MS programs where a student writes a capstone at the end of year four, defends an undergrad thesis, and then becomes a master's student to finish their program.
If you are following the links looking for information on the origin of the port on the ipod, the link from the old slashdot story doesn't work any more. Of course, that is a link to a site that isn't managed by slashdot or their overlords, so they don't have control over it (not) being there.
They clearly tried to manage their data using javascript, a big mistake from the get-go. If they'd have taken the same data and parsed with with Perl, they would have found that all the questions came from Python and Ruby people. Had they done it in C++, all the questions would have come from C# users. Had they done it in PL/SQL they would have found that the questions all came from rounding errors.
And if they had done it in assembly, they would have found there were no questions at all...
myself. It means I didn't take care of it and I fix it. Is that relevant?
Bullshit. You'd sit in your driveway and curse at Obama - twice.
Once, for (what you perceive as) his socialized takover of transportation.
Then a second time, because the highway administration hasn't approved the sale of the least expensive Chinese / Indian / Eastern European cars in this country, thus preventing you from buying unsafe and unreliable vehicles at rock-bottom bargain-basement prices.
MRI shortens the time it takes to understand what is wrong with a patient
That is only true if an MRI is available nearby.
there is very little need (if any) for exploratory surgery with good imaging
An MRI will never replace a biopsy. Never. It is good at seeing structure but it can't tell you what is going on at the cellular level.
Yet people (and on THIS site!) argue that technology is almost supposed to push medical costs higher. This is absolute nonsense.
Everything in this country increases medical costs. No matter what happens - even if nothing at all happens - costs go up because the system is built around the insurance companies. And the insurance companies are constructed to deny care to their customers. We couldn't have designed a more fucked-up system had we set out with that as our intent.
Think about it: if there is more throughput with the same equipment, so there are more people being scanned faster, do the costs go up or down?
As I already stated, in this country costs only go up. That is all there is to it. Someone could create a miracle pill tomorrow afternoon that healed broken bones (to use a very simple example) faster than Wolverine in the comics for $.05 per dose, and the insurance companies would still jack up prices because that is what they do.
It's the same salaried stuff. It's the same electricity!
That is a gross oversimplification, at the very least. You are overlooking the cost on the instrument for one - an MRI scanner is a lot more than just a tube. You still have to prep the patient. You still have to get them into - and out of - the tube. You still have to maintain the instrument. If you have a massive cooling failure on the instrument because you are using it for a larger portion of the day, you just screwed yourself.
you think you can build a better MRI machine in your garage and sell it more competitively to make a profit? Do you HAVE half a billion dollars to push it through FDA?
If you knew anything at all about the FDA you would know that a scanner doesn't have anywhere near the same kind of clearances to pass at the FDA as a drug. Not even remotely close. That said, it is highly unlikely you would have the power and cooling (just to name a few requirements) in your garage to build a better MRI.
For that matter most people would probably dim the lights in their neighborhood if they brought an MRI to full power in their garage.
There are all sorts of needs there, but with all the regulations you won't be able to just build a company making this stuff, coming up with new innovations and inventions. You can't do it in USA or the rest of the Western world because of government.
Apparently in your world Medtronic doesn't exist? Or St. Jude's? Or any of the dozens of companies making cardiovascular stents?
If you have these ideas of profiting from providing people with better technology - learn Mandarin.
If you want to look less less of an idiot - learn to read.
... when someone can make an MRI scan quieter. Going through an MRI scan to diagnose the causes of my migraines is almost enough to give me a low-grade headache on its own. Most MRI scans sound like an Atari arcade game cranked up loud to try to overcome the noise of the active quarry it was installed in.
Granted, it beats being irradiated, but if I could change anything about it I would make it quieter. Hell I'd tolerate it taking longer if it was quieter; they are kinda cozy and I could take a nap in the scanner if it wasn't so damned loud.
I can't hear the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard. And no, its not because whiteboards are so much more common now. It's also not from too many loud concerts or anything like that; I couldn't hear fingernails on a chalkboard when I was in elementary school, either (I did it once to get my classmates' attention and thought I was doing it wrong since I didn't hear anything).
I really figured it would have been passed on! To be extra verbose now that the dust has settled, I am myself in science but I wanted to try to post the question in as neutral of a tone as possible to avoid making the question itself look biased.
The mass of a DNA molecule is so incredibly variable (by length) that saying something weighs as much as a DNA molecule makes no sense whatsoever. There is undoubtedly a library of congress reference that would be several orders of magnitude more precise.
OK, really. What the fuck are you talking about? How exactly do you think I am "haunting" your comments? Do you mean that when I actually use logic and facts, you find it frightening?
it was also quite apparent in that/. story that had the experimental meta-moderation turned on
I haven't seen anything lately that resembles "experimental meta-moderation". When I go to metamoderation, I get the usual crappy page, which as usual, has multiple un-moderated comments that it is asking me about.
You are all over my journal with your trolling
Off the top of my head I cannot think of a single JE you have written that I have written a comment in. If you can provide an example, feel free. I have looked at some of your entries over time, as I often look to see what new JEs are posted and sometimes see one from you. I don't recall commenting in any of your JEs though.
you can go on, troll away
Do you make a habit of saying that to people you disagree with? Do you think that is how your idol wants you to treat people who don't subscribe 110% to your ideology?
But just in case you didn't know it before, "troll" is not synonymous with "different opinion from my own".
First of all, what the hell do you then think your point is?
And second, I never claimed to hate Ron Paul. Just because you worship the ground he walks on does not mean that every sentient being on the planet automatically hates him.
I happen to think he's an idiot, with the exception of his wanting to end the war. But that is a far cry from hating him.
You just don't have it in you, compared to their expression of hate
Congratulations, dumbshit. I have told you numerous times that I do not hate your idol. You finally have almost figured it out for yourself. Apparently you are just as slow as we already figured you to be. Good thing you are only one vote, for a candidate who doesn't have a chance of winning.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been wondering about the safety of the Mandarin Oranges I have been buying (in cups) at the grocery store. They say product of China right on the package (regardless of whether they are name-brand or store-brand); maybe I'll switch to pears and/or peaches instead.
A reversibly photoswitchable GFP-like protein with fluorescence excitation decoupled from switching
Of course, since it is in a Nature subjournal, you'll need to pay for it or find an institution to grab the full text from.
Medicine has a strong connection to science.
It certainly ought to.
Most of the major initial contribution to the life sciences were made by physician-scientists.
That is an objective statement. I would say a fair number, but that depends on where we draw the lines for "major" and "initial".
I can tell you that it is essentially impossible to "memorize textbooks and regurgitate on command" without building a mental model of the underlying biology or physiology.
I know a lot of med students, and I went to undergrad with a lot of pre-med students. Virtually none of them actually learned the material they went through in undergrad or in their first two years of med school; they relied on memorization instead. For better or for worse (I vote for the latter) this is exactly how the system is structured for them.
I would say that any medical program that doesn't promote critical thinking and scientific literacy is a program in need of reform.
I agree. However you are calling for the reform of every medical school in the country, as well as every pre-med program and the MCAT itself. AMCAS will not stand for that. They believe in their system whole-heartedly and believe that it creates the greatest physicians on earth.
Who does csh-2.mit.edu belong to at MIT? For a school that large there is a very good chance that it belongs to someone who is not necessarily well versed in network security. It is entirely possible that the system was compromised because of an exploit that an admin would consider "obvious" for whatever OS was running on it.
Medicine requires a lot of memorization and regurgitation - physicians have to apply their natural pattern-matching skills to research a huge database
Fixed that for 'ya.
Medicine, in a way is much harder than the normal problem-set of engineers.
Not really. Engineering actually requires logic and analysis. Medicine is 99% memorization and regurgitation.
(ever seen the size of a Cardiology textbook?)
In fact, yes I have. Last one I saw wasn't that much larger than the Organic Chemistry book I used in undergrad - which a bunch of annoying pre-med students committed to memory so they wouldn't have to actually learn the material.
than physicians wouldn't be recruited among the very best student
Physicians are not recruited from the very best students. They haven't been for quite some time. AMCAS is more interested in students who can memorize and regurgitate tons of information, and doesn't care who actually knows the material. The MCAT test is structured for the same purpose. The methods used to select med students are amongst the worst conceivable strategies for actually selecting "among the very best student" - unless of course what you actually want is an automaton.
Slashdot is a major "news" site
In what way is slashdot major anything any more? I don't even remember the last time that a site was slashdotted as a result of being featured on the front page. I'm actually (pleasantly) surprised to see that slashdot has gone roughly a full two days without a story about facebook (or facebook boy) on the front pgae. We were really scraping the bottom of the barrel when slashdot was running 2-3 facebook stories every day.
... and the remaining users are often here just to complain about how much better this site used to be.
Nonetheless, readership is down, membership is down, front page stories are less frequent, traffic is decreased
So there is more time for the material that is better then art history or music
In the case of the program I went through, at least, that won't do it. We had 4xxx level courses required for graduation that had as prerequisites full-year 3xxx-level course, which themselves had full-year 2xxx-level courses as prereqs, which themselves has full-year 1xxx-level courses as prereqs. Hence no matter how many liberal arts requirements you drop, you still can't get through the program in less than four years. Most of the required full-year courses could only be started in the fall and finished in the spring, so even taking summer courses wasn't going to get around the fact that the program was impossible to finish in less than four years (though summer courses were helpful to reduce the load a bit for the fall and spring semesters).
And for the record I never took an art history or music course. I fulfilled my history requirement with "history of science" courses. The easiest course I ever took was a PhyEd course, but it was only for one credit. Even the electives I took through the geology dept were 2xxx level or above and had significant enough writing requirements to be certified by the school as "writing intensive".
Medicine is not a science, at least not the way it is taught now. Science requires critical thinking, medicine is taught with the aim of producing automatons. The whole process of creating a physician is structured that way from the MCAT to the day they take the oath and beyond. We are not producing scientists or engineers in our medical schools, we are making robots who go through paces and follow programs. Even more so, we are producing people who are paid to memorize text books and regurgitate on command. >99% of med students in this country can't tell you how most of what the learned in school works, they only know if it works.
It is no small wonder there are so many health care applications of IBM's Watson...
I love that when I saw your message it was scored (+1, troll). If ever a message deserved to be scored (+5, troll), it was yours. You will, of course, most likely end up (+4, insightful) which is a good consolation prize but not as fitting.
Thing is, if you can take your STEM major over here in 4 years, or over there in 5, who's going to opt for the 5 year program? What will the outside world think if it took you 25% longer to reach the same goal?
I took more than 4 years to do my BS. I have received no significant criticism for that - certainly have not been passed over for any jobs as a result - and generally congratulated on making a wise choice when I point out that by extending it I finished with zero student loan debt.
I want someone who took stimulants and got it done in 3...
The program I went through would not be doable in 3 years, regardless of the level of drugs one is willing to take to forego sleep. The last courses I took included full-year 4xxx level with 3xxx level prereqs. The 3xxx level prereqs were full year courses with 2xxx-level prereqs that were also one-year courses, with prereqs of (you guessed it) one-year 1xxx level courses. Hence while some 4 year programs can be done in 3 years, the one I went through could not.
Problem is the longer the program the more expensive the cost is to the student.
That is true to a point. Taking a four-year program and making it into a five-year program does not, however, mean that it automatically becomes 25% more expensive in the end. If the problem is the timing of courses as opposed to the course load and credit requirements, you could make the 4-to-5 transition without incurring additional tuition costs (of course, this assumes no tuition increases from the institution over the time period, which is seldom likely).
However, if the program goes from 4 years to 5 years, and doesn't necessarily require the same back-breaking credit loads in the last years, the student could also potentially find a paying lab position during those last years to help offset the costs, and potentially finish with less debt than they might have had otherwise in a four-year track. I say this as someone who finished a BS in 5.5 years but graduated with zero student loan debt.
There is too much material for many programs to adequately cover in four years. Of course, part of this is because of the lack of good science and math curriculum in American high schools, but part of it is just the volume of material needed to adequately call someone "educated" in a STEM field.
The particular science I majored in had a very poor record for students finishing in four years, in part because there were three years of prerequisite work before you could take the most critical courses of the subject.
From my perspective, we either should start accepting that some programs need to take 5 (or more) years, or start doing more joint BS/MS programs where a student writes a capstone at the end of year four, defends an undergrad thesis, and then becomes a master's student to finish their program.
If you are following the links looking for information on the origin of the port on the ipod, the link from the old slashdot story doesn't work any more. Of course, that is a link to a site that isn't managed by slashdot or their overlords, so they don't have control over it (not) being there.
They clearly tried to manage their data using javascript, a big mistake from the get-go. If they'd have taken the same data and parsed with with Perl, they would have found that all the questions came from Python and Ruby people. Had they done it in C++, all the questions would have come from C# users. Had they done it in PL/SQL they would have found that the questions all came from rounding errors.
And if they had done it in assembly, they would have found there were no questions at all...
It is, after all, still better than most of what is sold as "music" these days.
Now get off my lawn...
Who do you blame when your car doesn't start?
myself. It means I didn't take care of it and I fix it. Is that relevant?
Bullshit. You'd sit in your driveway and curse at Obama - twice.
Once, for (what you perceive as) his socialized takover of transportation.
Then a second time, because the highway administration hasn't approved the sale of the least expensive Chinese / Indian / Eastern European cars in this country, thus preventing you from buying unsafe and unreliable vehicles at rock-bottom bargain-basement prices.
MRI shortens the time it takes to understand what is wrong with a patient
That is only true if an MRI is available nearby.
there is very little need (if any) for exploratory surgery with good imaging
An MRI will never replace a biopsy. Never. It is good at seeing structure but it can't tell you what is going on at the cellular level.
Yet people (and on THIS site!) argue that technology is almost supposed to push medical costs higher. This is absolute nonsense.
Everything in this country increases medical costs. No matter what happens - even if nothing at all happens - costs go up because the system is built around the insurance companies. And the insurance companies are constructed to deny care to their customers. We couldn't have designed a more fucked-up system had we set out with that as our intent.
Think about it: if there is more throughput with the same equipment, so there are more people being scanned faster, do the costs go up or down?
As I already stated, in this country costs only go up. That is all there is to it. Someone could create a miracle pill tomorrow afternoon that healed broken bones (to use a very simple example) faster than Wolverine in the comics for $.05 per dose, and the insurance companies would still jack up prices because that is what they do.
It's the same salaried stuff. It's the same electricity!
That is a gross oversimplification, at the very least. You are overlooking the cost on the instrument for one - an MRI scanner is a lot more than just a tube. You still have to prep the patient. You still have to get them into - and out of - the tube. You still have to maintain the instrument. If you have a massive cooling failure on the instrument because you are using it for a larger portion of the day, you just screwed yourself.
you think you can build a better MRI machine in your garage and sell it more competitively to make a profit? Do you HAVE half a billion dollars to push it through FDA?
If you knew anything at all about the FDA you would know that a scanner doesn't have anywhere near the same kind of clearances to pass at the FDA as a drug. Not even remotely close. That said, it is highly unlikely you would have the power and cooling (just to name a few requirements) in your garage to build a better MRI.
For that matter most people would probably dim the lights in their neighborhood if they brought an MRI to full power in their garage.
There are all sorts of needs there, but with all the regulations you won't be able to just build a company making this stuff, coming up with new innovations and inventions. You can't do it in USA or the rest of the Western world because of government.
Apparently in your world Medtronic doesn't exist? Or St. Jude's? Or any of the dozens of companies making cardiovascular stents?
If you have these ideas of profiting from providing people with better technology - learn Mandarin.
If you want to look less less of an idiot - learn to read.
... when someone can make an MRI scan quieter. Going through an MRI scan to diagnose the causes of my migraines is almost enough to give me a low-grade headache on its own. Most MRI scans sound like an Atari arcade game cranked up loud to try to overcome the noise of the active quarry it was installed in.
Granted, it beats being irradiated, but if I could change anything about it I would make it quieter. Hell I'd tolerate it taking longer if it was quieter; they are kinda cozy and I could take a nap in the scanner if it wasn't so damned loud.
How do i get money to 'study' such amazingly useless and stupid things like this...
You think knowing about the human response to sound is useless?
Some people are inclined to call anything that does not directly apply to killing more people, more quickly, as useless.
I can't hear the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard. And no, its not because whiteboards are so much more common now. It's also not from too many loud concerts or anything like that; I couldn't hear fingernails on a chalkboard when I was in elementary school, either (I did it once to get my classmates' attention and thought I was doing it wrong since I didn't hear anything).
Are there many others who can't hear it?
Or as the veterans I know who were familiar with them call them:
Meals, Rarely Edible.
I really figured it would have been passed on! To be extra verbose now that the dust has settled, I am myself in science but I wanted to try to post the question in as neutral of a tone as possible to avoid making the question itself look biased.
Thanks guys!
The mass of a DNA molecule is so incredibly variable (by length) that saying something weighs as much as a DNA molecule makes no sense whatsoever. There is undoubtedly a library of congress reference that would be several orders of magnitude more precise.
No no, you are constantly haunting my comments
OK, really. What the fuck are you talking about? How exactly do you think I am "haunting" your comments? Do you mean that when I actually use logic and facts, you find it frightening?
it was also quite apparent in that /. story that had the experimental meta-moderation turned on
I haven't seen anything lately that resembles "experimental meta-moderation". When I go to metamoderation, I get the usual crappy page, which as usual, has multiple un-moderated comments that it is asking me about.
You are all over my journal with your trolling
Off the top of my head I cannot think of a single JE you have written that I have written a comment in. If you can provide an example, feel free. I have looked at some of your entries over time, as I often look to see what new JEs are posted and sometimes see one from you. I don't recall commenting in any of your JEs though.
you can go on, troll away
Do you make a habit of saying that to people you disagree with? Do you think that is how your idol wants you to treat people who don't subscribe 110% to your ideology?
But just in case you didn't know it before, "troll" is not synonymous with "different opinion from my own".
and you don't hold water to their hate
First of all, what the hell do you then think your point is?
And second, I never claimed to hate Ron Paul. Just because you worship the ground he walks on does not mean that every sentient being on the planet automatically hates him.
I happen to think he's an idiot, with the exception of his wanting to end the war. But that is a far cry from hating him.
You just don't have it in you, compared to their expression of hate
Congratulations, dumbshit. I have told you numerous times that I do not hate your idol. You finally have almost figured it out for yourself. Apparently you are just as slow as we already figured you to be. Good thing you are only one vote, for a candidate who doesn't have a chance of winning.