Exactly, it isn't even official french from what I hear from my friends from France. Unlike english, there is a central body that specifies the language for french, and quebecois is not it. It's pretty much what you'd get if you blended 17th and 18th century french from the regions in europe that spoke it in the time. Slang galore. It would be like someone speaking victorian english to us, pretty much the only people that would understand it is the english majors.
No they are suggesting that the non-US customers are more willing to pay higher prices. This was a topic that came up in my managerial economics course, some segments of the market are willing to pay a higher price than others. The trick as a company is to get as much of that differential as you can, ie don't let the costumer save the money they would be willing to pay, instead have them pay it (and take it as profit). There have been several studies that have shown that US customers are much more price sensitive than their EU counterparts. So the company charges more in the EU because they care less than in the US and the lost customers are worse less than the extra review from the ones that they keep at the higher price.
Why not just find the most popular button and make it the size of the keyboard? At least for me and my hands are fairly large, the escape key is far enough away from home row that I have to move my hand to reach it, after I move my hand I have to look at the keyboard (or feel around like I'm reading braile to feel the little bumps on the f and j keys) anyways, so I don't see how the bigger key is going to help.
Re:Electronic Health Records is very hard
on
IT and Health Care
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· Score: 1
I didn't change the records themselves but the reporting database that our internal and government reports came from. I pulled the data from the master database to a second one with just the fields needed for the reports. In the case I mentioned I just changed the field that I pulled from the timestamp on one flag to another.
Secondly, I contest you're claim of "without oversight". What is oversight? Does a nurse going into a file folder have more oversight that someone that does a database change that is logged and can be restored to its original state from transaction logs and backups? The medical, clinical and physics directors, and the head of medical records were all aware of the reporting requirements changes. I was merely the IT guy that could talk to the computer gods and get them to give me the data.
Electronic records make possible a whole range of oversight that isn't practical otherwise. For example if the definition changed and we were on a paper record system, we would have had to go through each file manually to recalculate the report. Even with electronic records the level of manual review required to make sure the data was entered correct and is complete was about 3 people days (one for me, one for the clinical director and one for the medical records head) a month, to try to go back through 10 years worth of data would require months of work to do. The type of questions I was able to answer on the fly from the reporting data just wouldn't be practical. Ultimately the information is being used for funding and clinical practice design, the less accessible the information is the slower the clinic would be to adapt to new techniques with any sort of certainty that they are actually leading to better patient outcomes.
Re:Electronic Health Records is very hard
on
IT and Health Care
·
· Score: 1
We pulled the fields we needed into a non "live" reporting database, the account used to pull the data had read only access to the database. The reporting database was backed up prior to any changes, the live database was backed up to a SAN every two hours. As with anything it was a big complicated mess to get the official report off to the government at least three people touched the data. The medical records office supplied me with the address information and some of the procedure codes for what was done, I pulled the data and manually verified the outliers by looking at the chart/talking to the treatment team. Things could go weird with the automatic script if someone forgot to change the course of treatment that the patient was on then the start date from the patients first visit could be used even though the last visit is a new session of treatment (relapse, metastases for example), or the physician didn't assign a priority to the case.
The clinical director then looked at the data and again tried to find odd cases. There were all sorts of exceptions that could exclude a patient from our "waittimes", eg. patient delayed for treatment because they got chemo first, because they went on vacation etc. The it went back to the Medical Records department which formatted everything from all the different cancer centre departments and sent it off to the government.
Simpler stuff was usually verified by me (head of IT if I can be called that, I was a one man show:)) and the head of physics or the clinical director. Stuff like average wait time per doctor per month, when the monthly data became available we'd again filter out the weird cases manually. My biggest concern was more methodical not technological. Since we were being rated based on wait times, we naturally gave extra attention to the cases with long wait times to see if there was a reason we could exclude them. Potentially equally bad data but with a short wait time didn't get the manual scrutiny that the data that could damage our reputation. But that was the way the clinical director wanted it, and that was the game all the hospitals played with the government.
by bombarding the population with the Great Satan's dwarfs.
Re:Electronic Health Records is very hard
on
IT and Health Care
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I worked at a cancer centre and controlled the treatment planning, delivery and records. In my experience if something was going to get screwed up across the board it would have to be me that does it. Individual doctors and therapists just had access to one patients "file" at a time. Technology also makes it much easier to fix problems. For example, we had to report the time that a patient had to wait for treatment. The definition of the start date changed (can't remember something like it used to be when the treatment plan was approved by the oncologist, but became the date that the oncologist consult happened), anyways with a half hour of thinking and a couple lines of SQL I was able to change this value to the new definition on 10k+ patient files. With a paper chart they probably would have had an intern sitting around for weeks updating charts rather than practicing medicine. Manual practices are just that, manual, lots of health care provider time is wasted waiting for a chart that someone else has. With an electronic chart everyone can view the same chart at the same time (they usually lock the chart so only one person has write permission at a time though).
As for hardware reliablity: I had 5 servers, 60 workstations, a CT, and 5 radiation therapy machines (which themselves have 3 computers running in a voting redundant system), in the two years I was there we had 1 day that we were down because our database came back with an inconsistancy after its backup. Patients were then treated with the paper method and it was much much slower, treatments easily took twice as long because of waiting for charts etc. It actually turned out not to be bad, it probably was your stray neutrino scenario, anyways we left it in the state we found it in so that the vendor and database supplier could find the problem so it wouldn't happen again. We could of been back up in an hour because we had tape backups of the system. What happens if someone spills their lunch on a paper chart? Also, for another 50k or so you can get a hot standby server to failover to.
Also reporting is much easier from electronic systems. I got questions all the time like "what percentile of breast cancer patients getting 20 or more sessions waited for more than one week to start treatment?", I was able to have the answer over a 5 year period in less than an hour. It was much harder for a physician to bullshit his way into justifying his performance when any claim he made could be verified that quickly. In a paper system it would take days of someone's time to verify that stuff and so it probably wouldn't happen until someone had a bad outcome or a malpractice suit was filed.
Okay so you live in an area with shitty reception. Now you got a device that you can use to use your cell phone at home. But as soon as you leave your home you're in a dead zone. So maybe you are lucky and where you work/hang out has reception and now home has reception too so you can now justify a cell phone. But chances are you can't use your cellphone when you are at work anyways, and if you can it is a work phone and you aren't supposed to use it for personal calls. I wouldn't go out and by a cellphone for this, what the heck have people not heard of cordless phones either through their landline or VOIP?
Do you have enough room for all the user data on one system? For example you could share a folder with the Mac using samba (it is a couple clicks on a Mac to setup) and then mount the directory on the other systems. Everything goes there. Of course you'd want to back up the disks of the Mac periodically. A simple solution would be using Time Machine and an USB drive. All told it takes about 5 minutes to setup something like this on a Mac. Time Machine has a fixed backup schedule though if you want more control you could use another tool, or for example use cron and rsync on a linux box or automator/rsync on the mac.
So you are only free if you reject the religion that is imposed on you?
So I guess you aren't free to chose the religion that is imposed on you. Religious nut jobs are quite willing to live under an oppressive regime. The mormons moved to Utah to be together and enforce their culture, the Puritians to the US, the early converts to Islam to Medina, numerous cults that form collectives etc. That isn't to say that everyone that happens to live in the area when it is taken over or are born into it like it, just that some people are quite happy where they live even if it happens to be oppressive to people that aren't like them.
I have to totally agree on this one. I've had a variety of partners and a variety of condoms, none have worked. It makes me feel like a god going for ever, until I'm bloody tired and still can't get off. Sure she can find other ways, but after running a marathon it becomes hard to relax enough to get the job done.
A very large percentage of people with herpes don't have symptoms. So they can tell you they don't have it, but unless they've been tested recently they don't really know. As for a lot of other STDs: a lot of them don't have visable symptoms for guys but they do for girls. For example, ever wonder where girls get yeast infections from? Answer guys can have it but you can't tell, so she gets treated and clean and her boyfriend gives it to her again. The only way to be sure that the sex is safe is either not have it, or wrap it.
The only way you can disagree with me is if you are under the influence of the Great Satan. So either you agree with me, or you are obviously evil. What better argument could you want?
True each to there own, I guess I'm a cheap bastard:-) I haven't even bought a computer in 10 years: why buy when you can have work do it for you;-). My statement was more about the weirdness (to me) of collecting stuff you have no use for other than being able to say you have it. I guess it keeps kids in asia with jobs assemblying hdds.
I agree. I have friends that have just bought another 1TB drive, reason the old ones full. They have stuff that people gave to them or they downloaded 2+ years ago and haven't gotten around to watching yet. I had a friend in university that had 1k + anime films. Again he didn't watch most of them, they were there in case someone recommended one to him he'd already have it. Geesh. I get by just fine on a 100GB laptop drive. It is good enough for a few seasons of T.V. shows in normal def, I watch an episode and delete it. I think some people are just compulsive collectors or they get some kick out of being able to say "oh I have all of those do you want them" if anyone asks.
Not necessarily true. Civil servants sometimes have less rights than a normal citizen. I'm not sure if it is the case for police in britain though. For example, if you are in the army in Canada you can't discuss your opinions about military policies with the media without permission. If you do it is against the military code of discipline and you can get punished for it. It may just have been against his employment contract in this case as he got a written warning for it.Secondly, his articles must have been specific enough that they were able to track him down, so it is quite likely in the process they found the particular cases that were discussed "anonymosized" by him.
The press get more leeway because it is their job to report. They fall under the qualified privilege because they are duty bound as reporters to make their statements if they think it is in the public interest. Similarly a citizen being questioned by a police officer, a former employer giving a job reference etc. It can't be given with malicious intent though. At least at the federal level in Canada and the UK a journalist doesn't have the right to protect the anonymity of their sources in court.
A lot of this stuff stems back (at least for the former british empire) from changes back in the 17th century. Previously, the publishers had to get a license from the government, but in the middle of the century it became legal for anyone to publish as it was necessary to have a proper working democracy (you can't vote intelligently if you don't know what the agendas of the parties are). Anyways, these newly free publishers rightly wanted to make sure that they won't get punished if they publish stuff that doesn't agree with the government, or worse get punished after the fact if the government changed hands. So this privilege came about.
Nope not a working journalist. I'm not arguing against the ability to be an anonymous whistle blower, I'm arguing against being an anonymous journalist. If I'm reading someone's opinion and am going to be protesting government actions, or even just quoting them among friends I want to know more about them than that he goes by Xfactor41 on talkingtrash.com.
A journalist with an anonymous source can be tracked down and talked with, can get back in contact with his source (possibly) if more information is needed, and if it is something where an anonymous source should be revealed it can be accomplished. For example leaked national security information, its found to be libelous (journalists in most free countries have a "qualified privilege" as far as defamation goes as long as they spoke in something that is in the publics interest, sources do not share that right) can be forced to reveal sources. If the author themselves are anonymous then what? You just have a statement that can't be corrobated and defamation laws that can't be enforced.
Part of what keeps the social contract working is that you have freedom to say what you want but you also have a responsibility for what you say. If you allow anonymous journalism all that happens if an author gets a reputation for shoddy research, or their comments are found to be illegal is they open up an new account with a different user name. There is no longer the responsibility that goes along with the special protections journalists enjoy and the necessary public service that journalism is supposed to provide.
He wasn't claiming to have an anonymous source, he was claiming to be the source himself. It was his opinions that he was stating in public. If you say something in public you can't reasonably expect people not to know who you are. If you don't want the public to know what you think, don't say what you think in public. If you want to make public statements then be willing to own your opinions, or let a jounalist quote a private conversation with you as an anonymous source, that's the choice.
What has this newspaper done in the last ten years where they have cited anonymous sources?
He's not just a source he's the author. Authors are doing things in public hence they don't have any presumption of privacy. Sources talk privately to a journalist, since it is a private conversation they have a presumption of privacy. If he wanted anonymity he should have been a whistle blower and talked to a journalist.
so long as all information was obtained legitimately
It wasn't. He claimed to be a police officer. He had no right to comment publicly about ongoing investigations.
The days of journalists keeping the government in check and acting as the 4th estate I am afraid are long gone however.
Possibly. Here's the problem though, I don't know that journalists themselves have the right to write anonymously. They write can write under pseudonyms but they don't have any protection from being "outed" as far as I know. By definition, you can't have any presumption of privacy for things you do in public. They can protect their sources, but if they claim to be their own sources well...
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Exactly, it isn't even official french from what I hear from my friends from France. Unlike english, there is a central body that specifies the language for french, and quebecois is not it. It's pretty much what you'd get if you blended 17th and 18th century french from the regions in europe that spoke it in the time. Slang galore. It would be like someone speaking victorian english to us, pretty much the only people that would understand it is the english majors.
As a canadian I must unfortunately correct you in that Quebec is part of Canada not the US.
No they are suggesting that the non-US customers are more willing to pay higher prices. This was a topic that came up in my managerial economics course, some segments of the market are willing to pay a higher price than others. The trick as a company is to get as much of that differential as you can, ie don't let the costumer save the money they would be willing to pay, instead have them pay it (and take it as profit). There have been several studies that have shown that US customers are much more price sensitive than their EU counterparts. So the company charges more in the EU because they care less than in the US and the lost customers are worse less than the extra review from the ones that they keep at the higher price.
Why not just find the most popular button and make it the size of the keyboard? At least for me and my hands are fairly large, the escape key is far enough away from home row that I have to move my hand to reach it, after I move my hand I have to look at the keyboard (or feel around like I'm reading braile to feel the little bumps on the f and j keys) anyways, so I don't see how the bigger key is going to help.
Secondly, I contest you're claim of "without oversight". What is oversight? Does a nurse going into a file folder have more oversight that someone that does a database change that is logged and can be restored to its original state from transaction logs and backups? The medical, clinical and physics directors, and the head of medical records were all aware of the reporting requirements changes. I was merely the IT guy that could talk to the computer gods and get them to give me the data.
Electronic records make possible a whole range of oversight that isn't practical otherwise. For example if the definition changed and we were on a paper record system, we would have had to go through each file manually to recalculate the report. Even with electronic records the level of manual review required to make sure the data was entered correct and is complete was about 3 people days (one for me, one for the clinical director and one for the medical records head) a month, to try to go back through 10 years worth of data would require months of work to do. The type of questions I was able to answer on the fly from the reporting data just wouldn't be practical. Ultimately the information is being used for funding and clinical practice design, the less accessible the information is the slower the clinic would be to adapt to new techniques with any sort of certainty that they are actually leading to better patient outcomes.
The clinical director then looked at the data and again tried to find odd cases. There were all sorts of exceptions that could exclude a patient from our "waittimes", eg. patient delayed for treatment because they got chemo first, because they went on vacation etc. The it went back to the Medical Records department which formatted everything from all the different cancer centre departments and sent it off to the government.
Simpler stuff was usually verified by me (head of IT if I can be called that, I was a one man show :)) and the head of physics or the clinical director. Stuff like average wait time per doctor per month, when the monthly data became available we'd again filter out the weird cases manually. My biggest concern was more methodical not technological. Since we were being rated based on wait times, we naturally gave extra attention to the cases with long wait times to see if there was a reason we could exclude them. Potentially equally bad data but with a short wait time didn't get the manual scrutiny that the data that could damage our reputation. But that was the way the clinical director wanted it, and that was the game all the hospitals played with the government.
by bombarding the population with the Great Satan's dwarfs.
As for hardware reliablity: I had 5 servers, 60 workstations, a CT, and 5 radiation therapy machines (which themselves have 3 computers running in a voting redundant system), in the two years I was there we had 1 day that we were down because our database came back with an inconsistancy after its backup. Patients were then treated with the paper method and it was much much slower, treatments easily took twice as long because of waiting for charts etc. It actually turned out not to be bad, it probably was your stray neutrino scenario, anyways we left it in the state we found it in so that the vendor and database supplier could find the problem so it wouldn't happen again. We could of been back up in an hour because we had tape backups of the system. What happens if someone spills their lunch on a paper chart? Also, for another 50k or so you can get a hot standby server to failover to.
Also reporting is much easier from electronic systems. I got questions all the time like "what percentile of breast cancer patients getting 20 or more sessions waited for more than one week to start treatment?", I was able to have the answer over a 5 year period in less than an hour. It was much harder for a physician to bullshit his way into justifying his performance when any claim he made could be verified that quickly. In a paper system it would take days of someone's time to verify that stuff and so it probably wouldn't happen until someone had a bad outcome or a malpractice suit was filed.
Okay so you live in an area with shitty reception. Now you got a device that you can use to use your cell phone at home. But as soon as you leave your home you're in a dead zone. So maybe you are lucky and where you work/hang out has reception and now home has reception too so you can now justify a cell phone. But chances are you can't use your cellphone when you are at work anyways, and if you can it is a work phone and you aren't supposed to use it for personal calls. I wouldn't go out and by a cellphone for this, what the heck have people not heard of cordless phones either through their landline or VOIP?
Do you have enough room for all the user data on one system? For example you could share a folder with the Mac using samba (it is a couple clicks on a Mac to setup) and then mount the directory on the other systems. Everything goes there. Of course you'd want to back up the disks of the Mac periodically. A simple solution would be using Time Machine and an USB drive. All told it takes about 5 minutes to setup something like this on a Mac. Time Machine has a fixed backup schedule though if you want more control you could use another tool, or for example use cron and rsync on a linux box or automator/rsync on the mac.
So I guess you aren't free to chose the religion that is imposed on you. Religious nut jobs are quite willing to live under an oppressive regime. The mormons moved to Utah to be together and enforce their culture, the Puritians to the US, the early converts to Islam to Medina, numerous cults that form collectives etc. That isn't to say that everyone that happens to live in the area when it is taken over or are born into it like it, just that some people are quite happy where they live even if it happens to be oppressive to people that aren't like them.
I have to totally agree on this one. I've had a variety of partners and a variety of condoms, none have worked. It makes me feel like a god going for ever, until I'm bloody tired and still can't get off. Sure she can find other ways, but after running a marathon it becomes hard to relax enough to get the job done.
increase the risk of infection by damaging the physical barriers of the rectum or vagina."
I thought my penis was doing that.
However, if you're good at pulling out you'll be the pants off spermicide.
And you get to find creative places to put it.
A very large percentage of people with herpes don't have symptoms. So they can tell you they don't have it, but unless they've been tested recently they don't really know. As for a lot of other STDs: a lot of them don't have visable symptoms for guys but they do for girls. For example, ever wonder where girls get yeast infections from? Answer guys can have it but you can't tell, so she gets treated and clean and her boyfriend gives it to her again. The only way to be sure that the sex is safe is either not have it, or wrap it.
The only way you can disagree with me is if you are under the influence of the Great Satan. So either you agree with me, or you are obviously evil. What better argument could you want?
True each to there own, I guess I'm a cheap bastard :-) I haven't even bought a computer in 10 years: why buy when you can have work do it for you ;-). My statement was more about the weirdness (to me) of collecting stuff you have no use for other than being able to say you have it. I guess it keeps kids in asia with jobs assemblying hdds.
I agree. I have friends that have just bought another 1TB drive, reason the old ones full. They have stuff that people gave to them or they downloaded 2+ years ago and haven't gotten around to watching yet. I had a friend in university that had 1k + anime films. Again he didn't watch most of them, they were there in case someone recommended one to him he'd already have it. Geesh. I get by just fine on a 100GB laptop drive. It is good enough for a few seasons of T.V. shows in normal def, I watch an episode and delete it. I think some people are just compulsive collectors or they get some kick out of being able to say "oh I have all of those do you want them" if anyone asks.
Not necessarily true. Civil servants sometimes have less rights than a normal citizen. I'm not sure if it is the case for police in britain though. For example, if you are in the army in Canada you can't discuss your opinions about military policies with the media without permission. If you do it is against the military code of discipline and you can get punished for it. It may just have been against his employment contract in this case as he got a written warning for it.Secondly, his articles must have been specific enough that they were able to track him down, so it is quite likely in the process they found the particular cases that were discussed "anonymosized" by him.
A lot of this stuff stems back (at least for the former british empire) from changes back in the 17th century. Previously, the publishers had to get a license from the government, but in the middle of the century it became legal for anyone to publish as it was necessary to have a proper working democracy (you can't vote intelligently if you don't know what the agendas of the parties are). Anyways, these newly free publishers rightly wanted to make sure that they won't get punished if they publish stuff that doesn't agree with the government, or worse get punished after the fact if the government changed hands. So this privilege came about.
A journalist with an anonymous source can be tracked down and talked with, can get back in contact with his source (possibly) if more information is needed, and if it is something where an anonymous source should be revealed it can be accomplished. For example leaked national security information, its found to be libelous (journalists in most free countries have a "qualified privilege" as far as defamation goes as long as they spoke in something that is in the publics interest, sources do not share that right) can be forced to reveal sources. If the author themselves are anonymous then what? You just have a statement that can't be corrobated and defamation laws that can't be enforced.
Part of what keeps the social contract working is that you have freedom to say what you want but you also have a responsibility for what you say. If you allow anonymous journalism all that happens if an author gets a reputation for shoddy research, or their comments are found to be illegal is they open up an new account with a different user name. There is no longer the responsibility that goes along with the special protections journalists enjoy and the necessary public service that journalism is supposed to provide.
He wasn't claiming to have an anonymous source, he was claiming to be the source himself. It was his opinions that he was stating in public. If you say something in public you can't reasonably expect people not to know who you are. If you don't want the public to know what you think, don't say what you think in public. If you want to make public statements then be willing to own your opinions, or let a jounalist quote a private conversation with you as an anonymous source, that's the choice.
What has this newspaper done in the last ten years where they have cited anonymous sources?
He's not just a source he's the author. Authors are doing things in public hence they don't have any presumption of privacy. Sources talk privately to a journalist, since it is a private conversation they have a presumption of privacy. If he wanted anonymity he should have been a whistle blower and talked to a journalist.
so long as all information was obtained legitimately
It wasn't. He claimed to be a police officer. He had no right to comment publicly about ongoing investigations.
The days of journalists keeping the government in check and acting as the 4th estate I am afraid are long gone however.
Possibly. Here's the problem though, I don't know that journalists themselves have the right to write anonymously. They write can write under pseudonyms but they don't have any protection from being "outed" as far as I know. By definition, you can't have any presumption of privacy for things you do in public. They can protect their sources, but if they claim to be their own sources well ...
The punishment is meant not to recover just lost revenue but to be punitive. According to http://www.researchcopyright.com/article-penalties-for-copyright-infringement.php the copyright holder can request triple damages.