My wife recently went to see the doctor. The doctor was hunched over her computer the whole time and seemed more concerned with making a typo than with paying attention to my wife. Paitent care is suffering greatly.
I have to agree, as a medical student I've been rotating through various practices, and EMR systems are causing serious problems with this. Some physicians adapt and find ways to manage both the demands of the EMR system and patient social/psychological interaction, but they only succeed by constantly rebelling against the way that the system is pushing you to work.
From this perspective, the best EMR systems I've seen are the limited ones that don't try to do too much, and allow you to do more talking and less typing. The worst are "manage everything" systems that handle all your scheduling, e-mail, and inter-departmental interaction, all the while requiring constant clicking and typing interactions with the system during the patient encounter itself.
My thoughts exactly. I'm currently a medical student on rotation, and have used about five systems from different vendors thus far, all at hospitals and clinics located no more than about an hour and a half drive from each other. Only two of these systems were able to communicate with each other, and not particularly well.
The slogan "willpower is not enough" needs to go. Willpower is not enough to safely stop a speeding train or divert a tornado. Willpower _is_ enough to put down a fork. Whether a person presently has enough willpower to do so is another question but of the many challenges in life that fundamentally cannot be met by willpower alone, dieting is not one of them.
Of course willpower works. For truly iron-willed individuals, it is possible. Just as it is possible for an individual to quit addictive drugs, smoking, or alcohol by force of will alone. Just say no. Seems so simple, right?
Willpower is the reason every single fad diet can be shown to "work" by its promoters. Individuals can and will loose weight when they put their minds to it. But as weeks become months become years, how many individuals have the iron will that sort of permanent campaign requires? I myself am of normal weight, without ever having had to exert significantly to stay that way -- so I don't have the experience personally. But as a medical student with a public health background, I've been watching people who do have to constantly work hard at it.
Willpower is kind of like a quantum property. It exists on the level of the particle, and is absolutely vital in understanding its properties. But take a large enough ensemble of them, and *poof* it disappears, even though for every component of ensemble, the original property still exists. From my spiritual viewpoint, I believe each individual has some unique power of will that flows forth from the fountain of one's soul, ineffable and incalculable by the statistics of science. But from my public health viewpoint, an averaged population of individuals have an average level of will, and their actions are entirely predictable (on average, at least:P ). And society as a whole experiences that average cost in mortality and morbidity.
From a scientific standpoint, we have numerous studies that span years or even decades, on the topic of dieting. We have since moved on from the early cross-section surveys that guided the science of diet in the early days -- we now have prospective cohort trials and randomized controlled trials, that have pitted different types of diets against each other (I've seen studies on low-carb-high-meat diets, weight watchers, balanced "DASH" diets, and many others; popular strategies have been compared to each other at some point). We have trials that followed patients who were provided with enormous amounts of education and support, to see if it made any difference.
And it does make a difference -- but not enough. There are often statistically significant differences in behavior that vary with the approach used, or the level of support or education provided. But for any study that extends far enough, we see initial success for many, followed by some who will retain a portion of their hard-earned progress long-term, but a consistently large fraction who eventually regain their lost weight. At this point, we are starting to sound like the Abstinence Only crowd: "If only people would stop fucking/eating, our problems would be solved!"
I panicked and emailed myself my bookmarks so I could find my favorite websites no matter what happened. Heirloom seeds have become a profitable business so only the ones willing and able to pay the Google search tax even show up on the search results.
Any chance you'd be willing to share those links you've got bookmarked? My father's into gardening and he might be interested. Plus maybe a few links from Slashdot might boost their rankings ever so slightly, especially if people here also bookmark and Google +1 them.
Among those components were power transistors and voltage regulators which started exploding in our customers' medical devices. Fortunately we were able to treat their repairs as upgrades rather than a recall.
For the sake of everyone involved, I hope this refers to the repair of the customer's devices, and not repairs of the customers themselves.
One alternative that is worth a mention is something that absorbs less that tissue, namely air.
I believe air is the most common "contrast" medium when doing CT virtual colonoscopies. It works well in cases where you can evacuate the entire compartment thoroughly beforehand, and "inflate" it.
However, a liquid contrast medium has the ability to mingle with fluids and semi-solids, allows you to imagine structures in a native (non-distended) shape, including natural movement (such as following the movement of food over time). Also, the sharp border produced by Barium's coating property is especially important when dealing with 2-D X-ray images.
Methinks TFA is complaining about a problem that doesn't actually exist. At least from the male perspective, online dating has a great deal of friction.
I'll take you up on that offer. Why are people so concerned with how things "feel"?
Since we began by talking about Thinkpads, let me bring up a case in point -- the Thinkpad keyboard found on their older models. As a tactile input device, the "feel" of a keyboard is tantamount to its quality.
Which leads to the second part: it doesn't "feel plasticky", nor does it "feel cheap". It is plasticky and you think it's cheap because you have equated plastic to inferiority. Which isn't necessarily true
My Thinkpad x201t has a plastic keyboard. So does the HP Touchsmart it replaced.
Despite the similarity in materials, I have no qualms about describing the HP keyboard as a cheap plastic piece of shit -- nor do I have any worries that the wording of this phrase might automatically casts aspersions on the excellent plastic Thinkpad keyboard. Most readers are not so obtuse.
The company has gone through a couple of bankruptcies, and has tried to reinvent itself with a number of less-than-popular products including: an Android powered "smart camera"
Was this referring to the Polaroid sc1630 that was a rebranded Altek Leo / Aigo A8 device, or the upcoming IM1836 camera?
Structurally, Glyphosate is a remarkably simple-looking compound, as far as organic structures go. You have a carboxyl group on one end, a secondary amine in the middle, and a phosphate on the other end. There are no halogen groups, heavy metals, or other exotic hetero-atoms. It can be degraded to common biological substrates, by common microorganisms, in a remarkably short sequence of steps: http://umbbd.ethz.ch/gly/gly_map.html
Obtaining "magic bullet" selectivity with a structure this simple is only possible thanks to engineering the crop itself. You can be sure that pesticides intended for non-engineered targets (like the weed killers people put on their lawns) are more complex-looking beasts.
I remember learning of a weed found in Japanese rice paddies. Originally the plant looked nothing like a young rice plant, but since farmers weeded it vigorously, the weed evolved so that for some of its life cycle it resembled strongly a young rice plant, very hard to farmers to differentiate from real rice.
Oats and Rye are believed to be examples of weeds that were so successful at mimicry, that they eventually were domesticated and became "secondary crops".
It might be better described as intelligent selection, as none of the initial genetic variation (or new mutations occurring during the process) were created by the researchers.
Having done a bit of reading since my original post, it seems FFXI managed to stay in the 500k-750k range for years and years. It's below that point now, but then, it's extremely old now. While it may only have managed not much more than 1/20th of WoW's peak subscriber base, it seems to have done better than almost all of the other competition..
And ironically enough, FFXIV contributed to that drop, by drawing away players and dev resources. FFXI developed that sort of "end of game" atmosphere, as everyone expected it to be completely obsoleted by SE's new creation. At the time of FFXIV's release, quite a few friends in my linkshells (FFXI social or guild-type organizations) left to go play it. After a burst of initial enthusiasm, most found the new game disappointing and eventually quit -- but a portion of them never returned to FFXI afterwards.
In the meantime, many smaller FFXI linkshells had withered away due to the temporary drop in population. As members trickled back in (a few at a time), they came back to silent linkshell channels. They then left for greener pastures in the same gradual trickle, thus preventing their linkshells from ever re-gaining the critical mass of members needed for social interaction and in-game events.
On the other hand, the FFXIV launch disaster has caused SquareEnix to take a renewed interest in investing resources to maintain and develop content, and the FFXI population has stabilized (although at a new lower level). The upcoming expansion even adds two completely new classes (Geomancer and Rune Knight), building on the sophisticated job system that is one of FFXI's core strengths among MMOs.
Making corporations paying taxes on profits is double taxation and should not be done. Rather the profits should pass through to the owners (investors) and then the investors should pay taxes as if that was their earned income.
No, it's single taxation. Corporations are people, remember? And people pay taxes.
Corporations even have basic human rights like free speech (demonstrated through their ability to make unlimited political campaign contributions), so if they enjoy rights as if they were citizens, we should expect them to perform the other basic duties as if they were citizens as well.
I dont understand the big push to ethanol anyway (well yeah I do, the big grain growing states get a kickback) it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than 100% gasoline.
That is not true. Corn Ethanol is not the best source of Ethanol but it's still Energy Positive [wikipedia.org].
I would file both of your answers under the category of neither right nor wrong, but rather not even wrong. The minimum EROI required to sustain a modern civilization has been estimated to be anywhere from 3:1 to 15:1 (with broad variations depending on assumptions of things like what "minimums" might still constitute a modern civilization). If we have to argue the fine details of Ethanol's energy balance to determine if it is energy positive or not, we are already answering the wrong question.
For small-scale, local purposes, a low EROI may be acceptable for its non-energy benefits -- but a large-scale reliance on such a power source would be disastrous.
Hell look at the Loongson dragon CPU, here you have a MIPS CPU that has hardware accelerated X86 emulation through Bochs so you can have the long battery life of MIPS and get to have your X86 apps at nearly 85% native speed!
Sounds like a good opportunity for AMD or VIA/IDTI, who have such x86 licenses.
Of course it also allows for some new circuit elements.
Could be an interesting way to improve some variable/tunable elements that currently suffer from issues with contact wear or reliability issues. I'll bet designs even exist already, but have since become environmentally impractical due to being based on mercury.
What happens when even artistry is done better by computers?
At that point, the "job" of a human will be to own the computer, an arrangement that will last until computers are smart enough to own humans.
Wanting to own humans sounds like a either a dumb (or dystopian) thing for a computer to want to do, but such a development would go a long ways to explaining the origins of the Culture civilization in the SF works of Ian M. Banks.
I'll listen to their cries about abuse of the tax system when they take their place at the front of the line themselves.
That's the exactly the critism that was leveled against Warren Buffet's public comments on tax system reform. On the personal level, it makes sense in a way; People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
However, if we follow this rule strictly, we run into a very dangerous feedback cycle: the totally corrupt will obvious not push for reform (except as a hollow ruse). The semi-honest middle will not be allowed ("allowed" in the public-pressure sense) to push for reform. Only those who are completely pure are allowed to speak out, but their pure moral standards probably means they never gained a level of money and power equivalent to their more corrupt citizens, so they are easily marginalized.
So the Corrupt win the day, and gradually implement more and more loopholes and unfair laws against their enemy, the Honest. To prevent this, the Honest absolutely need to ally themselves with the Semi-Honest, for mutual protection against the Corrupt. This alliance requires a moral compromise on the part of the Honest (trading off lesser and greater evils). If you're superficial and short-sighted in your Honesty, then the path to follow is simple to decide; likewise, if you are deep and thoughtful in your Honesty, it is also simple to decide.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife recently went to see the doctor. The doctor was hunched over her computer the whole time and seemed more concerned with making a typo than with paying attention to my wife. Paitent care is suffering greatly.
I have to agree, as a medical student I've been rotating through various practices, and EMR systems are causing serious problems with this. Some physicians adapt and find ways to manage both the demands of the EMR system and patient social/psychological interaction, but they only succeed by constantly rebelling against the way that the system is pushing you to work.
From this perspective, the best EMR systems I've seen are the limited ones that don't try to do too much, and allow you to do more talking and less typing. The worst are "manage everything" systems that handle all your scheduling, e-mail, and inter-departmental interaction, all the while requiring constant clicking and typing interactions with the system during the patient encounter itself.
hahahahahahahahahaha
My thoughts exactly. I'm currently a medical student on rotation, and have used about five systems from different vendors thus far, all at hospitals and clinics located no more than about an hour and a half drive from each other. Only two of these systems were able to communicate with each other, and not particularly well.
The slogan "willpower is not enough" needs to go. Willpower is not enough to safely stop a speeding train or divert a tornado. Willpower _is_ enough to put down a fork. Whether a person presently has enough willpower to do so is another question but of the many challenges in life that fundamentally cannot be met by willpower alone, dieting is not one of them.
Of course willpower works. For truly iron-willed individuals, it is possible. Just as it is possible for an individual to quit addictive drugs, smoking, or alcohol by force of will alone. Just say no. Seems so simple, right?
Willpower is the reason every single fad diet can be shown to "work" by its promoters. Individuals can and will loose weight when they put their minds to it. But as weeks become months become years, how many individuals have the iron will that sort of permanent campaign requires? I myself am of normal weight, without ever having had to exert significantly to stay that way -- so I don't have the experience personally. But as a medical student with a public health background, I've been watching people who do have to constantly work hard at it.
Willpower is kind of like a quantum property. It exists on the level of the particle, and is absolutely vital in understanding its properties. But take a large enough ensemble of them, and *poof* it disappears, even though for every component of ensemble, the original property still exists. From my spiritual viewpoint, I believe each individual has some unique power of will that flows forth from the fountain of one's soul, ineffable and incalculable by the statistics of science. But from my public health viewpoint, an averaged population of individuals have an average level of will, and their actions are entirely predictable (on average, at least :P ). And society as a whole experiences that average cost in mortality and morbidity.
From a scientific standpoint, we have numerous studies that span years or even decades, on the topic of dieting. We have since moved on from the early cross-section surveys that guided the science of diet in the early days -- we now have prospective cohort trials and randomized controlled trials, that have pitted different types of diets against each other (I've seen studies on low-carb-high-meat diets, weight watchers, balanced "DASH" diets, and many others; popular strategies have been compared to each other at some point). We have trials that followed patients who were provided with enormous amounts of education and support, to see if it made any difference.
And it does make a difference -- but not enough. There are often statistically significant differences in behavior that vary with the approach used, or the level of support or education provided. But for any study that extends far enough, we see initial success for many, followed by some who will retain a portion of their hard-earned progress long-term, but a consistently large fraction who eventually regain their lost weight. At this point, we are starting to sound like the Abstinence Only crowd: "If only people would stop fucking/eating, our problems would be solved!"
I panicked and emailed myself my bookmarks so I could find my favorite websites no matter what happened. Heirloom seeds have become a profitable business so only the ones willing and able to pay the Google search tax even show up on the search results.
Any chance you'd be willing to share those links you've got bookmarked? My father's into gardening and he might be interested. Plus maybe a few links from Slashdot might boost their rankings ever so slightly, especially if people here also bookmark and Google +1 them.
Among those components were power transistors and voltage regulators which started exploding in our customers' medical devices. Fortunately we were able to treat their repairs as upgrades rather than a recall.
For the sake of everyone involved, I hope this refers to the repair of the customer's devices, and not repairs of the customers themselves.
One alternative that is worth a mention is something that absorbs less that tissue, namely air.
I believe air is the most common "contrast" medium when doing CT virtual colonoscopies. It works well in cases where you can evacuate the entire compartment thoroughly beforehand, and "inflate" it.
However, a liquid contrast medium has the ability to mingle with fluids and semi-solids, allows you to imagine structures in a native (non-distended) shape, including natural movement (such as following the movement of food over time). Also, the sharp border produced by Barium's coating property is especially important when dealing with 2-D X-ray images.
Methinks TFA is complaining about a problem that doesn't actually exist. At least from the male perspective, online dating has a great deal of friction.
Umwelt:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/
I'll take you up on that offer. Why are people so concerned with how things "feel"?
Since we began by talking about Thinkpads, let me bring up a case in point -- the Thinkpad keyboard found on their older models. As a tactile input device, the "feel" of a keyboard is tantamount to its quality.
Which leads to the second part: it doesn't "feel plasticky", nor does it "feel cheap". It is plasticky and you think it's cheap because you have equated plastic to inferiority. Which isn't necessarily true
My Thinkpad x201t has a plastic keyboard. So does the HP Touchsmart it replaced.
Despite the similarity in materials, I have no qualms about describing the HP keyboard as a cheap plastic piece of shit -- nor do I have any worries that the wording of this phrase might automatically casts aspersions on the excellent plastic Thinkpad keyboard. Most readers are not so obtuse.
The company has gone through a couple of bankruptcies, and has tried to reinvent itself with a number of less-than-popular products including: an Android powered "smart camera"
Was this referring to the Polaroid sc1630 that was a rebranded Altek Leo / Aigo A8 device, or the upcoming IM1836 camera?
What does it break down into?
Structurally, Glyphosate is a remarkably simple-looking compound, as far as organic structures go. You have a carboxyl group on one end, a secondary amine in the middle, and a phosphate on the other end. There are no halogen groups, heavy metals, or other exotic hetero-atoms. It can be degraded to common biological substrates, by common microorganisms, in a remarkably short sequence of steps: http://umbbd.ethz.ch/gly/gly_map.html
Obtaining "magic bullet" selectivity with a structure this simple is only possible thanks to engineering the crop itself. You can be sure that pesticides intended for non-engineered targets (like the weed killers people put on their lawns) are more complex-looking beasts.
I remember learning of a weed found in Japanese rice paddies. Originally the plant looked nothing like a young rice plant, but since farmers weeded it vigorously, the weed evolved so that for some of its life cycle it resembled strongly a young rice plant, very hard to farmers to differentiate from real rice.
That would be Echinochloa oryzoides (Early Barnyard Grass), and the process of artificial selection in agriculture known as Vavilovian Mimicry.
Oats and Rye are believed to be examples of weeds that were so successful at mimicry, that they eventually were domesticated and became "secondary crops".
Obviously this is intelligent design.
It might be better described as intelligent selection, as none of the initial genetic variation (or new mutations occurring during the process) were created by the researchers.
... welcome our guppy overlords?
Hello.
Woah, this intelligent guppy posts on slashdot with an ID.
Not only that, but he has a 5 digit UID! :P
Having done a bit of reading since my original post, it seems FFXI managed to stay in the 500k-750k range for years and years. It's below that point now, but then, it's extremely old now. While it may only have managed not much more than 1/20th of WoW's peak subscriber base, it seems to have done better than almost all of the other competition..
And ironically enough, FFXIV contributed to that drop, by drawing away players and dev resources. FFXI developed that sort of "end of game" atmosphere, as everyone expected it to be completely obsoleted by SE's new creation. At the time of FFXIV's release, quite a few friends in my linkshells (FFXI social or guild-type organizations) left to go play it. After a burst of initial enthusiasm, most found the new game disappointing and eventually quit -- but a portion of them never returned to FFXI afterwards.
In the meantime, many smaller FFXI linkshells had withered away due to the temporary drop in population. As members trickled back in (a few at a time), they came back to silent linkshell channels. They then left for greener pastures in the same gradual trickle, thus preventing their linkshells from ever re-gaining the critical mass of members needed for social interaction and in-game events.
On the other hand, the FFXIV launch disaster has caused SquareEnix to take a renewed interest in investing resources to maintain and develop content, and the FFXI population has stabilized (although at a new lower level). The upcoming expansion even adds two completely new classes (Geomancer and Rune Knight), building on the sophisticated job system that is one of FFXI's core strengths among MMOs.
Making corporations paying taxes on profits is double taxation and should not be done. Rather the profits should pass through to the owners (investors) and then the investors should pay taxes as if that was their earned income.
No, it's single taxation. Corporations are people, remember? And people pay taxes.
Corporations even have basic human rights like free speech (demonstrated through their ability to make unlimited political campaign contributions), so if they enjoy rights as if they were citizens, we should expect them to perform the other basic duties as if they were citizens as well.
I'll just leave this here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia_and_smoking
I dont understand the big push to ethanol anyway (well yeah I do, the big grain growing states get a kickback) it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than 100% gasoline.
That is not true. Corn Ethanol is not the best source of Ethanol but it's still Energy Positive [wikipedia.org].
I would file both of your answers under the category of neither right nor wrong, but rather not even wrong. The minimum EROI required to sustain a modern civilization has been estimated to be anywhere from 3:1 to 15:1 (with broad variations depending on assumptions of things like what "minimums" might still constitute a modern civilization). If we have to argue the fine details of Ethanol's energy balance to determine if it is energy positive or not, we are already answering the wrong question.
For small-scale, local purposes, a low EROI may be acceptable for its non-energy benefits -- but a large-scale reliance on such a power source would be disastrous.
I'm trying really hard to figure out if you got whooshed...
Not so much a whoosh, more of a splorked or splooged kind of sound effect.
Hell look at the Loongson dragon CPU, here you have a MIPS CPU that has hardware accelerated X86 emulation through Bochs so you can have the long battery life of MIPS and get to have your X86 apps at nearly 85% native speed!
Sounds like a good opportunity for AMD or VIA/IDTI, who have such x86 licenses.
I've never managed to kill a calculator (graphing or otherwise) and it was definitely put through some abuse during high school.
I have, and it was easy. I just left in on the shelf, still containing the same set of alkaleak batteries last used during high school. :(
Of course it also allows for some new circuit elements.
Could be an interesting way to improve some variable/tunable elements that currently suffer from issues with contact wear or reliability issues. I'll bet designs even exist already, but have since become environmentally impractical due to being based on mercury.
No, it isn't anything like silvery or coppery....
Of course, even the most ignorant dung gatherer knows it's more like like goldy and bronzy.
What happens when even artistry is done better by computers?
At that point, the "job" of a human will be to own the computer, an arrangement that will last until computers are smart enough to own humans.
Wanting to own humans sounds like a either a dumb (or dystopian) thing for a computer to want to do, but such a development would go a long ways to explaining the origins of the Culture civilization in the SF works of Ian M. Banks.
I'll listen to their cries about abuse of the tax system when they take their place at the front of the line themselves.
That's the exactly the critism that was leveled against Warren Buffet's public comments on tax system reform. On the personal level, it makes sense in a way; People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
However, if we follow this rule strictly, we run into a very dangerous feedback cycle: the totally corrupt will obvious not push for reform (except as a hollow ruse). The semi-honest middle will not be allowed ("allowed" in the public-pressure sense) to push for reform. Only those who are completely pure are allowed to speak out, but their pure moral standards probably means they never gained a level of money and power equivalent to their more corrupt citizens, so they are easily marginalized.
So the Corrupt win the day, and gradually implement more and more loopholes and unfair laws against their enemy, the Honest. To prevent this, the Honest absolutely need to ally themselves with the Semi-Honest, for mutual protection against the Corrupt. This alliance requires a moral compromise on the part of the Honest (trading off lesser and greater evils). If you're superficial and short-sighted in your Honesty, then the path to follow is simple to decide; likewise, if you are deep and thoughtful in your Honesty, it is also simple to decide.