Could you possibly post a link to a version that is not hidden behind a paywall? Perhaps a pre-print on your own research site; perhaps an HTML web page summary of your work? .
Why not start an automated scanning system and always, always, ALWAYS scan and upload all incoming mail to it where it is automagically scanned and OCR'ed (gocr) and saved again and faxed/efaxed/emailed to you. Make it a part of your business plan, and thus doing it will be requisite for your business remaining ISO-9000 compliant. Of course, it means making all of your correspondence public, allowing poetry such as at the end of this message to be widely known and embarassingly disseminated. But then you won't have knowingly and willfully mis-complied with the request of the letter, if your business process also makes it public knowledge that you are the recipient of an NSL letter.
``It is a matter of policy that all incoming mail is scanned and published.'' See if that holds water.
{begin embarassing poem}
What makes your heart beat pitter-patter? Is it something in someone else's soul or is it in their matter? Is your heart full of love and round, or have it been squashed flatter? Is it in your body or mind; where is the love you will find?
Thanks for pointing that extra "neutral" notch out to me.
I didn't even notice that, and considering that Saylor was just driving that car for the first time that day, he probably didn't notice it either.
This is a huge problem with migrating machine-human-interface design away from commonly accepted standards without taking into regard the problems that may occur.
I definitely agree that the +/o/- for the drive control on the tiptronic and the 'N' slot should be vastly different planes which are not easy to confuse, and which STAND OUT like these capital letters. Five peoples' lives were lost because of this stupidity of design.
The 2009 Lexus ES 350 that California Highway Patrol Officer Mark Saylor was driving was a "loaner" vehicle given to him temporarily while his car was being repaired.
It has a "starter button" instead of an ignition key, and requires that the bnutton be depressed for 3 or more seconds if the car is in gear, or it may not function to turn the car off at all over certain velocities.
The officer in San Diego was driving a loaner Lexus while his vehicle was being repaired. This loaner Lexus had a push-button "ignition" system, requiring just a push of a button to start the car, and a push of the button to stop the engine, unless the car is in gear and moving greater than velocity $x$, in which case it requires keeping the "starter" button on the dash {b}depressed continuously for three seconds{/b} to turn the system off. It also has an interlock requiring some weird combination so that putting the car into neutral at high velocities is not easily done. That's the information I've gleaned from the Union-Tribune's articles on it. I've driven that stretch of road to go to Santee to eat pizza and shop at lowes, and you often see people speeding recklessly down the steep grade.
Combination of new car with bad human-interface and a panic situation, even for a trained high-performing trooper lead to a deadly result.
In the past, L.L. Bean and American Express all experimented with greeting customers by name when they called. They did this by linking the ANI information received on their incoming 1-800-telephonenumber line with a computerized database. People were creeped out to have a person greet them by their name before they'd even said "Hello", and both American Express and L.L. Bean stopped doing this. Affinity marketing campaigns also did this and the FTC regulated this away, partially.
First synthetic gecko adhesive which cleans itself during use, as the natural gecko does. After contamination by microspheres, the microfiber array loses all adhesion strength. After repeated contacts with clean glass, the microspheres are shed, and the fibers recover 30% of their original adhesion. The fibers have a non-adhesive default state, which encourages particle removal during contact. Contact Self-Cleaning of Synthetic Gecko Adhesive, Langmuir 2008
First synthetic gecko adhesive which cleans itself during use, as the natural gecko does. After contamination by microspheres, the microfiber array loses all adhesion strength. After repeated contacts with clean glass, the microspheres are shed, and the fibers recover 30% of their original adhesion. The fibers have a non-adhesive default state, which encourages particle removal during contact. Contact Self-Cleaning of Synthetic Gecko Adhesive, Langmuir 2008
First synthetic gecko adhesive which cleans itself during use, as the natural gecko does. After contamination by microspheres, the microfiber array loses all adhesion strength. After repeated contacts with clean glass, the microspheres are shed, and the fibers recover 30% of their original adhesion. The fibers have a non-adhesive default state, which encourages particle removal during contact. Contact Self-Cleaning of Synthetic Gecko Adhesive, Langmuir 2008
Ah, serves me right for not RTFA and just reading the/. summary which states fiction rather than science fiction. Mea culpa.
"Oxford University Press has a blog post listing nine words used in science and technology which were actually dreamed up by fiction writers. Included on the list are terms like robotics, genetic engineering, deep space, and zero-g. What other terms are sure to follow in the future?"
If you're in banking, you must have noticed the fact that the increased cap of FDIC insurance from $100k to $250k will only apply until December of 2009, after which it reverts back to the limit of $100k per named account holder per financial institution.
How many people might get suckered into longer term CD's (Certificates of Deposits, not the ISO-9660 type) that might go over the boundary of the TEMPORARILY raised FDIC insurance caps and end up either inadequately covered or stuck with early-withdrawal fees?
Either way, NONE of the articles I have read make any statement about the fact that the so-called increase in the FDIC insurance from $100-thousand to $250-thousand is only going to last the length of calendar year 2009. That's a sham and a disgrace.
I kid you not about this: when I worked in the Los Angeles County Health System, I was paid by both the county and the state bursars. The paperwork for my job stated specifically that I was required to carry out my job EVEN IF THERE WERE NO FUNDS AVAILABLE TO BE DISBURSED TO ME FOR MY PAYCHECK. I have that document somewhere in my vertical archaeological dig of paperwork from the prior century.
I pointed this out to the H.R. person after my employment physical, and she told me "Honey, don't worry about it, the state don't run out of money." I respectfully disagreed, crossed out the line, initialed it, and signed the paperwork. Nobody gave me any trouble, but if this happened nowadays, I bet they wouldn't let me in with that line crossed out.
Don't even get me started about the payroll records and timecard abuse: the department secretary always told me to sign the blank timecard and she would fill it out: I refused to sign it unless I also filled out my hours. When I put in more than forty, she said, "Oh no, don't worry about it, we'll take care of it," or something equivalent to that.
Okay: "yeah, right" is a sarcastic response composed of two positive words rather than the same word repeated. With the fact that it is often said in a sarcastic tone and that it is often said as a succinct two word rejoinder, it is interpreted as a negation, a sarcastic agreement that actually disagrees.
I'm not at a place where I can access the research article, so let me comment about what I know about McLelland's previous work with neural networks.
Rumelhart and McLelland worked on the groundbreaking "can a neural network learn how to pronounce words based on their spelling?" paper, which used back-propagation to train a neural net to do just that. That was in the 1980s. (Sejnowski at the Salk Institute followed up with a lot of neural net training studies too.)
Their little cheat was that there was no temporal component to the data. Words were represented as sets of triplet-letters: catalog is represented as "-ca", "cat", "ata", "tal", "alo", and "log". (Actually, I don't remember if they used special sequences to represent start and stop, so --c -ca og- and g-- may not have been part of the sets.}
And of course the neural net didn't really have audio output, though of course the rejoinder is that this would be trivial.
My key question is how they deal with the issue of time in this study, and if there is any actual audio output which would act as feed-back for the training system or whether the output is representational only, as an output set of phonemes.
Having real audio output and real audio input would let it correlate its output with real language examples. Having representational blobs would only mean that: given inputs of the hash that represents "hard TH" vs the hash that represents "soft TH" the system could yield a result of different outputs.
And you're saying that the key result would be if the system learned to conflate or ignore the two sounds of "TH", hard or soft, in trying to interpret words. Remember that the initial Rumelhart-McLelland model was "content/meaning free", and I suspect that this one is too. Learning to conflate "x" and "y" in a neural net would be trivially implemented and trainable: the links for "x" and "y" into the model would have similar weights in the right contexts (the context being the set of predecessor and successor phonemes).
It sounds like an agglomerator: given a large dataset of valid words in a given language, this system learns the rule for "predecessor" and "successor" probabilities of a particular phoneme vs another phoneme and then produces random output with the same Bayesian probability, producing gibberish nonsensical sounds which follow the probability distribution of the input training language.
or that's my guess at least trying to be the typical slashdotter commenting without reading the article.
I'll try to get at the article from the Uni with journal access tomorrow.
I have a question. What particular pitfalls do you need to watch out for when you're signing a contract to do business with the government? Particularly with the FAR clauses, which are gargantuan in size and pantagruelian in complexity.
I was offered the opportunity to do a subcontract for a company doing business with the government and their contract included an Incorporation by Reference of the FAR clauses which I tried to investigate and got lost in the maze. "Incorportation by Reference" means that they state "all articles of the FAR" regulations apply, without them specifying exactly what these clauses are. In other words, an indirection pointer like a memory reference.
so this is called nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
Doing it with a gradient field and a special pulse sequence lets you get the vibrational amplitudes of your protons based on their position within the gradient field. That's what gets you MRI images. Before MRI images, nuclear spectroscopy was used to resonate the "nucleus" of atoms/molecules/conglomerations of molecules at varying radio-frequencies to see if there was any resulting resonance and output RF (radiofrequency) signal.
Protons resonate at 2.4 GHz approximately (which is the frequency used in microwaves to resonate the H's in the {H}_2{0} molecules in your food and heat it.
Notice that there is no FCC approval for this yet.
That's probably the biggest reason it's not for sale yet.
Or perhaps it doesn't have FCC approval yet because they didn't want its specs
to be leaked out beforehand.
"This device has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained." http://www.apple.com/iphone/technology/specs.html
in an OR, they do have to count the pieces of gauze used as packing, and the number of sponges used, and even disposable clamps and the plastic clips used on scalp opening are most-definitely counted. That's part of the scrub-nurse's job and it's the surgeons job to make sure the count is correct before closing. Now they won't count how much methyl-matacrylate they used, or how much cyano-acrylate was used (superglue is often used, whether dictated or not...), but every item that can be counted IS counted.
Let me give you a quick summary of procedure in an operating room, as regards instruments and instrument counts:
Every surgeon has a card (usually, literally a 3"x5" index card) with preferences and requirements for each particular operation they perform: for an appendectomy they may need a Saxony brand defrobulator and a #10 blade as the specialized items and they like to close the bowel with 2-0 (aka 00) chromic (made from catgut) and they like to close the skin with 3-0 poly and 6-0 purebread (usually used in cataract / ophthalmic procedures, but hey Underdog spoke out to me.) There might be three each of any particular scalpel blade they need and howsoever much of those stitches threaded on the appropriate types of needles: curved, straight, cutting, non-cutting, etc. There will also be the appropriate number of hemostats, deblooduclips, etc, that are necessary for the procedure. For a different procedure, say a vasectomy,... okay, let's say cranial burr hole or craniotomy for decompression of subdural for all the guys wincing out there, they may want a hand-twist drill, plastic clips for holding the scalp edges, good thick chromic for the fascial closure, etc., so a different set of objects.
There will be a minimum of two nurses assisting with the procedure, a scrub nurse (scrubbed in to the operation, hence the name) and a circulating nurse. The circulator will make sure that the tray with all of the equipment is already there before the operation starts. Even before the surgeon scrubs in, the scrub nurse will also go over the instruments and objects and de a pre-op count: making sure that there is enough of every item and making a note of the number of objects, including sponges which are actually small pieces of cloth uses to sponge up that red stuff that leaks out humans when they're cut. These cloths usually have a radio-opaque fiber sewn into them so that when they're accidentally left in the human body, something is easily apparent on X-ray or C-T; cotton is not so opaque to x-radiation.
The nurses know that there are int counts[i] of char* objects[i] for each of the different objects. The preop counts array is usually written on the form the circ nurse fills out. Then all of the really good fun stuff happens, and as it is almost all done and the surgeon is getting ready to close, the scrub nurse starts a pre-close count: counts that the number of needles handed back by the surgeon plus the number of unused needles adds up to the number that was in the pre-op count (for each variety of pre-threaded needle). They also check that the number of clean unused sponges (whether 1"x1", 2"x2", 0.5"x0.5", etc) added to the number of blooded sponges handed back by the surgeon off of the surgical field also add up to the number expected. All of the other instruments: retractors, hemostats, bolt-cutters (used to cut the titanium bars in the fun ortho cases), machetes (used in amputations...), are also counted to make sure none are missing. (sometimes, even retractors fall into the morbidly obese and are missed.)
If the pre-op count is not correct, there is a frenzy as the doc looks inside the patient (or, if the closing is happening real fast, the doc says find it find it and the nurses run around checking the little bits on the floor and mopping up with surgical cloths to see if a needle fell onto the floor or onto the surgeons' or nurses' gowns or even if the needle is stuck onto the bottom of the little blue booties the OR personnel are using to cover their hospital footwear.)
If the count is correct, then the closing is done, and then the scrub nurse does ANOTHER final post-op count and rewrites it all down to make sure nothing was left behind.
Amazingly, even in cases where stuff was left behind, the written records usually show that the count was correct: someone takes a shortcut and writes a copy of the list and it often isn't until the patient has an infection or a recurrent problems days, weeks, months, years down the r
It's because we allocate the money we spend so poorly and inefficiently. The majority ends up in the pockets of the insurance companies and the drug companies and the hospital companies, especially those who have friends in government to mandate their use. Example I just read about today: after this Medicare D fiasco http://www.sptimes.com/2005/webspecials05/medicare, the VA software fiasco (with a single software vendor), after so many numerous examples, the government has handed to 3-M on a gold-edged silver platter a NO BID CONTRACT for Medicare Payment Services which will reallocate payments based on new formulas (article at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/17/us/17medicare.ht ml). Do you think somebody has a friend up on high? Just like Halliburton getting no-bid contracts, just like all of the Katrina waste from no-bid contracts, just like Medicare D where the government GAVE UP its right to haggle and negotiate for lower prices from the drug manufacturers.
My god, we asked 3M to evaluate whether the government should use 3M software for medicare billing evaluation? What do they think the answer is going to be? And of course, 3M is out there selling its services to all hospitals saying hey we're know this software in and out, buy our own billing software to deal with medicare.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you possibly post a link to a version that is not hidden behind a paywall? Perhaps a pre-print on your own research site; perhaps an HTML web page summary of your work?
.
http://nengo.ca/
.
It looks like they use Python scripting in their NENGO simulator: http://www.frontiersin.org/neuroinformatics/10.3389/neuro.11/007.2009/abstract
Why not start an automated scanning system and always, always, ALWAYS scan and upload all incoming mail to it where it is automagically scanned and OCR'ed (gocr) and saved again and faxed/efaxed/emailed to you. Make it a part of your business plan, and thus doing it will be requisite for your business remaining ISO-9000 compliant. Of course, it means making all of your correspondence public, allowing poetry such as at the end of this message to be widely known and embarassingly disseminated. But then you won't have knowingly and willfully mis-complied with the request of the letter, if your business process also makes it public knowledge that you are the recipient of an NSL letter.
``It is a matter of policy that all incoming mail is scanned and published.'' See if that holds water.
{begin embarassing poem}
What makes your heart beat pitter-patter? Is it something in someone else's soul or is it in their matter? Is your heart full of love and round, or have it been squashed flatter? Is it in your body or mind; where is the love you will find?
{end embarassing poem}
k314q159z028675309
Thanks for pointing that extra "neutral" notch out to me.
I didn't even notice that, and considering that Saylor was just driving that
car for the first time that day, he probably didn't notice it either.
This is a huge problem with migrating machine-human-interface design away
from commonly accepted standards without taking into regard the problems
that may occur.
I definitely agree that the +/o/- for the drive control on the tiptronic
and the 'N' slot should be vastly different planes which are not easy
to confuse, and which STAND OUT like these capital letters. Five peoples'
lives were lost because of this stupidity of design.
The 2009 Lexus ES 350 that California Highway Patrol Officer Mark Saylor was driving was a "loaner" vehicle given to him temporarily while his car was being repaired.
It has a "starter button" instead of an ignition key, and requires that the bnutton be depressed for 3 or more seconds if the car is in gear, or it may not function to turn the car off at all over certain velocities.
The shifter has a strange configuration which allows it to "emulate" a manual transmission while it is really an automatic transmission. The "N" position is also used to shift up a gear.
You can almost make it out in this photo at http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/sedans/112_1004_2010_buick_lacrosse_2010_lexus_es_350_comparison/photo_22.html .
Article about why the starter button and transmission human interface may have been factors in the officer not being able to get the car out of gear:
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/starter-button-a-factor-in-runaway-lexus-es350/
Article about the crash :
http://www.sandiego6.com/mostpopular/story/Santee-CHP-officer-Saylor-killed-Lexus-accelerator/AzYjOhtvFE2mIuxTtxrK4Q.cspx
Taylor,
The officer in San Diego was driving a loaner Lexus while his vehicle was being repaired. This loaner Lexus had a push-button "ignition" system, requiring just a push of a button to start the car, and a push of the button to stop the engine, unless the car is in gear and moving greater than velocity $x$, in which case it requires keeping the "starter" button on the dash {b}depressed continuously for three seconds{/b} to turn the system off. It also has an interlock requiring some weird combination so that putting the car into neutral at high velocities is not easily done. That's the information I've gleaned from the Union-Tribune's articles on it. I've driven that stretch of road to go to Santee to eat pizza and shop at lowes, and you often see people speeding recklessly down the steep grade.
Combination of new car with bad human-interface and a panic situation, even for a trained high-performing trooper lead to a deadly result.
KL
In the past, L.L. Bean and American Express all experimented with greeting customers by name when they called. They did this by linking the ANI information received on their incoming 1-800-telephonenumber line with a computerized database. People were creeped out to have a person greet them by their name before they'd even said "Hello", and both American Express and L.L. Bean stopped doing this. Affinity marketing campaigns also did this and the FTC regulated this away, partially.
link to ftc pdf, see page 42 and other.
What ATT is trying to hide about what they've already done is steps beyond this.
kris
Ron Fearing's lab at UC Berkeley also does work on biomimetic materials such as synthetic gecko pads:
his biomimetics lab
has a link to their self-cleaning gecko adhesive material on the front page.
Self-Cleaning Gecko Adhesive (Sep. 2008)
First synthetic gecko adhesive which cleans itself during use, as the natural gecko does. After contamination by microspheres, the microfiber array loses all adhesion strength. After repeated contacts with clean glass, the microspheres are shed, and the fibers recover 30% of their original adhesion. The fibers have a non-adhesive default state, which encourages particle removal during contact.
Contact Self-Cleaning of Synthetic Gecko Adhesive, Langmuir 2008
Ron Fearing's lab at UC Berkeley also does work on biomimetic materials such as synthetic gecko pads:
biomimetics lab
has a link to their self-cleaning gecko adhesive material on the front page.
Sorry about the prior post.
Self-Cleaning Gecko Adhesive (Sep. 2008)
First synthetic gecko adhesive which cleans itself during use, as the natural gecko does. After contamination by microspheres, the microfiber array loses all adhesion strength. After repeated contacts with clean glass, the microspheres are shed, and the fibers recover 30% of their original adhesion. The fibers have a non-adhesive default state, which encourages particle removal during contact.
Contact Self-Cleaning of Synthetic Gecko Adhesive, Langmuir 2008
Self-Cleaning Gecko Adhesive (Sep. 2008)
First synthetic gecko adhesive which cleans itself during use, as the natural gecko does. After contamination by microspheres, the microfiber array loses all adhesion strength. After repeated contacts with clean glass, the microspheres are shed, and the fibers recover 30% of their original adhesion. The fibers have a non-adhesive default state, which encourages particle removal during contact.
Contact Self-Cleaning of Synthetic Gecko Adhesive, Langmuir 2008
Ah, serves me right for not RTFA and just reading the /. summary which states fiction rather than science fiction. Mea culpa.
"Oxford University Press has a blog post listing nine words used in science and technology which were actually dreamed up by fiction writers. Included on the list are terms like robotics, genetic engineering, deep space, and zero-g. What other terms are sure to follow in the future?"
Quark is partially based on James Joyce's work, Finnegan's Wake, though it seems to be a retro-explanation by Gell Mann.
Yep
I read it too.
If you're in banking, you must have noticed the fact that the increased cap of FDIC insurance from $100k to $250k will only apply until December of 2009, after which it reverts back to the limit of $100k per named account holder per financial institution.
How many people might get suckered into longer term CD's (Certificates of Deposits, not the ISO-9660 type) that might go over the boundary of the TEMPORARILY raised FDIC insurance caps and end up either inadequately covered or stuck with early-withdrawal fees?
Either way, NONE of the articles I have read make any statement about the fact that the so-called increase in the FDIC insurance from $100-thousand to $250-thousand is only going to last the length of calendar year 2009. That's a sham and a disgrace.
Kris
I kid you not about this: when I worked in the Los Angeles County Health System, I was paid by both the county and the state bursars. The paperwork for my job stated specifically that I was required to carry out my job EVEN IF THERE WERE NO FUNDS AVAILABLE TO BE DISBURSED TO ME FOR MY PAYCHECK. I have that document somewhere in my vertical archaeological dig of paperwork from the prior century.
I pointed this out to the H.R. person after my employment physical, and she told me "Honey, don't worry about it, the state don't run out of money." I respectfully disagreed, crossed out the line, initialed it, and signed the paperwork. Nobody gave me any trouble, but if this happened nowadays, I bet they wouldn't let me in with that line crossed out.
Don't even get me started about the payroll records and timecard abuse: the department secretary always told me to sign the blank timecard and she would fill it out: I refused to sign it unless I also filled out my hours. When I put in more than forty, she said, "Oh no, don't worry about it, we'll take care of it," or something equivalent to that.
I never saw timecards again from the department.
Coward of Anonymity:
6.170 is the E.E. design course, which in the mid 80's meant creating hardware instantiated Robotron or centipede etc.
6.070 is the C.S. design course.
Did you forget or did you never go?
There is also a new updated mini also with Core 2 duo processor, however it seems to only have firewire 400, not firewire 800.
http://www.apple.com/macmini/specs.html
I'm waiting for Leopard in october, so I hope to see if the Core-2-Duo processor bugs will be problematic with the updated mini before I buy it.
'stuck with a g4' kl
Okay: "yeah, right" is a sarcastic response composed of two positive words rather than the same word repeated. With the fact that it is often said in a sarcastic tone and that it is often said as a succinct two word rejoinder, it is interpreted as a negation, a sarcastic agreement that actually disagrees.
:)
Is that a double positive?
Where do I collect the prize?
- kris
I'm not at a place where I can access the research article, so let me comment about what I know about McLelland's previous work with neural networks.
Rumelhart and McLelland worked on the groundbreaking "can a neural network learn how to pronounce words based on their spelling?" paper, which used back-propagation to train a neural net to do just that. That was in the 1980s. (Sejnowski at the Salk Institute followed up with a lot of neural net training studies too.)
Their little cheat was that there was no temporal component to the data. Words were represented as sets of triplet-letters: catalog is represented as "-ca", "cat", "ata", "tal", "alo", and "log". (Actually, I don't remember if they used special sequences to represent start and stop, so --c -ca og- and g-- may not have been part of the sets.}
And of course the neural net didn't really have audio output, though of course the rejoinder is that this would be trivial.
My key question is how they deal with the issue of time in this study, and if there is any actual audio output which would act as feed-back for the training system or whether the output is representational only, as an output set of phonemes.
Having real audio output and real audio input would let it correlate its output with real language examples. Having representational blobs would only mean that: given inputs of the hash that represents "hard TH" vs the hash that represents "soft TH" the system could yield a result of different outputs.
And you're saying that the key result would be if the system learned to conflate or ignore the two sounds of "TH", hard or soft, in trying to interpret words. Remember that the initial Rumelhart-McLelland model was "content/meaning free", and I suspect that this one is too. Learning to conflate "x" and "y" in a neural net would be trivially implemented and trainable: the links for "x" and "y" into the model would have similar weights in the right contexts (the context being the set of predecessor and successor phonemes).
It sounds like an agglomerator: given a large dataset of valid words in a given language, this system learns the rule for "predecessor" and "successor" probabilities of a particular phoneme vs another phoneme and then produces random output with the same Bayesian probability, producing gibberish nonsensical sounds which follow the probability distribution of the input training language.
or that's my guess at least trying to be the typical slashdotter commenting without reading the article.
I'll try to get at the article from the Uni with journal access tomorrow.
Kris
I have a question. What particular pitfalls do you need to watch out for when you're signing a contract to do business with the government? Particularly with the FAR clauses, which are gargantuan in size and pantagruelian in complexity.
I was offered the opportunity to do a subcontract for a company doing business with the government and their contract included an Incorporation by Reference of the FAR clauses which I tried to investigate and got lost in the maze. "Incorportation by Reference" means that they state "all articles of the FAR" regulations apply, without them specifying exactly what these clauses are. In other words, an indirection pointer like a memory reference.
Any advice you may have would be of great help.
so this is called nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
Doing it with a gradient field and a special pulse sequence lets you get the
vibrational amplitudes of your protons based on their position within the gradient field.
That's what gets you MRI images. Before MRI images, nuclear spectroscopy was used to
resonate the "nucleus" of atoms/molecules/conglomerations of molecules at varying radio-frequencies to see if there was any resulting resonance and output RF (radiofrequency) signal.
Protons resonate at 2.4 GHz approximately (which is the frequency used in microwaves to resonate the H's in the {H}_2{0} molecules in your food and heat it.
"This device has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained." http://www.apple.com/iphone/technology/specs.html
Any tips or pointers to beginners about double entry ledgers?
I'm starting a small business and am trying to figure these things out.
How about for proposing a budget for a grant application, perhaps?
SBIR?
maybe it's a recurrence of illness?
Didn't he have surgery for a tumor?
in an OR, they do have to count the pieces of gauze used as packing, and the number of sponges used, and even disposable clamps and the plastic clips used on scalp opening are most-definitely counted. That's part of the scrub-nurse's job and it's the surgeons job to make sure the count is correct before closing. Now they won't count how much methyl-matacrylate they used, or how much cyano-acrylate was used (superglue is often used, whether dictated or not...), but every item that can be counted IS counted.
Hey
Let me give you a quick summary of procedure in an operating room, as regards instruments and instrument counts:
Every surgeon has a card (usually, literally a 3"x5" index card) with preferences and requirements for each particular operation they perform: for an appendectomy they may need a Saxony brand defrobulator and a #10 blade as the specialized items and they like to close the bowel with 2-0 (aka 00) chromic (made from catgut) and they like to close the skin with 3-0 poly and 6-0 purebread (usually used in cataract / ophthalmic procedures, but hey Underdog spoke out to me.) There might be three each of any particular scalpel blade they need and howsoever much of those stitches threaded on the appropriate types of needles: curved, straight, cutting, non-cutting, etc. There will also be the appropriate number of hemostats, deblooduclips, etc, that are necessary for the procedure. For a different procedure, say a vasectomy,... okay, let's say cranial burr hole or craniotomy for decompression of subdural for all the guys wincing out there, they may want a hand-twist drill, plastic clips for holding the scalp edges, good thick chromic for the fascial closure, etc., so a different set of objects.
There will be a minimum of two nurses assisting with the procedure, a scrub nurse (scrubbed in to the operation, hence the name) and a circulating nurse. The circulator will make sure that the tray with all of the equipment is already there before the operation starts. Even before the surgeon scrubs in, the scrub nurse will also go over the instruments and objects and de a pre-op count: making sure that there is enough of every item and making a note of the number of objects, including sponges which are actually small pieces of cloth uses to sponge up that red stuff that leaks out humans when they're cut. These cloths usually have a radio-opaque fiber sewn into them so that when they're accidentally left in the human body, something is easily apparent on X-ray or C-T; cotton is not so opaque to x-radiation.
The nurses know that there are int counts[i] of char* objects[i] for each of the different objects. The preop counts array is usually written on the form the circ nurse fills out. Then all of the really good fun stuff
happens, and as it is almost all done and the surgeon is getting ready to close, the scrub nurse starts a pre-close count: counts that the number of needles handed back by the surgeon plus the number of unused needles adds up to the number that was in the pre-op count (for each variety of pre-threaded needle). They also check that the number of clean unused sponges (whether 1"x1", 2"x2", 0.5"x0.5", etc) added to the number of blooded sponges handed back by the surgeon off of the surgical field also add up to the number expected. All of the other instruments: retractors, hemostats, bolt-cutters (used to cut the titanium bars in the fun ortho cases), machetes (used in amputations...), are also counted to make sure none are missing. (sometimes, even retractors fall into the morbidly obese and are missed.)
If the pre-op count is not correct, there is a frenzy as the doc looks inside the patient (or, if the closing is happening real fast, the doc says find it find it and the nurses run around checking the little bits on the floor and mopping up with surgical cloths to see if a needle fell onto the floor or onto the surgeons' or nurses' gowns or even if the needle is stuck onto the bottom of the little blue booties the OR personnel are using to cover their hospital footwear.)
If the count is correct, then the closing is done, and then the scrub nurse does ANOTHER final post-op count and rewrites it all down to make sure nothing was left behind.
Amazingly, even in cases where stuff was left behind, the written records usually show that the count was correct: someone takes a shortcut and writes a copy of the list and it often isn't until the patient has an infection or a recurrent problems days, weeks, months, years down the r
It's because we allocate the money we spend so poorly and inefficiently. The majority ends up in the pockets of the insurance companies and the drug companies and the hospital companies, especially those who have friends in government to mandate their use. Example I just read about today: after thise , the VA software fiasco (with a single software vendor), after so many numerous examples, the government has handed to 3-M on a gold-edged silver platter a NO BID CONTRACT for Medicare Payment Services which will reallocate payments based on new formulas (article at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/17/us/17medicare.ht ml). Do you think somebody has a friend up on high? Just like Halliburton getting no-bid contracts, just like all of the Katrina waste from no-bid contracts, just like Medicare D where the government GAVE UP its right to haggle and negotiate for lower prices from the drug manufacturers.
Medicare D fiasco http://www.sptimes.com/2005/webspecials05/medicar
My god, we asked 3M to evaluate whether the government should use 3M software for medicare billing evaluation? What do they think the answer is going to be? And of course, 3M is out there selling its services to all hospitals saying hey we're know this software in and out, buy our own billing software to deal with medicare.