But, the reality is that it often takes longer to compose your patient documentation on a computer than with pen and paper.
This is a tools and interface issue. The best tool I've seen for this is cross between a PDA and a tablet computer. It was easy to carry, not too small to jot notes on, and was always available. (No need to log on to a workstation.) Intface design is just going to take time, trial, and much error...
I don't understand why there is such a need to make a new protocol...
The article didn't mention a new protocol. And the HHS Department is pushing HL7 heavily, so if the companies are working with HHS then I'm sure the "nonproprietary technology standards" the article talks about includes HL7.
But there are lots of gaps in HL7 that need to be filled, and it's only the medical message transmission protocol anyway.
The biggest obstacle to this is doctors. That's not necessarily their fault, though.
This is going to require huge amounts of infrastructure, IT and human, to accomplish. It will take huge amounts of money and time. If you've ever wondered why the medical system is so far behind the IT curve, this is why. Also, add on to that the general resistence the medical community has, especially doctors, to change and it adds up to one heck of a hard mountain to climb.
You might say, "doctors, resistant to change? What about cutting edge medical procedures, 'n' stuff like that." True, medical science is leaping forward these days, but that doesn't mean that the rank and file are open to change. Often it's quite the opposite. You generally don't get through medical school if you're a maverick, willing to take risks. (Don't believe what you see every day on TV, folks.) Doctors are generally resistent to change. Now, add to that saying, "You're going to have to buy all this equipment for your office" and "Oh, you don't have complete control over the information anymore" and you're just asking for trouble.
I work for a small company that's trying (and, sadly failing at the moment) to sell a way to pay for part of the cost of the infrastructure from the ground up: video on demand for doctor's offices. Sound odd? It sounds even more out there to the average doctor, believe me. The basic idea is that the infrastructure for medical record storage and transmission could be payed for by doctors watching a few pharmaceutical ads per month. They'd also get educational videos for staff and patients, and training videos for new procedures.
Pharmaceutical companies already plough millions into sending reps out to the doctor's offices. They could just as easily pay doctors a fraction of that cost to get them to watch advertisement videos, saving the doctor's time to boot. But, for most doctors we've talked to, the very idea of having ads piped into their office is like kryptonite. They hate it. And they'll tell you so while writing a prescription with a pen that has "Merk" printed on it and squeezing a stress toy with a Phizer logo.
Aieeeeee... it sounds like you're saying random chance has a better chance of producing a positive outcome than directed scientific research does.
Why not?
For instance, when training a neural network, it's mathematically proven that adding a random factor, or "noise" to the system often causes the network to train faster and more efficiently.
Randomness isn't always a negative, especially in chaotic systems. Our society (and any sufficiently complex endeavor) is a chaotic system. Learn to live with randomness, grasshopper. It will serve you well.
Letting a deformed child live is a passive action...
Let me tell you...it's not passive in the least. I know this from personal experience. My nephew was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The first option my sister got from the doctors was, "You can take him home to die." It was a tough decision, but they decided to get him all of the corrective surgeries necessary to help him to live a close to normal life.
Believe me, the decision was far from passive.
A more appropriate version might be "Should you have a child if you know that it is likely to be deformed?"
But logically your comment is valid. Creating a chimera is more similar to this. But functionally it's not that far away from letting a child live that has a deformity. These days you must consider that, in the future, the defect could be corrected by a process we may now consider "out there," such as growing a new heart, getting a transplant from another species, or constructing an artificial one. The first two could benefit from chimera research. I'm all for it...
Learning AI is not impractical for a single player stand alone game but it is not as "exciting" nor do single player system have enough computing power and "experience" to really put a nueral net through its paces.
That's why we need evolving neural nets that can take advantage of the fact that several copies of the game run on distributed computers. Some process like NEAT (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies) could evolve neural networks, with each game instance being a test bed for a particular "revision" of the network.
If all else is equal, energy efficiency will tend to be selected for.
I still don't believe this is the case. It's either A) never actually the case that "all else is equal" is possible, even in principal, or B) not true even if all else could be equal. Otherwise, like I said before, entropy would have already won and we wouldn't even exist to pontificate about it.
Evolution is inseperable from complexity. That makes it hard to study, and difficult for classical science to wrap itself around it at the moment. Not that we shouldn't ever try to isolate factors and make those kinds of assertions about evolution, it's just that, at this point of our understanding of it, those assertions are simply impossible to verify. That's why I use the word "believe" in my first statement above.:)
Your definition of efficiency is too broad. You're basically equating efficiency with survivability. I'm defining efficiency the way it's used in the English language: the ratio of the useful energy delivered by a dynamic system to the energy supplied to it. While you could argue that a system that fails is not efficient because all energy put into it would be lost, that would make the word "efficient" cover too many meanings, rendering it meaningless.
It's an AI technique for search. linky Basically, the technique is to always try to minimize the error in some function. My point is that evolution does not do this when it comes to energy efficiency.
If it isn't more efficient (at survival), it won't last.
Again, not necessarily. An inefficient process may be more adaptive than an efficient one. An inefficient process will probably have more overlapping, redundant steps than a more efficient one. That would make it more fault tolerant and more able to handle changing environmental conditions.
Let's take the story of two organisims, a squirrel and a grasshopper. Say they both depend on a single nutrient for survival. The squirrel takes eight steps to get it and use it, and the grasshopper takes four. Some of these steps are internal (metabolic) and others external (behavioral). The squirrel gathers two kinds of food to get the nutrient, the grasshopper one. You'd think that, in a closed system, the grasshopper would win, right? It can get and metabolise the nutrient faster and more efficiently, right?
Not necessarily.:) The grasshopper's one food could disappear, leaving it SOL. The squirrel may depend on the same food, but it has a backup.
The grasshopper could dominate in retrieving all foods containing the nutrient, but because of the squirrel's more complex (and thus more adaptive) digestive system, it could just eat grasshoppers.:)
See? There are many more possibilities. Extreme efficiency eliminates complexity (and thus possibilities), and can be maladptive because of that.
However, all of this exchange takes energy, and if there's a more energy efficient way of doing things (such as, perhaps, storing memories in the extracellular matrix), evolution would tend to select in favor of it.
Not necessarily so. Just because process A is more energy efficient than process B does not mean that process A will be more likely selected for. Evolution is not hill climbing. In fact, evolution tends to create the opposite effect. Organisms become more complex (and usually less efficient) over time. If evolution tended to select for efficiency over other factors then entropy would be winning, not losing. Wouldn't that suck?:)
By the time you are in your 70's so much stuff pisses you off that you can barely deal with it.
Aging well is not just about taking care of yourself physically. New things don't have to piss you off. How they affect you is up to you.
My 93 year old grandfather is a good example. He get married again last year after my grandmother died. (Married 63 years.) My step grandmother is 84, a master bridge player, reads a new book every week, and can kick anyone's ass at scrabble. (And I mean, anyone!) They both have resilient personalities despite living difficult lives.
As long as you take care of your body there's no reason you can't live to a ripe old age with a keen mind and resilient psyche. It's up to you.
The same overtone of moral disapproval you express has greeted every major medical advance.
And, especially when it comes to immortality, cause and effect dovetail nicely. The same people who can't see the possibilities in immortality are the same people who wouldn't be able to handle it well themselves.
For instance, one common objection I hear to a 1000+ year lifespan is, "I'd get really bored. What would you do with all that time?" My response is always, "What would you NOT do?" More time opens up more possibilities. So, the people who can't (or won't) see the experiential possibilities a longer lifespan creates also can't (or won't) see the ways out of the social problems it creates.
Since plutonium is neither "highly radioactive" nor "among the most lethal substances known to man", forgive me for not reading the rest of your post.
I guess that's why my grandfather, who was a nuclear chemist at Oak Ridge National Labratory after WWII, would carry plutonium in a lead lined box at the end of a ten foot pole between shielded stations, and was mandated to loudly yell, "Plutonium on the move!" if he carried it around a hall corner.
Nah, that's like saying that Schroedinger's cat knows whether it's alive or not before the box is opened.
Of course the cat's the first one to know. Either way, the wave function is collapsed for the cat before the box is opened, especially if it dies. You can think of death as the ultimate reaction to an external stimuli, and thus the ultimate perception.:)
Of course, if it were genetics, according to Darwin, it would be a trait that should have been wiped out long ago since homosexuals cant reproduce.
As another poster has commented, this is a simple fallacy to rebuke. If homosexuality were genetic, then social pressures could easily cause it to be carried to the next generation. Oddly enough, then, the best way to wipe out homosexuality would be to accept it. Homosexuals would feel no social pressure to reproduce or "act heterosexual" and there would be less of them in the next generation. Even further, it would be best to encourage a hedonistic lifestyle where homosexuals did no create family groups.
So, here's the paradox: by opposing homosexuality and hedonism the fundamentalists are helping spread it further. Ain't that grand?:)
Certainly not assuming that in a hundred years we'll have genetically engineered winged monkeys who will fly all our nuclear waste into outer space.
Hey, thanks for the completely useless reduction ad absurdum there. Really added to the discussion.
It's the height of irresponsibility to assume that our children will be smart enough to solve a problem a hundred years from now whose solution has completely eluded us.
And it's the height of hubris to assume that we can fix everything perfectly now and that our technology will never get better.
And, if I'm not mistaken, we constantly assume that technology will get better in the future. That's called "optimisim."
But the whole point is that we store the stuff and KEEP WORKING on a better solution. Duh. Why is this simple concept so lost on you?
And my point is that, with only one party in power, the floodgates are open. At least in the past, with more than one party minding the door, there was some accountability. Now there is none.
Get off your high hat "you just don't understand" arrogance for a second, m'kay? Look at the reality of what's happening RIGHT NOW. Who gives a shit who started it? Are we on the fucking kindergarten playground here?
Slashdot Mirror
I would highly recommend against going to China with a plan of "Getting around" the censhorship.
Especially having admitted the desire to do it...
But, the reality is that it often takes longer to compose your patient documentation on a computer than with pen and paper.
This is a tools and interface issue. The best tool I've seen for this is cross between a PDA and a tablet computer. It was easy to carry, not too small to jot notes on, and was always available. (No need to log on to a workstation.) Intface design is just going to take time, trial, and much error...
I don't understand why there is such a need to make a new protocol...
The article didn't mention a new protocol. And the HHS Department is pushing HL7 heavily, so if the companies are working with HHS then I'm sure the "nonproprietary technology standards" the article talks about includes HL7.
But there are lots of gaps in HL7 that need to be filled, and it's only the medical message transmission protocol anyway.
For those curious, check it out.
The biggest obstacle to this is doctors. That's not necessarily their fault, though.
This is going to require huge amounts of infrastructure, IT and human, to accomplish. It will take huge amounts of money and time. If you've ever wondered why the medical system is so far behind the IT curve, this is why. Also, add on to that the general resistence the medical community has, especially doctors, to change and it adds up to one heck of a hard mountain to climb.
You might say, "doctors, resistant to change? What about cutting edge medical procedures, 'n' stuff like that." True, medical science is leaping forward these days, but that doesn't mean that the rank and file are open to change. Often it's quite the opposite. You generally don't get through medical school if you're a maverick, willing to take risks. (Don't believe what you see every day on TV, folks.) Doctors are generally resistent to change. Now, add to that saying, "You're going to have to buy all this equipment for your office" and "Oh, you don't have complete control over the information anymore" and you're just asking for trouble.
I work for a small company that's trying (and, sadly failing at the moment) to sell a way to pay for part of the cost of the infrastructure from the ground up: video on demand for doctor's offices. Sound odd? It sounds even more out there to the average doctor, believe me. The basic idea is that the infrastructure for medical record storage and transmission could be payed for by doctors watching a few pharmaceutical ads per month. They'd also get educational videos for staff and patients, and training videos for new procedures.
Pharmaceutical companies already plough millions into sending reps out to the doctor's offices. They could just as easily pay doctors a fraction of that cost to get them to watch advertisement videos, saving the doctor's time to boot. But, for most doctors we've talked to, the very idea of having ads piped into their office is like kryptonite. They hate it. And they'll tell you so while writing a prescription with a pen that has "Merk" printed on it and squeezing a stress toy with a Phizer logo.
Aieeeeee... it sounds like you're saying random chance has a better chance of producing a positive outcome than directed scientific research does.
Why not?
For instance, when training a neural network, it's mathematically proven that adding a random factor, or "noise" to the system often causes the network to train faster and more efficiently.
Randomness isn't always a negative, especially in chaotic systems. Our society (and any sufficiently complex endeavor) is a chaotic system. Learn to live with randomness, grasshopper. It will serve you well.
Letting a deformed child live is a passive action...
Let me tell you...it's not passive in the least. I know this from personal experience. My nephew was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The first option my sister got from the doctors was, "You can take him home to die." It was a tough decision, but they decided to get him all of the corrective surgeries necessary to help him to live a close to normal life.
Believe me, the decision was far from passive.
A more appropriate version might be "Should you have a child if you know that it is likely to be deformed?"
But logically your comment is valid. Creating a chimera is more similar to this. But functionally it's not that far away from letting a child live that has a deformity. These days you must consider that, in the future, the defect could be corrected by a process we may now consider "out there," such as growing a new heart, getting a transplant from another species, or constructing an artificial one. The first two could benefit from chimera research. I'm all for it...
...bringing an unknown consiousnous with who knows what kind of mental trama to bear is just plain wrong...
Would you say the same of, say, letting a severely deformed child live?
Learning AI is not impractical for a single player stand alone game but it is not as "exciting" nor do single player system have enough computing power and "experience" to really put a nueral net through its paces.
That's why we need evolving neural nets that can take advantage of the fact that several copies of the game run on distributed computers. Some process like NEAT (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies) could evolve neural networks, with each game instance being a test bed for a particular "revision" of the network.
If all else is equal, energy efficiency will tend to be selected for.
:)
I still don't believe this is the case. It's either A) never actually the case that "all else is equal" is possible, even in principal, or B) not true even if all else could be equal. Otherwise, like I said before, entropy would have already won and we wouldn't even exist to pontificate about it.
Evolution is inseperable from complexity. That makes it hard to study, and difficult for classical science to wrap itself around it at the moment. Not that we shouldn't ever try to isolate factors and make those kinds of assertions about evolution, it's just that, at this point of our understanding of it, those assertions are simply impossible to verify. That's why I use the word "believe" in my first statement above.
...then it wasn't efficient, by definition
Your definition of efficiency is too broad. You're basically equating efficiency with survivability. I'm defining efficiency the way it's used in the English language: the ratio of the useful energy delivered by a dynamic system to the energy supplied to it. While you could argue that a system that fails is not efficient because all energy put into it would be lost, that would make the word "efficient" cover too many meanings, rendering it meaningless.
What do you mean, evolution isn't hill climbing?
:) The grasshopper's one food could disappear, leaving it SOL. The squirrel may depend on the same food, but it has a backup.
:)
It's an AI technique for search. linky Basically, the technique is to always try to minimize the error in some function. My point is that evolution does not do this when it comes to energy efficiency.
If it isn't more efficient (at survival), it won't last.
Again, not necessarily. An inefficient process may be more adaptive than an efficient one. An inefficient process will probably have more overlapping, redundant steps than a more efficient one. That would make it more fault tolerant and more able to handle changing environmental conditions.
Let's take the story of two organisims, a squirrel and a grasshopper. Say they both depend on a single nutrient for survival. The squirrel takes eight steps to get it and use it, and the grasshopper takes four. Some of these steps are internal (metabolic) and others external (behavioral). The squirrel gathers two kinds of food to get the nutrient, the grasshopper one. You'd think that, in a closed system, the grasshopper would win, right? It can get and metabolise the nutrient faster and more efficiently, right?
Not necessarily.
The grasshopper could dominate in retrieving all foods containing the nutrient, but because of the squirrel's more complex (and thus more adaptive) digestive system, it could just eat grasshoppers.
See? There are many more possibilities. Extreme efficiency eliminates complexity (and thus possibilities), and can be maladptive because of that.
However, all of this exchange takes energy, and if there's a more energy efficient way of doing things (such as, perhaps, storing memories in the extracellular matrix), evolution would tend to select in favor of it.
:)
Not necessarily so. Just because process A is more energy efficient than process B does not mean that process A will be more likely selected for. Evolution is not hill climbing. In fact, evolution tends to create the opposite effect. Organisms become more complex (and usually less efficient) over time. If evolution tended to select for efficiency over other factors then entropy would be winning, not losing. Wouldn't that suck?
By the time you are in your 70's so much stuff pisses you off that you can barely deal with it.
Aging well is not just about taking care of yourself physically. New things don't have to piss you off. How they affect you is up to you.
My 93 year old grandfather is a good example. He get married again last year after my grandmother died. (Married 63 years.) My step grandmother is 84, a master bridge player, reads a new book every week, and can kick anyone's ass at scrabble. (And I mean, anyone!) They both have resilient personalities despite living difficult lives.
As long as you take care of your body there's no reason you can't live to a ripe old age with a keen mind and resilient psyche. It's up to you.
The same overtone of moral disapproval you express has greeted every major medical advance.
And, especially when it comes to immortality, cause and effect dovetail nicely. The same people who can't see the possibilities in immortality are the same people who wouldn't be able to handle it well themselves.
For instance, one common objection I hear to a 1000+ year lifespan is, "I'd get really bored. What would you do with all that time?" My response is always, "What would you NOT do?" More time opens up more possibilities. So, the people who can't (or won't) see the experiential possibilities a longer lifespan creates also can't (or won't) see the ways out of the social problems it creates.
Since plutonium is neither "highly radioactive" nor "among the most lethal substances known to man", forgive me for not reading the rest of your post.
I guess that's why my grandfather, who was a nuclear chemist at Oak Ridge National Labratory after WWII, would carry plutonium in a lead lined box at the end of a ten foot pole between shielded stations, and was mandated to loudly yell, "Plutonium on the move!" if he carried it around a hall corner.
It ain't silly putty, d00d.
Nah, that's like saying that Schroedinger's cat knows whether it's alive or not before the box is opened.
:)
Of course the cat's the first one to know. Either way, the wave function is collapsed for the cat before the box is opened, especially if it dies. You can think of death as the ultimate reaction to an external stimuli, and thus the ultimate perception.
I want to know who on gods green earth OBSERVED monkeys turning into humans.
Well, if the theory is correct, we did. We just didn't record the observations.
What is Memento if not the first well-known movie in years to literally require at least two viewings!?
:)
Oh, just wait until Primer comes out on DVD.
Of course, if it were genetics, according to Darwin, it would be a trait that should have been wiped out long ago since homosexuals cant reproduce.
:)
As another poster has commented, this is a simple fallacy to rebuke. If homosexuality were genetic, then social pressures could easily cause it to be carried to the next generation. Oddly enough, then, the best way to wipe out homosexuality would be to accept it. Homosexuals would feel no social pressure to reproduce or "act heterosexual" and there would be less of them in the next generation. Even further, it would be best to encourage a hedonistic lifestyle where homosexuals did no create family groups.
So, here's the paradox: by opposing homosexuality and hedonism the fundamentalists are helping spread it further. Ain't that grand?
Um, hello people! There's been prior art here...
...although many neuroscientists think that they may lead to 'mental clutter' or task-obsessiveness
Oh, you mean creativity?
Certainly not assuming that in a hundred years we'll have genetically engineered winged monkeys who will fly all our nuclear waste into outer space.
Hey, thanks for the completely useless reduction ad absurdum there. Really added to the discussion.
It's the height of irresponsibility to assume that our children will be smart enough to solve a problem a hundred years from now whose solution has completely eluded us.
And it's the height of hubris to assume that we can fix everything perfectly now and that our technology will never get better.
And, if I'm not mistaken, we constantly assume that technology will get better in the future. That's called "optimisim."
But the whole point is that we store the stuff and KEEP WORKING on a better solution. Duh. Why is this simple concept so lost on you?
Wouldn't this also ban Adblock from Firefox?
It would if the FCC regulated computer content.
Wait a sec...
And my point is that, with only one party in power, the floodgates are open. At least in the past, with more than one party minding the door, there was some accountability. Now there is none.
Get off your high hat "you just don't understand" arrogance for a second, m'kay? Look at the reality of what's happening RIGHT NOW. Who gives a shit who started it? Are we on the fucking kindergarten playground here?
When the entire US becomes the camp you can lecture me about perspective.