Yes, test, test, test. I believe that there are people who may have a susceptibility. When I walk through a hospital or lab I can "feel" the MRI/NMR machines, but it doesn't mean I'm feeling the earth's mag field. It's an odd sensation. The nearest thing I can explain is it's like I have the sensation of being watched.
Does this mean I'm allergic to magnetic fields? No, I don't think I've started an immune response to magnetic fields. Sensitive? Yes.
The Soviets did this for eye surgery decades ago. They would have patients on a carousel with surgeons each applying one step of the surgery. Then the entire patient carousel would shift with the next surgeons applying their one step to the next patient.
New Topic: Top 5 reasons it sucks to hire the new crop of engineering students: 5.) They expect the Statement of work you're asking for completion to be colorful, fun, and well written. 4.) They can relate how their professor who cave them a B- is soooo much better at solving problems than you. 3.) They are convinced working as a TA is real work. 2.) Untraining the bad habits. I block instant messaging for a reason. 1.) They want me to vote for Obama and incessantly drone on about how horrible life is in the US.
In another comparison reported by the World Health Organization that used a different set of health indicators, the U.S. also fared poorly with a ranking of 15 among 25 industrialized nations
In that same report, it is noted the if accidents were removed from the statistics, the US would have the number one lifespan in the world.
A good bit of Europe's economy are state-controlled enterprises (ever hear of Airbus?). It's a system that works very well,
What? Airbus is doing well? Really? What school of business did you go to? The only reason they will still be making some planes is that Boeing can't fulfill all the orders.
Europe doesn't scare me. It's the government that will replace the failing governments that scares me. How long will Europe survive, crushed under it's own caretaker-state? 15% Unemployment, a 35 hour work week, 6 weeks vacation and a sense of sniveling self righteousness that nothing is wrong spells an inevitable repeat of the circumstances of the Locarno Pact.
This is what Putin is waiting for...like a vulture circling.
they are in for a disappointment. No, they aren't. If your idea isn't worth your time and investment, it sure as hell isn't worth theirs.
I know it's a lot of work. First hand.
There is nothing that says you can't go to management and say "Hey, I've got this idea, it's fully disclosed, I'd like to learn how to productize it. Is there someone who can help me go through the process so that it's exactly the way you want it? I want to create a market analysis, a 5P chart, and make a few calls to customers to see if it's something they can use."
If they say no, you have a choice. Leave or stay. You can't take the exact idea with you, but you do get to keep your domain knowledge. Maybe you can recreate the idea somewhere else.
I can tell you, if you ask an officer level manager (or CEO) in those words, you will get attention as *enthusiasm* and as *initiative* which is exactly what a CEO likely is complaining about when he or she says there is a lack of innovation. I think there's plenty of innovation. There's a shortage of usable innovation and initiative. If not, you work for a company that will die. But you already knew that.
So in your world, management should stop worrying about all those unimportant things and come running down to the lab to see your Greatest Invention Ever. Then, through the magic of being part of a company, the idea forms itself into either something the company internal can use or that everyone in the outside world will fall over themselves to buy.
It doesn't happen that way.
You work in *their* world, not yours. They are probably not doing everything they can to make you feel special, wanted, and valued (it used to be a paycheck was plenty) but fine. You are undervalued.
So every engineer at your company has a pet project that will revolutionize efficiency and creativity. How are you going to differentiate yourself from every other genius?
By the time it was done, they'd sapped all the enthusiasm for innovation out of the room. They probably zapped it out of everyone not willing to do the entrepreneurial process. It's hard. It's depressing. It's not full of people giving you gold stars for your magical ideas.
If you can bring your idea to a "blessed level" you have two choices. One, go along with the flow and get your $100 genius invention paycheck or two, play the game and say "I'll manage the idea and bring it to fruition for a $50K bonus at the end of the year if I meet the target of $1MM in company savings. If I fail, you bonus me nothing."
If it's not a "safe" solution (Sun, IBM, or "blessed" by Gartner), then it's not something to be taken seriously.
No, it will be taken and weighed against the vendors. How one presents an idea to management will likely be what is not taken seriously.
Sun, IBM, etc all have solutions and they work. They are packaged, supported, planned, installed, warranted, and documented. How do you present your stellar ideas to management? In a dusty old computer that reeks of "homebuilt", a cheesy black and white Powerpoint presentation, no plan for failure, no support structure, no redundancy, no analysis (as in a real B-school style analysis) of cost structure and other lost opportunity to compare your idea to a professional idea?
This is what I see when a brilliant idea comes out of IT. Half baked, kool-aid drinking engineers reapplying another bug ridden Linux tool convinced that their idea is the best simply because they conjured it themselves and on the face it seems cheaper.
Spend a few minutes and package your idea. Bell Labs developed ideas well because they thought them through obsessively and not because they were presented and accepted at the half-baked stage of development.
I'm not saying that half baked ideas are bad. Not at all. It's simply that a half baked idea cannot be evaluated well against a fully supported (vendor) idea. In a fear-driven shareholder environment, a well thought out plan of a good idea trumps a crappy brilliant idea every time.
Not always true. A GRE, SE, or FLAIR image sequence for anatomy will not line up well with the EPI sequence of fMRI due to B field non-linearities and shift even if the patient doesn't move. The nice thing, though, is that unless there is surgery and deformation due to swelling, tissue void, or skull shifting, the skull shape stays constant and one can use it as a rigid body for starting the registration.
There are some software programs to attempt it but it still comes down to an expert setting some landmarks and using some validated software. Sorry, but the "free software" world is behind the commercial software and I see the gap widening.
I get my information from being in the field. Look up Synthroid (or any narrow therapeutic drug, for that matter) When someone who is calibrated to Synthroid (or other brand name hormone replacement therapy) ends up with more hormone problems, more often than not it's because a generic was substituted on them. A generic, while fulfilling its duties as an equivalent, does not necessarily metabolize the same way as the originally studied material.
To quote from the FDA: A generic drug is identical, or bioequivalent to a brand name drug in dosage form, safety, strength, route of administration, quality, performance characteristics and intended use. Although generic drugs are chemically identical to their branded counterparts, they are typically sold at substantial discounts from the branded price.
But, and here's the catch, there is a 20% allowance in both directions of bioavailability. Not funny. With the example of Synthroid, patient calibrations are within 5%. If you were to go outside of this, you ill either become sub-therapeutic or become toxic. I can attest to Synthroid being *spot on* with each lot number, which is important when someone buys their meds every 6 months. Not so for a generic.
Many times, a generic is manufactured by the original company through a private label. Find those matches and you can save some money.
You can witness the same with narrow therapeutic drugs such as warfarin, quinidine, procainamide, theophylline, lithium, phenytoin, carbamazepine and valproic acid. Recognize these?
This is a case of the fervent IP-stealers saying "it's the same" when, in fact, it's not. Generics are not manufactured the same, the uptake is not the same (check urine *and* stool output of the drug, please), and the patient feedback is not the same.
As far as your comparisons of "branded" goods (Oakley and Haynes) vs. so called generics, you're confusing the issue greatly.
No, you are confused. The issue is that the pirated version of something is better than the original. The pirated Oakleys are not better. First hand experience says the same about socks.
I don't give 2 minutes thought to whether or not I run Windows and Linux. My work efficiency is held up by my ability to ask for information of a client and then interpret and "gist" data. Go ahead and have OS wars all you want. My Windows notebook interacts with the world and with me quite well.
Why is this a "low end" system? Is it because it is targeted at the non-US, non-EU market?
I'd consider it "efficient" rather than low end. It's efficient because it will not come with a load of hardware that is not needed at a cost that is not needed.
There are people spending $4K on a system with a 7"-ish monitor who will use it only for email. Perhaps this would be a better system for that market.
When I first heard about it and imagined what it would be like, I thought "huh. A new way to see something"
Remember the first time you typed on a keyboard? It was slow, awkward, and you had to think about it. After a while, you because a faster typist. Less thinking. Then it becomes *part*of*you* and you can type 60 wpm. I type very fast, but I kid-you-not, I could not tell you where the keys are from memory. The keyboard has become part of me.
Describe what it is like (and how) to type fast to a person who has never seen a keyboard.
Now you have an idea of what I am trying to describe with my time trying this device.
The cool thing about this invention/technology is not the "detail" your tongue can "see" but rather the way the information is transmitted to the brain.
I don't remember anything about signal intensity. It was more about the shapes and changes and [insert more words to describe something that is impossible to describe without a shared experience]
I had the pleasure of trying it about 6 years ago in Dr. Bach-y-Rita's lab. I did not try the tongue--I tried a test rig using a finger. It is totally unlike anything I could imagine. It took about 5 minutes to get the hang of it. I was amazed at how fast I could figure it out.
The nice thing about the tongue is that is is so *fast* in its connection to the brain, unlike the eyes or ears understanding information.
There are so many applications for something like this.
First I met someone at a FMRI scanner. It turns out that she became my wife.
Second test: Stroop. Never seen so many smart people get so frustrated. A word is presented: "RED" It is written in green ink. What color is the ink? Then, just as you get the hang of it, what is the word?
Third: Nicotine addictions. Drop a bolus of nicotine into a willing research subject. I've heard "That's better than sex" to "Ohhhhhhh" to "I think I wet myself"
The BOLD theory, that's why. Blood Oxygenation Level Detection. You are not measuring glucose directly, you are measuring a spin-able for of hemoglobin that is in the state of giving up oxygen. Oxygen is thought to be used in glucose metabolism. Metabolism is thought to be a sign of life. FMRI measures the amount of hemoglobin. The interesting data comes from measuring *changes* in the amount of hemoglobin utilization.
One can see motor movements in the brain. I tell you to move your finger (or think about moving your finger ) and I can see in the brain the area that: hears me say "move your finger" then the language area that interprets "move your finger" and the pre-motor area firing, then the motor area firing.
There are a million tests that can be given in the MR scanner. Some of them can be really funny.
You are leaving out something: The 7 years it takes to learn how to make the drug. Do you think it magically happens? It takes $1,000,000 a day to develop a drug once it reached the "potential" milestone. I know because I have participated in the process. That is for *one* drug research, *one* scale-up (pilot plant work), one FDA clinical trial in the US,...
What do you think--because it's open source that a million drug candidates can be tested in a pilot plant that there will be economy of scale?
Drug discovery is hard, labor-intensive, resource intensive work. People are trying to generate a computer model for drug discovery, but frankly, it is still much less expensive, much faster, and much more correct to do the research in the lab, then on rats, and then on humans.
95% of my remote time is spend on the Solaris system--which has 24 7445 PPC Mercury nodes under it interconnected by RapidIO to make it interesting.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try it. VNC seems to work just fine for Outlook (which connects to my company office via a VPN that does not have a Mac version) which is the only reason I use the Window box.
I work at home. I silenced my systems by putting them* down in the basement except for my dual G5 Mac. I either shell in the Solaris and Linux boxes or VNC into the Windows box.
Works great, very quiet, and the systems don't heat up my office and the basement is naturally cool. I can now have a Feng Shui uncluttered workspace.
* 1 9 slot 6U VME Solaris Box * 1 Dual Xeon * 1 PIII Linux server * 1 2 TB Fibre channel disk * 1 AMD Noisemaker
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone can feel or hear the gradients (that's the pulsing).
I'm talking about when the machine is quiet--no scanning. It's just a giant magnet at that point in time.
Yes, test, test, test. I believe that there are people who may have a susceptibility. When I walk through a hospital or lab I can "feel" the MRI/NMR machines, but it doesn't mean I'm feeling the earth's mag field. It's an odd sensation. The nearest thing I can explain is it's like I have the sensation of being watched.
Does this mean I'm allergic to magnetic fields? No, I don't think I've started an immune response to magnetic fields. Sensitive? Yes.
Soon we can be on a honda assembly line
The Soviets did this for eye surgery decades ago. They would have patients on a carousel with surgeons each applying one step of the surgery. Then the entire patient carousel would shift with the next surgeons applying their one step to the next patient.
New Topic:
Top 5 reasons it sucks to hire the new crop of engineering students:
5.) They expect the Statement of work you're asking for completion to be colorful, fun, and well written.
4.) They can relate how their professor who cave them a B- is soooo much better at solving problems than you.
3.) They are convinced working as a TA is real work.
2.) Untraining the bad habits. I block instant messaging for a reason.
1.) They want me to vote for Obama and incessantly drone on about how horrible life is in the US.
As a right-winger, I bitch that schools are into left-wing touchy feely measure-the-kids-by-the-best-they-can-do philosophy.
Because, well, that's the scientific fact defining the best teaching method for today. Or was it yesterday?
ID is nearly the least of my concerns.
Adding to your thought:
Simulations are doomed to succeed.
In another comparison reported by the World Health Organization that used a different set of health indicators, the U.S. also fared poorly with a ranking of 15 among 25 industrialized nations
In that same report, it is noted the if accidents were removed from the statistics, the US would have the number one lifespan in the world.
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/11/beyond-those-health-care-numbers-us.html
http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/does-the-us-lead-in-life-expectancy-223/
http://firstfriday.wordpress.com/2007/08/22/world-health-organization-rankings-distort-us-position/
A good bit of Europe's economy are state-controlled enterprises (ever hear of Airbus?). It's a system that works very well,
What? Airbus is doing well? Really? What school of business did you go to? The only reason they will still be making some planes is that Boeing can't fulfill all the orders.
Europe doesn't scare me. It's the government that will replace the failing governments that scares me. How long will Europe survive, crushed under it's own caretaker-state? 15% Unemployment, a 35 hour work week, 6 weeks vacation and a sense of sniveling self righteousness that nothing is wrong spells an inevitable repeat of the circumstances of the Locarno Pact.
This is what Putin is waiting for...like a vulture circling.
they are in for a disappointment.
No, they aren't. If your idea isn't worth your time and investment, it sure as hell isn't worth theirs.
I know it's a lot of work. First hand.
There is nothing that says you can't go to management and say "Hey, I've got this idea, it's fully disclosed, I'd like to learn how to productize it. Is there someone who can help me go through the process so that it's exactly the way you want it? I want to create a market analysis, a 5P chart, and make a few calls to customers to see if it's something they can use."
If they say no, you have a choice. Leave or stay. You can't take the exact idea with you, but you do get to keep your domain knowledge. Maybe you can recreate the idea somewhere else.
I can tell you, if you ask an officer level manager (or CEO) in those words, you will get attention as *enthusiasm* and as *initiative* which is exactly what a CEO likely is complaining about when he or she says there is a lack of innovation. I think there's plenty of innovation. There's a shortage of usable innovation and initiative. If not, you work for a company that will die. But you already knew that.
So in your world, management should stop worrying about all those unimportant things and come running down to the lab to see your Greatest Invention Ever. Then, through the magic of being part of a company, the idea forms itself into either something the company internal can use or that everyone in the outside world will fall over themselves to buy.
It doesn't happen that way.
You work in *their* world, not yours. They are probably not doing everything they can to make you feel special, wanted, and valued (it used to be a paycheck was plenty) but fine. You are undervalued.
So every engineer at your company has a pet project that will revolutionize efficiency and creativity. How are you going to differentiate yourself from every other genius?
By the time it was done, they'd sapped all the enthusiasm for innovation out of the room.
They probably zapped it out of everyone not willing to do the entrepreneurial process. It's hard. It's depressing. It's not full of people giving you gold stars for your magical ideas.
If you can bring your idea to a "blessed level" you have two choices. One, go along with the flow and get your $100 genius invention paycheck or two, play the game and say "I'll manage the idea and bring it to fruition for a $50K bonus at the end of the year if I meet the target of $1MM in company savings. If I fail, you bonus me nothing."
If it's not a "safe" solution (Sun, IBM, or "blessed" by Gartner), then it's not something to be taken seriously.
No, it will be taken and weighed against the vendors. How one presents an idea to management will likely be what is not taken seriously.
Sun, IBM, etc all have solutions and they work. They are packaged, supported, planned, installed, warranted, and documented. How do you present your stellar ideas to management? In a dusty old computer that reeks of "homebuilt", a cheesy black and white Powerpoint presentation, no plan for failure, no support structure, no redundancy, no analysis (as in a real B-school style analysis) of cost structure and other lost opportunity to compare your idea to a professional idea?
This is what I see when a brilliant idea comes out of IT. Half baked, kool-aid drinking engineers reapplying another bug ridden Linux tool convinced that their idea is the best simply because they conjured it themselves and on the face it seems cheaper.
Spend a few minutes and package your idea. Bell Labs developed ideas well because they thought them through obsessively and not because they were presented and accepted at the half-baked stage of development.
I'm not saying that half baked ideas are bad. Not at all. It's simply that a half baked idea cannot be evaluated well against a fully supported (vendor) idea. In a fear-driven shareholder environment, a well thought out plan of a good idea trumps a crappy brilliant idea every time.
Or are you suggesting that your brain actually moves around inside your skull when you swallow..?
The brain really moves the B field during swallowing, resulting the the brain apparently moving.
they're relatively easy to match up!
Not always true. A GRE, SE, or FLAIR image sequence for anatomy will not line up well with the EPI sequence of fMRI due to B field non-linearities and shift even if the patient doesn't move. The nice thing, though, is that unless there is surgery and deformation due to swelling, tissue void, or skull shifting, the skull shape stays constant and one can use it as a rigid body for starting the registration.
There are some software programs to attempt it but it still comes down to an expert setting some landmarks and using some validated software. Sorry, but the "free software" world is behind the commercial software and I see the gap widening.
Bill
I get my information from being in the field. Look up Synthroid (or any narrow therapeutic drug, for that matter) When someone who is calibrated to Synthroid (or other brand name hormone replacement therapy) ends up with more hormone problems, more often than not it's because a generic was substituted on them. A generic, while fulfilling its duties as an equivalent, does not necessarily metabolize the same way as the originally studied material.
To quote from the FDA:
A generic drug is identical, or bioequivalent to a brand name drug in dosage form, safety, strength, route of administration, quality, performance characteristics and intended use. Although generic drugs are chemically identical to their branded counterparts, they are typically sold at substantial discounts from the branded price.
But, and here's the catch, there is a 20% allowance in both directions of bioavailability. Not funny. With the example of Synthroid, patient calibrations are within 5%. If you were to go outside of this, you ill either become sub-therapeutic or become toxic. I can attest to Synthroid being *spot on* with each lot number, which is important when someone buys their meds every 6 months. Not so for a generic.
Many times, a generic is manufactured by the original company through a private label. Find those matches and you can save some money.
You can witness the same with narrow therapeutic drugs such as warfarin, quinidine, procainamide, theophylline, lithium, phenytoin, carbamazepine and valproic acid. Recognize these?
This is a case of the fervent IP-stealers saying "it's the same" when, in fact, it's not. Generics are not manufactured the same, the uptake is not the same (check urine *and* stool output of the drug, please), and the patient feedback is not the same.
As far as your comparisons of "branded" goods (Oakley and Haynes) vs. so called generics, you're confusing the issue greatly.
No, you are confused. The issue is that the pirated version of something is better than the original. The pirated Oakleys are not better. First hand experience says the same about socks.
I don't give 2 minutes thought to whether or not I run Windows and Linux. My work efficiency is held up by my ability to ask for information of a client and then interpret and "gist" data. Go ahead and have OS wars all you want. My Windows notebook interacts with the world and with me quite well.
That's Dr. Bach-y-Rita's device from Madison, WI. It's a little bigger than 3x3.
Why is this a "low end" system? Is it because it is targeted at the non-US, non-EU market?
I'd consider it "efficient" rather than low end. It's efficient because it will not come with a load of hardware that is not needed at a cost that is not needed.
There are people spending $4K on a system with a 7"-ish monitor who will use it only for email. Perhaps this would be a better system for that market.
Here's a simile (maybe a metaphore)
When I first heard about it and imagined what it would be like, I thought "huh. A new way to see something"
Remember the first time you typed on a keyboard? It was slow, awkward, and you had to think about it. After a while, you because a faster typist. Less thinking. Then it becomes *part*of*you* and you can type 60 wpm. I type very fast, but I kid-you-not, I could not tell you where the keys are from memory. The keyboard has become part of me.
Describe what it is like (and how) to type fast to a person who has never seen a keyboard.
Now you have an idea of what I am trying to describe with my time trying this device.
The cool thing about this invention/technology is not the "detail" your tongue can "see" but rather the way the information is transmitted to the brain.
I don't remember anything about signal intensity. It was more about the shapes and changes and [insert more words to describe something that is impossible to describe without a shared experience]
I had the pleasure of trying it about 6 years ago in Dr. Bach-y-Rita's lab. I did not try the tongue--I tried a test rig using a finger. It is totally unlike anything I could imagine. It took about 5 minutes to get the hang of it. I was amazed at how fast I could figure it out.
The nice thing about the tongue is that is is so *fast* in its connection to the brain, unlike the eyes or ears understanding information.
There are so many applications for something like this.
First I met someone at a FMRI scanner. It turns out that she became my wife.
Second test: Stroop. Never seen so many smart people get so frustrated. A word is presented: "RED" It is written in green ink. What color is the ink? Then, just as you get the hang of it, what is the word?
Third: Nicotine addictions. Drop a bolus of nicotine into a willing research subject. I've heard "That's better than sex" to "Ohhhhhhh" to "I think I wet myself"
More later.
The BOLD theory, that's why. Blood Oxygenation Level Detection. You are not measuring glucose directly, you are measuring a spin-able for of hemoglobin that is in the state of giving up oxygen. Oxygen is thought to be used in glucose metabolism. Metabolism is thought to be a sign of life. FMRI measures the amount of hemoglobin. The interesting data comes from measuring *changes* in the amount of hemoglobin utilization.
One can see motor movements in the brain. I tell you to move your finger (or think about moving your finger ) and I can see in the brain the area that: hears me say "move your finger" then the language area that interprets "move your finger" and the pre-motor area firing, then the motor area firing.
There are a million tests that can be given in the MR scanner. Some of them can be really funny.
Examples on request.
You are leaving out something: The 7 years it takes to learn how to make the drug. Do you think it magically happens? It takes $1,000,000 a day to develop a drug once it reached the "potential" milestone. I know because I have participated in the process. That is for *one* drug research, *one* scale-up (pilot plant work), one FDA clinical trial in the US, ...
What do you think--because it's open source that a million drug candidates can be tested in a pilot plant that there will be economy of scale?
Drug discovery is hard, labor-intensive, resource intensive work. People are trying to generate a computer model for drug discovery, but frankly, it is still much less expensive, much faster, and much more correct to do the research in the lab, then on rats, and then on humans.
95% of my remote time is spend on the Solaris system--which has 24 7445 PPC Mercury nodes under it interconnected by RapidIO to make it interesting.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try it. VNC seems to work just fine for Outlook (which connects to my company office via a VPN that does not have a Mac version) which is the only reason I use the Window box.
I work at home. I silenced my systems by putting them* down in the basement except for my dual G5 Mac. I either shell in the Solaris and Linux boxes or VNC into the Windows box.
Works great, very quiet, and the systems don't heat up my office and the basement is naturally cool. I can now have a Feng Shui uncluttered workspace.
* 1 9 slot 6U VME Solaris Box
* 1 Dual Xeon
* 1 PIII Linux server
* 1 2 TB Fibre channel disk
* 1 AMD Noisemaker
Simulations are doomed to succeed.