It's rather irksome how effectively marketers have pushed "resolution" rather than bitrate as a metric of video quality, despite the fact that, with digital video, the latter is generally far more important than the former(except, of course, for output devices like monitors and projectors, where the number of physical pixels really does matter, and input devices like cameras, where the number of pixels matters, along with the quality of the glass, degree of compression, and a bunch of other fiddly stuff).
As 20 seconds in the image manipulation program of your choice will easily demonstrate, you can resize an image(and, by extension, a series of images) from any resolution you have to any resolution you want, subject only to the limits of your RAM and your patience.
If all video were lossless, or there were some iron law stating "though shalt allocate no less than X bits per Y pixels", comparing videos by resolution might actually matter. As it is, though, in most real world situations, the limitation is in the bitrate(unless you have a really crap monitor), and, while you can smear your too-few-Mb/s mpeg4 over as "high resolution" an output as you like, it isn't going to look any better.
Simple marketing stunt, I expect. For the cost of hosting a couple of stupidly large videos, and the bandwidth of a lot of people downloading the first 10 seconds and then giving up, and a couple of fiber-to-home users downloading the whole thing and then realizing that no x86 ever made can allow flash to decode video at that resolution in real time, Google gets a little more buzz about youtube.
Particularly given the existence of films that are never actually filmed(ie. virtually anything Pixar has done, etc.) which make the existence of a camera that can actually handle a given resolution irrelevant to that resolution's "existence", the notion of a "highest resolution" seems rather meaningless.
This goes double for any format with lossy compression(ie. pretty much all of them in any sort of practical use), where you could declare that your format is 16,000,000x9,000,000 pixels, and thus the awesomest available, and then compress it down to 1Mb/S. The result would look roughly like the original Wolfenstein; but it would be the highest resolution out there.
Depending on what percentage of their product portfolio Coraid just suspended shipment of, they may be in serious trouble; but that isn't really Sun/Oracle/ZFS's problem...
However, Oracle does(or at least Sun did) sell ZFS-based NAS/SAN appliances(pretty cool looking, actually. 4U or so, slides out with top-loading trays for 48 SATA drives. Web interface for carving it up into pools and serving it up over ethernet).
Thus, while they certainly have some motivation to provide indemnification to customers, because having their server users getting sued is awkward, it isn't clear that they actually mind NetApp shooting their smaller competitors in the ZFS NAS/SAN appliance space in the face for them(all the benefits, none of the bad publicity), unless those competitors are willing to pony up for a Solaris license per box, or something.
I suspect that they are going after NAS vendors simply because the NAS vendors are a more direct threat to their business.
NetApp probably doesn't like that Sun, now Oracle, is using "their" features in direct-attached storage for Solaris boxes; but NetApp doesn't sell direct attached storage, so that isn't as much their problem(and Larry's lawyers are probably scary).
If, on the other hand, the world starts sprouting outfits who are combining CDDL software+commodity disks+commodity NICs+modestly custom 'lots of SAS/SATA and redundant PSUs' chassis, NetApp suddenly has a whole bunch of competitors who can undercut them good and hard. That won't mean instant death or anything; but it certainly isn't good news for them.
Humoural theories of medicine are long dead(well, mostly, given the persistence of homeopathy, vitalism, energy healing, and anything that purports to be an ancient chinese secret, I'm sure that somebody is still killing people in approved Galenic fashion...); but the goo that fills out your eyeball is still called that.
If it can be seen without a microscope, odds are that it was discovered and named a long time ago(16th century at the latest) and a lot of the antique names stuck(because, hey, Latin makes you sound smarter!).
Hey! This sounds like excellent news. It means that they should all pass their "business ethics" classes, thus sparing the public from the dangers of unethical managers...
Some "augmented reality" is, indeed, really just "augmented perception". Some, though, involves doing things like building video games with entirely fake enemies/objectives/etc overlaid on real environments, and that is definitely "augmented reality" if perhaps not definitely "useful"...
As for radiation detection, would it be cheating to count closing your eyes and detecting the Cherenkov radiation produced by the interaction of beta radiation with your vitreous humor? It is kind of indirect; but more than a few sensors work by having one stage that converts what you want to measure into something easy to measure, ideally more or less linearly, and then a second stage that actually measures it...
Electric eels can, I think do something similar. Its ability to generate high-powered stunning or lethal pulses for hunting and defense is pretty dramatic; but it also has a system for generating weak pulses for active electrolocation.
At the New England Aquarium, they have one in a tank wired up with sensors that convert electrical activity to sound, pretty neat to listen to it in action...
Given that the number of things that you can sense without breaking the known laws of physics is limited, we have reasonably informed basis for speculation, plus a lot of field data:
Electromagnetic radiation: everything from pretty longwave IR to UV is well documented(IR in certain snake's heat-sensor pits, UV in some insects, "visible light" is obvious enough) There are certain radiotrophic fungi, which can perform a process analogous to photosynthesis; but with gamma radiation. This isn't a directly sensory function; but it does imply that there is a biologically produce-able molecule, in the wild, that could serve as the basis of a gamma-ray vision system(if not, perhaps, a very fast one) The unknown(at least for me) is radio waves. I've never heard of anything using them; but organisms with conductive structures linked to their nervous systems are potential suspects....
Magnetic fields: Confirmed in birds and some insects; both as a 'compass-like' directional sense, and as a visual signal. And, since electricity and magnetism are related, anything with reasonably high-resolution magnetic sensors can detect electrical currents, as well.
Sound waves: Confirmed, obviously enough, across a pretty wide frequency band in all sorts of species, both as a conventional 'hearing' sense, and for detection and ranging.
Chemicals: Anything with a sense of smell is a pretty sensitive chemical detector, some better than others. Even bacteria can follow chemical gradients, and animals with sophisticated olfactory systems can detect tens or hundred of thousands of chemicals, and at fairly low concentrations...
Electrical currents: Sharks, possibly among others, can sense the electrical impulses that make your muscles move at distances long enough to make this a useful hunting tool. Don't know if anyone else has picked up this trick...
Can anyone think of other physical phenomena that may or may not have biological sensors capable of detecting it, and any known cases?
It's actually a particular color. Those thick black lines you see in redacted documents? They look like ordinary sharpie; but they are actually special-order cryptochrome markers ("Cryptochrome: plaintext to cyphertext with the stroke of a pen")...
I would assume that there is some way for maintenance incidents to be fed into the system. Heck, those are probably even more instructive than simple explosions; because it is a lot easier to measure things like transformer coolant levels/temps, line amperages, atmospheric methance concentrations, etc. before everything is a smoldering mess...
I suspect that there are several complicating factors:
Getting electricians who are competent to work on high voltage or high current distribution systems(and not make the situation worse) is probably a trifle harder than getting ones capable of doing home wiring without the place burning down(the latter, now that the fad for building shitty houses in the exurbs that nobody wants, should be in excellent supply). Not impossible; but you are probably looking at a nontrivial amount of theory, plus some time following around people who know what they are doing.
Second, in dense urban areas, maintenance often means cutting power to whiny people, or digging up roads for days at a time that a bunch of complainers were trying to "commute" on. I strongly suspect that, if you cornered the highest ranking guy at ConEd who wears a hard hat for purposes other than publicity photos, he could tell you all kinds of upgrades and repairs that he would love to make. After the third scotch, he could probably stop shaking and tell you about the various obstacles in his way...
At least for companies that have distinctive "styles" it can be amusing to try to imagine their naming conventions, architectural decisions, preferred partner companies, and so forth applied to completely incongruous areas.
Were they to enter this particular market, Google really would crow about how their breakthrough "machete-reduce" algorithm allows large genocide tasks to be broken down and distributed across thousands of low-cost commodity actors. And Microsoft actually would respond with something about how "converging ForeFront Internal Security with Society Managment Server increases operational efficiency and enables robust application of centralized policy driven user execution rules"...
It is a world operating completely as expected when a multinational corporation cares more about satisfying the requests of large customers than it does small ones.
That(in addition to a variety of empirical observations about the relative overhead of private sector vs. state-single-payer entities) is one of the main arguments against leaving medical insurance as a private sector function:
Basically, insurance is supposed to be a risk pooling mechanism. If you have a million people, total medical costs 10 million units; but with an unknown and highly uneven distribution, being able to pay 10 units(or 15, because the insurer is inefficient) with probability 100% beats having a 1% chance of having to pay 250,000 units and either die or go bankrupt.
However, the better your actuarial, epidemiological, and genetic technologies are, the less the "unknown" part of "unknown and highly uneven" holds up. In the extreme case, of perfect knowledge of lifetime medical expenses, "insurance" would be identical to a line of credit, just with more paperwork and overhead.
Thus, as your knowledge increases(both sciencey genetic testing stuff, and old-school actuarial pre-existing condition/demographic/lifestyle stuff), you(the society level "you", the individual "you" doesn't really have much choice) have to make a decision: Do you use the state, in some fashion, to provide the risk pool that the market no longer will? Or do you decide that more accurate cost allocation is a good thing, and the sickies can either pay up or die?
If you want a maximally pathological system(not that we would ever do that, cough, cough) you have a two-track system: individual private insurance, which becomes ever-less risk-pooling as knowledge increases, and employer-provided insurance, which risk-pools across all employees of a given entity. This two tier system is almost brilliantly perverse because it creates a strong incentive against hiring sickly people(even otherwise highly productive ones) because they raise the average cost of your employee risk pool, and thus the cost of providing health benefits. This ensures that people with pricey medical conditions are less likely to be employed, and less likely to be able to pay for them(even if they have valuable skills and a relatively cheap condition. Somebody with no particular skills who needs a $500,000 lung transplant is a charity case, keeping them alive, or not, is simply a humanitarian question; but there are plenty of people with more skills and cheaper conditions who, if employed, could pay their way; but if not employed, obviously can't.)
Plus, it discourages entrepreneurial activity; because quitting your job at $MEGACORP means getting kicked out of their risk pool, and facing the(much smaller) risk pool provided by purely market based insurance.
Much more broadly, though, this is a much, much older and more general phenomenon. Technology has always cut both ways vs. economic inequality. On the one hand, because it increases productivity, technology can and does increase what the poor have access to(fat poor people, for instance, are a quite recent invention). On the other hand; because it increases the scope of human power, it increases the benefits of wealth even faster.
Consider the really old days. Ancient Egypt, or classic Greece or something. Being king beat the hell out of being a peasant; but the actual quality of life available, even for a literal king's ransom, was pretty mediocre. Enough food, of whatever kind you preferred(unless it was out of season, no refrigeration), a (drafty) palace, an (aesthetically appealing but useless) heap of gold, and some slaves. You could still die of a simple infection, could only travel as fast as a horse, and so forth. With technology, the list of "what money can buy" has expanded enormously.
I would assume that, barring their securing super-cheap/free licenses for themselves on the "well, these are designed for poor kids who can't afford to buy our actual products, so why not score ourselves a tax writeoff?" principle, the OLPC people would just include the hardware and basic software support(to the best of my knowledge, "X11 that can see more than one pointer at a time, based on a touchscreen" is safe "All the little refinements that make using an iPhone nice" is a patent minefield).
From there, users could either just suck up a slightly less shiny, not quite as inertial scrolling experience, or they could violate the patents(if it is even a patent violation in whatever jurisdiction they are in) totally without any official knowledge or connivance of the OLCP entity.
A few years ago, we all would have been reading this thread through just such a material. A few of us may still be.
The reason that CRTs were made of leaded glass was to protect the user from the X-rays one can generate by firing three 40 kilovolt electron guns through a vacuum and into their face. Those let the visible light through just fine, and largely protected users from eyeball cancer.
Some vests contain trauma plates, in addition to fiber of one sort or another, and those are both heavy and stiff(of course, for exactly this reason, most people who aren't expecting to take any rifle fire on a given day generally skip them).
More broadly, though, military and law enforcement sometimes put up with excessively weighty gear because it's the best of bad alternatives, not because carrying heavy things is morally salubrious. If it were practical for them to have more armor; but carried for them, you'd be damn sure that they'd be doing the exact same thing(see, for example, research on powered exoskeletons...) Doctors, because they tend to face radiation exposure indoors, in predictable places and at predictable times, are just easier to make "carry-assisted" armor for.
Plus, I suspect that, given that doctors are expensive to train, and experienced doctors are considered valuable, a comparatively cheap mechanism that allows a doctor to work until the age where he is incapable of being an effective doctor, rather than until the age where he can't wear a lead suit all day, could easily pay for itself in a very short period of time.
Have you never heard that phrase before? It has nothing to do with "indoctrination". It is the (more in some areas, less in others, utopian) notion that, with cheap genetic sequencing and similar technologies it will become possible to treat the precise disease condition of the specific patient, in the way maximally likely to work, given their genetic and phenotypic makeup.
A lot of it is basically puffery at this stage; but, for instance, there are already substantial areas in oncology where arguably similar techniques are used. Research has shown that simply classifying cancers by location "breast/lung/pancreas/etc." misses huge amounts of variation in sensitivity to various treatments. It has become reasonably common to decide on a course of action(radiation or not, chemo or not and which agents on what schedule, excision or not and how urgently) based on the genetic markers of a particular tumor, rather than its gross anatomy and location.
Slashdot Mirror
It's rather irksome how effectively marketers have pushed "resolution" rather than bitrate as a metric of video quality, despite the fact that, with digital video, the latter is generally far more important than the former(except, of course, for output devices like monitors and projectors, where the number of physical pixels really does matter, and input devices like cameras, where the number of pixels matters, along with the quality of the glass, degree of compression, and a bunch of other fiddly stuff).
As 20 seconds in the image manipulation program of your choice will easily demonstrate, you can resize an image(and, by extension, a series of images) from any resolution you have to any resolution you want, subject only to the limits of your RAM and your patience.
If all video were lossless, or there were some iron law stating "though shalt allocate no less than X bits per Y pixels", comparing videos by resolution might actually matter. As it is, though, in most real world situations, the limitation is in the bitrate(unless you have a really crap monitor), and, while you can smear your too-few-Mb/s mpeg4 over as "high resolution" an output as you like, it isn't going to look any better.
Simple marketing stunt, I expect. For the cost of hosting a couple of stupidly large videos, and the bandwidth of a lot of people downloading the first 10 seconds and then giving up, and a couple of fiber-to-home users downloading the whole thing and then realizing that no x86 ever made can allow flash to decode video at that resolution in real time, Google gets a little more buzz about youtube.
Particularly given the existence of films that are never actually filmed(ie. virtually anything Pixar has done, etc.) which make the existence of a camera that can actually handle a given resolution irrelevant to that resolution's "existence", the notion of a "highest resolution" seems rather meaningless.
This goes double for any format with lossy compression(ie. pretty much all of them in any sort of practical use), where you could declare that your format is 16,000,000x9,000,000 pixels, and thus the awesomest available, and then compress it down to 1Mb/S. The result would look roughly like the original Wolfenstein; but it would be the highest resolution out there.
Depending on what percentage of their product portfolio Coraid just suspended shipment of, they may be in serious trouble; but that isn't really Sun/Oracle/ZFS's problem...
However, Oracle does(or at least Sun did) sell ZFS-based NAS/SAN appliances(pretty cool looking, actually. 4U or so, slides out with top-loading trays for 48 SATA drives. Web interface for carving it up into pools and serving it up over ethernet).
Thus, while they certainly have some motivation to provide indemnification to customers, because having their server users getting sued is awkward, it isn't clear that they actually mind NetApp shooting their smaller competitors in the ZFS NAS/SAN appliance space in the face for them(all the benefits, none of the bad publicity), unless those competitors are willing to pony up for a Solaris license per box, or something.
I suspect that they are going after NAS vendors simply because the NAS vendors are a more direct threat to their business.
NetApp probably doesn't like that Sun, now Oracle, is using "their" features in direct-attached storage for Solaris boxes; but NetApp doesn't sell direct attached storage, so that isn't as much their problem(and Larry's lawyers are probably scary).
If, on the other hand, the world starts sprouting outfits who are combining CDDL software+commodity disks+commodity NICs+modestly custom 'lots of SAS/SATA and redundant PSUs' chassis, NetApp suddenly has a whole bunch of competitors who can undercut them good and hard. That won't mean instant death or anything; but it certainly isn't good news for them.
Humoural theories of medicine are long dead(well, mostly, given the persistence of homeopathy, vitalism, energy healing, and anything that purports to be an ancient chinese secret, I'm sure that somebody is still killing people in approved Galenic fashion...); but the goo that fills out your eyeball is still called that.
If it can be seen without a microscope, odds are that it was discovered and named a long time ago(16th century at the latest) and a lot of the antique names stuck(because, hey, Latin makes you sound smarter!).
Hey! This sounds like excellent news. It means that they should all pass their "business ethics" classes, thus sparing the public from the dangers of unethical managers...
Oh, also forgot biological accelerometers(your inner ear, and friends).
And temperature sensors, of course. Don't know how I forgot that the first and second time.
Some "augmented reality" is, indeed, really just "augmented perception". Some, though, involves doing things like building video games with entirely fake enemies/objectives/etc overlaid on real environments, and that is definitely "augmented reality" if perhaps not definitely "useful"...
Does she lack the capacitor for nerd puns?
As for radiation detection, would it be cheating to count closing your eyes and detecting the Cherenkov radiation produced by the interaction of beta radiation with your vitreous humor? It is kind of indirect; but more than a few sensors work by having one stage that converts what you want to measure into something easy to measure, ideally more or less linearly, and then a second stage that actually measures it...
Electric eels can, I think do something similar. Its ability to generate high-powered stunning or lethal pulses for hunting and defense is pretty dramatic; but it also has a system for generating weak pulses for active electrolocation.
At the New England Aquarium, they have one in a tank wired up with sensors that convert electrical activity to sound, pretty neat to listen to it in action...
Given that the number of things that you can sense without breaking the known laws of physics is limited, we have reasonably informed basis for speculation, plus a lot of field data:
Electromagnetic radiation: everything from pretty longwave IR to UV is well documented(IR in certain snake's heat-sensor pits, UV in some insects, "visible light" is obvious enough) There are certain radiotrophic fungi, which can perform a process analogous to photosynthesis; but with gamma radiation. This isn't a directly sensory function; but it does imply that there is a biologically produce-able molecule, in the wild, that could serve as the basis of a gamma-ray vision system(if not, perhaps, a very fast one) The unknown(at least for me) is radio waves. I've never heard of anything using them; but organisms with conductive structures linked to their nervous systems are potential suspects....
Magnetic fields: Confirmed in birds and some insects; both as a 'compass-like' directional sense, and as a visual signal. And, since electricity and magnetism are related, anything with reasonably high-resolution magnetic sensors can detect electrical currents, as well.
Sound waves: Confirmed, obviously enough, across a pretty wide frequency band in all sorts of species, both as a conventional 'hearing' sense, and for detection and ranging.
Chemicals: Anything with a sense of smell is a pretty sensitive chemical detector, some better than others. Even bacteria can follow chemical gradients, and animals with sophisticated olfactory systems can detect tens or hundred of thousands of chemicals, and at fairly low concentrations...
Electrical currents: Sharks, possibly among others, can sense the electrical impulses that make your muscles move at distances long enough to make this a useful hunting tool. Don't know if anyone else has picked up this trick...
Can anyone think of other physical phenomena that may or may not have biological sensors capable of detecting it, and any known cases?
It's actually a particular color. Those thick black lines you see in redacted documents? They look like ordinary sharpie; but they are actually special-order cryptochrome markers ("Cryptochrome: plaintext to cyphertext with the stroke of a pen")...
I would assume that there is some way for maintenance incidents to be fed into the system. Heck, those are probably even more instructive than simple explosions; because it is a lot easier to measure things like transformer coolant levels/temps, line amperages, atmospheric methance concentrations, etc. before everything is a smoldering mess...
I suspect that there are several complicating factors:
Getting electricians who are competent to work on high voltage or high current distribution systems(and not make the situation worse) is probably a trifle harder than getting ones capable of doing home wiring without the place burning down(the latter, now that the fad for building shitty houses in the exurbs that nobody wants, should be in excellent supply). Not impossible; but you are probably looking at a nontrivial amount of theory, plus some time following around people who know what they are doing.
Second, in dense urban areas, maintenance often means cutting power to whiny people, or digging up roads for days at a time that a bunch of complainers were trying to "commute" on. I strongly suspect that, if you cornered the highest ranking guy at ConEd who wears a hard hat for purposes other than publicity photos, he could tell you all kinds of upgrades and repairs that he would love to make. After the third scotch, he could probably stop shaking and tell you about the various obstacles in his way...
Hey, people who live in low risk locations take those low risks seriously...
At least for companies that have distinctive "styles" it can be amusing to try to imagine their naming conventions, architectural decisions, preferred partner companies, and so forth applied to completely incongruous areas.
Were they to enter this particular market, Google really would crow about how their breakthrough "machete-reduce" algorithm allows large genocide tasks to be broken down and distributed across thousands of low-cost commodity actors. And Microsoft actually would respond with something about how "converging ForeFront Internal Security with Society Managment Server increases operational efficiency and enables robust application of centralized policy driven user execution rules"...
It is a world operating completely as expected when a multinational corporation cares more about satisfying the requests of large customers than it does small ones.
That(in addition to a variety of empirical observations about the relative overhead of private sector vs. state-single-payer entities) is one of the main arguments against leaving medical insurance as a private sector function:
Basically, insurance is supposed to be a risk pooling mechanism. If you have a million people, total medical costs 10 million units; but with an unknown and highly uneven distribution, being able to pay 10 units(or 15, because the insurer is inefficient) with probability 100% beats having a 1% chance of having to pay 250,000 units and either die or go bankrupt.
However, the better your actuarial, epidemiological, and genetic technologies are, the less the "unknown" part of "unknown and highly uneven" holds up. In the extreme case, of perfect knowledge of lifetime medical expenses, "insurance" would be identical to a line of credit, just with more paperwork and overhead.
Thus, as your knowledge increases(both sciencey genetic testing stuff, and old-school actuarial pre-existing condition/demographic/lifestyle stuff), you(the society level "you", the individual "you" doesn't really have much choice) have to make a decision: Do you use the state, in some fashion, to provide the risk pool that the market no longer will? Or do you decide that more accurate cost allocation is a good thing, and the sickies can either pay up or die?
If you want a maximally pathological system(not that we would ever do that, cough, cough) you have a two-track system: individual private insurance, which becomes ever-less risk-pooling as knowledge increases, and employer-provided insurance, which risk-pools across all employees of a given entity. This two tier system is almost brilliantly perverse because it creates a strong incentive against hiring sickly people(even otherwise highly productive ones) because they raise the average cost of your employee risk pool, and thus the cost of providing health benefits. This ensures that people with pricey medical conditions are less likely to be employed, and less likely to be able to pay for them(even if they have valuable skills and a relatively cheap condition. Somebody with no particular skills who needs a $500,000 lung transplant is a charity case, keeping them alive, or not, is simply a humanitarian question; but there are plenty of people with more skills and cheaper conditions who, if employed, could pay their way; but if not employed, obviously can't.)
Plus, it discourages entrepreneurial activity; because quitting your job at $MEGACORP means getting kicked out of their risk pool, and facing the(much smaller) risk pool provided by purely market based insurance.
Much more broadly, though, this is a much, much older and more general phenomenon. Technology has always cut both ways vs. economic inequality. On the one hand, because it increases productivity, technology can and does increase what the poor have access to(fat poor people, for instance, are a quite recent invention). On the other hand; because it increases the scope of human power, it increases the benefits of wealth even faster.
Consider the really old days. Ancient Egypt, or classic Greece or something. Being king beat the hell out of being a peasant; but the actual quality of life available, even for a literal king's ransom, was pretty mediocre. Enough food, of whatever kind you preferred(unless it was out of season, no refrigeration), a (drafty) palace, an (aesthetically appealing but useless) heap of gold, and some slaves. You could still die of a simple infection, could only travel as fast as a horse, and so forth. With technology, the list of "what money can buy" has expanded enormously.
I would assume that, barring their securing super-cheap/free licenses for themselves on the "well, these are designed for poor kids who can't afford to buy our actual products, so why not score ourselves a tax writeoff?" principle, the OLPC people would just include the hardware and basic software support(to the best of my knowledge, "X11 that can see more than one pointer at a time, based on a touchscreen" is safe "All the little refinements that make using an iPhone nice" is a patent minefield).
From there, users could either just suck up a slightly less shiny, not quite as inertial scrolling experience, or they could violate the patents(if it is even a patent violation in whatever jurisdiction they are in) totally without any official knowledge or connivance of the OLCP entity.
"Tools" -> "Options" -> "Advanced" -> "Encryption" -> "Security Devices".
A few years ago, we all would have been reading this thread through just such a material. A few of us may still be.
The reason that CRTs were made of leaded glass was to protect the user from the X-rays one can generate by firing three 40 kilovolt electron guns through a vacuum and into their face. Those let the visible light through just fine, and largely protected users from eyeball cancer.
Some vests contain trauma plates, in addition to fiber of one sort or another, and those are both heavy and stiff(of course, for exactly this reason, most people who aren't expecting to take any rifle fire on a given day generally skip them).
More broadly, though, military and law enforcement sometimes put up with excessively weighty gear because it's the best of bad alternatives, not because carrying heavy things is morally salubrious. If it were practical for them to have more armor; but carried for them, you'd be damn sure that they'd be doing the exact same thing(see, for example, research on powered exoskeletons...) Doctors, because they tend to face radiation exposure indoors, in predictable places and at predictable times, are just easier to make "carry-assisted" armor for.
Plus, I suspect that, given that doctors are expensive to train, and experienced doctors are considered valuable, a comparatively cheap mechanism that allows a doctor to work until the age where he is incapable of being an effective doctor, rather than until the age where he can't wear a lead suit all day, could easily pay for itself in a very short period of time.
Have you never heard that phrase before? It has nothing to do with "indoctrination". It is the (more in some areas, less in others, utopian) notion that, with cheap genetic sequencing and similar technologies it will become possible to treat the precise disease condition of the specific patient, in the way maximally likely to work, given their genetic and phenotypic makeup.
A lot of it is basically puffery at this stage; but, for instance, there are already substantial areas in oncology where arguably similar techniques are used. Research has shown that simply classifying cancers by location "breast/lung/pancreas/etc." misses huge amounts of variation in sensitivity to various treatments. It has become reasonably common to decide on a course of action(radiation or not, chemo or not and which agents on what schedule, excision or not and how urgently) based on the genetic markers of a particular tumor, rather than its gross anatomy and location.