You must be new around here. OS X on Intel isn't faster, it's snappier.
Perhaps faster, perhaps not, perhaps snappier, perhaps not. What it will be is PORTABLE without causing 2nd degree burns as a G5 powerbook would. The problem with the PPC970 is that it's just too darn hot -- witness the water cooled production machines (dual 2.7 ghz G5). You can't do that with a notebook and have it be meaningfully portable. This is probably the biggest reason they had to ditch PPC, along with the lack of speed improvements in the G5.
As a scientists, I hope the day will never come in which only "qualified researchers" can publish on controversial issues. Voting age citizens are supposed to be able to comprehend, judge, and evaluate information for themselves.
Although I agree with this in concept, the problem here is not that people shouldn't be allowed to have their opinions and discuss controversy, but rather that when people read stuff like this, that claims geniune scientific method and discovery without having either, they grow worried about vaccines. This not only endangers their own children, which depending on the laws of the state they live in, etc., is their business, but creates a public health risk -- people who are immunosuppressed due to illness, old age/young age, aren't vaccinated due to being too young, or have other immune problems are at risk of dying because people decide not to have their kids vaccinated because of some junk written at salon.com.
Worse yet, if they don't get the vaccine and the child has a negative outcome from getting measles, mumps, or rubella, I'm sure they can still sue the doctor, even if we beg them to reconsider at the time and document our disagreement with their refusal of the vaccine. Laypeople have a right to information, a right to discussion, a right to refuse care, but then why do they get to retain the right to blame us if their decisions go badly?
Further, I don't pretend to understand the inside of my car, or the electrical wiring in my house enough to be able to render an accurate judgement. Medical science is not any different from any other technical field -- yes any person of age can read the information (if they're literate), but can they really understand it, and do they know which sources are accurate and which are not?
"Valence introduces its 2nd generation N-Charge Power System, a Saphion® technology-based, universal, portable battery designed to power a vast array of mobile electronic devices. The N-Charge Base Unit provides up to 5 additional hours of notebook run-time and the flexibility to support your cell phone, digital camera, MP3 player, and more"
The old NCharge is still available from them: http://store.yahoo.com/valencetech-store/ncharge11.html and is described as follows: "Up to 10 hours of continuous notebook run-time or up to 5 days of cell phone talk time with the N-Charge system VNC130."
(5 hours again with the lighter VNC65.)
They don't claim it works as long as the larger, laptop shaped battery -- it's on their store.
Hope you're actually reading these. You actually don't have acute ADD. You have adult-diagnosis ADD. The taking the TV apart stuff -- ADD in a high-functioning child.
ADD is like not having brakes on the car that is your brain. So you can go really fast but have to keep turning so as to not hit things. If you're fast enough, you can make enough turns that you still get to where you're supposed to. This is the high IQ/smart kid with ADD. Compensatory mechanisms get you through until you can't do it anymore, then you get diagnosed. Not uncommon with adult ADD patients, and the really nice benefit you get from the meds is classic.
I wrote specifically to tell you to ask your doctor about Concerta -- extended release formulation of methylphenidate. It's nice because a lot of the "trippy" side effects are from the short release pharmacokinetics of the normal methylphenidate -- it's peaking and dropping all day long as you take multiple doses, or just spikes and drops off. Either way -- side effect city. The Concerta smooths it out. Much better.
Kargis (This does not represent medical advice as a physician, but rather simply describes the characteristics of the medication. Ask your doctor about it. Do not change meds without a physician's advice. This does not constitute a covenant of care.)
OK. You asked for it. How anyone can ignore clear, observable, treatable differences in neurophysiology is completely beyond me. ADD troubles people because it is a disease of the brain. We don't like thinking of what's in our skull as meat, but if you've ever done an autopsy, neurosurgery, or dissection -- there it is. Meat. Grey and white matter. It's a set of parts that can has unique properties for each person. Some unique properties are good. Some are bad. Live with it. ADD is different from just creative thinking or style differences because while you have it, you get LESS done. You are LESS effective, and even if more creative, don't manage to FINISH anything. Treatment gives you just enough "pause" or "brakes on the car" (a psychiatrist once described it to me as "the brain has too much gas and no brakes", which is an accurate description). With a bit of brakes, you've taken a high performance death machine that drives into walls and turned it into a Formula 1 racer. Alternative schooling can only help by adding coping mechanisms, which is another key portion of treatment, but the MTA trial (coping skills+therapy versus coping skills + therapy + ritalin versus just ritalin) showed that the best group us both methods, then just ritalin. The coping skills+therapy only group did NO better than kids left to their diagnosis without help. It is a neurochemical disorder. Neurochemical alterations by adding exogenous chemicals can swing things back into order. That simple.
If you have diabetes, you don't have insulin. You give back insulin, you don't die. Why neurochemicals are so different to people is completely beyond me.
Dr. Laura has a doctorate. In physiology. She is not a neuroscientist, not a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, not a neurologist, not a licensed social worker, not a pediatrician. She has a certificate that allows her to do Child and Family counseling. That's it. This does not make her an authority on ADD. And what's worse, she's said stuff like:
"''[Responding to a fax, Schlessinger says:] "It goes on and says 'Pedophilia and child molestation have zero to do with being gay, homosexual orientation' and that's not true. <B> That is not true. How many letters have I read on the air from gay men who acknowledge that a huge portion of the male homosexual populace is predatory on young boys <B>." - Dr. Laura radio show, August 13, 1999 (quoted by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC)). "
Asking her for advice is asking a serial murderer about conflict resolution skills. Check your sources. Read the literature. Consider the science. Then decide for yourself. Yes there are those who want to treat cancer with human urine extract, but when scientifically tested, it turns out that human urine extract really doesn't kill tumors very well. Go figure.
Kargis Strong, MD (pseudonym) Diplomate, American Board of Pediatrics
So, you were on prescription stimulants for a neurobiologically well characterized illness, then instead started taking Crystal Meth from the street? And you're complaining about ADD being an overdiagnosis? How about antisocial personality disorder or conduct disorder?
Albert Einstein wouldn't have been diagnosed with ADD because he was able to generate enough task orientation, discipline, and attention to write the first draft on special relativity.
"The fact that many of our greatest minds" -- where does this "fact" come from? Just because you're a recovering drug addict that had a bad experience does not invalidate decades of careful, validated, painstaking scientific research that has consistently shown certain behavioral features that represent a neurobiological disorder of cortical arousal called ADD (today).
You can see the decreased arousal on PET and fMRI, and can watch it improve with stimulants, and ALSO with biofeedback exercises and/or videogames.
The crucial thing to do is: a) have the child undergo a FULL neuropsychiatric evaluation. This is required by law for the school district to provide, and is the most comprehensive behavioral and cognitive testing we have. It will find the weaknesses as well as the strengths. b) find a physician YOU trust to manage the ADD meds. There are physicians more versed than others in this -- some are child psych people, some are just pediatricians who have developed the field over the years, some are neurologists. None of them are crystal meth dealers. c) Learn everything you can about the disease. Do not allow the school to limit your child, but understand that people with ADD do best in settings of structure -- it gives people with ADD something to expend their energy on, and produces wonderful results in combination with stimulants. d) Do not accept the dogma that ADD automatically means lower IQ, less school success, etc. This, like all averages, has selection bias. Smart people with ADD weren't being diagnosed in the past or treated. The high functioning group is now becoming the adult diagnosis group -- vice presidents of companies, physicians, other bright folk have all been found, and done better with treatment than without.
Good luck. Biofeedback techniques are definitely useful in ADD, as they produce the kinds of change in the brain while being used that are clearly beneficial. But no one is sure how lasting the effects are. Stimulants work. I didn't believe in them as a pediatrician until I saw them in effect. Eventually, maybe, we'll be able to edit the hardware permanently. Until then, stimulants effect a temp fix on the hardware, and biofeedback is a software patch.
Wow. Maybe, maybe, maybe "The Second Renaissance" was in turn ripped off from the robot detective series of novels Asimov did, which feature a robot detective and his initially unhappy technophobe human partner who solve crimes perpetrated by robots. (Caves of Steel is the first one)
Looks like I Robot is just the wrong title for the film.
Would be madness to build a supercomputer out of Opterons -- and you'd need 4400 of them for it to . . . to do what?
Specint base Opteron 246 = 1248 Specint base G5 2 ghz = 800
Specfp base Opteron 246 = 1209 Specfp base G5 2 ghz = 840
These numbers are from spec.org for the opteron and of course apple.com. Now I'm not sure why I need 4400 opterons all of a sudden to equal 2200 of these initially slower machines. And of course, the idea that no one's doing this:
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/news/pr_730.html
ARMONK, N.Y. and TOKYO July 30, 2003 -- IBM today announced that Japan's largest national research organization has ordered an IBM TM Linux(R) supercomputer that when completed will deliver more than 11 trillion calculations per second, making it the world's most powerful Linux-based supercomputer. It is expected to be more powerful than the current Linux cluster currently ranked as the third most powerful supercomputer in the world, according to the widely popular TOP500 List of Supercomputers [1].
The supercomputer is planned to be integrated with other non-Linux systems to form a massive, distributed computing Grid -- enabling collaboration between corporations, academia and government -- to support various research including grid technologies, life sciences bioinformatics and nanotechnology.
The system with a total of 2,636 processors will include 1,058 IBM 325 systems, which were introduced today with 2,116 AMD OpteronTM processors. [2]
At least look into stuff before deciding that it's not competitive -- the opteron is certainly competitive. Sure, it's not a Mac, but it's pretty damned fast, and a quick look online shows a price of ~$3000 -- same as list on the G5.
Finally, no one knows how well these things will multiprocess -- they're not using linux, they're using OS X -- which is BSD, granted, and should do well, but god only knows what they've done. I actually do think it will be a nice, fast machine, just not necessarily significantly better for specious reasons than a similar opteron machine when the initial base spec marks are so much in favor of the Opteron (800 vs 1200 is 25% last time I checked), and the Opteron has the advantage of having IBM working on making Linux nice, fast, and well-behaved in a cluster setting.
IBM argues, in essence, that they need to do this to stay competitive
The math is pretty simple. Let's say you're IBM and you can either hire an engineer in the US for $40,000 per year, or in India for 60,000 rupees per year, which is at most $1400.
Now I have no doubt that American programmers are more productive, better versed in the needs of the American user, better speakers of English, and better trained at US universities.
However. Are you all really 30 times more productive? Can IBM get the work of 30 Indian programmers from 1 American programmer?
Probably not. This is the problem with economics. When we were the only country capable of generating good quality code because we had all the people who knew how to do it -- we were set. However, the Internet is, and should be a global driver of economies, and thus, much as manufacture of things (physical objects) has moved off shore, so too now will the manufacture of code/IP. Certainly innovation will continue to occur here, but for many applications, the consumer doesn't really need innovation, just some code to do what they want.
Doubtless my karma will suffer for this, but it's how I see it.
Meta-analyses are up front recognized as being flawed because they are biased by article selection, and by being statistical analyses of data from different studies with different methodologies, each with their own biases and confounders. However, when there is not adequate evidence to make a conclusion based on individual studies, meta-analyses can be useful in guiding further research -- and that's all anyone's ever purported they're good for. The idea that they reduced down to 107 articles based on "reading the abstracts" is reductionist and misleading. Generally, the approach taken is to find candidate studies that look on-topic, then evaluate them for methodological flaws and decide whether or not the study was done well enough to include. Sure there's potential bias here, but it's known ahead of time. Anyway, that's my take on meta-analyses.
As for low-carbohydrate diets being the wonder cure for everything -- couple of things that should at least provoke curiosity. One is the idea that prolonged ketosis is good for you. I'm not saying that it's for sure prolonged, as some studies report that the ketosis is transient, but if it's not, how will long-term utilization of the lipid metabolism pathways as the primary source of glucose for the brain and body affect people? No one knows. Furthermore, the observed tendency is for people on the Atkins Diet to eat lots of calories -- more than normal, regardless of what Atkins may have written, and the weight loss is not always as advertised. Metabolism is a somewhat black box to us, especially in terms of individual variances -- some people may have bad reactions to this sort of diet, reflecting differences in biochemistry between people. No, I don't mean fundamental differences, but rather differences in enzyme function and or production that can change how things get metabolized.
Ultimately, as many others have written, the key to weight loss is increasing energy expenditure and decreasing energy intake. Examples include:
Cancer -- rapidly dividing cancer cells use up lots of energy, and cytokines designed to fight the tumor also induce anorexia. Thus, more energy used, less food eaten --> weight loss.
Cystic Fibrosis -- increased energy expenditure secondary to ongoing sinopulmonary infection, decreased intake due to malabsorption caused by pancreatic insufficiency --> weight loss.
"Hacker Diet" -- exercise (increased EE), less than 2000 kcals per day (decreased energy intake).
For a group largely made of computer oriented folk, this simple input output relationship seems unusually difficult. Bottom line -- if you don't utilize the energy you consume as food, your body stores it as fat, and you gain weight. This is NOT rocket science. Low-carb, low-fat, low-whatever -- diets can have too much or too little of things, but no one has ever convincingly yet found the magic mix that lets everyone loose weight.
This has worked in the lab. There seems to be a subpopulation of marrow stem cells that retain differentiation potential.
Kargis Strong, MD
Cell, Vol. 105, 369-377, May 4, 2001
Purification of rare hematopoietic stem cell(s) (HSC) to homogeneity is required to study their self-renewal, differentiation, phenotype, and homing. Long-term repopulation (LTR) of irradiated hosts and serial transplantation to secondary hosts represent the gold standard for demonstrating self-renewal and differentiation, the defining properties of HSC. We show that rare cells that home to bone marrow can LTR primary and secondary recipients. During the homing, CD34 and SCA-1 expression increases uniquely on cells that home to marrow. These adult bone marrow cells have tremendous differentiative capacity as they can also differentiate into epithelial cells of the liver, lung, GI tract, and skin. This finding may contribute to clinical treatment of genetic disease or tissue repair.
Um. Although that Sciam article accurately discusses the doubts of some, there are an impressive number of experiments that have shown that stem cells can be pulled from marrow, and can and will replace tissues from other organs.
Actually, if you look at the Nature issue, they are actually trying to look at the non-coding regions of DNA. Non-coding RNA is harder to look at because it requires finding what is in the cell, and doesn't turn into a protein. Systems biology approaches will be needed to make this happen, but it's nice to see that there is significant thought going into the fact that "non-coding" DNA can change the fur color of mice.
The reason that bacteria feeding/fueling themselves with UV radiation would be difficult is that UV, as mentioned numerous times here, is really toxic to living things. This toxicity, unlike ones that bacteria manage to adapt to -- heat, pressure, toxins, etc., is a problem for evolution because UV damages DNA in a direct, radiation absorption leading to bond disruption and DNA breakage causing mutation and more often than not, critical mutations that cause organism failure -- death. Using UV as an experimental mutagen is problematic, and not often done for that reason -- it's too good at killing your organism, and not particularly good at leaving you with interesting or functional mutations.
The bacteria that survive in space probably, and I stress probably because I don't have any personal knowledge of them, survived by hiding. Pigments could theoretically be engineered (and thus evolved) to absorb UV, but given how much of an impetus an organism would need to do this, and how much evolutionary time something like photosynthesis took to get to its fantastic efficiency, it would take longer than a couple decades in space. Could there be bacteria out there that thrive on UV and are in the midst of slowly evolving into plant-like organisms? Sure. Do I think they're out there? Not really -- not if life is generally DNA based. It's just too hard on DNA.
Certainly anything that is hardware can be implemented in software, but only at the cost of an immense speed hit. An excellent example is the Itanium 2 hardware simulator at Intel. By using literally hundreds of Alphas, you can get a processor model that runs at like 1 hertz or something ridiculously slow. So in theory, if you had the right model, you could write software to model a human brain in software and run it on a C64. It would be the slowest human brain in history, but I suppose it would be a comparable computational construct.
See -- part of what makes the brain significant is that it can perform multiple complex computations independently, interdepenently, and very rapidly all at the same time. No computer can do that right now, probably because the brain likely functions in a straightforward logical fashion as well as a separate or likely superimposed quantum computing fashion.
So IF you could find ALL the computations that the brain performs, or even all of the types of computations that the human brain peforms, sure, you could get a decent model built.
The processing power of a honeybee's brain in terms of the power needed for it to perform flight as it does, and find honey, and return to the hive, etc., has been estimated at 60 teraflops. The idea that 6 times as much processing power = the human brain seems reasonably foolish. I think ultimately, the problem is that people tend to think of brains as giant calculating machines, when they're not -- there's a great deal of hardwired logic controlling things like breathing and reflexes, that aren't so much mediated by calculation, as they are by simple input output "black-box" sort of processes. This is another reason attempting to equate a brain to a giant computer seems foolish.
Unfortunately, the follow-ups to the initial finding that there was a type of regressive autism characterized and comorbid with an inflammatory bowel disease (which is what the Apr30 press piece above refers to) found consistent autoimmune etiology for autism.
As for your child -- amoxicillin prophylaxis is recommended, and nearly universal for children with significant kidney reflux, or the kidneys end up destoryed and the patient dies of renal failure. So far, none of the patient's I've had on this have ended up with autism.
Autism tends to come at 18-24 months in terms of the developmental regression and the positive symptoms, and that's an age where vaccines happen, and when some things like amoxicillin prophylaxis for VUR come or go.
We tend to look for answers, which is only natural, but in this particular case, none of the obvious ones -- vaccines, mercury, etc., are statistically significant factors that can separate a person who will have autism from one who won't.
A new process... such as not having interns work 48 hours straight... just isn't going to happen anytime soon.
You don't mean like the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education making that unacceptable in an accredited program, do you? Because, yeah, like, that'll never happen. Oh. Wait. It just did.
http://www.acgme.org/new/residentHours602.asp
Highlights:
Duty Hours
Residents must not be scheduled for more than 80 hours per week, averaged over a four-week period, with the provision that individual programs may apply to their sponsoring institution's Graduate Medical Education Committee (GMEC) for an increase in this limit of up to 10 percent if they can provide a sound educational rationale.
Residents must have at least one full (24-hour) day out of seven free of patient care duties, averaged over four weeks.
Residents must not be assigned in-house call more often than every third night, averaged over four weeks.
Continuous time on duty (call) is limited to 24 hours, with additional time up to six hours for inpatient and outpatient continuity, transfer of care, educational debriefing and formal didactic activities. Residents may not assume responsibility for new patients after 24 hours.
Residents should have a minimum rest period of 10 hours between duty periods.
When residents take call from home and are called into the hospital, the time spent in the hospital must be counted toward the weekly duty hour.
Sure. We're backwards. We don't innovate. We don't use technology. Sure.
MRI. Surgical robots. Hip replacements. Self-contained artificial heart. Transplants.
So. You think it's a good idea for an expert system to make medical decisions. How about coding decisions. Sit back and ask yourself if you think that a computer would be any good at doing what most of you do -- let's say writing code well. Let's say managing a network well. Would any of you trust a computer to do these things? Now ask yourself why this bothers you (if it does).
Ultimately, the difference between a computer munging data and a human expert is a series of things -- heuristics, cognition, intuition -- computers don't have any of these things.
Physicians are highly trained -- two years of basic sciences, two years of clinical training, followed by at least three years to become an internist, family practitioner, or pediatrician -- 4 for an OB/Gyn, 5 for a surgeon. This is all after 4 years of college.
Why do you people (the average slashdotter) feel that you have the right to judge people who've spent the majority of their lives in school learning to do this? Why do you all think you know anything about medicine? I, personally, would like to see the reaction of this site to a site run by doctors suggesting that programmers be replaced by computers.
Would you honestly trust your life to the opinion of a data mining tool?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I've been playing with it since I saw the thread, and it tolerated and responded pretty well to searches for Yoko Kanno and Delirium.
I'm even finding new music I like. Seems to work.
Anand
Hrm. I'd heard it was Bitboyz Oy . . .
Kargis
Ha ha ha. Excepting that the Intel X86 processors use more power and generate significantly more heat than AMD's.
Kargis
Perhaps faster, perhaps not, perhaps snappier, perhaps not. What it will be is PORTABLE without causing 2nd degree burns as a G5 powerbook would. The problem with the PPC970 is that it's just too darn hot -- witness the water cooled production machines (dual 2.7 ghz G5). You can't do that with a notebook and have it be meaningfully portable. This is probably the biggest reason they had to ditch PPC, along with the lack of speed improvements in the G5.
Kargis
Although I agree with this in concept, the problem here is not that people shouldn't be allowed to have their opinions and discuss controversy, but rather that when people read stuff like this, that claims geniune scientific method and discovery without having either, they grow worried about vaccines. This not only endangers their own children, which depending on the laws of the state they live in, etc., is their business, but creates a public health risk -- people who are immunosuppressed due to illness, old age/young age, aren't vaccinated due to being too young, or have other immune problems are at risk of dying because people decide not to have their kids vaccinated because of some junk written at salon.com.
Worse yet, if they don't get the vaccine and the child has a negative outcome from getting measles, mumps, or rubella, I'm sure they can still sue the doctor, even if we beg them to reconsider at the time and document our disagreement with their refusal of the vaccine. Laypeople have a right to information, a right to discussion, a right to refuse care, but then why do they get to retain the right to blame us if their decisions go badly?
Further, I don't pretend to understand the inside of my car, or the electrical wiring in my house enough to be able to render an accurate judgement. Medical science is not any different from any other technical field -- yes any person of age can read the information (if they're literate), but can they really understand it, and do they know which sources are accurate and which are not?
Kargis Strong, MD
(Pediatrician)
"Valence introduces its 2nd generation N-Charge Power System, a Saphion® technology-based, universal, portable battery designed to power a vast array of mobile electronic devices. The N-Charge Base Unit provides up to 5 additional hours of notebook run-time and the flexibility to support your cell phone, digital camera, MP3 player, and more"
1 .html
The old NCharge is still available from them:
http://store.yahoo.com/valencetech-store/ncharge1
and is described as follows:
"Up to 10 hours of continuous notebook run-time or up to 5 days of cell phone talk time with the N-Charge system VNC130."
(5 hours again with the lighter VNC65.)
They don't claim it works as long as the larger, laptop shaped battery -- it's on their store.
Why do incorrect reviews come here?
Kargis
Wow. Must be fun to take other's peoples' Gods off of lists like that. Cool. You're my hero.
Shiva is a God. We're just willing to admit that creation and destruction are part of the same process.
Kargis
Rick,
Hope you're actually reading these. You actually don't have acute ADD. You have adult-diagnosis ADD. The taking the TV apart stuff -- ADD in a high-functioning child.
ADD is like not having brakes on the car that is your brain. So you can go really fast but have to keep turning so as to not hit things. If you're fast enough, you can make enough turns that you still get to where you're supposed to. This is the high IQ/smart kid with ADD. Compensatory mechanisms get you through until you can't do it anymore, then you get diagnosed. Not uncommon with adult ADD patients, and the really nice benefit you get from the meds is classic.
I wrote specifically to tell you to ask your doctor about Concerta -- extended release formulation of methylphenidate. It's nice because a lot of the "trippy" side effects are from the short release pharmacokinetics of the normal methylphenidate -- it's peaking and dropping all day long as you take multiple doses, or just spikes and drops off. Either way -- side effect city. The Concerta smooths it out. Much better.
Kargis
(This does not represent medical advice as a physician, but rather simply describes the characteristics of the medication. Ask your doctor about it. Do not change meds without a physician's advice. This does not constitute a covenant of care.)
OK. You asked for it. How anyone can ignore clear, observable, treatable differences in neurophysiology is completely beyond me. ADD troubles people because it is a disease of the brain. We don't like thinking of what's in our skull as meat, but if you've ever done an autopsy, neurosurgery, or dissection -- there it is. Meat. Grey and white matter. It's a set of parts that can has unique properties for each person. Some unique properties are good. Some are bad. Live with it. ADD is different from just creative thinking or style differences because while you have it, you get LESS done. You are LESS effective, and even if more creative, don't manage to FINISH anything. Treatment gives you just enough "pause" or "brakes on the car" (a psychiatrist once described it to me as "the brain has too much gas and no brakes", which is an accurate description). With a bit of brakes, you've taken a high performance death machine that drives into walls and turned it into a Formula 1 racer. Alternative schooling can only help by adding coping mechanisms, which is another key portion of treatment, but the MTA trial (coping skills+therapy versus coping skills + therapy + ritalin versus just ritalin) showed that the best group us both methods, then just ritalin. The coping skills+therapy only group did NO better than kids left to their diagnosis without help. It is a neurochemical disorder. Neurochemical alterations by adding exogenous chemicals can swing things back into order. That simple.
If you have diabetes, you don't have insulin. You give back insulin, you don't die. Why neurochemicals are so different to people is completely beyond me.
Dr. Laura has a doctorate. In physiology. She is not a neuroscientist, not a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, not a neurologist, not a licensed social worker, not a pediatrician. She has a certificate that allows her to do Child and Family counseling. That's it. This does not make her an authority on ADD.
And what's worse, she's said stuff like:
"''[Responding to a fax, Schlessinger says:] "It goes on and says 'Pedophilia and child molestation have zero to do with being gay, homosexual orientation' and that's not true. <B> That is not true. How many letters have I read on the air from gay men who acknowledge that a huge portion of the male homosexual populace is predatory on young boys <B>."
- Dr. Laura radio show, August 13, 1999 (quoted by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC)). "
Asking her for advice is asking a serial murderer about conflict resolution skills. Check your sources. Read the literature. Consider the science. Then decide for yourself. Yes there are those who want to treat cancer with human urine extract, but when scientifically tested, it turns out that human urine extract really doesn't kill tumors very well. Go figure.
Kargis Strong, MD
(pseudonym)
Diplomate, American Board of Pediatrics
So, you were on prescription stimulants for a neurobiologically well characterized illness, then instead started taking Crystal Meth from the street? And you're complaining about ADD being an overdiagnosis? How about antisocial personality disorder or conduct disorder?
Albert Einstein wouldn't have been diagnosed with ADD because he was able to generate enough task orientation, discipline, and attention to write the first draft on special relativity.
"The fact that many of our greatest minds" -- where does this "fact" come from? Just because you're a recovering drug addict that had a bad experience does not invalidate decades of careful, validated, painstaking scientific research that has consistently shown certain behavioral features that represent a neurobiological disorder of cortical arousal called ADD (today).
You can see the decreased arousal on PET and fMRI, and can watch it improve with stimulants, and ALSO with biofeedback exercises and/or videogames.
The crucial thing to do is:
a) have the child undergo a FULL neuropsychiatric evaluation. This is required by law for the school district to provide, and is the most comprehensive behavioral and cognitive testing we have. It will find the weaknesses as well as the strengths.
b) find a physician YOU trust to manage the ADD meds. There are physicians more versed than others in this -- some are child psych people, some are just pediatricians who have developed the field over the years, some are neurologists. None of them are crystal meth dealers.
c) Learn everything you can about the disease. Do not allow the school to limit your child, but understand that people with ADD do best in settings of structure -- it gives people with ADD something to expend their energy on, and produces wonderful results in combination with stimulants.
d) Do not accept the dogma that ADD automatically means lower IQ, less school success, etc. This, like all averages, has selection bias. Smart people with ADD weren't being diagnosed in the past or treated. The high functioning group is now becoming the adult diagnosis group -- vice presidents of companies, physicians, other bright folk have all been found, and done better with treatment than without.
Good luck. Biofeedback techniques are definitely useful in ADD, as they produce the kinds of change in the brain while being used that are clearly beneficial. But no one is sure how lasting the effects are. Stimulants work. I didn't believe in them as a pediatrician until I saw them in effect. Eventually, maybe, we'll be able to edit the hardware permanently. Until then, stimulants effect a temp fix on the hardware, and biofeedback is a software patch.
Kargis Strong, MD
Wow. Maybe, maybe, maybe "The Second Renaissance" was in turn ripped off from the robot detective series of novels Asimov did, which feature a robot detective and his initially unhappy technophobe human partner who solve crimes perpetrated by robots. (Caves of Steel is the first one)
Looks like I Robot is just the wrong title for the film.
Kargis
Would be madness to build a supercomputer out of Opterons -- and you'd need 4400 of them for it to . . . to do what?
Specint base Opteron 246 = 1248
Specint base G5 2 ghz = 800
Specfp base Opteron 246 = 1209
Specfp base G5 2 ghz = 840
These numbers are from spec.org for the opteron and of course apple.com. Now I'm not sure why I need 4400 opterons all of a sudden to equal 2200 of these initially slower machines. And of course, the idea that no one's doing this:
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/news/pr_730.html
ARMONK, N.Y. and TOKYO July 30, 2003 -- IBM today announced that Japan's largest national research organization has ordered an IBM TM Linux(R) supercomputer that when completed will deliver more than 11 trillion calculations per second, making it the world's most powerful Linux-based supercomputer. It is expected to be more powerful than the current Linux cluster currently ranked as the third most powerful supercomputer in the world, according to the widely popular TOP500 List of Supercomputers [1].
The supercomputer is planned to be integrated with other non-Linux systems to form a massive, distributed computing Grid -- enabling collaboration between corporations, academia and government -- to support various research including grid technologies, life sciences bioinformatics and nanotechnology.
The system with a total of 2,636 processors will include 1,058 IBM 325 systems, which were introduced today with 2,116 AMD OpteronTM processors. [2]
At least look into stuff before deciding that it's not competitive -- the opteron is certainly competitive. Sure, it's not a Mac, but it's pretty damned fast, and a quick look online shows a price of ~$3000 -- same as list on the G5.
Finally, no one knows how well these things will multiprocess -- they're not using linux, they're using OS X -- which is BSD, granted, and should do well, but god only knows what they've done. I actually do think it will be a nice, fast machine, just not necessarily significantly better for specious reasons than a similar opteron machine when the initial base spec marks are so much in favor of the Opteron (800 vs 1200 is 25% last time I checked), and the Opteron has the advantage of having IBM working on making Linux nice, fast, and well-behaved in a cluster setting.
Kargis
The math is pretty simple. Let's say you're IBM and you can either hire an engineer in the US for $40,000 per year, or in India for 60,000 rupees per year, which is at most $1400.
Now I have no doubt that American programmers are more productive, better versed in the needs of the American user, better speakers of English, and better trained at US universities.
However. Are you all really 30 times more productive? Can IBM get the work of 30 Indian programmers from 1 American programmer?
Probably not. This is the problem with economics. When we were the only country capable of generating good quality code because we had all the people who knew how to do it -- we were set. However, the Internet is, and should be a global driver of economies, and thus, much as manufacture of things (physical objects) has moved off shore, so too now will the manufacture of code/IP. Certainly innovation will continue to occur here, but for many applications, the consumer doesn't really need innovation, just some code to do what they want.
Doubtless my karma will suffer for this, but it's how I see it.
Kargis Strong
As for low-carbohydrate diets being the wonder cure for everything -- couple of things that should at least provoke curiosity. One is the idea that prolonged ketosis is good for you. I'm not saying that it's for sure prolonged, as some studies report that the ketosis is transient, but if it's not, how will long-term utilization of the lipid metabolism pathways as the primary source of glucose for the brain and body affect people? No one knows. Furthermore, the observed tendency is for people on the Atkins Diet to eat lots of calories -- more than normal, regardless of what Atkins may have written, and the weight loss is not always as advertised. Metabolism is a somewhat black box to us, especially in terms of individual variances -- some people may have bad reactions to this sort of diet, reflecting differences in biochemistry between people. No, I don't mean fundamental differences, but rather differences in enzyme function and or production that can change how things get metabolized.
Ultimately, as many others have written, the key to weight loss is increasing energy expenditure and decreasing energy intake. Examples include:
Cancer -- rapidly dividing cancer cells use up lots of energy, and cytokines designed to fight the tumor also induce anorexia. Thus, more energy used, less food eaten --> weight loss.
Cystic Fibrosis -- increased energy expenditure secondary to ongoing sinopulmonary infection, decreased intake due to malabsorption caused by pancreatic insufficiency --> weight loss.
"Hacker Diet" -- exercise (increased EE), less than 2000 kcals per day (decreased energy intake).
For a group largely made of computer oriented folk, this simple input output relationship seems unusually difficult. Bottom line -- if you don't utilize the energy you consume as food, your body stores it as fat, and you gain weight. This is NOT rocket science. Low-carb, low-fat, low-whatever -- diets can have too much or too little of things, but no one has ever convincingly yet found the magic mix that lets everyone loose weight.
Just my thoughts,
Kargis Strong, MD
Pediatrician
This has worked in the lab. There seems to be a subpopulation of marrow stem cells that retain differentiation potential.
Kargis Strong, MD
Cell, Vol. 105, 369-377, May 4, 2001
Purification of rare hematopoietic stem cell(s) (HSC) to homogeneity is required to study their self-renewal, differentiation, phenotype, and homing. Long-term repopulation (LTR) of irradiated hosts and serial transplantation to secondary hosts represent the gold standard for demonstrating self-renewal and differentiation, the defining properties of HSC. We show that rare cells that home to bone marrow can LTR primary and secondary recipients. During the homing, CD34 and SCA-1 expression increases uniquely on cells that home to marrow. These adult bone marrow cells have tremendous differentiative capacity as they can also differentiate into epithelial cells of the liver, lung, GI tract, and skin. This finding may contribute to clinical treatment of genetic disease or tissue repair.
Um. Although that Sciam article accurately discusses the doubts of some, there are an impressive number of experiments that have shown that stem cells can be pulled from marrow, and can and will replace tissues from other organs.
Cell, Vol. 105, 369-377, May 4, 2001
Kargis Strong, MD
You mean being dead (or undead) doesn't automatically make you sterile?
Actually, if you look at the Nature issue, they are actually trying to look at the non-coding regions of DNA. Non-coding RNA is harder to look at because it requires finding what is in the cell, and doesn't turn into a protein. Systems biology approaches will be needed to make this happen, but it's nice to see that there is significant thought going into the fact that "non-coding" DNA can change the fur color of mice.
The reason that bacteria feeding/fueling themselves with UV radiation would be difficult is that UV, as mentioned numerous times here, is really toxic to living things. This toxicity, unlike ones that bacteria manage to adapt to -- heat, pressure, toxins, etc., is a problem for evolution because UV damages DNA in a direct, radiation absorption leading to bond disruption and DNA breakage causing mutation and more often than not, critical mutations that cause organism failure -- death. Using UV as an experimental mutagen is problematic, and not often done for that reason -- it's too good at killing your organism, and not particularly good at leaving you with interesting or functional mutations.
The bacteria that survive in space probably, and I stress probably because I don't have any personal knowledge of them, survived by hiding. Pigments could theoretically be engineered (and thus evolved) to absorb UV, but given how much of an impetus an organism would need to do this, and how much evolutionary time something like photosynthesis took to get to its fantastic efficiency, it would take longer than a couple decades in space. Could there be bacteria out there that thrive on UV and are in the midst of slowly evolving into plant-like organisms? Sure. Do I think they're out there? Not really -- not if life is generally DNA based. It's just too hard on DNA.
Kargis Strong, MD
Certainly anything that is hardware can be implemented in software, but only at the cost of an immense speed hit. An excellent example is the Itanium 2 hardware simulator at Intel. By using literally hundreds of Alphas, you can get a processor model that runs at like 1 hertz or something ridiculously slow. So in theory, if you had the right model, you could write software to model a human brain in software and run it on a C64. It would be the slowest human brain in history, but I suppose it would be a comparable computational construct.
See -- part of what makes the brain significant is that it can perform multiple complex computations independently, interdepenently, and very rapidly all at the same time. No computer can do that right now, probably because the brain likely functions in a straightforward logical fashion as well as a separate or likely superimposed quantum computing fashion.
So IF you could find ALL the computations that the brain performs, or even all of the types of computations that the human brain peforms, sure, you could get a decent model built.
Good luck!
Kargis Strong, MD
The processing power of a honeybee's brain in terms of the power needed for it to perform flight as it does, and find honey, and return to the hive, etc., has been estimated at 60 teraflops. The idea that 6 times as much processing power = the human brain seems reasonably foolish. I think ultimately, the problem is that people tend to think of brains as giant calculating machines, when they're not -- there's a great deal of hardwired logic controlling things like breathing and reflexes, that aren't so much mediated by calculation, as they are by simple input output "black-box" sort of processes. This is another reason attempting to equate a brain to a giant computer seems foolish.
Kargis Strong, MD
Unfortunately, the follow-ups to the initial finding that there was a type of regressive autism characterized and comorbid with an inflammatory bowel disease (which is what the Apr30 press piece above refers to) found consistent autoimmune etiology for autism.
As for your child -- amoxicillin prophylaxis is recommended, and nearly universal for children with significant kidney reflux, or the kidneys end up destoryed and the patient dies of renal failure. So far, none of the patient's I've had on this have ended up with autism.
Autism tends to come at 18-24 months in terms of the developmental regression and the positive symptoms, and that's an age where vaccines happen, and when some things like amoxicillin prophylaxis for VUR come or go.
We tend to look for answers, which is only natural, but in this particular case, none of the obvious ones -- vaccines, mercury, etc., are statistically significant factors that can separate a person who will have autism from one who won't.
You don't mean like the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education making that unacceptable in an accredited program, do you? Because, yeah, like, that'll never happen. Oh. Wait. It just did.
http://www.acgme.org/new/residentHours602.asp
Highlights: Duty Hours Residents must not be scheduled for more than 80 hours per week, averaged over a four-week period, with the provision that individual programs may apply to their sponsoring institution's Graduate Medical Education Committee (GMEC) for an increase in this limit of up to 10 percent if they can provide a sound educational rationale. Residents must have at least one full (24-hour) day out of seven free of patient care duties, averaged over four weeks. Residents must not be assigned in-house call more often than every third night, averaged over four weeks. Continuous time on duty (call) is limited to 24 hours, with additional time up to six hours for inpatient and outpatient continuity, transfer of care, educational debriefing and formal didactic activities. Residents may not assume responsibility for new patients after 24 hours. Residents should have a minimum rest period of 10 hours between duty periods. When residents take call from home and are called into the hospital, the time spent in the hospital must be counted toward the weekly duty hour.
Sure. We're backwards. We don't innovate. We don't use technology. Sure.
MRI. Surgical robots. Hip replacements. Self-contained artificial heart. Transplants.
Kargis Strong, MD
So. You think it's a good idea for an expert system to make medical decisions. How about coding decisions. Sit back and ask yourself if you think that a computer would be any good at doing what most of you do -- let's say writing code well. Let's say managing a network well. Would any of you trust a computer to do these things? Now ask yourself why this bothers you (if it does).
Ultimately, the difference between a computer munging data and a human expert is a series of things -- heuristics, cognition, intuition -- computers don't have any of these things.
Physicians are highly trained -- two years of basic sciences, two years of clinical training, followed by at least three years to become an internist, family practitioner, or pediatrician -- 4 for an OB/Gyn, 5 for a surgeon. This is all after 4 years of college.
Why do you people (the average slashdotter) feel that you have the right to judge people who've spent the majority of their lives in school learning to do this? Why do you all think you know anything about medicine? I, personally, would like to see the reaction of this site to a site run by doctors suggesting that programmers be replaced by computers.
Would you honestly trust your life to the opinion of a data mining tool?
Think about it.