One of the paper authors, Jay Pantone, has an Erdos number of 3. That means Anonymous 4chan Poster has an Erdos number of 4. Pretty good for an anonymous 4chan poster.
Yeah, but the guy I know knew Zelazny when they were both originally undergrads (I think). I was mainly surprised to learn that Zelazny wrote a book about a perpetual student, not that perpetual students exist in real life.
But the workers would have been observed both before and after the checklists were implemented. While possibly improving overall care throughout the study, the Hawthorne effect shouldn't be the cause of the improvements after the checklists were implemented.
Even if one study isn't enough to change standards of care in the entire country (which I agree with), it should be enough to get a hospital somewhere to trial checklists. They should already be collecting infection data and data on the cause of deaths inside the hospital, so there may not be much of a Hawthorne effect then.
In the case of ICU checklists, nurses every year are required to do more and more documentation (an average of 18 pieces of paper for a new non-ICU admission to my hospital) and every checklist or additional page you add to that is taking time away from patient care. So what sounds like a great idea may in fact cause worse outcomes because it puts the nurses focus on a paper rather than their patient.
I agree. Someone should run a study where they first record error rates, infection rates, death rates, etc., then develop checklists based on that data, implement those checklists, and finally record the same data while the checklists are in use. That way you'd have at least some experimental evidence arguing either for or against checklists. Doctors all love evidence-based medicine, so I'm sure they'd get behind whatever the outcome, or at least support additional studies to gather more evidence.
... Reads TFA... Oh, they already did such a study, and it said checklists improve overall patient care. Awesome. Why don't you believe in evidence-based medicine?
Yeah, but now Jen McCarty has a book out (not mentioned in TFA) that talks about the same stuff as TFA. The article is likely related to publicity for the book.
Jen McCarty was my labmate in grad school (we had the same adviser), so I heard about the Titanic rivets a lot.
Jen didn't know if all of the rivets were made of poorer-quality iron. She only had 48 to test (they're expensive to retrieve). I have no idea how those rivets were distributed about the ship. A statistician might be able to tell you how confident you can be with 48 sample out of population of hundreds of thousands. However, IIRC every single rivet tested was of the poorer quality.
I believe the rivets were pulled out of the Titanic itself. Even if they were gathered from the ocean floor around the wreck, I think it's highly unlikely that someone happened to dump bad rivets from the early 1900s in the middle of the North Atlantic right where the Titanic sunk.
Both Jen's grad-school research and TFA mention higher quality iron being used in ship rivets normally. While it was more difficult to test for slag in rivets 100 years ago, they were very good at knowing how to make better (read: stronger) iron, because ultimately you can just test the iron to failure and see how strong it was. Jen looked at iron from other structures built around the same time as the Titanic and they were definitely of a higher quality (I think TFA mentioned the Brooklyn Bridge).
Finally, slag doesn't grow in iron because they sit on the ocean for 100 years. These rivets are roughly an inch in diameter, and Jen cut them in half and looked inside them. There was corrosion on the outside, sure, but the impurities that are at issue here are embedded in the rivets. IIRC, slag is almost a glassy substance. It has different mechanical properties than iron, leading to stress concentrations in the iron surrounding chunks of it. These stress concentrations result in the iron failing under less overall stress than it would have otherwise.
..."The Transformers," Hasbro's popular 1980s toy line of giant robots that morph into cars, trucks, planes, ships and other technological creations.
20 years ago, transformers would have been described as giant robots that transform into other things. Now CNN says they 'morph', depite the face that their name contains in it the word used to describe their shape-changing. What's worse is that the word 'morph' became popular because of the terminator in T-2, where it's used to describe something noticably different from what the transformers do.
Ask to see the breaker box that holds the breakers to your office space. The amperage that will trip each breaker should be printed on it. If it's not clear which breakers go to your office space (perhaps because there's one big box for the building and it's not labeled well, or there are different boxes for each office and they're not labelled well, either), ask the landlord.
Put in the lease that the electrical system in they office space will have a capacity of X. Have a clause that says that if this isn't the case, the landlord will spend his own money to fix it in X weeks/months/etc, and if he doesn't then you get free rent until he does, as well as the option to break your lease without penalty. Be willing to pay an electrician to check that the max amperage of the space is what it's agreed to before you sign the lease, though. Also make sure the lease allows you to have an electrician come in and do said checking.
If you're really worried, put a significant penalty into the lease if the amperage is too low (I'm sure you don't want to move any more than you have to). You will probably have to pay a little extra for this. If your landlord balks at this, tell him to get an electrician who will back his work do the inspection, so that the electrician pays the penalty and the landlord doesn't.
Re:Terry Pratchett
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't think it will ever happen. From what I've heard, Terry Pratchett doesn't really want to work with Neil again. It's not that Neil wasn't enjoyable to work with, it's that everything kept talking about the book that Neil Gaiman wrote with that other guy. Terry doesn't like to be the other guy.
Despite what people seem to be saying here, it's pretty easy to inflate grade in an engineering class without appearing like the proffessor is just cheating. All you need to do is make sure all your tests and asignments are too hard to use a traditional scale of 100-90 = A, 90-80 = B, 80-70 = C, etc. This makes it reasonable to scale the grades in the class in some manner. You then set this scale such that the average student gets a B+ and the lowest will only get a C+ or B-.
I have a friend who works as a freelance contractor sometimes and the impression I got from him was that if the tax-deductible organization you do the work for gives you a letter or notice or something that you volunteered a certain amount of time as a professional whatever-you-do to help them, then you can count that as a tax write-off. You aren't deducting the time spent from your taxes so much as the professional service that you provide. I certainly can't vouch for the validity of his claim, and as a materials scientist I don't think I'll have a chance to donate my professional skills anytime in the near future, but it may be worth calling an accountant about if you're interested.
It would be if there wasn't so much travel. It's very easy to be a carrier for a bacteria even if you have no symptoms. One person could easily make 10 or 20 people contagious, and each of them could make 10 or 20 contagious, etc. One of them traveling to NYC could get the entire east coast.
I think it's worth pointing out that most cleaners, like clorax, are antibacterial in a completely different way than all antibiotic drugs, in that they use chemicals like bleach to dissolve all the cells they come in contact with. That's why most of them say you should use gloves and whatnot when you use them. Anything that they're going to put in soap to kill bacteria will be something that doesn't harm people, making is a good candidate for antibiotic medicine.
See my previous post, since I don't want to repeat myself too much.
The short version is antibiotic hand soap breeds bacteria that are immune to that type of antibiotic. Since there are only three or four different types of antibiotics out there, breeding a resistant strain from hand soap means the strain is also immune to an entire type of antibiotic, so if you have a staph infection and use the soap you could get a strain of staph resistant to whatever particular antibiotic is in the soap. If someone else living in the same household gets infected with this new resistant strain of staph, they can't be helped by an entire type of antibiotic, focing the use of second- or third-line antibiotics. And the only way to breed a resistant strain is to use an antibiotic on it.
Hmmm... I guess I just repeated myself a bunch. Oh well.
If this guy caught the infection in the hospital, how could antibiotic soaps or failing to follow doctor's directions have been contributing factors, especially given the rarity and strength of vancomycin?
What happens is first- and second-line antibiotics, like penicillin, get overused. This creates many different strains of bacteria all over that are antibiotic resistant. If you get sick with one of these superbugs and can't shake it off on your own then you go to the hospital and get vancomycin. Since so much vancomycin has to be used in hositals it stands to reason that eventually one strain of bacteria will evolve that's immune to it. If there weren't so many strains of bacteria that were immune to penicillin there wouldn't be as much of a need to use vancomycin as much, resulting in fewer strains of vancomycin.
BTW, hospitals of full of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria, due both to all the antibiotics used there and to all the people that go there with antibiotic resistant strains ofbacteria already in them.
My info on how it doesn't always really self-sharpen comes from one fo Todd Hufnagle's grad students who works two doors down from my lab. The problem is they can't get it amorphous enough at the sizes they need with the strenths they need. Or at least they think that's it. All they really know is it isn't self-sharpening enough.
And to beat out DU it'll have to be self-sharpening. Which it may well be.
Ideally it is self sharpening. Because it's amorphous it has no preferential shear planes, so it always shears at 45 degrees, making it effectively self sharpening. At least in theory that's what it does. I work with a guy working on it and he explained to me that this "self sharpening" stuff is really theoretical because they can't really make large enough samples easily to test with.
Jeez, I have a busy day at work and as a result have to wait utill tomorrow to find out my advisor's company has been slashdotted:-]
The foils work like this:
When two elements mix together they will all either give off energy or suck up energy. If two elements give off energy when they mix then they mix exothermically. In the case of solids, it's usually not possible to take advantage of this energy because it's very difficult to get to chunks of differnet elements to mix together on the atomic level. However advances in computer chip fabrication methods have made this energy accessible.
The energy of mixing is made available by creating very thin alternating layers of two materials with a very high heat of mixing. Right now work working with a thickness of 50nm per two layers (that's 50nm for one layer of material A plus one layer of material B). When the layers are that thick, it's possible for atoms of the two layers to actually diffuse into each other due thermal diffusion when they get hot enough.
Right now we're using a 30V spark to get them hot. The spark will get a very small section of the foil hot enough to have the two layers diffuse into each other. When this happens a lot of heat is released (since they mix very exothermically). This heat energy is enough to make the atoms all around the sparked area start to interdiffuse, which gives off heat, which causes more atoms to interdiffuse, etc. The reaction moves through the foil very quickly (around 1 m/sec) and generates enough heat to get the foil up to very high temperatures (our current system gets to around 1200 deg C). As you can see, all the heat actually does come from inside the foil. This rapidly generated heat can be used to melt a strong, high temperature solder known as a braize that's attached to the two parts you are joining. Normally the only way to melt this braize is to put it in an oven at 800 deg C or higher, which is what leads to the high thermal mismatch of metal-ceramic joins. If the foil is used to join the two materials, they won't get hotter than ~100 deg C, resulting in very low thermal mismatch. And thanks to all the work from the IC industry the technology to make these foils, which expensive to buy, is very cheap and easy to operate, allowing us to make the foils inexpensively.
I'm sure I could have done a better job of explaining the foil, but at least I have more info than the blurb. BTW, there's a better version of the article here.
The movie industry doesn't adjust for inflation on purpose. Not adjusting for inflation means that movies will keep bringing in more and more money, allowing studios to say that such-and-such a movie broke lots of box office records in all their ads.
I moved my My Music folder from wherever the default is to a different drive. The next time I clicked on a My Music shortcut WinXP looked for and found the moved My Music folder. Something similiar might work for the My Pictures Directory.
Dilbert: You're only hearing what you want to hear!
PHB: Yes, I do look thinner today. It must be the situp I did yesterday.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the paper authors, Jay Pantone, has an Erdos number of 3. That means Anonymous 4chan Poster has an Erdos number of 4. Pretty good for an anonymous 4chan poster.
That is what an .M3U playlist is. If you prefer you can make them by hand or by scripting or whatever.
I may use the same alarm clock. My wife had it when we married, I think as a hand-me-down from her parents.
Yeah, but the guy I know knew Zelazny when they were both originally undergrads (I think). I was mainly surprised to learn that Zelazny wrote a book about a perpetual student, not that perpetual students exist in real life.
Wow. I think I know the guy who inspired that book.
But the workers would have been observed both before and after the checklists were implemented. While possibly improving overall care throughout the study, the Hawthorne effect shouldn't be the cause of the improvements after the checklists were implemented.
Even if one study isn't enough to change standards of care in the entire country (which I agree with), it should be enough to get a hospital somewhere to trial checklists. They should already be collecting infection data and data on the cause of deaths inside the hospital, so there may not be much of a Hawthorne effect then.
In the case of ICU checklists, nurses every year are required to do more and more documentation (an average of 18 pieces of paper for a new non-ICU admission to my hospital) and every checklist or additional page you add to that is taking time away from patient care. So what sounds like a great idea may in fact cause worse outcomes because it puts the nurses focus on a paper rather than their patient.
I agree. Someone should run a study where they first record error rates, infection rates, death rates, etc., then develop checklists based on that data, implement those checklists, and finally record the same data while the checklists are in use. That way you'd have at least some experimental evidence arguing either for or against checklists. Doctors all love evidence-based medicine, so I'm sure they'd get behind whatever the outcome, or at least support additional studies to gather more evidence.
Yeah, but now Jen McCarty has a book out (not mentioned in TFA) that talks about the same stuff as TFA. The article is likely related to publicity for the book.
Jen McCarty was my labmate in grad school (we had the same adviser), so I heard about the Titanic rivets a lot.
Jen didn't know if all of the rivets were made of poorer-quality iron. She only had 48 to test (they're expensive to retrieve). I have no idea how those rivets were distributed about the ship. A statistician might be able to tell you how confident you can be with 48 sample out of population of hundreds of thousands. However, IIRC every single rivet tested was of the poorer quality.
I believe the rivets were pulled out of the Titanic itself. Even if they were gathered from the ocean floor around the wreck, I think it's highly unlikely that someone happened to dump bad rivets from the early 1900s in the middle of the North Atlantic right where the Titanic sunk.
Both Jen's grad-school research and TFA mention higher quality iron being used in ship rivets normally. While it was more difficult to test for slag in rivets 100 years ago, they were very good at knowing how to make better (read: stronger) iron, because ultimately you can just test the iron to failure and see how strong it was. Jen looked at iron from other structures built around the same time as the Titanic and they were definitely of a higher quality (I think TFA mentioned the Brooklyn Bridge).
Finally, slag doesn't grow in iron because they sit on the ocean for 100 years. These rivets are roughly an inch in diameter, and Jen cut them in half and looked inside them. There was corrosion on the outside, sure, but the impurities that are at issue here are embedded in the rivets. IIRC, slag is almost a glassy substance. It has different mechanical properties than iron, leading to stress concentrations in the iron surrounding chunks of it. These stress concentrations result in the iron failing under less overall stress than it would have otherwise.
"Have you ever read Monte Cook's Iron Heroes"? Mike Mearls, one of the leads for 4th ed, wrote Iron Heroes.
20 years ago, transformers would have been described as giant robots that transform into other things. Now CNN says they 'morph', depite the face that their name contains in it the word used to describe their shape-changing. What's worse is that the word 'morph' became popular because of the terminator in T-2, where it's used to describe something noticably different from what the transformers do.
I'll never understand the media.
Ask to see the breaker box that holds the breakers to your office space. The amperage that will trip each breaker should be printed on it. If it's not clear which breakers go to your office space (perhaps because there's one big box for the building and it's not labeled well, or there are different boxes for each office and they're not labelled well, either), ask the landlord.
Put in the lease that the electrical system in they office space will have a capacity of X. Have a clause that says that if this isn't the case, the landlord will spend his own money to fix it in X weeks/months/etc, and if he doesn't then you get free rent until he does, as well as the option to break your lease without penalty. Be willing to pay an electrician to check that the max amperage of the space is what it's agreed to before you sign the lease, though. Also make sure the lease allows you to have an electrician come in and do said checking.
If you're really worried, put a significant penalty into the lease if the amperage is too low (I'm sure you don't want to move any more than you have to). You will probably have to pay a little extra for this. If your landlord balks at this, tell him to get an electrician who will back his work do the inspection, so that the electrician pays the penalty and the landlord doesn't.
I don't think it will ever happen. From what I've heard, Terry Pratchett doesn't really want to work with Neil again. It's not that Neil wasn't enjoyable to work with, it's that everything kept talking about the book that Neil Gaiman wrote with that other guy. Terry doesn't like to be the other guy.
John
Despite what people seem to be saying here, it's pretty easy to inflate grade in an engineering class without appearing like the proffessor is just cheating. All you need to do is make sure all your tests and asignments are too hard to use a traditional scale of 100-90 = A, 90-80 = B, 80-70 = C, etc. This makes it reasonable to scale the grades in the class in some manner. You then set this scale such that the average student gets a B+ and the lowest will only get a C+ or B-.
Mr. Spey
I have a friend who works as a freelance contractor sometimes and the impression I got from him was that if the tax-deductible organization you do the work for gives you a letter or notice or something that you volunteered a certain amount of time as a professional whatever-you-do to help them, then you can count that as a tax write-off. You aren't deducting the time spent from your taxes so much as the professional service that you provide. I certainly can't vouch for the validity of his claim, and as a materials scientist I don't think I'll have a chance to donate my professional skills anytime in the near future, but it may be worth calling an accountant about if you're interested.
Mr. Spey
Woudn't this be somewhat regional, though?
It would be if there wasn't so much travel. It's very easy to be a carrier for a bacteria even if you have no symptoms. One person could easily make 10 or 20 people contagious, and each of them could make 10 or 20 contagious, etc. One of them traveling to NYC could get the entire east coast.
Mr. Spey
I think it's worth pointing out that most cleaners, like clorax, are antibacterial in a completely different way than all antibiotic drugs, in that they use chemicals like bleach to dissolve all the cells they come in contact with. That's why most of them say you should use gloves and whatnot when you use them. Anything that they're going to put in soap to kill bacteria will be something that doesn't harm people, making is a good candidate for antibiotic medicine.
Mr. Spey
See my previous post, since I don't want to repeat myself too much.
... I guess I just repeated myself a bunch. Oh well.
The short version is antibiotic hand soap breeds bacteria that are immune to that type of antibiotic. Since there are only three or four different types of antibiotics out there, breeding a resistant strain from hand soap means the strain is also immune to an entire type of antibiotic, so if you have a staph infection and use the soap you could get a strain of staph resistant to whatever particular antibiotic is in the soap. If someone else living in the same household gets infected with this new resistant strain of staph, they can't be helped by an entire type of antibiotic, focing the use of second- or third-line antibiotics. And the only way to breed a resistant strain is to use an antibiotic on it.
Hmmm
Mr. Spey
If this guy caught the infection in the hospital, how could antibiotic soaps or failing to follow doctor's directions have been contributing factors, especially given the rarity and strength of vancomycin?
What happens is first- and second-line antibiotics, like penicillin, get overused. This creates many different strains of bacteria all over that are antibiotic resistant. If you get sick with one of these superbugs and can't shake it off on your own then you go to the hospital and get vancomycin. Since so much vancomycin has to be used in hositals it stands to reason that eventually one strain of bacteria will evolve that's immune to it. If there weren't so many strains of bacteria that were immune to penicillin there wouldn't be as much of a need to use vancomycin as much, resulting in fewer strains of vancomycin.
BTW, hospitals of full of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria, due both to all the antibiotics used there and to all the people that go there with antibiotic resistant strains ofbacteria already in them.
Mr. Spey
My info on how it doesn't always really self-sharpen comes from one fo Todd Hufnagle's grad students who works two doors down from my lab. The problem is they can't get it amorphous enough at the sizes they need with the strenths they need. Or at least they think that's it. All they really know is it isn't self-sharpening enough.
Mr. Spey
And to beat out DU it'll have to be self-sharpening. Which it may well be.
Ideally it is self sharpening. Because it's amorphous it has no preferential shear planes, so it always shears at 45 degrees, making it effectively self sharpening. At least in theory that's what it does. I work with a guy working on it and he explained to me that this "self sharpening" stuff is really theoretical because they can't really make large enough samples easily to test with.
Mr. Spey
Jeez, I have a busy day at work and as a result have to wait utill tomorrow to find out my advisor's company has been slashdotted :-]
The foils work like this:
When two elements mix together they will all either give off energy or suck up energy. If two elements give off energy when they mix then they mix exothermically. In the case of solids, it's usually not possible to take advantage of this energy because it's very difficult to get to chunks of differnet elements to mix together on the atomic level. However advances in computer chip fabrication methods have made this energy accessible.
The energy of mixing is made available by creating very thin alternating layers of two materials with a very high heat of mixing. Right now work working with a thickness of 50nm per two layers (that's 50nm for one layer of material A plus one layer of material B). When the layers are that thick, it's possible for atoms of the two layers to actually diffuse into each other due thermal diffusion when they get hot enough.
Right now we're using a 30V spark to get them hot. The spark will get a very small section of the foil hot enough to have the two layers diffuse into each other. When this happens a lot of heat is released (since they mix very exothermically). This heat energy is enough to make the atoms all around the sparked area start to interdiffuse, which gives off heat, which causes more atoms to interdiffuse, etc. The reaction moves through the foil very quickly (around 1 m/sec) and generates enough heat to get the foil up to very high temperatures (our current system gets to around 1200 deg C). As you can see, all the heat actually does come from inside the foil. This rapidly generated heat can be used to melt a strong, high temperature solder known as a braize that's attached to the two parts you are joining. Normally the only way to melt this braize is to put it in an oven at 800 deg C or higher, which is what leads to the high thermal mismatch of metal-ceramic joins. If the foil is used to join the two materials, they won't get hotter than ~100 deg C, resulting in very low thermal mismatch. And thanks to all the work from the IC industry the technology to make these foils, which expensive to buy, is very cheap and easy to operate, allowing us to make the foils inexpensively.
I'm sure I could have done a better job of explaining the foil, but at least I have more info than the blurb. BTW, there's a better version of the article here.
Mr. Spey
I don't know what's up with the link in the blurb, but here's a working link to the article: http://news.com.com/2100-1033-918439.html?tag=fd_t op
Mr. Spey
The movie industry doesn't adjust for inflation on purpose. Not adjusting for inflation means that movies will keep bringing in more and more money, allowing studios to say that such-and-such a movie broke lots of box office records in all their ads.
Mr. Spey
I moved my My Music folder from wherever the default is to a different drive. The next time I clicked on a My Music shortcut WinXP looked for and found the moved My Music folder. Something similiar might work for the My Pictures Directory. Dilbert: You're only hearing what you want to hear!
PHB: Yes, I do look thinner today. It must be the situp I did yesterday.
Mr. Spey