Re:And thus the difference between law and science
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No Pardon For Turing
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· Score: 1
however, is not constant and can be changed at the whim of politicians. To retroactively change laws to find someone not guilty seems innocent enough, but that would also mean you could change laws to find someone guilty of a crime that didn't exist when they did an act.
The one does not require the other. However, I'm not entirely convinced that retroactive guilt is entirely a bad thing. It is almost impossible to be sure that something you're doing is legal as it is, and if some scumbag does something nasty and it turns out they were exploiting a loophole, why not just get rid of the loophole and try them for it anyway?
The law is an approximation of justice - not a definition of it. But, then again, I'm not a lawyer...
There is no pressure gradient in space either, as long as you're willing to put your crew in an evacuated living area. If you want your crew to be living in 1atm of pressure, then you have a HUGE pressure issue underwater.
Most of the solutions are to have people breathe something different - like various mixtures with much lower concentrations of O2 and N2 so that at huge pressures people can sorta breathe them. However, so far all these mixtures have problems with them. In space they actually do the opposite - crank up the concentration of O2 and lower the pressure - which people generally tolerate better and it is easier on the pressure vessel. However, as learned by the Apollo program that doesn't always work great when you're on the ground at 1atm.
Re:The ocean frontier - not
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Remembering Sealab
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· Score: 5, Informative
One REALLY big difference between undersea and space is air pressure. If you want people to be living near 1atm of pressure then in space you have to deal with at most 1atm of pressure on your hull. Underwater you're dealing with more than 1atm of pressure before you reach depths on par with a big swimming pool. That means you need a lot less structural strength in your spacecraft.
All the messing around with gas mixtures undersea is about trying to work at higher pressures to cut down on that disadvantage, but it gets really messy - people are designed to live at 1atm on 20% O2. In space that is fairly easy to provide, and deep underwater it is almost impossible.
Now, in space you have lots of other issues to deal with I'll grant you, and the cost of moving around is pretty high too (well, maneuver in space is cheaper per mile than underwater, except that stuff is thousands of miles apart so you do a LOT more of it and once you're close to a gravity well you build up kinetic/potential energy and changing your energy state is much harder). Underwater you can just use buoyancy to do half the work.
However, if you have the ECG as part of an investigation into a particular symptom, you need someone who has interpreted your symptoms, your risk factors, and your clinical examination, in order to put your ECG into context. This is why cardiologists will always look at the ECG themselves, and not rely on a report (ha!) or their junior's interpretation.
The ECG in question was read by a cardiologist who knew nothing about my symptoms or why the test was being sought - they saw an ECG and FAXed a report to my primary doctor. Based on the result my primary doctor sent me to see a cardiologist who obtained another ECG and did all the stuff you suggested. I'd say having a cardiologist interpret the first ECG was a waste, but the second one was obviously a value-add.
My point wasn't that we don't need cardiologists - only that we don't need them for all the stuff they get used for. I'm fine with escalating things to the appropriate level of expertise. What doesn't make sense is having overqualified people doing work at the lower levels.
I think your definition of insane is a bit different than mine. I prefer to see my wife at 8AM and 6PM on most days, and not work on the weekends. Oh, and there's a little bit of staying late involved? On top of six 13-hour shifts in a week?
Why is it that doctors can't work normal 40 hour weeks? Just increase the supply to compensate...
I can see how a doctor doing a complex surgery might have to put in a long day (not like you can punch out in the middle) - perhaps with two days off to compensate.
I'm sure this lifestyle is fine for some, but certainly not for me. If we want to lower healthcare costs I suspect that making the field more accessible to more workers is going to be part of the solution. Somehow I doubt that doctors are working 70 hour weeks in France...
The suggestion that was raised was that it was important to have citations to prove that the author did their homework and was aware of related work. My point was that if that were REALLY the goal then it wasn't important to publish the citations. Obviously it is silly to add them and then remove them, but the obvious solution to that is to never add them in the first place.
What in your opinion is the true importance of citations? I certainly don't think they should be used to test the author's knowledge - publishing papers isn't some kind of test.
I'd argue that they're useful for readers to make them aware of the context of research. When they further this goal they are useful. When they don't, then they're superfluous. If they aren't useful to the reader, then there is no point in publishing them.
While I'd love to see some reform of the drug industry, it isn't quite as black-and-white as you make it out. First, all they discovered is a disease mechanism, not a treatment.
When somebody does come up with a proposed treatment, it will be after some modest amount of R&D money is spent (might be a lot, might be a little - chances are the study that nails it won't be expensive but all the work that didn't pan out will be). Now you have a drug candidate - a molecule that in a test tube does something that we think will block the disease. What we still don't know is whether it will work in real people, or if it is dangerous. Until you resolve both questions fairly conclusively the FDA won't let you sell it. Determining both requires a series of clinical trials that typically cost $50M or so at least. Often the first compound you test doesn't pan out, so you try another one (after being out some portion of the first $50M with nothing to show for it). Maybe you try 5 and none of them work. Maybe you get it right on the first try. Maybe you spend $500M and figure out that your understanding of the disease was off and it is a dead end.
In any case, once you do have a compound that you've proven to work, the FDA lets you sell it. At this point you're out an average of $100M or so.when you look at the stuff that did or didn't pan out. For something like Alzheimer's that will be easy to recoup assuming somebody else doesn't come out with a competing drug quickly. For a less common/chronic disease, or if there is quite a bit of competition, you might make at best a modest profit. Some drugs actually lose money - they were studied because it was thought that they would make money, but for one reason or another things went sour - they're still sold since every pill makes a marginal profit (manufacture for cents, sell for dollars), but it might or might not recoup the R&D costs.
I'm not saying that Pharma companies don't make a lot of money, but if yiou look at their stock it has been pretty flat across the industry for a decade - so it isn't like they're making it hands-over-fists for a while now. Drug R&D involves a lot of costs and most of the bigs ones start well after some university professor publishes the paper that will get the Nobel Prize. Much of that work is semi-routine, but it costs quite a bit of money and the NIH almost never funds it.
I'd be interested in seeing the NIH do some end-to-end drug testing from lab all the way to market, and then license the compound for free manufacture in the US, in poor countries, and in first-world countries that agree to reciprocate. The final pills probably wouldn't be free, but they'd have costs similar to aspirin/etc in most cases. We could then see how that model works out cost-wise. The NIH might even outsource some of the work to existing drug companies, but would retain all patent rights (basically it would be work-for-hire/etc) - avoiding the creation of bureaucracy and using existing expertise, but getting rid of some of the issues that result from the fairly regressive pricing model that exists for drugs.
If that happens you've already won. That corporate drone's appearance has cost Ubisoft more than they made from your game purchase in the first place. If lots of people did this they'd lose more than they would in a class action even if they won every case.
Yup - though I never actually got my license I did study the question pools for the amatuer novice license ages ago (they were officially published by then), and they basically read like the question was the first half of a regulation, and the answer was the second half. If you memorized the Q&A's then you basically had all the regulations memorized, and a half-decent amount of radio theory.
Biochemist here, and I couldn't agree more on memorizing pathways, periodic tables, or whatever. Stuff I use I have memorized, stuff I use less often I understand and I know where to get it. I was at the top of my class both in undergrad and grad school (at a top-tier school).
The Kreb's cycle is next to incomprehensible until you've taught people what an aldol condensation is, and that typically doesn't come until the second year of college. Sure, you can memorize it, but that's about it. If you want to teach the general concepts about how cells use this reaction pathway to oxidize sugars and various intermediates along the way are useful for various other things, then that is something you can teach in first year. Making people regurgitate reaction diagrams is a pointless exercise in following tradition. I'd rather they spent more time on the principles behind why it works, and get more into some of the less-taught pathways than have students spend a lot of time cramming the structure of a-KG and memorizing the names of a dozen enzymes.
That is a test in somebody's ability and willingness to function without sleep - not in their ability to practice medicine. The two don't need to be synonymous.
That's why I'd never enter a medical profession, even though most likely I'd make a lot more money if I did so, and I think I'd be pretty good at it...
Yes, but did the guy reading the slide HAVE to do all those other things?
I got an ECG a few years ago and it was interpreted by an MD (a cardiologist). No doubt a hospital generates so many of these in a day that you could easily employ somebody full-time to do nothing but interpret them. However, instead of giving somebody a year of training and turning them lose for $60k/yr they instead send them to a team of cardiology MDs each taking maybe 10% of the load and being paid $200k/yr easily.
No doubt the MD who read my ECG could have done a holistic evaluation of my situation and provided all kinds of recommendations, and they no doubt do that for other patients all the time. However, they weren't doing that for me. What they did do is render a few sentences of opinion purely based on the test, perhaps with a recommendation for follow-up. I'm not convinced that this couldn't have been done FAR less expensively by a technician.
Now, we'll always need generalists, and we'll always need the occasional House for the 0.1% of cases that truly boggle the mind. However, the problem with our medical system is that we make everybody a generalist and we don't triage cases well. Everybody who wants to gets to see House, and House is so busy that he probably doesn't get to spend adequate time on the cases that really do demand his expertise. I know a diabetic who was treated by a well-respected endocrinologist and it took the guy two years to get her blood sugars under control, and then only poorly with a bunch of side-effects. It took another two years to really get things working well, and in the meantime there were numerous cardiovascular complications (you name it). The problem was that the guy was so popular that he was overbooked, and he didn't spend more than a single 15-minute appointment per quarter dealing with her. So, he'd prescribe something, then review numbers 3 months later (maybe fasting sugars have dropped from 250 to 220), then adjust medications, and repeat. If the guy had handed things off to a nurse who followed-up one week after a medication switch they could have probably titrated her meds in a few months at most. I'm sure reimbursement structures don't help - doctors don't have much incentive to do things between periodic appointments unless you're in a hospital.
A triage-based system with less doctor involvement would greatly reduce costs and potentially increase access to care. A nurse who can check in on a patient biweekly is probably a lot more useful for the average patient than a doctor who can check in twice a year. Sometimes the simple stuff matters most when it comes to things like compliance and spotting problems.
Doctors are an important part of the system, but right now they're a one-size-fits-all solution.
So, suppose the guy adds 47 references to prove to the reviewers that the material is a genuine contribution (as if that even made sense - any number of citations does not prove that you didn't miss a complete previous duplication)? The reviewer is satisfied that the guy has done his homework and gives the OK. Why not then remove the references before publication? If the purpose is to ensure that due diligence is done then removing the references would have no negative effect at all.
No, references are primarily a way to pay homage to existing academics, and sometimes used for their more face-value purpose (making the reader aware of other work that they might not already be aware of that is closely related).
How else do you explain some of those top-referenced works that have hundreds or thousands of citations - often from 50 years ago on topics that can be found in any textbook from 20 years ago? These references provide no readers service - who reads physics papers and doesn't know what Relativity is, etc? These references don't prove that the author has done due diligence - who publishes a serious paper in physics without having some idea of what Einstein already discovered? No, these references are purely homage.
Well, alas a majority of your fellow Americans wanted the right to wait until they were sick to buy health insurance.
It didn't help that quite a few insurance companies claimed that people were doing this when they actually weren't.
So, because both individuals and companies like to scam each other we now have a compromise where companies have to offer insurance to anybody (even if they're already sick), and individuals have to buy insurance even if they don't think they will get sick.
The Red Cross symbol is more than the organizational symbol of the International Red Cross - it is also a protective symbol recognized by the Geneva Conventions. It can be worn by personnel not associated with the International Red Cross and must be respected. It can only be used in certain circumstances, including armed forced medical personnel.
I would think that responding to a bombing to rescue anybody still inside would be considered a legitimate use of the Red Cross symbol. The Geneva Conventions weren't really designed with the facilitation of the assassination of specific individuals in mind. The concept was that combat is more about capturing ground and blowing things up, and the people guarding both are not really the targets of war. If you're hitting a bunker specifically with the goal of killing the people inside and no so much the bunker itself then the Conventions actually work against you somewhat (they don't prevent you from hitting the bunker, but they do prevent you from attacking rescuers, and you are required to accept the surrender of anybody inside).
Only issue with that is that the rescue forces can legitimately wear the red cross, and bombing them is a violation of the Geneva Convention. You could probably mine the living daylights out of the area before the rescue team shows up but bombing anything with a cross on it is verboten.
Now, if you can blanket the area with FAEs you might be able to aphixiate the inhabitants assuming they don't have sealed ventilation (the CO2 would dissipate quickly outside).
Yup. When you only have 15 minutes to respond to an incoming attack and limited early-warning capability you'll probably get pretty twitchy on the trigger finger. At least with the US and the USSR the windows are generally longer due to the sheer size of the countries and distance/etc. That gives you more time to figure out what is going on before you hit the launch button. Plus both countries have submarine forces likely to survive an attack so you don't have to launch everything you have in 5 min or lose it.
The deterioration of the USSR early warning systems is another big risk - if they can't spot launches then their first warning is a blip on a radar 5 min from impact. Can you figure out if a blip is real in 5 min and mount a response? Or, do you just hit the big button as soon as you see something?
"Just" add more concrete? That isn't cheap. Considering the upgrades cost $82M, and the cost of adding an extra n meters of concrete on top of some extensive underground bunker system is probably a lot more than that, I'd say this is a pretty cost-effective approach (for the US). This isn't unlike the Valkyrie bomber - the US never made more than a prototype but the USSR had to come up with an effective fighter countermeasure to a supersonic strategic bomber.
Nuclear weapons just aren't a credible threat here - nobody wants to use them. That is like talking about being able to turn half of iran into a glass mirror - it probably won't happen unless NYC is about to become a crater and there is a credible risk that Boston is next. A big conventional bomb on the other hand is something the leadership in Iran probably thinks about all the time - nobody is eager to get into a shooting war with Iran but I think few would be very surprised if one started suddenly.
Sorta depends. From my casual observations companies tend to remain product-focused for about two generations of leadership - the founder, and his hand-picked successor. If the founder sticks around the company can care about its customers for quite a while. If the founder leaves quickly and there is a lot of money to be had (thus giving the first successor a ton of cash), then it can be a fairly short time as anybody who actually cared cashes out fast.
Now, founders can also run their companies into the ground for entirely different reasons, but usually it isn't because of a lack of R&D. It is hard for a software company to sustain success even when it isn't internally sabotaged.
I think the main reason companies tend to like solar is that it allows them to reduce their peak power use, which on industrial scales has a big impact on the rates you pay. For a typical company HVAC is probably their biggest electrical cost, and it peaks at the same time that solar peaks. So, installing solar panels generates power at the time that getting it from the grid is most expensive. If you can get subsidies or goodwill for doing it then that also helps.
On the other hand, a datacenter is running 24x7, and probably has the highest demand sometime other than noon, with a much more level load vs time. So, the same opportunity just isn't there.
I don't have access to industrial volume pricing on solar components, so it is hard to estimate exact costs. However, 28MWx24x7 is a lot of energy. To generate a substantial portion of that using solar would require a very large array of panels and then some way to store that energy. For residential solar laws are written to allow consumers to sell their power back to the grid at full rates, but there is no way that Facebook could get that deal. They'd need an array capable of generating something like 80MW during the day (of which they're selling 50MW) so that they can make enough money to buy the 28MW for the time they aren't generating much solar. The whole town doesn't use 50MW, so who is going to buy it? The only way I know of to store that kind of power is pumping water up dams, so now it has to build a hydro plant on the side.
If building 100MW-scale solar made commercial sense you'd see more utilities actually doing it.
Maybe, maybe not. Haven't seen it happen yet, and that probably says something.
With the way that studios control copyrights in the first place it wouldn't surprise me if the artist would have to beg permissions to parody his own song...
I dunno. The Germans had some really high-tech stuff like the V2, and the Tiger. However, the US had a fair bit of technology as well. Certainly on the Signals (Ultra, Magic, etc) front the allies were WAY ahead of the Germans. The P51 was a quite capable aircraft as well - other than the few ME262s the Germans fielded it was much more capable than anything the Germans flew. In the Pacific War the US had clear technological superiority almost across the board. It didn't get much use in Europe, but the VT fuse a huge technological advantage in the Pacific (I believe it was avoided in Europe to prevent capture - hard to recover fuses in the middle of the ocean, plus the Germans had almost no offensive air capability after D-day).
The Germans lost the war for a number of reasons - probably the biggest one was that it is pretty hard to take on just about everybody and win. The US has a far greater advantage over the rest of the world today compared to what Germany had and the advantage of geographic isolation and I'm skeptical that the US could really sustain a US-vs-everybody conventional shooting war for more than a few years if it were truly taken seriously. Another big factor was that industry in the US and Russia was far from the lines, and industry in Germany was not. You can build a lot more tanks if your workers aren't homeless and your factory doesn't have an air-conditioned roof.
Uh, if they can't transmit the data into the site once, how do they expect to ever host it and upload it millions of times from there to everybody else?
So, you're saying the liberal media conspiracy will try to suppress the message of the Republicans who are just trying to get out the truth?
That is how this would get spun, and it will certainly energize the typical Red-stater. This is the primary, so they're the only people voting anyway.
I could care less for the guy, but lawsuits like this should not be allowed. Write your music, and go ahead and ask to get paid for it, but your right to control of how it is used ends when I buy the CD or pay the standardized non-discriminatory fee for performance.
What's next - Cisco suing anybody who sends email that they disagree with through a router on the basis of some patent?
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however, is not constant and can be changed at the whim of politicians. To retroactively change laws to find someone not guilty seems innocent enough, but that would also mean you could change laws to find someone guilty of a crime that didn't exist when they did an act.
The one does not require the other. However, I'm not entirely convinced that retroactive guilt is entirely a bad thing. It is almost impossible to be sure that something you're doing is legal as it is, and if some scumbag does something nasty and it turns out they were exploiting a loophole, why not just get rid of the loophole and try them for it anyway?
The law is an approximation of justice - not a definition of it. But, then again, I'm not a lawyer...
Again, triage is the key - as long as people know when to escalate everybody doesn't have to be an expert...
There is no pressure gradient in space either, as long as you're willing to put your crew in an evacuated living area. If you want your crew to be living in 1atm of pressure, then you have a HUGE pressure issue underwater.
Most of the solutions are to have people breathe something different - like various mixtures with much lower concentrations of O2 and N2 so that at huge pressures people can sorta breathe them. However, so far all these mixtures have problems with them. In space they actually do the opposite - crank up the concentration of O2 and lower the pressure - which people generally tolerate better and it is easier on the pressure vessel. However, as learned by the Apollo program that doesn't always work great when you're on the ground at 1atm.
One REALLY big difference between undersea and space is air pressure. If you want people to be living near 1atm of pressure then in space you have to deal with at most 1atm of pressure on your hull. Underwater you're dealing with more than 1atm of pressure before you reach depths on par with a big swimming pool. That means you need a lot less structural strength in your spacecraft.
All the messing around with gas mixtures undersea is about trying to work at higher pressures to cut down on that disadvantage, but it gets really messy - people are designed to live at 1atm on 20% O2. In space that is fairly easy to provide, and deep underwater it is almost impossible.
Now, in space you have lots of other issues to deal with I'll grant you, and the cost of moving around is pretty high too (well, maneuver in space is cheaper per mile than underwater, except that stuff is thousands of miles apart so you do a LOT more of it and once you're close to a gravity well you build up kinetic/potential energy and changing your energy state is much harder). Underwater you can just use buoyancy to do half the work.
However, if you have the ECG as part of an investigation into a particular symptom, you need someone who has interpreted your symptoms, your risk factors, and your clinical examination, in order to put your ECG into context. This is why cardiologists will always look at the ECG themselves, and not rely on a report (ha!) or their junior's interpretation.
The ECG in question was read by a cardiologist who knew nothing about my symptoms or why the test was being sought - they saw an ECG and FAXed a report to my primary doctor. Based on the result my primary doctor sent me to see a cardiologist who obtained another ECG and did all the stuff you suggested. I'd say having a cardiologist interpret the first ECG was a waste, but the second one was obviously a value-add.
My point wasn't that we don't need cardiologists - only that we don't need them for all the stuff they get used for. I'm fine with escalating things to the appropriate level of expertise. What doesn't make sense is having overqualified people doing work at the lower levels.
I think your definition of insane is a bit different than mine. I prefer to see my wife at 8AM and 6PM on most days, and not work on the weekends. Oh, and there's a little bit of staying late involved? On top of six 13-hour shifts in a week?
Why is it that doctors can't work normal 40 hour weeks? Just increase the supply to compensate...
I can see how a doctor doing a complex surgery might have to put in a long day (not like you can punch out in the middle) - perhaps with two days off to compensate.
I'm sure this lifestyle is fine for some, but certainly not for me. If we want to lower healthcare costs I suspect that making the field more accessible to more workers is going to be part of the solution. Somehow I doubt that doctors are working 70 hour weeks in France...
The suggestion that was raised was that it was important to have citations to prove that the author did their homework and was aware of related work. My point was that if that were REALLY the goal then it wasn't important to publish the citations. Obviously it is silly to add them and then remove them, but the obvious solution to that is to never add them in the first place.
What in your opinion is the true importance of citations? I certainly don't think they should be used to test the author's knowledge - publishing papers isn't some kind of test.
I'd argue that they're useful for readers to make them aware of the context of research. When they further this goal they are useful. When they don't, then they're superfluous. If they aren't useful to the reader, then there is no point in publishing them.
While I'd love to see some reform of the drug industry, it isn't quite as black-and-white as you make it out. First, all they discovered is a disease mechanism, not a treatment.
When somebody does come up with a proposed treatment, it will be after some modest amount of R&D money is spent (might be a lot, might be a little - chances are the study that nails it won't be expensive but all the work that didn't pan out will be). Now you have a drug candidate - a molecule that in a test tube does something that we think will block the disease. What we still don't know is whether it will work in real people, or if it is dangerous. Until you resolve both questions fairly conclusively the FDA won't let you sell it. Determining both requires a series of clinical trials that typically cost $50M or so at least. Often the first compound you test doesn't pan out, so you try another one (after being out some portion of the first $50M with nothing to show for it). Maybe you try 5 and none of them work. Maybe you get it right on the first try. Maybe you spend $500M and figure out that your understanding of the disease was off and it is a dead end.
In any case, once you do have a compound that you've proven to work, the FDA lets you sell it. At this point you're out an average of $100M or so.when you look at the stuff that did or didn't pan out. For something like Alzheimer's that will be easy to recoup assuming somebody else doesn't come out with a competing drug quickly. For a less common/chronic disease, or if there is quite a bit of competition, you might make at best a modest profit. Some drugs actually lose money - they were studied because it was thought that they would make money, but for one reason or another things went sour - they're still sold since every pill makes a marginal profit (manufacture for cents, sell for dollars), but it might or might not recoup the R&D costs.
I'm not saying that Pharma companies don't make a lot of money, but if yiou look at their stock it has been pretty flat across the industry for a decade - so it isn't like they're making it hands-over-fists for a while now. Drug R&D involves a lot of costs and most of the bigs ones start well after some university professor publishes the paper that will get the Nobel Prize. Much of that work is semi-routine, but it costs quite a bit of money and the NIH almost never funds it.
I'd be interested in seeing the NIH do some end-to-end drug testing from lab all the way to market, and then license the compound for free manufacture in the US, in poor countries, and in first-world countries that agree to reciprocate. The final pills probably wouldn't be free, but they'd have costs similar to aspirin/etc in most cases. We could then see how that model works out cost-wise. The NIH might even outsource some of the work to existing drug companies, but would retain all patent rights (basically it would be work-for-hire/etc) - avoiding the creation of bureaucracy and using existing expertise, but getting rid of some of the issues that result from the fairly regressive pricing model that exists for drugs.
If that happens you've already won. That corporate drone's appearance has cost Ubisoft more than they made from your game purchase in the first place. If lots of people did this they'd lose more than they would in a class action even if they won every case.
Yup - though I never actually got my license I did study the question pools for the amatuer novice license ages ago (they were officially published by then), and they basically read like the question was the first half of a regulation, and the answer was the second half. If you memorized the Q&A's then you basically had all the regulations memorized, and a half-decent amount of radio theory.
Biochemist here, and I couldn't agree more on memorizing pathways, periodic tables, or whatever. Stuff I use I have memorized, stuff I use less often I understand and I know where to get it. I was at the top of my class both in undergrad and grad school (at a top-tier school).
The Kreb's cycle is next to incomprehensible until you've taught people what an aldol condensation is, and that typically doesn't come until the second year of college. Sure, you can memorize it, but that's about it. If you want to teach the general concepts about how cells use this reaction pathway to oxidize sugars and various intermediates along the way are useful for various other things, then that is something you can teach in first year. Making people regurgitate reaction diagrams is a pointless exercise in following tradition. I'd rather they spent more time on the principles behind why it works, and get more into some of the less-taught pathways than have students spend a lot of time cramming the structure of a-KG and memorizing the names of a dozen enzymes.
We lose the forest for the trees in education...
That is a test in somebody's ability and willingness to function without sleep - not in their ability to practice medicine. The two don't need to be synonymous.
That's why I'd never enter a medical profession, even though most likely I'd make a lot more money if I did so, and I think I'd be pretty good at it...
Yes, but did the guy reading the slide HAVE to do all those other things?
I got an ECG a few years ago and it was interpreted by an MD (a cardiologist). No doubt a hospital generates so many of these in a day that you could easily employ somebody full-time to do nothing but interpret them. However, instead of giving somebody a year of training and turning them lose for $60k/yr they instead send them to a team of cardiology MDs each taking maybe 10% of the load and being paid $200k/yr easily.
No doubt the MD who read my ECG could have done a holistic evaluation of my situation and provided all kinds of recommendations, and they no doubt do that for other patients all the time. However, they weren't doing that for me. What they did do is render a few sentences of opinion purely based on the test, perhaps with a recommendation for follow-up. I'm not convinced that this couldn't have been done FAR less expensively by a technician.
Now, we'll always need generalists, and we'll always need the occasional House for the 0.1% of cases that truly boggle the mind. However, the problem with our medical system is that we make everybody a generalist and we don't triage cases well. Everybody who wants to gets to see House, and House is so busy that he probably doesn't get to spend adequate time on the cases that really do demand his expertise. I know a diabetic who was treated by a well-respected endocrinologist and it took the guy two years to get her blood sugars under control, and then only poorly with a bunch of side-effects. It took another two years to really get things working well, and in the meantime there were numerous cardiovascular complications (you name it). The problem was that the guy was so popular that he was overbooked, and he didn't spend more than a single 15-minute appointment per quarter dealing with her. So, he'd prescribe something, then review numbers 3 months later (maybe fasting sugars have dropped from 250 to 220), then adjust medications, and repeat. If the guy had handed things off to a nurse who followed-up one week after a medication switch they could have probably titrated her meds in a few months at most. I'm sure reimbursement structures don't help - doctors don't have much incentive to do things between periodic appointments unless you're in a hospital.
A triage-based system with less doctor involvement would greatly reduce costs and potentially increase access to care. A nurse who can check in on a patient biweekly is probably a lot more useful for the average patient than a doctor who can check in twice a year. Sometimes the simple stuff matters most when it comes to things like compliance and spotting problems.
Doctors are an important part of the system, but right now they're a one-size-fits-all solution.
So, suppose the guy adds 47 references to prove to the reviewers that the material is a genuine contribution (as if that even made sense - any number of citations does not prove that you didn't miss a complete previous duplication)? The reviewer is satisfied that the guy has done his homework and gives the OK. Why not then remove the references before publication? If the purpose is to ensure that due diligence is done then removing the references would have no negative effect at all.
No, references are primarily a way to pay homage to existing academics, and sometimes used for their more face-value purpose (making the reader aware of other work that they might not already be aware of that is closely related).
How else do you explain some of those top-referenced works that have hundreds or thousands of citations - often from 50 years ago on topics that can be found in any textbook from 20 years ago? These references provide no readers service - who reads physics papers and doesn't know what Relativity is, etc? These references don't prove that the author has done due diligence - who publishes a serious paper in physics without having some idea of what Einstein already discovered? No, these references are purely homage.
Well, alas a majority of your fellow Americans wanted the right to wait until they were sick to buy health insurance.
It didn't help that quite a few insurance companies claimed that people were doing this when they actually weren't.
So, because both individuals and companies like to scam each other we now have a compromise where companies have to offer insurance to anybody (even if they're already sick), and individuals have to buy insurance even if they don't think they will get sick.
The Red Cross symbol is more than the organizational symbol of the International Red Cross - it is also a protective symbol recognized by the Geneva Conventions. It can be worn by personnel not associated with the International Red Cross and must be respected. It can only be used in certain circumstances, including armed forced medical personnel.
I would think that responding to a bombing to rescue anybody still inside would be considered a legitimate use of the Red Cross symbol. The Geneva Conventions weren't really designed with the facilitation of the assassination of specific individuals in mind. The concept was that combat is more about capturing ground and blowing things up, and the people guarding both are not really the targets of war. If you're hitting a bunker specifically with the goal of killing the people inside and no so much the bunker itself then the Conventions actually work against you somewhat (they don't prevent you from hitting the bunker, but they do prevent you from attacking rescuers, and you are required to accept the surrender of anybody inside).
Only issue with that is that the rescue forces can legitimately wear the red cross, and bombing them is a violation of the Geneva Convention. You could probably mine the living daylights out of the area before the rescue team shows up but bombing anything with a cross on it is verboten.
Now, if you can blanket the area with FAEs you might be able to aphixiate the inhabitants assuming they don't have sealed ventilation (the CO2 would dissipate quickly outside).
Yup. When you only have 15 minutes to respond to an incoming attack and limited early-warning capability you'll probably get pretty twitchy on the trigger finger. At least with the US and the USSR the windows are generally longer due to the sheer size of the countries and distance/etc. That gives you more time to figure out what is going on before you hit the launch button. Plus both countries have submarine forces likely to survive an attack so you don't have to launch everything you have in 5 min or lose it.
The deterioration of the USSR early warning systems is another big risk - if they can't spot launches then their first warning is a blip on a radar 5 min from impact. Can you figure out if a blip is real in 5 min and mount a response? Or, do you just hit the big button as soon as you see something?
"Just" add more concrete? That isn't cheap. Considering the upgrades cost $82M, and the cost of adding an extra n meters of concrete on top of some extensive underground bunker system is probably a lot more than that, I'd say this is a pretty cost-effective approach (for the US). This isn't unlike the Valkyrie bomber - the US never made more than a prototype but the USSR had to come up with an effective fighter countermeasure to a supersonic strategic bomber.
Nuclear weapons just aren't a credible threat here - nobody wants to use them. That is like talking about being able to turn half of iran into a glass mirror - it probably won't happen unless NYC is about to become a crater and there is a credible risk that Boston is next. A big conventional bomb on the other hand is something the leadership in Iran probably thinks about all the time - nobody is eager to get into a shooting war with Iran but I think few would be very surprised if one started suddenly.
Sorta depends. From my casual observations companies tend to remain product-focused for about two generations of leadership - the founder, and his hand-picked successor. If the founder sticks around the company can care about its customers for quite a while. If the founder leaves quickly and there is a lot of money to be had (thus giving the first successor a ton of cash), then it can be a fairly short time as anybody who actually cared cashes out fast.
Now, founders can also run their companies into the ground for entirely different reasons, but usually it isn't because of a lack of R&D. It is hard for a software company to sustain success even when it isn't internally sabotaged.
I think the main reason companies tend to like solar is that it allows them to reduce their peak power use, which on industrial scales has a big impact on the rates you pay. For a typical company HVAC is probably their biggest electrical cost, and it peaks at the same time that solar peaks. So, installing solar panels generates power at the time that getting it from the grid is most expensive. If you can get subsidies or goodwill for doing it then that also helps.
On the other hand, a datacenter is running 24x7, and probably has the highest demand sometime other than noon, with a much more level load vs time. So, the same opportunity just isn't there.
I don't have access to industrial volume pricing on solar components, so it is hard to estimate exact costs. However, 28MWx24x7 is a lot of energy. To generate a substantial portion of that using solar would require a very large array of panels and then some way to store that energy. For residential solar laws are written to allow consumers to sell their power back to the grid at full rates, but there is no way that Facebook could get that deal. They'd need an array capable of generating something like 80MW during the day (of which they're selling 50MW) so that they can make enough money to buy the 28MW for the time they aren't generating much solar. The whole town doesn't use 50MW, so who is going to buy it? The only way I know of to store that kind of power is pumping water up dams, so now it has to build a hydro plant on the side.
If building 100MW-scale solar made commercial sense you'd see more utilities actually doing it.
Maybe, maybe not. Haven't seen it happen yet, and that probably says something.
With the way that studios control copyrights in the first place it wouldn't surprise me if the artist would have to beg permissions to parody his own song...
I dunno. The Germans had some really high-tech stuff like the V2, and the Tiger. However, the US had a fair bit of technology as well. Certainly on the Signals (Ultra, Magic, etc) front the allies were WAY ahead of the Germans. The P51 was a quite capable aircraft as well - other than the few ME262s the Germans fielded it was much more capable than anything the Germans flew. In the Pacific War the US had clear technological superiority almost across the board. It didn't get much use in Europe, but the VT fuse a huge technological advantage in the Pacific (I believe it was avoided in Europe to prevent capture - hard to recover fuses in the middle of the ocean, plus the Germans had almost no offensive air capability after D-day).
The Germans lost the war for a number of reasons - probably the biggest one was that it is pretty hard to take on just about everybody and win. The US has a far greater advantage over the rest of the world today compared to what Germany had and the advantage of geographic isolation and I'm skeptical that the US could really sustain a US-vs-everybody conventional shooting war for more than a few years if it were truly taken seriously. Another big factor was that industry in the US and Russia was far from the lines, and industry in Germany was not. You can build a lot more tanks if your workers aren't homeless and your factory doesn't have an air-conditioned roof.
Uh, if they can't transmit the data into the site once, how do they expect to ever host it and upload it millions of times from there to everybody else?
So, you're saying the liberal media conspiracy will try to suppress the message of the Republicans who are just trying to get out the truth?
That is how this would get spun, and it will certainly energize the typical Red-stater. This is the primary, so they're the only people voting anyway.
I could care less for the guy, but lawsuits like this should not be allowed. Write your music, and go ahead and ask to get paid for it, but your right to control of how it is used ends when I buy the CD or pay the standardized non-discriminatory fee for performance.
What's next - Cisco suing anybody who sends email that they disagree with through a router on the basis of some patent?