But nobody wants to lug a laptop everywhere. Remember how big the first generation of wireless phones were? If you were determined, you would carry it everywhere, but it was a hassle. What's wrong with trying to satisfy as many of your computing wants and needs as possible in a palm sized device?
Imagine all of the down time that you have when you could pull it out (the Palm) and get stuff done. Waiting for your table at a restaurant - check email. Waiting for your food - work on slide presentation. Between innings at the baseball game - another compile of that OSS project you've been working on. Rest stop on a scenic hike - pop the CF from your CoolPix in and email a shot to friends. With all the storage, you can keep all of your databases (finance, contacts, medical records, profession-related records) and documents (with version control) with you. If you're a lawyer, then you have a database of all of your cases at your fingertips so that when you get a page from a client you can quickly look over his case. If you're a doctor, your database will have the details of all patients you've seen in the past year so that when you get an emergency page about one of your patients when you're out camping, you can look over the details of the case. If you are a programmer, then you've got the source to all the projects you've ever worked on with you. How did I do that linked list thingy back in '97 (as your cab creeps forward in a traffic jam)? You can look it up! If you're a musician, you could carry the MIDI files for all of the projects you've been working on and edit them/play them through the speaker. Eventually, you'll have all the sound files in your palm too so you can tweak your master mixes while you ride to work on the subway!
OK, now where was I? Oh, yes. Laptops are too big and we aren't even close to tapping the potential of the Palm form factor.
I'd like to have video out on a palm device for the same reason that I have it on my laptop and desktop computers.
Me too! I want to be able to give slide shows from a Palm (S video or other). I think that is a legitimate use of video for the Palm since I don't want to carry around something as big as a laptop that won't fit easily in my pocket. Available options are a good thing. People that don't want video or color don't have to buy the video/color models!
And right now, there's a group of rednecks in Alabama with a dozen bearcat scanners trying to intercept wireless communications.
Actually, there is a group in Alabama who have developed time modulated ultra wideband chips that promise extraordinary wireless bit rates and nearly perfect security. Check out Time Domain. In addition to wireless LAN, you can use the stuff for pocket sized radar (see through walls!) and GPS to within centimeters! Anyway, I think it looks cool and haven't yet seen a story about it on/. (I submitted it 10 months ago, though)
Apparently it is already so convincing that some TV producers are using it rather than live musicians.
That's great. Now we can have artificial music to go with the arificial worlds depicted in TV shows. The actors had better watch out too, since the computer generated actors aren't too far off either. After the machines become self aware (Jan 1, 2000), this will be just another technique they will have to passify ^[[D^[[D^[[D entertain us humans:-^)
Because Sun wants to be the high end solution. Linux/Intel is a low cost solution that small shops can get started with. Sun wants those shops to be able to ramp up easily to Solaris on Sun hardware when the load gets to be high and the IPO has brought them plenty of $$$ for new iron. Java on Linux is one way to make sure customers will be walking down Sun's road when it's time to grow. No Java on Linux might mean that the business starts out with Linux OSS solutions (Perl, Zope, etc.) or NT/Intel using VB/COM or Microsoft Java with Windows specific features and will be forever trapped into that technology. Then Sun gets nothing. At least with Java, Sun gets to inject a little bit of itself into everyone's world and get a little leverage.
It makes sense for Sun to push Java on all the low end platforms. Since there are invariably parts of the business that do not run on Java, it is clear that people could migrate to Sun hardware/Solaris/Java more easily from Linux/Java than from NT/Java simply because Linux shares a common Unix denominator with Solaris.
On the server side, you want platform DEPENDENCE, not independence. You might as well get something out of an E10000 running Solaris once you've spent the money on it - you WANT to use all the neato performance tweaks that only SYSTEM PROGRAMMING can expose.
It would be better to keep the platform dependence part of things hidden inside the JVM/JIT. Sun, the people who build the machine and are intimately familiar with its capabilities, should do the performance tweaking for you inside of the JVM.
Why would Sun, who have done so well in differentiating themselves on the server side with the best compilers, best RAS, most scaleability want to flatten out the software landscape? It just doesn't make sense from the standpoint of strategy.
My guess would be that they are probably counting on having the best Java tools. Also, with a flattened software landscape that they essentially control, it will be easy for all of the shops using NT to move on over to SUN hardware for better performance.
are nice...but don't forget about Rush! It's pretty cerebral with lots of moods and usually has good intensity.
Re:Is this guy on any of the Kook Lists?
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t pretty much amounts to taking something like Feynman's sum-over-histories (a relativistically correct theory) and putting the histories into an abstract probability space.
But aren't Feynmans sum-over-histories techniques time dependent? And isn't an abstract probability space already what we use in standard sum-over-histories QM? Feynman's first technique, which uses path integrals, is not relativistic. His second technique, which is relativistic, uses a series of Feynman diagrams (not really a sum-of-histories, but rather a sum of processes) which account for most of the important things to be summed (more diagrams for more accuracy), but each diagram still involves time (space-time). And again, what is a sum-over-histories if there are no histories because there is no time.
Barbour is not "throwing out time". He's throwing out time as a dynamical variable and treating spacetime as a whole, without saying how (if at all) it is to be split into space and time.
Well this is what SR and GR do already. This is then just our normal understanding of space-time then, is it not? Guess I'll have to find a better article describing the math. Anyone got a better link?
Re:Is this guy on any of the Kook Lists?
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If you can point to how this interpretation contradicts experimental evidence or contains internal logical contradictions, then you have a right to call him a kook.
His theory doesn't account for the experimentally verified discrepancies between different frames of reference regarding simultaneity that are explained by special relativity. I find it hard to accept his idea of an objectively defined frozen slice of state space without considering time, since that would mean that simultaneity is hard coded - which is in direct contradiction to experimental facts. The contradictions related to simultaneity are well known and are discussed in any college physics course. Special (and general) relativity cope with these apparent contradictions elegantly by weaving time and space together into space-time. By throwing out time, he is now yoked with the same old inconsistencies of classical mechanics that relativity has solved. If I am mistaken about this apparent conflict between his theory and experimental evidence, please point out my error.
This is the primary reason that Quantum Mechanics and Relativity are fundamentally incompatible theories. QM explains the probabilities that occur in the interactions between particle-waves, but it does not begin to explain what "time" is, or what "gravity" is!
Quantum mechanics requires time and is quite compatible with special relativity. The phase of the wave function generally depends upon time. Time is not assumed to be constant - it is treated relativistically in modern (and successful) theories of quantum electrodynamics.
General relativity is a classical theory of gravity for which a quantum counterpart has not been worked out - yet.
IMNSHO, Schroedringers equation describes the world - period.
Actually, his equation is not really correct, but a nonrelativistic approximation that must be replaced by other, more complicated equations/techniques (e.g. Dirac equations, Feynman diagrams) if more accuracy is desired.
The only "real" things that we can hang our hats on are the"collapsed views" - they are the the only verifiable part of the universe we will "see" - at any scale, and with any kind of instrumentation. A "collapsed view" is simply another term for a measurement of the universe. All we can ever have knowledge of is a collection of measurements. The equations of quantum mechanics and its "wave function interference", etc are just mathematical constructs to help up calculate the probability of what we will measure next. What happens between measurements is something we will never know.
It's clear that we need a new concept of time that incorporates what we currently know.
The new concept you speak of that incorporates what we currently know has been created. It is called spacetime. Space and Time - they are intertwined...can't have one without the other. Works well for the geodesics of GR and the Feynman diagrams of QM. Am I missing something here?
...the "common" perception of time just doesn't work.
Sure, but which deficiency of the spacetime mathematical construct is his model supposed to fix? (e.g, in what areas should his model make better experimentally verifiable predictions?)
That time, as we perceive it, is only a series of previous probabilies in this probability space called the Universe.
The only question, then, is how do you define this sequence of probabilities of state space? If they are different points within the same space, then you have a parametric sequence/curve. Is it something like x(1), x(2), x(3), x(4),....x(i),...? If so, then how is this any different from x(t) where the sequence index is what we call time? If the sequence exists, then the index must exist, and we can call that index time!
Also, consider the simply thought experiments (and actual experiments) from special relativity that relate to simultaneity of events, whereby two events appear to happen at the same "time" to one observer, but at separate "times" to another observer who is in relative motion. The phenomenon is very real and must be explained by the laws of physics. Were the two events both present together (simultaneous) or not? Which observer is correct? In order to make everything work out correctly, you must have spacetime. I would like to see how the author would treat the problem of events (points in state space) which appear "simultaneous" (existing together) or not, depending upon which frame of reference you are in!
Re:Is this guy on any of the Kook Lists?
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The guy just seems to be trying to say that he thinks of the universe as a very large state space with a probability assigned to every possible configuration of particles. OK, fine. But what do the probabilities mean? Probability of what? That a particular point in configuration space will follow another? Oops, that can't be it, since without time there is no sequence of events, no matter what the frame of reference. Therefore nothing can ever "happen". Kind of boring, if you ask me. So at this very point in nontime, I exist with a lot of false memories and a lot of evidence to corroborate them, but no time to contemplate them. Survey says...Kook! Now a more realistic theory is that our "universe" is but a speck of dirt in the hair of a very big Border Collie who is about to get a bath.
But to don a different managerial hat for a moment... Young docs are also slow. You don't need to send out 57 different tests to diagnose a URI. You don't need to spend 25 minutes talking with a patient who has the flu
I agree with that completely. That is what we have nurse practitioners and physician assistants (PA) for! As for speed, that comes with repetition and experience. As for the overutilization of tests - that's part of the prevailing CYA mentality that largely stems from the hyperlitigious environment we live in these days. Prosecutor to doctor on the witness stand: "Is it fair to say that if you had ordered test X that the tumor would have been detected earlier and thus possibly cured?". "Uh, I guess so...". At this point the doc may as well just sign a blank check. Of course, this is a bigger problem in some parts of the country than others.....
Doctors, as a group, of any age, know jack about anything other than medicine (I'd even question that for many of them.) They certainly don't know computers, and they demonstrate their leech-using ancestry every time they are expected to use something more complex than a microscope.
There may be a grain of truth here for the old docs, but as one of those "young" docs, I can assure you that the basic computer skills are there. For starters, almost every young doc I know is facile with and completely dependent upon either a palm pilot or psion series 5. I've been programming as a hobby since the Vic 20 first arrived on the scene,and have a good working knowledge of C/C++/Perl/Java/Pascal/FORTRAN/SQL/etc. I admin a highly customized departmental Linux server (Apache/mod_perl/SQL/qmail) and develop software as a hobby. I may not be in the same league as you in the computer world, but I bet I could get a decent job programming or as an admin if I decided to quit medicine today. One doc aquaintance of mine started a successful medical informatics company after one of his side programming projects took off. He does this full time now and it is a multimillion dollar company. Another doc friend of mine is personally developing custom DSP hardware in his spare time and will be doing a startup with this soon while still practicing. Three other doc friends of mine dabble in Linux as interested newbies. Another one plays with VB. I have yet to meet a young doctor who can't cope with an alphanumeric password. After all, it is really no different than memorizing the alphanumerics of drugs and their doses. These are just some of the docs I know personally - there a lot of other geek docs out there that I don't know.
Although I don't know him personally and don't think he actively practices medicine at this point in time (he took a detour into genomic research), I do know that Lincoln Stein is an M.D, and somehow his medical degree did not prevent him from developing some nice perl modules and contributing to The Perl Journal and some O'Reilly books. How is it, you ask, that there are geek doctors out there? Well, there are a lot of docs with engineering and natural sciences degrees other than biology (physics/math for me) who have picked up some decent computer skills along the way. IMHO, I don't believe your stereotype fits the younger generation of docs well, although there are some people in every profession that simply don't care for computers.
The current state of computer medical records sucks. It's not going to get better any time soon. There is a total lack of standardization or quality from any of the leading vendors. Therefore, it's of little use. Therefore, your doc won't put your weekly penicillin shot for various 'social diseases' here on slashdot.
Once healtheon, or some other relatively large force in the medical informatics industry, is able to get an open standard set of XML DTD's together, then you will be able to send the sordid details of your weekly shots to slashdot as
<treatment> <drug>penicillin</drug> <dose>1 million units</dose> <route>In the but</route> <frequency>weekly</frequency> <condition>syphillis</condition> </treatment> etc.
I do agree with you that there is a lot of inertia in medicine that makes it hard to implement systems that any reasonable business would have adopted decades ago. But I submit that this is mainly the "old guard" that is resistant to change. I'm sorry that you haven't met any geek docs yet, but I can assure you that they are out there in force.
This should be better, but I have to go help one of our docs find the 'any' key.
I had to explain the concept of "domain name server" to one of our hospital IT staff the other day when I wanted to add a machine to the network!
Having online and fully accessible medical records strikes me as so much expensive but trendy claptrap.
It would actually save a lot of money and bring healthcare into step with the rest of the modern world. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to look for a patient's chart in the medical records department only to find that it has been checked out by someone else, misplaced, or simply lost. Sometimes it is in the "long term storage" facility and has to be manually retrieved and delivered, etc. Other times, parts of the chart are missing or illegible. It would be riduculous for any major company to keep records this way, yet this is how it is done in hospitals.
A lot of money is spent paying people to constantly organize and retrieve/maintain paper records. When a referral to another physician is made, someone has to manually stand there and xerox each page, put it in an envelope and send it in the mail or fax it. Sending an xml document would take a fraction of the time and cost next to nothing. The storage requirements and cost of maintanence would be much lower than the current "medical record warehouse" approach. Many hospitals, such as your friendly neighborhood VA, are already moving to electronic records to save time and money. Your medical information already is and will increasingly be stored in databases which are inevitably going to be networked in some fashion, just as most corporate information is/will be.
Now the issue of access is a legitimate concern. I do believe that the information should largely be kept in private networks and sent from office to office as xml files on a "need to know" basis, much like the way paper charts are copied and faxed today. There should also be a unified online master database that stores information about you that would be useful in an emergency situation, such as your drug allergies, blood type, wishes with respect to life support (e.g., living will information), names and phone numbers of your physicians and next of kin. The nature of this information should be something that you are allowed to control by logging in and editing it, or by delegating this to your primary care physician. Believe me, if you arrive unconcious at the trauma center with serious injuries, you will want the doctors there to be able to quickly ascertain that you are a hemophiliac, have had a lung transplant, are allergic to penicillin, are on blood thinning medications, etc. You could keep all this information on a card in your wallet, on a bracelet, or in an online database. If you don't want your sex change operation in the "online" database, then you should be able to have a say about this.
Healthcare info will be in networked databases like every other type of information. It will be vulnerable to cracking like everything else. Some crackers may use spend time finding out about a classmate's HIV status or which antihypertensive drug he's taking, while others would rather work on cracking their classmate's online bank account. Furthermore, it is not like your medical information was in a vault before databases were used. At many hospitals, one can simply walk into the medical records area unnoticed and start looking at charts when the clerk is out to lunch or in the basement looking for an old chart. If someone is really determined to get the medical facts about you, they could probably do it more quickly through old fashioned means than by having to resort to cracking an online database.
People regard the _potential_ for intelligence with perhaps a little too highly. I feel that while there can't be drawn a specific line in the sane, once someone shows that they are self-aware they are a person. And no sooner.
As a side question - what will we do when our personal computers reach a level of intellegence comparable to humans or become somewhat self aware? Will we ethically be able to turn them off or reboot them? Will my Dell Optiplex GX9000 have more rights than my future offspring since it will probably be more intellegent and self-aware?
With that in mind, I really don't feel that harming a non-sentient human is the same thing as harming a mature person.
So then, is it ethically acceptable to also run up enormous national debt, deplete natural resources, and pollute the earth since the only people who would suffer down the line are those who are not yet sentient. You harm these not yet sentient people with these actions, but that is OK, right, since it is okay to harm humans who are not yet sentient.
....decide that massive surgical intervention to save malformed newborns is too expensive for society to bear, and allow the parents of babies with biliary atresia (a fatal malformation of the liver) a choice between euthanasia or natural death? (Most babies with this problem die, due to lack of donor livers or rejection of transplants.)
Well then, the real issue here is whether or not we should try to help someone afflicted with a terrible disease. Certainly there are a lot of conditions in which the odds are not good, but we do still try. Severe head injuries, septic shock, adult respiratory distress syndrome, cancer, etc...
There was not cure for hydrocephalus - until the shunt was painstakingly developed and refined on actual patients
There was not cure for diabetes - until insulin was purified and produced
There was no cure for certain congenital malformations of the heart and great vessels - until surgical techniques advanced through trying to save people through intervention.
There is still no cure for AIDS - but we are getting awfully close with the (very expensive) protease inhibitors. It is only a matter of time.
I guess you probably get my drift. So yes, liver transplants are quite difficult and expensive, and the rejection rate is currently too high. But our experience in trying to combat the disease will ultimately lead to more efficient and reliable treatments. Again, I am not saying that we are going to find a cure for anencephaly because some conditions, such as this, truely are incurable. However, others are just very difficult, but not insurmountable.
Singer thinks that consciousness doesn't begin until a month or more after full-term birth and draws conclusions from this.
An argument based on conciousness is somewhat tricky because we don't really know what it is or when it begins. Furthermore, you are unconcious during sleep, so should we be allowed to euthanize you in your sleep? What about an unconcious victim of an automobile accident who is lying in the street. Should they be euthanized? After all, they may not regain conciousness for months, if ever. All we can do in these cases is state probabilities. How about someone who is really drunk or has overdosed and is unconcious?
We must also be careful about the legal definitions of "brain dead". Comatose is not the same as brain dead. To be brain dead, you must have no brainstem function (no gag reflex, no respirations, no corneal reflexes, etc.). Simply being permanantly unconcious is not enough!
In short, I have met plenty of serverely disabled people who are quite pleasant and are leading happy lives - and plenty of "fully functional" people who are nothing but a drain on society.
If we base our criteria for euthanasia upon the probability of happiness or likelihood of being a contributor to society, then we face a dangerous slippery slope. If we can kill an infant on the grounds that he probably won't be happy or productive as a paraplegic, then can we also kill the adults who have intractable clinical depression, or those adults who have become severely disabled, or those that are simply too lazy to contribute to society? No we can't, even though we have more data about particular adult cases and their likelihood of being productive (if you've been a bum for 20 years, statistically, you are very unlikely to work a regular job again) than we do about particular disabled children (who haven't even been given a chance yet).
Each of our lives has a beginning, middle, and end. And each of us goes though a variety of stages during which we may have net positive or negative value to society. If you integrate this "value" curve over the timeline of a life, some lives may have an overall positive or negative "value" (economic, or whatever other parameter you care to use). But none of them deserve to be cut short based on uncertain attempts to predict what that value will be. We can't even predict much simpler things, so how can we justify killing someone because we don't think they would want to be alive 10 years from now. Why not just let them grow up and decide for themselves. If they really don't like life, then they will find a way to end it, but it will be through their own choice. On the other hand, if they are so severely disabled that they are permanantly unconcious and bedridden, then I don't think many people agree that they are living any kind of wothwhile life. In these cases, nature often takes over as there is a high chance that they will contract a fatal pneumonia, pulmonary embolus, infected decubitus ulcer with osteomyelitis, etc.
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Sorry, but I already put dibs on the moon and the stars when I promised them to my girlfriend one night.
Imagine all of the down time that you have when you could pull it out (the Palm) and get stuff done. Waiting for your table at a restaurant - check email. Waiting for your food - work on slide presentation. Between innings at the baseball game - another compile of that OSS project you've been working on. Rest stop on a scenic hike - pop the CF from your CoolPix in and email a shot to friends. With all the storage, you can keep all of your databases (finance, contacts, medical records, profession-related records) and documents (with version control) with you. If you're a lawyer, then you have a database of all of your cases at your fingertips so that when you get a page from a client you can quickly look over his case. If you're a doctor, your database will have the details of all patients you've seen in the past year so that when you get an emergency page about one of your patients when you're out camping, you can look over the details of the case. If you are a programmer, then you've got the source to all the projects you've ever worked on with you. How did I do that linked list thingy back in '97 (as your cab creeps forward in a traffic jam)? You can look it up! If you're a musician, you could carry the MIDI files for all of the projects you've been working on and edit them/play them through the speaker. Eventually, you'll have all the sound files in your palm too so you can tweak your master mixes while you ride to work on the subway!
OK, now where was I? Oh, yes. Laptops are too big and we aren't even close to tapping the potential of the Palm form factor.
Me too! I want to be able to give slide shows from a Palm (S video or other). I think that is a legitimate use of video for the Palm since I don't want to carry around something as big as a laptop that won't fit easily in my pocket. Available options are a good thing. People that don't want video or color don't have to buy the video/color models!
Actually, there is a group in Alabama who have developed time modulated ultra wideband chips that promise extraordinary wireless bit rates and nearly perfect security. Check out Time Domain. In addition to wireless LAN, you can use the stuff for pocket sized radar (see through walls!) and GPS to within centimeters! Anyway, I think it looks cool and haven't yet seen a story about it on /. (I submitted it 10 months ago, though)
When screen real estate is at a premium as it is on the Palm, color can be a very useful way to encode information. Unless you're color blind...
That's great. Now we can have artificial music to go with the arificial worlds depicted in TV shows. The actors had better watch out too, since the computer generated actors aren't too far off either. After the machines become self aware (Jan 1, 2000), this will be just another technique they will have to passify ^[[D^[[D^[[D entertain us humans :-^)
It makes sense for Sun to push Java on all the low end platforms. Since there are invariably parts of the business that do not run on Java, it is clear that people could migrate to Sun hardware/Solaris/Java more easily from Linux/Java than from NT/Java simply because Linux shares a common Unix denominator with Solaris.
It would be better to keep the platform dependence part of things hidden inside the JVM/JIT. Sun, the people who build the machine and are intimately familiar with its capabilities, should do the performance tweaking for you inside of the JVM.
My guess would be that they are probably counting on having the best Java tools. Also, with a flattened software landscape that they essentially control, it will be easy for all of the shops using NT to move on over to SUN hardware for better performance.
are nice...but don't forget about Rush! It's pretty cerebral with lots of moods and usually has good intensity.
But aren't Feynmans sum-over-histories techniques time dependent? And isn't an abstract probability space already what we use in standard sum-over-histories QM? Feynman's first technique, which uses path integrals, is not relativistic. His second technique, which is relativistic, uses a series of Feynman diagrams (not really a sum-of-histories, but rather a sum of processes) which account for most of the important things to be summed (more diagrams for more accuracy), but each diagram still involves time (space-time). And again, what is a sum-over-histories if there are no histories because there is no time.
Barbour is not "throwing out time". He's throwing out time as a dynamical variable and treating spacetime as a whole, without saying how (if at all) it is to be split into space and time.
Well this is what SR and GR do already. This is then just our normal understanding of space-time then, is it not? Guess I'll have to find a better article describing the math. Anyone got a better link?
His theory doesn't account for the experimentally verified discrepancies between different frames of reference regarding simultaneity that are explained by special relativity. I find it hard to accept his idea of an objectively defined frozen slice of state space without considering time, since that would mean that simultaneity is hard coded - which is in direct contradiction to experimental facts. The contradictions related to simultaneity are well known and are discussed in any college physics course. Special (and general) relativity cope with these apparent contradictions elegantly by weaving time and space together into space-time. By throwing out time, he is now yoked with the same old inconsistencies of classical mechanics that relativity has solved. If I am mistaken about this apparent conflict between his theory and experimental evidence, please point out my error.
Quantum mechanics requires time and is quite compatible with special relativity. The phase of the wave function generally depends upon time. Time is not assumed to be constant - it is treated relativistically in modern (and successful) theories of quantum electrodynamics.
General relativity is a classical theory of gravity for which a quantum counterpart has not been worked out - yet.
Actually, his equation is not really correct, but a nonrelativistic approximation that must be replaced by other, more complicated equations/techniques (e.g. Dirac equations, Feynman diagrams) if more accuracy is desired.
The only "real" things that we can hang our hats on are the"collapsed views" - they are the the only verifiable part of the universe we will "see" - at any scale, and with any kind of instrumentation. A "collapsed view" is simply another term for a measurement of the universe. All we can ever have knowledge of is a collection of measurements. The equations of quantum mechanics and its "wave function interference", etc are just mathematical constructs to help up calculate the probability of what we will measure next. What happens between measurements is something we will never know.
The new concept you speak of that incorporates what we currently know has been created. It is called spacetime. Space and Time - they are intertwined...can't have one without the other. Works well for the geodesics of GR and the Feynman diagrams of QM. Am I missing something here?
Sure, but which deficiency of the spacetime mathematical construct is his model supposed to fix? (e.g, in what areas should his model make better experimentally verifiable predictions?)
The only question, then, is how do you define this sequence of probabilities of state space? If they are different points within the same space, then you have a parametric sequence/curve. Is it something like x(1), x(2), x(3), x(4), ....x(i),...? If so, then how is this any different from x(t) where the sequence index is what we call time? If the sequence exists, then the index must exist, and we can call that index time!
Also, consider the simply thought experiments (and actual experiments) from special relativity that relate to simultaneity of events, whereby two events appear to happen at the same "time" to one observer, but at separate "times" to another observer who is in relative motion. The phenomenon is very real and must be explained by the laws of physics. Were the two events both present together (simultaneous) or not? Which observer is correct? In order to make everything work out correctly, you must have spacetime. I would like to see how the author would treat the problem of events (points in state space) which appear "simultaneous" (existing together) or not, depending upon which frame of reference you are in!
The guy just seems to be trying to say that he thinks of the universe as a very large state space with a probability assigned to every possible configuration of particles. OK, fine. But what do the probabilities mean? Probability of what? That a particular point in configuration space will follow another? Oops, that can't be it, since without time there is no sequence of events, no matter what the frame of reference. Therefore nothing can ever "happen". Kind of boring, if you ask me. So at this very point in nontime, I exist with a lot of false memories and a lot of evidence to corroborate them, but no time to contemplate them. Survey says...Kook! Now a more realistic theory is that our "universe" is but a speck of dirt in the hair of a very big Border Collie who is about to get a bath.
I agree with that completely. That is what we have nurse practitioners and physician assistants (PA) for! As for speed, that comes with repetition and experience. As for the overutilization of tests - that's part of the prevailing CYA mentality that largely stems from the hyperlitigious environment we live in these days. Prosecutor to doctor on the witness stand: "Is it fair to say that if you had ordered test X that the tumor would have been detected earlier and thus possibly cured?". "Uh, I guess so...". At this point the doc may as well just sign a blank check. Of course, this is a bigger problem in some parts of the country than others.....
There may be a grain of truth here for the old docs, but as one of those "young" docs, I can assure you that the basic computer skills are there. For starters, almost every young doc I know is facile with and completely dependent upon either a palm pilot or psion series 5. I've been programming as a hobby since the Vic 20 first arrived on the scene,and have a good working knowledge of C/C++/Perl/Java/Pascal/FORTRAN/SQL/etc. I admin a highly customized departmental Linux server (Apache/mod_perl/SQL/qmail) and develop software as a hobby. I may not be in the same league as you in the computer world, but I bet I could get a decent job programming or as an admin if I decided to quit medicine today. One doc aquaintance of mine started a successful medical informatics company after one of his side programming projects took off. He does this full time now and it is a multimillion dollar company. Another doc friend of mine is personally developing custom DSP hardware in his spare time and will be doing a startup with this soon while still practicing. Three other doc friends of mine dabble in Linux as interested newbies. Another one plays with VB. I have yet to meet a young doctor who can't cope with an alphanumeric password. After all, it is really no different than memorizing the alphanumerics of drugs and their doses. These are just some of the docs I know personally - there a lot of other geek docs out there that I don't know.
Although I don't know him personally and don't think he actively practices medicine at this point in time (he took a detour into genomic research), I do know that Lincoln Stein is an M.D, and somehow his medical degree did not prevent him from developing some nice perl modules and contributing to The Perl Journal and some O'Reilly books. How is it, you ask, that there are geek doctors out there? Well, there are a lot of docs with engineering and natural sciences degrees other than biology (physics/math for me) who have picked up some decent computer skills along the way. IMHO, I don't believe your stereotype fits the younger generation of docs well, although there are some people in every profession that simply don't care for computers.
The current state of computer medical records sucks. It's not going to get better any time soon. There is a total lack of standardization or quality from any of the leading vendors. Therefore, it's of little use. Therefore, your doc won't put your weekly penicillin shot for various 'social diseases' here on slashdot.
Once healtheon, or some other relatively large force in the medical informatics industry, is able to get an open standard set of XML DTD's together, then you will be able to send the sordid details of your weekly shots to slashdot as
<treatment>
<drug>penicillin</drug>
<dose>1 million units</dose>
<route>In the but</route>
<frequency>weekly</frequency>
<condition>syphillis</condition>
</treatment> etc.
I do agree with you that there is a lot of inertia in medicine that makes it hard to implement systems that any reasonable business would have adopted decades ago. But I submit that this is mainly the "old guard" that is resistant to change. I'm sorry that you haven't met any geek docs yet, but I can assure you that they are out there in force.
This should be better, but I have to go help one of our docs find the 'any' key.
I had to explain the concept of "domain name server" to one of our hospital IT staff the other day when I wanted to add a machine to the network!
It would actually save a lot of money and bring healthcare into step with the rest of the modern world. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to look for a patient's chart in the medical records department only to find that it has been checked out by someone else, misplaced, or simply lost. Sometimes it is in the "long term storage" facility and has to be manually retrieved and delivered, etc. Other times, parts of the chart are missing or illegible. It would be riduculous for any major company to keep records this way, yet this is how it is done in hospitals.
A lot of money is spent paying people to constantly organize and retrieve/maintain paper records. When a referral to another physician is made, someone has to manually stand there and xerox each page, put it in an envelope and send it in the mail or fax it. Sending an xml document would take a fraction of the time and cost next to nothing. The storage requirements and cost of maintanence would be much lower than the current "medical record warehouse" approach. Many hospitals, such as your friendly neighborhood VA, are already moving to electronic records to save time and money. Your medical information already is and will increasingly be stored in databases which are inevitably going to be networked in some fashion, just as most corporate information is/will be.
Now the issue of access is a legitimate concern. I do believe that the information should largely be kept in private networks and sent from office to office as xml files on a "need to know" basis, much like the way paper charts are copied and faxed today. There should also be a unified online master database that stores information about you that would be useful in an emergency situation, such as your drug allergies, blood type, wishes with respect to life support (e.g., living will information), names and phone numbers of your physicians and next of kin. The nature of this information should be something that you are allowed to control by logging in and editing it, or by delegating this to your primary care physician. Believe me, if you arrive unconcious at the trauma center with serious injuries, you will want the doctors there to be able to quickly ascertain that you are a hemophiliac, have had a lung transplant, are allergic to penicillin, are on blood thinning medications, etc. You could keep all this information on a card in your wallet, on a bracelet, or in an online database. If you don't want your sex change operation in the "online" database, then you should be able to have a say about this.
Healthcare info will be in networked databases like every other type of information. It will be vulnerable to cracking like everything else. Some crackers may use spend time finding out about a classmate's HIV status or which antihypertensive drug he's taking, while others would rather work on cracking their classmate's online bank account. Furthermore, it is not like your medical information was in a vault before databases were used. At many hospitals, one can simply walk into the medical records area unnoticed and start looking at charts when the clerk is out to lunch or in the basement looking for an old chart. If someone is really determined to get the medical facts about you, they could probably do it more quickly through old fashioned means than by having to resort to cracking an online database.
As a side question - what will we do when our personal computers reach a level of intellegence comparable to humans or become somewhat self aware? Will we ethically be able to turn them off or reboot them? Will my Dell Optiplex GX9000 have more rights than my future offspring since it will probably be more intellegent and self-aware?
With that in mind, I really don't feel that harming a non-sentient human is the same thing as harming a mature person.
So then, is it ethically acceptable to also run up enormous national debt, deplete natural resources, and pollute the earth since the only people who would suffer down the line are those who are not yet sentient. You harm these not yet sentient people with these actions, but that is OK, right, since it is okay to harm humans who are not yet sentient.
Well then, the real issue here is whether or not we should try to help someone afflicted with a terrible disease. Certainly there are a lot of conditions in which the odds are not good, but we do still try. Severe head injuries, septic shock, adult respiratory distress syndrome, cancer, etc...
There was not cure for hydrocephalus - until the shunt was painstakingly developed and refined on actual patients
There was not cure for diabetes - until insulin was purified and produced
There was no cure for certain congenital malformations of the heart and great vessels - until surgical techniques advanced through trying to save people through intervention.
There is still no cure for AIDS - but we are getting awfully close with the (very expensive) protease inhibitors. It is only a matter of time.
I guess you probably get my drift. So yes, liver transplants are quite difficult and expensive, and the rejection rate is currently too high. But our experience in trying to combat the disease will ultimately lead to more efficient and reliable treatments. Again, I am not saying that we are going to find a cure for anencephaly because some conditions, such as this, truely are incurable. However, others are just very difficult, but not insurmountable.
An argument based on conciousness is somewhat tricky because we don't really know what it is or when it begins. Furthermore, you are unconcious during sleep, so should we be allowed to euthanize you in your sleep? What about an unconcious victim of an automobile accident who is lying in the street. Should they be euthanized? After all, they may not regain conciousness for months, if ever. All we can do in these cases is state probabilities. How about someone who is really drunk or has overdosed and is unconcious?
We must also be careful about the legal definitions of "brain dead". Comatose is not the same as brain dead. To be brain dead, you must have no brainstem function (no gag reflex, no respirations, no corneal reflexes, etc.). Simply being permanantly unconcious is not enough!
In short, I have met plenty of serverely disabled people who are quite pleasant and are leading happy lives - and plenty of "fully functional" people who are nothing but a drain on society.
If we base our criteria for euthanasia upon the probability of happiness or likelihood of being a contributor to society, then we face a dangerous slippery slope. If we can kill an infant on the grounds that he probably won't be happy or productive as a paraplegic, then can we also kill the adults who have intractable clinical depression, or those adults who have become severely disabled, or those that are simply too lazy to contribute to society? No we can't, even though we have more data about particular adult cases and their likelihood of being productive (if you've been a bum for 20 years, statistically, you are very unlikely to work a regular job again) than we do about particular disabled children (who haven't even been given a chance yet).
Each of our lives has a beginning, middle, and end. And each of us goes though a variety of stages during which we may have net positive or negative value to society. If you integrate this "value" curve over the timeline of a life, some lives may have an overall positive or negative "value" (economic, or whatever other parameter you care to use). But none of them deserve to be cut short based on uncertain attempts to predict what that value will be. We can't even predict much simpler things, so how can we justify killing someone because we don't think they would want to be alive 10 years from now. Why not just let them grow up and decide for themselves. If they really don't like life, then they will find a way to end it, but it will be through their own choice. On the other hand, if they are so severely disabled that they are permanantly unconcious and bedridden, then I don't think many people agree that they are living any kind of wothwhile life. In these cases, nature often takes over as there is a high chance that they will contract a fatal pneumonia, pulmonary embolus, infected decubitus ulcer with osteomyelitis, etc.
Or you can just go to Cheap Bytes for a CD. You can preorder RH 6.1 now for $1.99.
Does it recalculate the statistics, etc. every time I update or add a new record?