So how about propaganda-style editing backed by PR operations with sovereign backing? For instance, articles involving China, where the 50-cent army runs rampant over the more obscure topics (in contrast, popular and well-known topics are usually well-defended, so only subtle alterations tend to get through).
It's not just Wikipedia -- they're likely present on any western media forums considered high-traffic or influential in the realms of policy (for instance, The Economist's comment sections), where they crap up threads and start flamewars to disrupt topics critical of the PRC. It's hard to distinguish them from posters which may merely be jingoistic bozos, but their abundance and stubborn persistence is unusual, compared with topics about any other nation.
Oh wait, maybe you mean the other kind of enormous prick?
"Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert 'the genes for an elephant's trunk' into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. What you CAN do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals. For instance, we can in theory splice the native plants' talent for nitrogen fixation into a terran plant." -- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, Nonlinear Genetics
This would explain why "adequately" showed up so often-- every doctor has their own writing style with their own collection of pet phrases/words, and my guess is that certain doctors like to use the word "adequately" more often than others.
I would have to know the context of how the word "adequately" was used, but a possibility is that it could have been employed in the process of clinical butt-covering. Sometimes a physician gets a bad feeling about potential adverse outcomes, yet there's maybe nothing directly actionable, and you end up with a note written in guarded terms, in preparation for legal or disciplinary review -- including perhaps careful descriptions of things that have been "adequately" evaluated or performed.
Lipitor
Patients on Lipitor likely already have poor Cardiovascular health. In particular, Heart Failure is known to be associated with elevated suicide risk; such patients frequently suffer from limitations in their daily physical activities, and depression is common.
Swab
This one is a little tough to puzzle out. It probably occurs in reference to swab-samples, but I really can't think of specific medical tests that would be linked to elevated suicide risk. On the other hand, if they referred to forensic swabs, that might be a different situation.
integrated
Probably references a patient requiring complex integrated healthcare, meaning they have complex health problems.
Now this is rather interesting. Tumor interiors are often low-pH environments, thanks to poor oxygenation and a reliance on anaerobic metabolism (see: arburg effect).
Standard CGA, you mean? As I recall it had a mode not quite like EGA.
I managed to get a PCjr monitor for cheap back when I was a poor student stuck with monochome.
If you chopped off the proprietary PCjr connector and put a standard DE-9 one on, you could use it as an ordinary CGA monitor. If your video card supported it, the monitor could also operate in a special interlaced EGA mode. Terrible refresh rate and flickering, but it worked.
A Corporation is NOT a one-person-per-vote democracy. It is one-SHARE-per-vote.
Sometimes it is not even one-share-per-vote. Thanks to inventive structures involving different share classes, the owners of a tiny minority of shares can sometimes end up controlling the majority of the vote.
Funny you should mention Net Neutrality, because this is what it's all about. And an example of how farsighted Google is compared to their opposition, always a step ahead in their strategic planning. If Net Neutrality continues to get rolled back, expect Internet companies to get squeezed hard by the big ISPs (I predict Netflix will be the most vulnerable example of this). "Nice Market you got there. Would be a shame if anything happened to it."
Google is anticipating such a development, and demonstrating to those providers that they are not quite untouchable as they think. They don't need to roll out Google Fiber everywhere (though that would be awesome), just do it enough times to demonstrate to ISPs that they can do it anywhere.
This would be an excellent development, bit keep in mind the field is littered with many dozens of failed devices and startup companies.
Of the various http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noninvasive_glucose_monitor"> non-invasive glucose monitoring methods that have been tried, I am aware of only one that was approved in the US (a transcutaneous electroporation device), and that one was withdrawn from the market shortly after.
And how many were on H-1B's rather than green card-holders?
Well, most FMGs use J1 visas for residency and fellowship, although H-1B's are sometimes used for this purpose as well. Afterwards, an H1B can be used to remain in the US as a practicing physician, and as a stepping stone for a green card.
If one can sinter the blades for a jet engine damaged by a bird strike, that would be a fundamental technological accomplishment, especially if the blades are balanced and could be installed.
Printing a turbine blade would be quite an accomplishment, considering that modern blades are often made from a single crystal of Superalloy metal
The issue here is the distinction between Prophylactic Vaccines and Therapeutic Vaccines.
The OP's confusion is understandable, as the vast majority of vaccines in clinical use are purely Prophylactic in nature, functioning solely as preventatives; these have little or no utility when administered after infection has taken place. Such vaccines are typically heavily dependent on Humoral Immunity, which may take several weeks time to reach maximum effectiveness, and maybe an additional dose or two.
This delay means the vaccine is of little use in acute infectious diseases (which run their course in a relatively short length of time). In chronic diseases, the infectious agent may be around longer, but usually by that time the immune system is already generating an appropriate response to the naturally occurring disease agent -- in other words, the advantage of the vaccine was purely in helping the immune system get there "first-est with the most-est", and you've already lost that advantage in waiting.
The number of Therapeutic Vaccines is relatively small, but a good example of one such entity is the Rabies Vaccine (which is both a Prophylactic and Therapeutic Vaccine) -- which manages to work post-exposure in part due to the time lag before the virus succeeds in penetrating the central nervous system. The case for most HIV therapeutic vaccine candidates I've seen, is in the argument that an HIV infection mis-directs the immune system that can be corrected; most such candidates attempt to enhance the Cell-Mediated Immune response, which appears to be particularly vital to the anti-HIV immune response. However, several such agents have been tried in the past, and all have failed in testing.
In modern times, Artificial Heart designs have been diverging into two camps. This one belongs to the old-school cardiac mimics -- complex multi-chamber pumps designed to mimic the pulsatile flow of a natural heart. The bovine pericardium lining is a clever idea -- we already make bio-prosthetic valves (mostly from pig heart valves). As the material is non-living connective tissue, it doesn't raise the same acute rejection problems that living xeno-grafts have. And, while most patients with such valves still require permanent treatment with drugs to prevent clots, the required degree of anti-coagulation is much less than those required with mechanical valves.
The other school consists of the pulse-less turbine-type devices. Instead of mimicking a natural heart, these devices use a high-speed rotating impeller to drive fluid flow. It was once thought that the shearing forces of an impeller would result in too much damage to red blood cells, and that pulsatile flow of blood was a necessary feature physiological feature, but non-pulsatile later-generation Ventricular Assistive Devices have demonstrated this is not the case. Currently, all such devices are only used as adjuncts to a failing natural heart, and there are no such devices approved as complete replacements -- yet. Compared with their more complex cousins, these devices are smaller and lighter, and mechanically more robust. However, they suffer from issues with clots and damage to leukocytes, due to the artificial materials used.
In either case, it will be interesting to see how the devices performs out in the field. The expected Five-year lifespan of a unit doesn't sound like much, but keep in mind many patients will be elderly, and your goal may simply be to give them improved quality-of-life, until in a few years something else kills them instead.
60-80 hour work weeks endured by software engineers
You know, that might be part of the problem, too. With a 60-80 hour work week, how much time do you think software engineers have to participate in the community itself? A neighborhood isn't just a set of nice buildings you drive past in-between work/sleep cycles.
The link to Fourier's gangrene on Wikipedia is totally unnecessary, and the article includes an image that is decidedly not safe for work.
I've actually seen (and smelled) a case of Fournier's Gangrene.
What you're looking at on Wikipedia is a little misleading, as it is actually the aftermath of a surgical procedure in which necrotic tissue has already been stripped away. The typical appearance of a case would involve something more like painful and massively swollen testicles, with discoloration that may initially be reddish but rapidly changing to bluish/greenish color, with a foul odor. Externally visible tissue breakdown will eventually start to happen, but most cases end up in surgery well before that happens.
To borrow an old joke: Cellulosic Ethanol is the fuel of the future -- and always will be.
From a chemistry or molecular biology perspective the concept looks great -- similar Hexose sugar units are in Sugar / Starch / Cellulose, so why not use the most abundant and cheapest material? The problem looks different from the perspective of evolutionary biology, however. Naturally occurring Cellulase enzymes, sourced from a wide range of different organisms, have each undergone a long process of optimization through evolutionary history. Yet every enzyme remains extremely slow and inefficient (compared to enzymes that process sugars and starches). Why is that?
I believe the reason is that Cellulose (or rather, the Cellulose-in-Lignin composite matrix that plants use) is the end result of a very long evolutionary arms race between plants and their consumers. It has evolved to be resistant to microbial degradation -- never totally resistant, but just tough enough to ensure no critter gets a free lunch out of digesting it.
Of course, not all Cellulosic Ethanol need be derived from purely microbial techniques; chemical and chemical/biological hybrid processes might break the evolutionary deadlock. Others have suggested engineering the starting material itself, starting with plants designed to produce more easily digestible Cellulose (which brings up the problem of how well they would defend themselves against insects and pathogens). Unfortunately, in each of these alternate solutions, the amount of work needed is enormous, and it is possible we are simply out of time, with regards to the funding for this sort of research.
Reasonable alternatives would not be priced at $27 a pop or pose a serious mercury contamination risk for disposed of bulbs, or evacuation [epa.gov] in the case of broken ones.
A bit of perspective here. I worked out the numbers once, and found that a typical CFL has about as much mercury as ~5lbs of swordfish steaks. So if a CFL is a serious mercury contamination risk, then all over the U.S. there are seafood vendors who are shipping around what are essentially batches of mercury contamination, for people cook and eat.
Slashdot Mirror
So how about propaganda-style editing backed by PR operations with sovereign backing? For instance, articles involving China, where the 50-cent army runs rampant over the more obscure topics (in contrast, popular and well-known topics are usually well-defended, so only subtle alterations tend to get through).
It's not just Wikipedia -- they're likely present on any western media forums considered high-traffic or influential in the realms of policy (for instance, The Economist's comment sections), where they crap up threads and start flamewars to disrupt topics critical of the PRC. It's hard to distinguish them from posters which may merely be jingoistic bozos, but their abundance and stubborn persistence is unusual, compared with topics about any other nation.
To borrow from Mel Brooks:
Count De Monet: "I have come on the most urgent of business. The userbase is revolting!"
King Dice: "You said it; they stink on ice."
For those building slashdot alternatives
Might I remind my fellow posters, that the last time a mass user-base fork occurred, we ended up with Kuro5hin?
Ewww...
Open source generic engineering for all! Say, would you happen to know the nucleotide sequence for an enormous prick?
Here you go: http://www.snpedia.com/index.p...
Oh wait, maybe you mean the other kind of enormous prick?
"Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert 'the genes for an elephant's trunk' into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. What you CAN do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals. For instance, we can in theory splice the native plants' talent for nitrogen fixation into a terran plant." -- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, Nonlinear Genetics
Warburg effect (for those who want to learn more about it)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Thanks, it's easy to make typos and hard to make links, when posting from a mobile phone.
This would explain why "adequately" showed up so often-- every doctor has their own writing style with their own collection of pet phrases/words, and my guess is that certain doctors like to use the word "adequately" more often than others.
I would have to know the context of how the word "adequately" was used, but a possibility is that it could have been employed in the process of clinical butt-covering. Sometimes a physician gets a bad feeling about potential adverse outcomes, yet there's maybe nothing directly actionable, and you end up with a note written in guarded terms, in preparation for legal or disciplinary review -- including perhaps careful descriptions of things that have been "adequately" evaluated or performed.
Lipitor
Patients on Lipitor likely already have poor Cardiovascular health. In particular, Heart Failure is known to be associated with elevated suicide risk; such patients frequently suffer from limitations in their daily physical activities, and depression is common.
Swab
This one is a little tough to puzzle out. It probably occurs in reference to swab-samples, but I really can't think of specific medical tests that would be linked to elevated suicide risk. On the other hand, if they referred to forensic swabs, that might be a different situation.
integrated
Probably references a patient requiring complex integrated healthcare, meaning they have complex health problems.
Now this is rather interesting. Tumor interiors are often low-pH environments, thanks to poor oxygenation and a reliance on anaerobic metabolism (see: arburg effect).
that's the magical median age when slashdotters leave their mother's basement
Ah yes, that is the age when our wizardly powers surge forth, granting eldrich understanding beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. I remember it well.
Standard CGA, you mean? As I recall it had a mode not quite like EGA.
I managed to get a PCjr monitor for cheap back when I was a poor student stuck with monochome.
If you chopped off the proprietary PCjr connector and put a standard DE-9 one on, you could use it as an ordinary CGA monitor. If your video card supported it, the monitor could also operate in a special interlaced EGA mode. Terrible refresh rate and flickering, but it worked.
A Corporation is NOT a one-person-per-vote democracy. It is one-SHARE-per-vote.
Sometimes it is not even one-share-per-vote. Thanks to inventive structures involving different share classes, the owners of a tiny minority of shares can sometimes end up controlling the majority of the vote.
Funny you should mention Net Neutrality, because this is what it's all about. And an example of how farsighted Google is compared to their opposition, always a step ahead in their strategic planning. If Net Neutrality continues to get rolled back, expect Internet companies to get squeezed hard by the big ISPs (I predict Netflix will be the most vulnerable example of this). "Nice Market you got there. Would be a shame if anything happened to it."
Google is anticipating such a development, and demonstrating to those providers that they are not quite untouchable as they think. They don't need to roll out Google Fiber everywhere (though that would be awesome), just do it enough times to demonstrate to ISPs that they can do it anywhere.
C'mon....are we really worried about a use case for telnet websurfing?
Porn, of course. After a while you don't even see the code anymore -- just blonde, brunette, redhead...
Proofpoint Researcher: "Is your refrigerator running?"
Fridge Owner: "Yes?"
Proofpoint Researcher: "Well, you'd better go catch it!"
This would be an excellent development, bit keep in mind the field is littered with many dozens of failed devices and startup companies.
Of the various http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noninvasive_glucose_monitor"> non-invasive glucose monitoring methods that have been tried, I am aware of only one that was approved in the US (a transcutaneous electroporation device), and that one was withdrawn from the market shortly after.
And how many were on H-1B's rather than green card-holders?
Well, most FMGs use J1 visas for residency and fellowship, although H-1B's are sometimes used for this purpose as well. Afterwards, an H1B can be used to remain in the US as a practicing physician, and as a stepping stone for a green card.
If one can sinter the blades for a jet engine damaged by a bird strike, that would be a fundamental technological accomplishment, especially if the blades are balanced and could be installed.
Printing a turbine blade would be quite an accomplishment, considering that modern blades are often made from a single crystal of Superalloy metal
.
The issue here is the distinction between Prophylactic Vaccines and Therapeutic Vaccines .
The OP's confusion is understandable, as the vast majority of vaccines in clinical use are purely Prophylactic in nature, functioning solely as preventatives; these have little or no utility when administered after infection has taken place. Such vaccines are typically heavily dependent on Humoral Immunity, which may take several weeks time to reach maximum effectiveness, and maybe an additional dose or two.
This delay means the vaccine is of little use in acute infectious diseases (which run their course in a relatively short length of time). In chronic diseases, the infectious agent may be around longer, but usually by that time the immune system is already generating an appropriate response to the naturally occurring disease agent -- in other words, the advantage of the vaccine was purely in helping the immune system get there "first-est with the most-est", and you've already lost that advantage in waiting.
The number of Therapeutic Vaccines is relatively small, but a good example of one such entity is the Rabies Vaccine (which is both a Prophylactic and Therapeutic Vaccine) -- which manages to work post-exposure in part due to the time lag before the virus succeeds in penetrating the central nervous system. The case for most HIV therapeutic vaccine candidates I've seen, is in the argument that an HIV infection mis-directs the immune system that can be corrected; most such candidates attempt to enhance the Cell-Mediated Immune response, which appears to be particularly vital to the anti-HIV immune response. However, several such agents have been tried in the past, and all have failed in testing.
This is true even though a homely spouse makes for a much more attentive husband/wife.
Jimmy Soul - If You Want To Be Happy (1963)
If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life
Never make a pretty woman your wife
So from my personal point of view
Get an ugly girl to marry you
surely helps my Mom
Oh hey, You just helped me figure out what rhymes with "ritz" and "sits" and "pits". Thanks!
As often happens, I was placed in "none of the above" when social classification came around.
Ah yes, the Picked-Last-For-Kickball-Team non-tribe. We know of it.
In modern times, Artificial Heart designs have been diverging into two camps. This one belongs to the old-school cardiac mimics -- complex multi-chamber pumps designed to mimic the pulsatile flow of a natural heart. The bovine pericardium lining is a clever idea -- we already make bio-prosthetic valves (mostly from pig heart valves). As the material is non-living connective tissue, it doesn't raise the same acute rejection problems that living xeno-grafts have. And, while most patients with such valves still require permanent treatment with drugs to prevent clots, the required degree of anti-coagulation is much less than those required with mechanical valves.
The other school consists of the pulse-less turbine-type devices. Instead of mimicking a natural heart, these devices use a high-speed rotating impeller to drive fluid flow. It was once thought that the shearing forces of an impeller would result in too much damage to red blood cells, and that pulsatile flow of blood was a necessary feature physiological feature, but non-pulsatile later-generation Ventricular Assistive Devices have demonstrated this is not the case. Currently, all such devices are only used as adjuncts to a failing natural heart, and there are no such devices approved as complete replacements -- yet. Compared with their more complex cousins, these devices are smaller and lighter, and mechanically more robust. However, they suffer from issues with clots and damage to leukocytes, due to the artificial materials used.
In either case, it will be interesting to see how the devices performs out in the field. The expected Five-year lifespan of a unit doesn't sound like much, but keep in mind many patients will be elderly, and your goal may simply be to give them improved quality-of-life, until in a few years something else kills them instead.
60-80 hour work weeks endured by software engineers
You know, that might be part of the problem, too. With a 60-80 hour work week, how much time do you think software engineers have to participate in the community itself? A neighborhood isn't just a set of nice buildings you drive past in-between work/sleep cycles.
The link to Fourier's gangrene on Wikipedia is totally unnecessary, and the article includes an image that is decidedly not safe for work.
I've actually seen (and smelled) a case of Fournier's Gangrene.
What you're looking at on Wikipedia is a little misleading, as it is actually the aftermath of a surgical procedure in which necrotic tissue has already been stripped away. The typical appearance of a case would involve something more like painful and massively swollen testicles, with discoloration that may initially be reddish but rapidly changing to bluish/greenish color, with a foul odor. Externally visible tissue breakdown will eventually start to happen, but most cases end up in surgery well before that happens.
Cellulose is the only way to go
To borrow an old joke: Cellulosic Ethanol is the fuel of the future -- and always will be.
From a chemistry or molecular biology perspective the concept looks great -- similar Hexose sugar units are in Sugar / Starch / Cellulose, so why not use the most abundant and cheapest material? The problem looks different from the perspective of evolutionary biology, however. Naturally occurring Cellulase enzymes, sourced from a wide range of different organisms, have each undergone a long process of optimization through evolutionary history. Yet every enzyme remains extremely slow and inefficient (compared to enzymes that process sugars and starches). Why is that?
I believe the reason is that Cellulose (or rather, the Cellulose-in-Lignin composite matrix that plants use) is the end result of a very long evolutionary arms race between plants and their consumers. It has evolved to be resistant to microbial degradation -- never totally resistant, but just tough enough to ensure no critter gets a free lunch out of digesting it.
Of course, not all Cellulosic Ethanol need be derived from purely microbial techniques; chemical and chemical/biological hybrid processes might break the evolutionary deadlock. Others have suggested engineering the starting material itself, starting with plants designed to produce more easily digestible Cellulose (which brings up the problem of how well they would defend themselves against insects and pathogens). Unfortunately, in each of these alternate solutions, the amount of work needed is enormous, and it is possible we are simply out of time, with regards to the funding for this sort of research.
Reasonable alternatives would not be priced at $27 a pop or pose a serious mercury contamination risk for disposed of bulbs, or evacuation [epa.gov] in the case of broken ones.
A bit of perspective here. I worked out the numbers once, and found that a typical CFL has about as much mercury as ~5lbs of swordfish steaks. So if a CFL is a serious mercury contamination risk, then all over the U.S. there are seafood vendors who are shipping around what are essentially batches of mercury contamination, for people cook and eat.