When you screen huge masses of people needlessly, almost all to all of your hits are going to be incorrect. Additional testing of these false positives are harmful. Biopsies, radiation, no-fly lists -- harmful.
Nobody is saying that we should never wiretap if we have evidence. That's testing a small population. The problem here is that we are wiretapping everybody to attempt to find evidence.
As somebody who was previously in the academic medical field, this is not just a problem with cancer drugs. "Positive Outcome Bias" or "publish bias" is a huge problem.
A negative study should be just as important as a positive study. If done well... obviously.
Published negative studies dissuade doctors from using certain offlabel treatments. Published negative studies prevent other docs from wasting time and money to discover the same results.
More importantly, many clinical changes are based on meta-studies... which as basically studies which combine all the available data. If negative studies are not published, it throws off these metastudies... and thus bad care occurs.
For purely selfish reasons I love that the superbugs invasion means I no longer have to wear ties when seeing my patients. Now if I could just figure out a way to get rid of my nasty pager.:)
Apple has to do very little with security, honestly. Compared to a serial-killer, even the car thief looks good. Apple keeps their solid history of security and adds a nice backup platform. If anybody asks, all they have to say is that we are better than Microsoft.
In college I worked on developing a space-station waste-water treatment plan for NASA. The human wastes were converted through microbacterial and plant systems into crystal clear drinking water and very healthy crops.
One of the problems, however, was how to handle evaporation. Water in the air of a space craft equals mold, fungi, microbes, etc.
One of the potential solutions was to vent the humidity to space.
Editor of Carotids.com Here. Sorry that dreamhost is having problems handling the traffic. We bought a dedicated server for tech-recipes.com and then carotids gets slashdotted. Bad guess on our part.:)
Here's a cut and paste of the article. Sorry for the server problems:
Dr. AA06:33 am46 comments Edit This
I am a currently practicing board-certified Internal Medicine physician in a large rapidly expanding tech-growth community. (Ed note: Verified) Our area is rapidly being filled with web development, IT, and biotechnology companies. As a doctor in this area over the last few years, I have discovered some unique health problems associated with this population. One of my patients pointed me to this site when I was discussing with her if computer use causes carpal tunnel syndrome.
I have noticed several repeating patterns in this geek lifestyle population.
I have always wanted to post my observations regarding the geek lifestyle. I affectionately call it the "geek lifestyle" because of my previous life of programming and web design. One of the best part of my job is getting to live vicariously through these young energetic people. I frequently wonder what would have happened to me if I would have stayed with my tech-life instead of transitioning to medicine.
Personal points aside, I have noticed several repeating patterns in this geek lifestyle population. Hopefully, these ideas will spark others to study this unique population.
#1 Horrible Sleep Hygiene Insomnia and altered sleep patterns is one of the most common complaints to my office. Frequently the complaint is of light sleep or of multiple awakening throughout the night. Although this can be a symptom of depression, this is typically caused by poor sleep habits. It typically starts with somebody waking up in the middle of the night and turning on the laptop or TV. This begins to happen more and more frequently until the patient starts to worry about waking up as soon as they go to bed at night. This stress makes the sleep worse and worse until they finally come to see me.
The bed should only be used for two things-sex and sleep.
The fix is typically easy if the habit is not too ingrained. The bed should only be used for two things-sex and sleep. If one is awake in bed for more than 10-15 minutes, one should get up and do something non-stimulating. Listening to music or reading are excellent choices. Lying in bed and watching TV or using the laptop are the worst. These stimulate the brain to wake up even more. If this happens repeatedly, the habit will be formed.
A few of my patients have tried "sleep hacking" and it almost always fails. The dangers of hacking sleep have been explored by a physician elsewhere.
#2 Headaches
Poor screen position, too small font, screen too bright/too dark, poor sitting posture are all commonly reported causes of chronic headache. Recurrent headaches are a very frequent complaint among heavy computer users. Typically these are caused by a multitude of issues regarding computer use. If they occur the same time every day or if they do not appear on non-work days, these are the clues that point me to a computer cause.
Often when I tell my patients that I suspect it is their work environment, they come back and tell me me how they fixed it. Poor screen position, too small font, screen too bright/too dark, poor sitting posture are all commonly reported causes of chronic headache. When in doubt, I just tell them to trade offices for a couple of days. If they feel better in the other office, then it suggests that it is related to their personal work environment.
Poor eyesight is frequently believed to be a cause of chronic headaches although I believe that is very overrated. What I have seen a few times is that people with glasses having too strong of a prescription. Type-A people when getting refracted for glasses will mistakenly report that higher and higher powers make them
Syphilis is neither that dangerous nor a bacteria.
The title of the article is very misleading. These 6 are the bacteria/fungus that have been become the highest resistant to antibotics.
Pneumococcus pneumonia, neisseria meningitis, and strep soft tissue infections typically kill patients much quicker than the organisms listed above.... we have good antibotics for these; however, they can just overwealm the system before the antibotics have time to work.
We are currently designing two huge web services projects. The problem with them both is that they need to be available 24/7. Large backbone blackouts like this one give us a huge problem. How do we provide services without having multiple servers scattered throughout the internet?
So you might say, "Well, have servers scattered throughout the internet!" That's expensive for a project that is built out of our own pockets with adsense money. Plus, keeping databases in sync across multiple long-distance servers is painful/expensive as well.
If the web structure was more dependable, this wouldn't be as much of an issue. Local redundancy is easy compared to nationwide/worldwide redundancy.
How have some of you jedi developers tackled this problem?
You can install OSX on x86 platforms! Until Apple is finally successful in legally forcing users to take down the directions, you can install OSX on your x86 platform right now!
You may not be able to buy it off the shelf yet... but the overwealming popularity of people's interest in installing OSX on intel boxes shows that x86 people are interested in "the other side."
Now I have to be responsible for the transport as well? I can run servers looking at data on a screen just fine... but running a code?
Plus, the EMTs are trained to do their job... and now you are going to have little ole me barking orders to these guys who have been doing it solo for years and years.
Does my extra knowledge better for the patient than their physicial being there? They can touch and physicially examine the poor guy... I can just sit there and look at numbers.
When I see the study that shows that this actually saves lives, then I will believe it. Until then, I believe it's just a another tech company trying to stir up interest in investors.
I finally went with the WinTV-PVR-350 for $200 dollars. It does MPEG 2 in AND out. I had an old pent 600 already...
The reason I agree with you is that the cable company's system is so integrated that I think my wife would be able to control it better. I may like the ability to rip everything to DVD... but she just wants to the ability to rip Desperate Housewives easily.
"Hence, in order to have good coverage, you need to put antennas all over the park."
Great! That's exactly what I want...
"Hey, dad, is that a long-necked gray glacksmale hawk on that wi-fi tower over there?"
Honestly though, you know what will really happen?
a- Spammers will hit the open access points to flood their product onto the net. b- Kids will steal as many access points as possible. c- Tax payers will wonder what the hell they are doing putting wi-fi out in the middle of nowhere instead of giving wi-fi to rural Texas... where it might actually improve quality of life.
Please don't recommend this so broadly. Experts should use hijack this to fix systems that can't be fixed any other way. Hijack This alone will miss files that are currently not being executed. Using Hijack This alone without other antispyware software is silly.
Just because it's not running, I am sure you don't want some coolwebsearch files just sitting silently on your system.
Slashdot Mirror
When you screen huge masses of people needlessly, almost all to all of your hits are going to be incorrect. Additional testing of these false positives are harmful. Biopsies, radiation, no-fly lists -- harmful.
Nobody is saying that we should never wiretap if we have evidence. That's testing a small population. The problem here is that we are wiretapping everybody to attempt to find evidence.
If only I had mod points to give... thanks.
I'll whore out our little game we just released. It's free, fun, and addictive.
http://qdideas.com/gtf
As somebody who was previously in the academic medical field, this is not just a problem with cancer drugs. "Positive Outcome Bias" or "publish bias" is a huge problem.
http://www.ama-assn.org/public/peer/7_15_98/jpv71042.htm
A negative study should be just as important as a positive study. If done well... obviously.
Published negative studies dissuade doctors from using certain offlabel treatments. Published negative studies prevent other docs from wasting time and money to discover the same results.
More importantly, many clinical changes are based on meta-studies... which as basically studies which combine all the available data. If negative studies are not published, it throws off these metastudies... and thus bad care occurs.
As much as I am not overly concerned about google's invasion of privacy (with street view)... I am unsure of the point of this article.
Just because one person does not care if google is all up on their grill, this does not mean that other people shouldn't care.
For purely selfish reasons I love that the superbugs invasion means I no longer have to wear ties when seeing my patients. Now if I could just figure out a way to get rid of my nasty pager. :)
If you are looking for a rundown of all the new features, you can check out Apple's official listing of the 300 new features. Tech-Recipes has already started releasing screenshots and tutorials detailing many of these.
Apple has to do very little with security, honestly. Compared to a serial-killer, even the car thief looks good. Apple keeps their solid history of security and adds a nice backup platform. If anybody asks, all they have to say is that we are better than Microsoft.
Yeah, my description of the reported errors has been on digg and everywhere else. Feel free to share your horror stories:
l tiple-iphone-activation-errors/
/Still waiting for my activation.
http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/davak/2007/06/29/mu
In college I worked on developing a space-station waste-water treatment plan for NASA. The human wastes were converted through microbacterial and plant systems into crystal clear drinking water and very healthy crops.
One of the problems, however, was how to handle evaporation. Water in the air of a space craft equals mold, fungi, microbes, etc.
One of the potential solutions was to vent the humidity to space.
Editor of Carotids.com Here. Sorry that dreamhost is having problems handling the traffic. We bought a dedicated server for tech-recipes.com and then carotids gets slashdotted. Bad guess on our part. :)
Here's a cut and paste of the article. Sorry for the server problems:
Dr. AA06:33 am46 comments Edit This
I am a currently practicing board-certified Internal Medicine physician in a large rapidly expanding tech-growth community. (Ed note: Verified) Our area is rapidly being filled with web development, IT, and biotechnology companies. As a doctor in this area over the last few years, I have discovered some unique health problems associated with this population. One of my patients pointed me to this site when I was discussing with her if computer use causes carpal tunnel syndrome.
I have noticed several repeating patterns in this geek lifestyle population.
I have always wanted to post my observations regarding the geek lifestyle. I affectionately call it the "geek lifestyle" because of my previous life of programming and web design. One of the best part of my job is getting to live vicariously through these young energetic people. I frequently wonder what would have happened to me if I would have stayed with my tech-life instead of transitioning to medicine.
Personal points aside, I have noticed several repeating patterns in this geek lifestyle population. Hopefully, these ideas will spark others to study this unique population.
#1 Horrible Sleep Hygiene
Insomnia and altered sleep patterns is one of the most common complaints to my office. Frequently the complaint is of light sleep or of multiple awakening throughout the night. Although this can be a symptom of depression, this is typically caused by poor sleep habits. It typically starts with somebody waking up in the middle of the night and turning on the laptop or TV. This begins to happen more and more frequently until the patient starts to worry about waking up as soon as they go to bed at night. This stress makes the sleep worse and worse until they finally come to see me.
The bed should only be used for two things-sex and sleep.
The fix is typically easy if the habit is not too ingrained. The bed should only be used for two things-sex and sleep. If one is awake in bed for more than 10-15 minutes, one should get up and do something non-stimulating. Listening to music or reading are excellent choices. Lying in bed and watching TV or using the laptop are the worst. These stimulate the brain to wake up even more. If this happens repeatedly, the habit will be formed.
A few of my patients have tried "sleep hacking" and it almost always fails. The dangers of hacking sleep have been explored by a physician elsewhere.
#2 Headaches
Poor screen position, too small font, screen too bright/too dark, poor sitting posture are all commonly reported causes of chronic headache.
Recurrent headaches are a very frequent complaint among heavy computer users. Typically these are caused by a multitude of issues regarding computer use. If they occur the same time every day or if they do not appear on non-work days, these are the clues that point me to a computer cause.
Often when I tell my patients that I suspect it is their work environment, they come back and tell me me how they fixed it. Poor screen position, too small font, screen too bright/too dark, poor sitting posture are all commonly reported causes of chronic headache. When in doubt, I just tell them to trade offices for a couple of days. If they feel better in the other office, then it suggests that it is related to their personal work environment.
Poor eyesight is frequently believed to be a cause of chronic headaches although I believe that is very overrated. What I have seen a few times is that people with glasses having too strong of a prescription. Type-A people when getting refracted for glasses will mistakenly report that higher and higher powers make them
When people ask me what myspace is, this is the video that I show them.
It shows myspace is all of its painful glory.
Syphilis is neither that dangerous nor a bacteria.
The title of the article is very misleading. These 6 are the bacteria/fungus that have been become the highest resistant to antibotics.
Pneumococcus pneumonia, neisseria meningitis, and strep soft tissue infections typically kill patients much quicker than the organisms listed above.... we have good antibotics for these; however, they can just overwealm the system before the antibotics have time to work.
As I am a ICU doctor, I see these guys more often that I want.
The problem is that the drug companies don't make much money from antibotics. They have high production costs and are used infrequently...
While hypertension and anti-cholesterol medicines are used by almost everyone if they live long enough.
At least that's the theory why drug companies spend so much less money creating antibotics than other meds.
Parent comment is a hack job from a previous Fry article here:
The Accidental Blogger
How an Experiment in February
Became a Nightly Sports Ritual --
October 31, 2005
In other news...
The use of the F5 key has been banned.
Ask Slashdot.
We are currently designing two huge web services projects. The problem with them both is that they need to be available 24/7. Large backbone blackouts like this one give us a huge problem. How do we provide services without having multiple servers scattered throughout the internet?
So you might say, "Well, have servers scattered throughout the internet!" That's expensive for a project that is built out of our own pockets with adsense money. Plus, keeping databases in sync across multiple long-distance servers is painful/expensive as well.
If the web structure was more dependable, this wouldn't be as much of an issue. Local redundancy is easy compared to nationwide/worldwide redundancy.
How have some of you jedi developers tackled this problem?
You can install OSX on x86 platforms! Until Apple is finally successful in legally forcing users to take down the directions, you can install OSX on your x86 platform right now!
You may not be able to buy it off the shelf yet... but the overwealming popularity of people's interest in installing OSX on intel boxes shows that x86 people are interested in "the other side."
Oh, crap... I am pretty conservative, but those blogspots are wonderful prose.
Thanks for the karma sacrifice.
Longhorn originally had three major parts. It appears Microsoft has released two of those three now.
.NET framework and allows for integration into Longhorn, Microsoft's new OS.
WinFX is an object-oriented API that uses the
Win -> API
FX -> Framework
WinFS is the vaporware magical file system that includes a new abstraction layer for the files for sorting, searching, indexing, etc.
Monad/MSH is the new command line/shell scipting part of longhorn. It too can be downloaded and used in beta right now. It's probably the most useful aspect of longhorn to the average power-user.
If you are going to play with something that isn't going to scrub your system, I would start with monad. It sits happy on any installed system.
Do you mean that when viewing the regular old My Pictures and My Music folders on 2k that it crashes?
If so, then it is probably a corrupt thumbs.db file.
Oh, our poor malpractice fees!
Now I have to be responsible for the transport as well? I can run servers looking at data on a screen just fine... but running a code?
Plus, the EMTs are trained to do their job... and now you are going to have little ole me barking orders to these guys who have been doing it solo for years and years.
Does my extra knowledge better for the patient than their physicial being there? They can touch and physicially examine the poor guy... I can just sit there and look at numbers.
When I see the study that shows that this actually saves lives, then I will believe it. Until then, I believe it's just a another tech company trying to stir up interest in investors.
Yeah, I agree.
I finally went with the WinTV-PVR-350 for $200 dollars. It does MPEG 2 in AND out. I had an old pent 600 already...
The reason I agree with you is that the cable company's system is so integrated that I think my wife would be able to control it better. I may like the ability to rip everything to DVD... but she just wants to the ability to rip Desperate Housewives easily.
"Hence, in order to have good coverage, you need to put antennas all over the park."
Great! That's exactly what I want...
"Hey, dad, is that a long-necked gray glacksmale hawk on that wi-fi tower over there?"
Honestly though, you know what will really happen?
a- Spammers will hit the open access points to flood their product onto the net.
b- Kids will steal as many access points as possible.
c- Tax payers will wonder what the hell they are doing putting wi-fi out in the middle of nowhere instead of giving wi-fi to rural Texas... where it might actually improve quality of life.
I am a wi-fi fan-boy... but what the hell?
Yeah, you are right... that's the only information I need to chunk out a quick program running off the feed.
Speaking of the feed...here's the URL that contains the actual XML information:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/xml/
I guess they didn't post it on the front page to decrease the slash effect.
Please don't recommend this so broadly. Experts should use hijack this to fix systems that can't be fixed any other way. Hijack This alone will miss files that are currently not being executed. Using Hijack This alone without other antispyware software is silly.
5 8.html
Just because it's not running, I am sure you don't want some coolwebsearch files just sitting silently on your system.
Here's my recent techrx post regarding this same subject: http://www.tech-recipes.com/windows_spyware_tips7