In HS, finding the two primes that add up to an even number was the most memorable assignment. The teacher had a bet that anyone who could write a faster program than his would get a prize... but his was always faster for any number over a million or so. It wasn't until the next semester that I figured out that the key was to only loop until the square root of a factor before deciding it was prime.
Sorry about the link, it was the first I found that was specific to heart surgery. The other reply was accurate in that I only had one issue and there were no other issues that would require more extensive access. The main contraindication for the treatment is having a lot of fat. (I don't remember if it's surface fat, or if it's fat around your organs.)
There are risks with any procedure, but believe me there are plenty of risks associated with open heart surgery and the following recovery. Without the robot, they would need to saw open my sternum and spread my rib cage. You can't just stitch the sternum closed when you're done. I would have faced a much, much longer recovery period after the hospital with open heart. Scars are cosmetic and inconvenient, but that shouldn't be the primary consideration for choosing robotic surgery.
I did a lot of research on robotic heart surgery because I know that open heart surgery is a well-understood procedure. It sucks (split sternum!!), but lots of surgeons know how to do it correctly. I made sure that the surgeon was well-practiced in robotic and non-robotic surgery (in case a problem occurred, they need to be able to do it the old-fashioned way). And at the time I found other research papers that did find benefits for some cardiac patients but not for gynecological/urological procedures. If I or someone I knew needed a non-cardiac procedure, I would prefer not using a robot. But if someone I know fits the treatment profile for robotic heart surgery, and has access to an experienced surgeon, I would tell them that they should definitely consider it.
"Robotic surgery was more expensive ($39,030 vs $36,340) but was associated with a shorter length of stay (5 vs 6 days), lower mortality (1.0% vs 1.9%), and lower overall complication rates (27.2% vs 30.3%)."
When I needed to have a mitral valve repaired, I was told I was a good candidate for robotic surgery because I was relatively young and in good health otherwise. I went in Tuesday morning and left the hospital Friday afternoon, and instead of a twelve-inch scar down the middle of my chest, I have a 3.5-inch scar on my right side surrounded by three puncture wound scars (for the robotic arms). I'm glad I had the option.
That said, I'm concerned that some hospitals, having made a big investment in a surgical robot, might be tempted to get additional use out of it by adding on other procedures where the cost/benefit analysis isn't so clear.
OK, so listening to this, I just now realized (30+ years later) that an alphabet tune that has been stuck in my head forever looks like it's based on the Well-Tempered Clavier.
Fugue No. 2 in C minor, BMV 847 (track 4) vs. start of Alphabet Chat (Found one for the letter L; still funny to me.)
Parody of Power Rangers. No one is mistaking this for an actual official Power Rangers movie. (Compare with Hustler v. Falwell.) The difference in fan fiction is that when looking at an excerpt of text, there is the potential that a reader might mistake a piece with officially sanctioned/published material. Non-commercial work faces a lower bar for being judged as fair use. (Thus firms are more likely to obtain permission/licensing when making a product or film.)
Health care applications typically don't have access to a master list of names. They use multiple criteria in addition to names to do master patient indexing. Similar names are an important component (Jaro-Winkler is a nice metric to consider), but are given less weight when the last name or first name is common. But if you include birth date, government identifiers (ssn, driver's license, medicaid/medicare), current/past addresses (allowing again for transposition or similar errors), your accuracy gets much better.
No idea if government intelligence apps do this, but I would expect they do (or at least there are staff members who know what to do, if they could only convince higher-ups).
There are price levels where the risk of fraud and abuse may outweigh the costs of enforcement and compliance. People who travel to other countries cannot carry more than $10000 in cash without reporting it. The risk is money laundering and drug running.
Regulating everything or regulating nothing always leads to huge Type I/Type II errors. Reasonable people can disagree on the appropriate level of compromise.
The article was adapted from a longer blog post. In the adaptation, they linked to Psychology Today (ugh) to discuss "micro-inequities" as the initial term for phenomena that were later covered under the term unconscious bias or implicit bias. Having it doesn't make you racist or sexist; it's as human as risk aversion and loss aversion, both well studied. But like risk aversion or loss aversion, implicit bias can dissuade humans from making an optimal, economically rational decision. It takes self-awareness and practice to overcome these tendencies (and then only sometimes).
If you can't explain it, and you can't define it, and you can't trace it back, perhaps it's not real.
These have been studied for decades in psychology, social psychology, and sociology. Do you really expect a full lit review in an article in the popular press, adapted from a blog post by an academic who is speaking from personal experience about topics not in his core field?
In the 80's, I learned calculus in a US public high school with a textbook from the 1960's. Well, that, *and* a great math teacher. Making an e-book that presents the material is easy... making an e-book that actually helps students gain understanding is pretty darn hard.
For more details on this, I recommend Kevin Drum's article, which summarizes the research well. (Not just a spurious correlation, although it's good to be skeptical.)
I needed mitral valve repair surgery, and I was a good candidate for robotic surgery: relatively young, good health (other than the valve), not obese (fat gets in the way). Instead of sawing my sternum and spreading my chest open, the surgeon (who has a lot of experience in both robotic and open heart surgery) was able to go in through my right side and leave a 3-inch scar and three puncture wounds. I was in the hospital Tuesday morning, and out Friday afternoon. I'm grateful to have had access to this technology. The benefits of robotic surgery compared to open heart surgery are clear (at least in my case).
But when a hospital has a large fixed cost to acquire technology, it is all too tempting to spread that cost out over a greater number of surgeries. The benefits are not nearly so clear in surgeries that don't require bone-breaking or bone-sawing. If someday I need gall bladder surgery, or if my spouse needs a hysterectomy, I would have a strong preference to avoid robotic surgery unless a skilled surgeon can make a compelling argument that the specifics of our case are a good fit for robotic assistance. (And believe me, I read as much of the medical literature as I could in making the decision: when one of the surgical steps is, basically, "shut down the heart," you want to know as much as you can. Open heart surgery for valve repair is a well-understood, well-practiced technique, but for me the decision to use the robot was about the reduced shock to the body, shorter recovery time, and reduced scarring.)
Part of the credit for the deficit decline under Clinton goes to George HW Bush, who broke his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge for the good of the country. I remember being really concerned about the revenue increases that Clinton signed early in his first term because I was familiar with Republican talking points about taxes being automatically bad for the economy. Then I saw that the world didn't end, I took some basic econ courses (micro/macro) and learned to take macro theories (left or right) with huge handfuls of salt when considering the real world.
A common fallacy is that governments should run their finances like a family. A family does not (1) live forever, (2) print its own currency, (3) collect revenue as a matter of law, or (4) have a duty to provide public goods like a national defense. Maintaining debt in perpetuity makes sense as long as the economy grows over the long term and as long as that debt doesn't get "too big" (with pretty fierce debate over what that means -- 100% of GDP is not necessarily too big by historical standards, but reputable minds can disagree).
But in terms of the maturity level of *this* particular Congress, this is pretty spot on.
There are exceptions to first amendment protections. Speech that incites imminent lawless action, or "fighting words" (speech that leads to immediate physical retaliation) are not protected, at least in the US.
The purpose of letting people speak freely is to allow venting of grievances as an alternative to violent confrontation. But when those words in fact degrade civility to the point that violence increases, then we've reached diminishing returns for the first amendment. When individuals or groups can bully with impunity and induce violence against a person (sometimes by suicide), then I can start to see the problems with unfettered free speech rights.
It's not enough to justify the banning of anonymity, but civilization needs at least a little civility.
For cognitively demanding jobs and careers, we need to attract the best and brightest regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. So if a career path is not pulling from the full population, it is a fair question to examine why. We are faced with a long-term shortage in the supply of nurses. Why don't more men pursue that career?
To compare with a slightly different field: my spouse works in a manufacturing environment, and she's the best engineer there (IMHO). They would like to continue improving the department by hiring new staff, but they can't find qualified people. Maybe if women and men were pursuing mechanical engineering in equal numbers, there'd be a better pool of candidates to draw from?
(Also: Garbage trucks are becoming more automated. Pretty soon, we won't need women *or* men hanging off the back of a truck.)
I'm a lifelong Catholic (with mod points I'm burning, but oh well), and I agree with the majority of the parent post, and your original post. But there are two items I need to respond to.
concepts such as papal infallibility
Infallibility only applies when the pope speaks ex cathedra. It is reserved for doctrinal issues, not policy. The anti-contraception encyclical Humane Vitae is not an infallible teaching but a matter of individual conscience, and the Catholics who follow H.V. are rare indeed.
If that's what your spirit tells you, then maybe you should consider the possibility that you're being held spiritually hostage by these people as a way to further their power, and the reality is that if you truly want to be closer to God, there are far better ways to do that than through these morally bankrupt charlatans.
I think many liberal American Catholics have been forced to consider this. Among those who stay in spite of the hostility from the hierarchy, there is a general feeling that we have to work to change the church, over a long period of time. The priest shortage will only grow worse over time, and the church will perhaps be forced to change. I know someone who is gay and Catholic who stays because he believes he is called to change the church, even though many members of his family have left.
"Why bother staying?" is a very valid question. Financial and moral corruption should be rooted out, and Catholics and non-Catholics alike can work toward those goals both in the church and in other large instutitions. But as for why I stay, the most Slashdot-relevant quote that comes to mind is, "Because, there is good in him. I've felt it.... I can save him."
Steve Jobs admired Sony (before they went bad) and built Apple with a similar focus on the consumer. It's not a foregone conclusion that Apple will follow Sony's fate -- how well has the current Apple leadership learned from Jobs? will the next generation of innovators see Apple as a place to build cool things? (versus Google, or Amazon, or -urk- Facebook?)
But the usual trajectory is: founder leaves, the immediate replacement does pretty well, but after that leadership is only able to see what worked in the past and not what needs to change to be successful in the future.
20 years ago, I was an Apple guy seeing Windows 3.1 and thinking "Not as good as my Mac, but..." I'm having similar thoughts about the Kindle Fire and Android now. In between, Apple nearly died out (when Jobs was gone). I think the near-death experience will keep Apple from getting too fat and happy over the next decade, but in the long term, who knows?
Apple stores have been around for 10 years. When they started, iPhones and iPads did not exist. Past performance does not guarantee future results, but as a retail experience Apple has done very well.
His statistical reasoning is always well described, so that if you disagree with his results, at least you understand why you disagree. He's got "picks" and a description of the system used to generate them.
The original article is an interesting network analysis exercise, but it is really limited by its assumption of no a priori quality data. (Any time you beat Kentucky or North Carolina or other perennial powerhouses, that's almost always a quality win.) Sagarin and LRMC follow similar logic, but without an explicit network piece.
Slashdot Mirror
In HS, finding the two primes that add up to an even number was the most memorable assignment. The teacher had a bet that anyone who could write a faster program than his would get a prize ... but his was always faster for any number over a million or so. It wasn't until the next semester that I figured out that the key was to only loop until the square root of a factor before deciding it was prime.
Sorry about the link, it was the first I found that was specific to heart surgery. The other reply was accurate in that I only had one issue and there were no other issues that would require more extensive access. The main contraindication for the treatment is having a lot of fat. (I don't remember if it's surface fat, or if it's fat around your organs.)
There are risks with any procedure, but believe me there are plenty of risks associated with open heart surgery and the following recovery. Without the robot, they would need to saw open my sternum and spread my rib cage. You can't just stitch the sternum closed when you're done. I would have faced a much, much longer recovery period after the hospital with open heart. Scars are cosmetic and inconvenient, but that shouldn't be the primary consideration for choosing robotic surgery.
I did a lot of research on robotic heart surgery because I know that open heart surgery is a well-understood procedure. It sucks (split sternum!!), but lots of surgeons know how to do it correctly. I made sure that the surgeon was well-practiced in robotic and non-robotic surgery (in case a problem occurred, they need to be able to do it the old-fashioned way). And at the time I found other research papers that did find benefits for some cardiac patients but not for gynecological/urological procedures. If I or someone I knew needed a non-cardiac procedure, I would prefer not using a robot. But if someone I know fits the treatment profile for robotic heart surgery, and has access to an experienced surgeon, I would tell them that they should definitely consider it.
"Critical Outcomes in Nonrobotic vs Robotic-Assisted Cardiac Surgery"
http://www.ctsnet.org/jans/cri...
"Robotic surgery was more expensive ($39,030 vs $36,340) but was associated with a shorter length of stay (5 vs 6 days), lower mortality (1.0% vs 1.9%), and lower overall complication rates (27.2% vs 30.3%)."
When I needed to have a mitral valve repaired, I was told I was a good candidate for robotic surgery because I was relatively young and in good health otherwise. I went in Tuesday morning and left the hospital Friday afternoon, and instead of a twelve-inch scar down the middle of my chest, I have a 3.5-inch scar on my right side surrounded by three puncture wound scars (for the robotic arms). I'm glad I had the option.
That said, I'm concerned that some hospitals, having made a big investment in a surgical robot, might be tempted to get additional use out of it by adding on other procedures where the cost/benefit analysis isn't so clear.
OK, so listening to this, I just now realized (30+ years later) that an alphabet tune that has been stuck in my head forever looks like it's based on the Well-Tempered Clavier.
Fugue No. 2 in C minor, BMV 847 (track 4) vs. start of Alphabet Chat (Found one for the letter L; still funny to me.)
"A-B-C-D-E C-D-E-F-G H-I-J-K L-M-N-O-P Q-R-S-T-U R-S-T-U-V S-T-U-V W-X-Y-Z and ... A ... B ... C."
Kill off IE if you must; but keep IE-tan around, and give her a new hair tie ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Parody of Power Rangers. No one is mistaking this for an actual official Power Rangers movie. (Compare with Hustler v. Falwell.) The difference in fan fiction is that when looking at an excerpt of text, there is the potential that a reader might mistake a piece with officially sanctioned/published material. Non-commercial work faces a lower bar for being judged as fair use. (Thus firms are more likely to obtain permission/licensing when making a product or film.)
Satire of grimdark and remakes/reboots. "In the grim future of Hello Kitty, there is only war". http://onastick.net/sitz/image...
The video was interesting in spots; this article wasn't.
Wisdom, if you can handle it. Cognitive dissonance, if you can't.
There are no fires. Only thermal events.
Health care applications typically don't have access to a master list of names. They use multiple criteria in addition to names to do master patient indexing. Similar names are an important component (Jaro-Winkler is a nice metric to consider), but are given less weight when the last name or first name is common. But if you include birth date, government identifiers (ssn, driver's license, medicaid/medicare), current/past addresses (allowing again for transposition or similar errors), your accuracy gets much better.
No idea if government intelligence apps do this, but I would expect they do (or at least there are staff members who know what to do, if they could only convince higher-ups).
Really, this pretty much covers everybody in-between, too.
There are price levels where the risk of fraud and abuse may outweigh the costs of enforcement and compliance. People who travel to other countries cannot carry more than $10000 in cash without reporting it. The risk is money laundering and drug running.
Regulating everything or regulating nothing always leads to huge Type I/Type II errors. Reasonable people can disagree on the appropriate level of compromise.
The article was adapted from a longer blog post. In the adaptation, they linked to Psychology Today (ugh) to discuss "micro-inequities" as the initial term for phenomena that were later covered under the term unconscious bias or implicit bias. Having it doesn't make you racist or sexist; it's as human as risk aversion and loss aversion, both well studied. But like risk aversion or loss aversion, implicit bias can dissuade humans from making an optimal, economically rational decision. It takes self-awareness and practice to overcome these tendencies (and then only sometimes).
These have been studied for decades in psychology, social psychology, and sociology. Do you really expect a full lit review in an article in the popular press, adapted from a blog post by an academic who is speaking from personal experience about topics not in his core field?
We are humans. With quirky, bug-prone wetware.
In the 80's, I learned calculus in a US public high school with a textbook from the 1960's. Well, that, *and* a great math teacher. Making an e-book that presents the material is easy ... making an e-book that actually helps students gain understanding is pretty darn hard.
For more details on this, I recommend Kevin Drum's article, which summarizes the research well. (Not just a spurious correlation, although it's good to be skeptical.)
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline
I needed mitral valve repair surgery, and I was a good candidate for robotic surgery: relatively young, good health (other than the valve), not obese (fat gets in the way). Instead of sawing my sternum and spreading my chest open, the surgeon (who has a lot of experience in both robotic and open heart surgery) was able to go in through my right side and leave a 3-inch scar and three puncture wounds. I was in the hospital Tuesday morning, and out Friday afternoon. I'm grateful to have had access to this technology. The benefits of robotic surgery compared to open heart surgery are clear (at least in my case).
But when a hospital has a large fixed cost to acquire technology, it is all too tempting to spread that cost out over a greater number of surgeries. The benefits are not nearly so clear in surgeries that don't require bone-breaking or bone-sawing. If someday I need gall bladder surgery, or if my spouse needs a hysterectomy, I would have a strong preference to avoid robotic surgery unless a skilled surgeon can make a compelling argument that the specifics of our case are a good fit for robotic assistance. (And believe me, I read as much of the medical literature as I could in making the decision: when one of the surgical steps is, basically, "shut down the heart," you want to know as much as you can. Open heart surgery for valve repair is a well-understood, well-practiced technique, but for me the decision to use the robot was about the reduced shock to the body, shorter recovery time, and reduced scarring.)
Part of the credit for the deficit decline under Clinton goes to George HW Bush, who broke his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge for the good of the country. I remember being really concerned about the revenue increases that Clinton signed early in his first term because I was familiar with Republican talking points about taxes being automatically bad for the economy. Then I saw that the world didn't end, I took some basic econ courses (micro/macro) and learned to take macro theories (left or right) with huge handfuls of salt when considering the real world.
A common fallacy is that governments should run their finances like a family. A family does not (1) live forever, (2) print its own currency, (3) collect revenue as a matter of law, or (4) have a duty to provide public goods like a national defense. Maintaining debt in perpetuity makes sense as long as the economy grows over the long term and as long as that debt doesn't get "too big" (with pretty fierce debate over what that means -- 100% of GDP is not necessarily too big by historical standards, but reputable minds can disagree).
But in terms of the maturity level of *this* particular Congress, this is pretty spot on.
Better example: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.
Just like 'No Child Left Behind' and 'Mission Accomplished'
There are exceptions to first amendment protections. Speech that incites imminent lawless action, or "fighting words" (speech that leads to immediate physical retaliation) are not protected, at least in the US.
The purpose of letting people speak freely is to allow venting of grievances as an alternative to violent confrontation. But when those words in fact degrade civility to the point that violence increases, then we've reached diminishing returns for the first amendment. When individuals or groups can bully with impunity and induce violence against a person (sometimes by suicide), then I can start to see the problems with unfettered free speech rights.
It's not enough to justify the banning of anonymity, but civilization needs at least a little civility.
For cognitively demanding jobs and careers, we need to attract the best and brightest regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. So if a career path is not pulling from the full population, it is a fair question to examine why. We are faced with a long-term shortage in the supply of nurses. Why don't more men pursue that career?
To compare with a slightly different field: my spouse works in a manufacturing environment, and she's the best engineer there (IMHO). They would like to continue improving the department by hiring new staff, but they can't find qualified people. Maybe if women and men were pursuing mechanical engineering in equal numbers, there'd be a better pool of candidates to draw from?
(Also: Garbage trucks are becoming more automated. Pretty soon, we won't need women *or* men hanging off the back of a truck.)
I'm a lifelong Catholic (with mod points I'm burning, but oh well), and I agree with the majority of the parent post, and your original post. But there are two items I need to respond to.
Infallibility only applies when the pope speaks ex cathedra. It is reserved for doctrinal issues, not policy. The anti-contraception encyclical Humane Vitae is not an infallible teaching but a matter of individual conscience, and the Catholics who follow H.V. are rare indeed.
I think many liberal American Catholics have been forced to consider this. Among those who stay in spite of the hostility from the hierarchy, there is a general feeling that we have to work to change the church, over a long period of time. The priest shortage will only grow worse over time, and the church will perhaps be forced to change. I know someone who is gay and Catholic who stays because he believes he is called to change the church, even though many members of his family have left.
"Why bother staying?" is a very valid question. Financial and moral corruption should be rooted out, and Catholics and non-Catholics alike can work toward those goals both in the church and in other large instutitions. But as for why I stay, the most Slashdot-relevant quote that comes to mind is, "Because, there is good in him. I've felt it. ... I can save him."
Steve Jobs admired Sony (before they went bad) and built Apple with a similar focus on the consumer. It's not a foregone conclusion that Apple will follow Sony's fate -- how well has the current Apple leadership learned from Jobs? will the next generation of innovators see Apple as a place to build cool things? (versus Google, or Amazon, or -urk- Facebook?)
But the usual trajectory is: founder leaves, the immediate replacement does pretty well, but after that leadership is only able to see what worked in the past and not what needs to change to be successful in the future.
20 years ago, I was an Apple guy seeing Windows 3.1 and thinking "Not as good as my Mac, but ..." I'm having similar thoughts about the Kindle Fire and Android now. In between, Apple nearly died out (when Jobs was gone). I think the near-death experience will keep Apple from getting too fat and happy over the next decade, but in the long term, who knows?
Apple stores have been around for 10 years. When they started, iPhones and iPads did not exist. Past performance does not guarantee future results, but as a retail experience Apple has done very well.
His statistical reasoning is always well described, so that if you disagree with his results, at least you understand why you disagree. He's got "picks" and a description of the system used to generate them.
The original article is an interesting network analysis exercise, but it is really limited by its assumption of no a priori quality data. (Any time you beat Kentucky or North Carolina or other perennial powerhouses, that's almost always a quality win.) Sagarin and LRMC follow similar logic, but without an explicit network piece.