The major banks have already said that they would leave Scotland for England, including Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin...
People don't realise how costly monopolies are. I work for a UK hospital, and have worked in the department that's responsible for purchasing all of the medicines the hospital uses. We have an online system that tells us for any given drug that generic A is the cheapest at £0.50 per box, generic B is £0.60, generic C is £1.00 per box and generic D is £5.00 per box. If every hospital buys generic A's levothyroxine, then generics B, C and D will just stop producing this medicine, because there's no market for it - and then if generic A wants to charge £20.00 per box, they can, because they have no competition to bring the prices down and the hospitals need to buy levothyroxine.
So instead, the hospitals are grouped into purchasing regions, and one region will buy generic A's levothyroxine, one will buy generic B, and one will buy generic C. (Generic D doesn't get a look-in because its prices are considered unreasonably high). The hospitals that were made to buy the more expensive levothyroxine will then be told to purchase the cheapest simvastatin, and the middling-cheapest flucloxacillin (while the people who bought the cheap levothyroxine will buy the more expensive flucloxacillin), so no region is out-of-pocket overall.
And yet, when I've mentioned this to people, they seem to think this is unnecessary, and all the hospitals should just buy the cheapest version of every medication. Here's what happens when a company is given a monopoly and decides not to play nicely with its customers: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/hea...
- a noble gas has been found in space (this confirmed people's expectations that argon-36 could be found as part of a supernova, even though argon-40 is much more common on Earth - note that argon-36 is also available on Earth, just in smaller quantities, it's not a new isotope) - a noble gas molecule has been found in space (previously, argon compounds were only detected following Earth-based lab experiments)
The significant part of this discovery is not:
- that a noble gas can form a compound. Argon has had known compounds since 2003. Xenon has had known compounds since 1962, some of which are even stable at normal room temperature/pressure.
It's funny - when I took a preformulation class (drug crystallisation and compounding, etc) the lecturer gave us a list of library books he thought we might find useful. No pressure. One of my friends picked one fairly low down on the list, and we discovered, to our surprise, that the lecturer had actually co-authored that one. He'd barely encouraged us to read it, let alone buy it.
I graduated from university in the UK in 2012. Over my entire time at university I bought the following textbooks: An organic chemistry textbook (£5) A physiology textbook (£35) A cell biology textbook (£25) A BNF (£5) Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics (£40) A spectroscopic analysis textbook (£5)
This adds up to £115, or about $170. I then sold most of these books on to other students and made a lot of this back.
Some students also bought: A law and ethics textbook (£20) A maths for pharmacists textbook (£20)
Which gives a final total of £155, or about $225, spread over four years and assuming that students sold none of their books (in reality, almost everyone had sold most of their textbooks by the end of the course).
Any other books we needed were either provided free of charge (for example, higher years could have the university's old editions of the BNF each time they went out of date) or were available from the library/in ebook format.
Why do American students have such gigantic textbook bills?
A glass of fruit juice is every bit as bad, and does the same liver damage, as a shot of whiskey.
So fruit juice causes ascites, hepatic encephalopathy, deranged clotting (don't point to a warfarin interaction here, I mean independent increases in clotting time), hepatic flap, Korsakoff's psychosis and fatty liver disease? I would really like to see some citations on that one.
I actually went to this school when I was younger (so I was pretty surprised to see it appear on Slashdot!), and was very interested in this article because when I was there, we were given a very good IT education - in MS Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint and Frontpage (plus, er, PageMaker).
Anyway, I think there are a few reasons why this userbase might adapt to Linux better than a random selection of people: 1. Their age - while a lot of older people are extremely reluctant to just try something on a computer, for fear of breaking it, people who've grown up with computers as the norm aren't so worried about that. So I think they're less likely to be intimidated by a new interface, and more likely to engage with customising it.
1a. You would also probably get less resistance from them than from a worker who's been using MS Office every single day for the past 20 years and is extremely familiar with it and therefore works very, very quickly. Swapping their software over will result in an immediate productivity drop and could cost a company money. Swapping a 12-year-old's software over is a minor annoyance.
2. It's a science and engineering school, so a number of the girls who have chosen to go there will have a bigger interest in technology than the average population of the area. (There are other schools of a similar academic standard locally with different specialisms and this does guide some students' school preferences.)
3. The school is academically selective, so you have a better chance of being able to teach the students how to adapt to different systems (swapping between Linux and Windows when a workplace requires it, for example). In an average population you will confuse a lot of people just because the blue "e" they click to go on the Internet has disappeared.
Actually, the school is a specialist science and engineering school and has been since at least 2005 or so (when the oldest pupils currently there will have joined the school), so I suspect a higher proportion of girls than normal already do go into STEM fields.
Oh come on, don't blame CFS for being overweight. The last CFS group I attended, there was only one overweight person there. They aren't correlated. Okay, we can't exercise as much - but we can control our calorie intake as easily as anyone else, and food intake is more strongly linked with obesity than lack of exercise (since few people exercise enough to burn a substantial amount of calories).
It summarises the stories for you, apparently quite competently (I haven't used it myself - it won't run on a 2nd gen Touch). As far as I could tell, none of those aggregators in the linked article do that.
If anyone wants another good book set in an office, Joshua Ferris' Then We Came To The End is brilliant. It's about a group of advertising workers during the bursting of the dot-com bubble and is very funny.
That's nonsense. There are plenty of European workplaces that don't allow mobile phones to be used except on breaks, and a decent number that don't allow them to be carried. I've only actually worked at two different companies, and one had the first rule and the other the second rule. This was in England, from 2009 onwards. This is because we're supposed to be dealing with patients, not sodding around on Angry Birds or taking a distracting, non-emergency personal call (what fancy smartphone doesn't have a voicemail feature?). Emergency calls can go to our normal landline phone system.
The Apple marketing people may not like it, but it's time to admit it â" yes guys, your system is as vulnerable as Windows. Don't ignore the lesson of Flashfake. Think serious about security, not just different [sic].
Because whoever posted this doesn't seem to get it: Apple's marketing slogan at around the turn of the millennium was "Think Different". It's a joke, not an unintentional grammatical error.
I know you're just being flippant regarding depression in Alzheimer's, but one of the big problems with Alzheimer's can be what you do remember. It's not total retro- and anterograde amnesia. My great-uncle developed dementia after a stroke, and was somehow forced into nearly constantly reliving his part in the battle of Stalingrad and subsequent interment in a Russian POW camp. He was unable to recognise some of his own family but remembered more than enough of the events of WW2.
When the OP says he doesn't want a tablet, does he mean he doesn't want a device like an iPad etc, or is he saying he doesn't want a graphics tablet? If the latter, isn't the Wacom project primarily for use of Wacom graphics tablets?
I use this for artwork, and it doesn't bleed, doesn't blob, and produces very fine lines. As long as I haven't been using it on paint, which the nib really doesn't like.
Well, we don't have something called compounding pharmacies here as such, so I think they'd be considered a "specials manufacturer" - premises licensed for the production of unlicensed medications, usually things like syrup versions of tablets or unusual mixtures. But specials manufacturers are still required to notify the MHRA and get a recall cascade going, just like a "proper" manufacturer.
Yep, it's a bit of both. There are two registers of pharmacies: - a national one, run by our regulatory body, which includes both hospitals and community pharmacies - more local ones, held by the PCTs
You could get the national listing involved but it adds a layer of bureaucracy (the organisation that holds all that data has many other functions which might interfere with speed of recall). So you talk to the PCTs instead, who know exactly whom they're paying locally and don't have as many people to contact. Additionally, the national register of pharmacy premises does not include any details on doctors or dentists, so you'd have to go back to either the PCTs (who again hold data on the local level) or their regulatory bodies whenever doctors or dentists need recall information. Doctors and dentists do hold some stock of drugs and sometimes need to know about recalls.
I think it's because the hospital system and the community pharmacy system are very separate, and while both are regulated by a central body (the General Pharmaceutical Council) that body has no involvement in drug recall cases, because it doesn't regulate drug standards, only pharmacists and pharmacy premises. So you can either: be the MHRA and directly contact all hospitals plus all PCTs (who will do the legwork of then contacting primary care doctors/dentists/community pharmacists), or be the MHRA and contact the GPhC and wait for the GPhC to pass it on. The GPhC also only work Mon-Fri 9-5.
Things may well change as the PCTs are due to be abolished next year, but requiring the PCTs to contact all pharmacies on their patch reduces the numbers that any one body has to contact. (PCTs cover areas of up to about 1 million patients. Their replacements cover much smaller areas, but of course there's more of them.)
So, I work in a hospital pharmacy in England. If we were in this situation:
1. The drug company would be required by law to notify the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) upon realising there is a problem. This can be done out of office hours if it is a serious problem (we have class 4 recalls for things like typos in leaflets, which tend not to qualify for urgent action).
2. The MHRA would fax out a drug recall notification to all hospital pharmacies, private hospital pharmacies and Primary Care Trusts in the country, who would be responsible for forwarding it to any community pharmacies, doctors and dentists in their area (assuming this was a drug those groups would be likely to have - this won't happen if the drug is hospital-only). Many pharmacists are also signed up for instant email notifications of drug recalls. The MHRA doesn't waste time working out which hospitals have been affected - it's the hospital's responsibility to determine whether they stock(ed) that drug using the brand names, manufacturers and batch numbers given.
3. In the case of direct harm to patients, this would be a Class 1 Recall ("potentially serious or life-threatening") requiring removal of the product from hospitals/pharmacies/doctors etc immediately. If you are the on-call pharmacist for a hospital and it's 6pm on a Sunday, tough, you'd need to go in and sort it out there and then - quarantine the drugs, take them out of ward stock, etc. 3a. In this case, the original recall has been expanded to include things that only might be problematic, so those could be done as a class 2 recall (action within 48h, not immediate) or even class 3, so hospitals can concentrate on the stuff that's actually killing people.
4. The hospital is also required to contact all potentially affected patients (we don't usually record batch numbers for which drugs have been given to patients except in certain specific cases, so we would usually need to contact all patients who received Drug X within an appropriate timescale).
So that sounds quite simple to me. At which stage does the US system differ? The recall list is very long here, but on the other hand, chances are your hospital doesn't use everything on the list and you can completely ignore the ones you haven't stocked.
(Don't just say "it's because the US has 300m people and you have 60m"; that just means your regulatory agency needs to send out more faxes initially and I'm sure the faxes are done via some sort of batch method.)
Slashdot Mirror
The major banks have already said that they would leave Scotland for England, including Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin...
Actually, RBS plans to do exactly that in the event of a Yes vote:
http://www.theguardian.com/bus...
People don't realise how costly monopolies are. I work for a UK hospital, and have worked in the department that's responsible for purchasing all of the medicines the hospital uses. We have an online system that tells us for any given drug that generic A is the cheapest at £0.50 per box, generic B is £0.60, generic C is £1.00 per box and generic D is £5.00 per box. If every hospital buys generic A's levothyroxine, then generics B, C and D will just stop producing this medicine, because there's no market for it - and then if generic A wants to charge £20.00 per box, they can, because they have no competition to bring the prices down and the hospitals need to buy levothyroxine.
So instead, the hospitals are grouped into purchasing regions, and one region will buy generic A's levothyroxine, one will buy generic B, and one will buy generic C. (Generic D doesn't get a look-in because its prices are considered unreasonably high). The hospitals that were made to buy the more expensive levothyroxine will then be told to purchase the cheapest simvastatin, and the middling-cheapest flucloxacillin (while the people who bought the cheap levothyroxine will buy the more expensive flucloxacillin), so no region is out-of-pocket overall.
And yet, when I've mentioned this to people, they seem to think this is unnecessary, and all the hospitals should just buy the cheapest version of every medication. Here's what happens when a company is given a monopoly and decides not to play nicely with its customers:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/hea...
The significant parts of this discovery are:
- a noble gas has been found in space (this confirmed people's expectations that argon-36 could be found as part of a supernova, even though argon-40 is much more common on Earth - note that argon-36 is also available on Earth, just in smaller quantities, it's not a new isotope)
- a noble gas molecule has been found in space (previously, argon compounds were only detected following Earth-based lab experiments)
The significant part of this discovery is not:
- that a noble gas can form a compound. Argon has had known compounds since 2003. Xenon has had known compounds since 1962, some of which are even stable at normal room temperature/pressure.
It's funny - when I took a preformulation class (drug crystallisation and compounding, etc) the lecturer gave us a list of library books he thought we might find useful. No pressure. One of my friends picked one fairly low down on the list, and we discovered, to our surprise, that the lecturer had actually co-authored that one. He'd barely encouraged us to read it, let alone buy it.
Apologies for the formatting problems - it appears that Slashdot cannot cope with pound signs.
I graduated from university in the UK in 2012. Over my entire time at university I bought the following textbooks:
An organic chemistry textbook (£5)
A physiology textbook (£35)
A cell biology textbook (£25)
A BNF (£5)
Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics (£40)
A spectroscopic analysis textbook (£5)
This adds up to £115, or about $170. I then sold most of these books on to other students and made a lot of this back.
Some students also bought:
A law and ethics textbook (£20)
A maths for pharmacists textbook (£20)
Which gives a final total of £155, or about $225, spread over four years and assuming that students sold none of their books (in reality, almost everyone had sold most of their textbooks by the end of the course).
Any other books we needed were either provided free of charge (for example, higher years could have the university's old editions of the BNF each time they went out of date) or were available from the library/in ebook format.
Why do American students have such gigantic textbook bills?
So fruit juice causes ascites, hepatic encephalopathy, deranged clotting (don't point to a warfarin interaction here, I mean independent increases in clotting time), hepatic flap, Korsakoff's psychosis and fatty liver disease? I would really like to see some citations on that one.
I think you mean cholinesterase inhibitors - agents that inhibit the effects of acetylcholinesterase.
I actually went to this school when I was younger (so I was pretty surprised to see it appear on Slashdot!), and was very interested in this article because when I was there, we were given a very good IT education - in MS Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint and Frontpage (plus, er, PageMaker).
Anyway, I think there are a few reasons why this userbase might adapt to Linux better than a random selection of people:
1. Their age - while a lot of older people are extremely reluctant to just try something on a computer, for fear of breaking it, people who've grown up with computers as the norm aren't so worried about that. So I think they're less likely to be intimidated by a new interface, and more likely to engage with customising it.
1a. You would also probably get less resistance from them than from a worker who's been using MS Office every single day for the past 20 years and is extremely familiar with it and therefore works very, very quickly. Swapping their software over will result in an immediate productivity drop and could cost a company money. Swapping a 12-year-old's software over is a minor annoyance.
2. It's a science and engineering school, so a number of the girls who have chosen to go there will have a bigger interest in technology than the average population of the area. (There are other schools of a similar academic standard locally with different specialisms and this does guide some students' school preferences.)
3. The school is academically selective, so you have a better chance of being able to teach the students how to adapt to different systems (swapping between Linux and Windows when a workplace requires it, for example). In an average population you will confuse a lot of people just because the blue "e" they click to go on the Internet has disappeared.
Actually, the school is a specialist science and engineering school and has been since at least 2005 or so (when the oldest pupils currently there will have joined the school), so I suspect a higher proportion of girls than normal already do go into STEM fields.
Oh come on, don't blame CFS for being overweight. The last CFS group I attended, there was only one overweight person there. They aren't correlated. Okay, we can't exercise as much - but we can control our calorie intake as easily as anyone else, and food intake is more strongly linked with obesity than lack of exercise (since few people exercise enough to burn a substantial amount of calories).
It summarises the stories for you, apparently quite competently (I haven't used it myself - it won't run on a 2nd gen Touch). As far as I could tell, none of those aggregators in the linked article do that.
France already does require all drivers to carry breathalysers.
And 300 people, on average, are hit each year by lightning, while in 2011 8500 people were murdered with a firearm. So no, you are not more likely to be struck (even non-fatally) by lightning than murdered with a firearm.
If anyone wants another good book set in an office, Joshua Ferris' Then We Came To The End is brilliant. It's about a group of advertising workers during the bursting of the dot-com bubble and is very funny.
Sure, it's a surefire way...assuming you're flying in the US. The OP is travelling by train.
That's nonsense. There are plenty of European workplaces that don't allow mobile phones to be used except on breaks, and a decent number that don't allow them to be carried. I've only actually worked at two different companies, and one had the first rule and the other the second rule. This was in England, from 2009 onwards. This is because we're supposed to be dealing with patients, not sodding around on Angry Birds or taking a distracting, non-emergency personal call (what fancy smartphone doesn't have a voicemail feature?). Emergency calls can go to our normal landline phone system.
The Apple marketing people may not like it, but it's time to admit it â" yes guys, your system is as vulnerable as Windows. Don't ignore the lesson of Flashfake. Think serious about security, not just different [sic].
Because whoever posted this doesn't seem to get it: Apple's marketing slogan at around the turn of the millennium was "Think Different". It's a joke, not an unintentional grammatical error.
I know you're just being flippant regarding depression in Alzheimer's, but one of the big problems with Alzheimer's can be what you do remember. It's not total retro- and anterograde amnesia. My great-uncle developed dementia after a stroke, and was somehow forced into nearly constantly reliving his part in the battle of Stalingrad and subsequent interment in a Russian POW camp. He was unable to recognise some of his own family but remembered more than enough of the events of WW2.
When the OP says he doesn't want a tablet, does he mean he doesn't want a device like an iPad etc, or is he saying he doesn't want a graphics tablet? If the latter, isn't the Wacom project primarily for use of Wacom graphics tablets?
I use this for artwork, and it doesn't bleed, doesn't blob, and produces very fine lines. As long as I haven't been using it on paint, which the nib really doesn't like.
Well, we don't have something called compounding pharmacies here as such, so I think they'd be considered a "specials manufacturer" - premises licensed for the production of unlicensed medications, usually things like syrup versions of tablets or unusual mixtures. But specials manufacturers are still required to notify the MHRA and get a recall cascade going, just like a "proper" manufacturer.
Yep, it's a bit of both. There are two registers of pharmacies:
- a national one, run by our regulatory body, which includes both hospitals and community pharmacies
- more local ones, held by the PCTs
You could get the national listing involved but it adds a layer of bureaucracy (the organisation that holds all that data has many other functions which might interfere with speed of recall). So you talk to the PCTs instead, who know exactly whom they're paying locally and don't have as many people to contact. Additionally, the national register of pharmacy premises does not include any details on doctors or dentists, so you'd have to go back to either the PCTs (who again hold data on the local level) or their regulatory bodies whenever doctors or dentists need recall information. Doctors and dentists do hold some stock of drugs and sometimes need to know about recalls.
I think it's because the hospital system and the community pharmacy system are very separate, and while both are regulated by a central body (the General Pharmaceutical Council) that body has no involvement in drug recall cases, because it doesn't regulate drug standards, only pharmacists and pharmacy premises. So you can either: be the MHRA and directly contact all hospitals plus all PCTs (who will do the legwork of then contacting primary care doctors/dentists/community pharmacists), or be the MHRA and contact the GPhC and wait for the GPhC to pass it on. The GPhC also only work Mon-Fri 9-5.
Things may well change as the PCTs are due to be abolished next year, but requiring the PCTs to contact all pharmacies on their patch reduces the numbers that any one body has to contact. (PCTs cover areas of up to about 1 million patients. Their replacements cover much smaller areas, but of course there's more of them.)
So, I work in a hospital pharmacy in England. If we were in this situation:
1. The drug company would be required by law to notify the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) upon realising there is a problem. This can be done out of office hours if it is a serious problem (we have class 4 recalls for things like typos in leaflets, which tend not to qualify for urgent action).
2. The MHRA would fax out a drug recall notification to all hospital pharmacies, private hospital pharmacies and Primary Care Trusts in the country, who would be responsible for forwarding it to any community pharmacies, doctors and dentists in their area (assuming this was a drug those groups would be likely to have - this won't happen if the drug is hospital-only). Many pharmacists are also signed up for instant email notifications of drug recalls. The MHRA doesn't waste time working out which hospitals have been affected - it's the hospital's responsibility to determine whether they stock(ed) that drug using the brand names, manufacturers and batch numbers given.
3. In the case of direct harm to patients, this would be a Class 1 Recall ("potentially serious or life-threatening") requiring removal of the product from hospitals/pharmacies/doctors etc immediately. If you are the on-call pharmacist for a hospital and it's 6pm on a Sunday, tough, you'd need to go in and sort it out there and then - quarantine the drugs, take them out of ward stock, etc.
3a. In this case, the original recall has been expanded to include things that only might be problematic, so those could be done as a class 2 recall (action within 48h, not immediate) or even class 3, so hospitals can concentrate on the stuff that's actually killing people.
4. The hospital is also required to contact all potentially affected patients (we don't usually record batch numbers for which drugs have been given to patients except in certain specific cases, so we would usually need to contact all patients who received Drug X within an appropriate timescale).
So that sounds quite simple to me. At which stage does the US system differ? The recall list is very long here, but on the other hand, chances are your hospital doesn't use everything on the list and you can completely ignore the ones you haven't stocked.
(Don't just say "it's because the US has 300m people and you have 60m"; that just means your regulatory agency needs to send out more faxes initially and I'm sure the faxes are done via some sort of batch method.)