I think this already exists in the form of "Skype Darts". Essentially you set up Skype at two locations, focusing the webcam on a dart board. Each player then tosses the dart in an attempt to score points.
What's great is that the billions of physics calculations needed to perform accurate dart-throwing (taking into account wind resistance, muscle fatigue, and other factors), are outsourced to the external site. In this way, "Reality" is able to accurately simulate the dart game, down to the molecular level. This is all streamed to the other player in real-time, with very little lag.
As an ex-biology teacher, one of my professor's pet peeves was that there was no single "scientific method". There are a some general approaches and a lot of techniques, but no single, official approach.
For example, it may be that doing double-blind studies are often a great idea, but we regularly accept studies without it as being scientifically valid. I'm actually partial to the "guess and check" method for solving lots of problems. Different problems work better with different methods.
It turns out they didn't use viruses, but instead transposons to get their genetic code in a cell. The catch is that transposons (aka jumping genes) are mutagenic. They did use a certain enzyme in mouse cells to remove them, but it's still possible they caused damage to the DNA. If it can be safely removed, that's great, but I'd be a little nervous about this approach.
It may be possible to achieve the same approach using raw strands of RNA that never modifies the DNA, but I'm sure smarter people than me may know reasons why that's difficult.
I saw Coraline in a 3D theater last weekend and I was surprised how effective it was. I left the theater and passed a flat screen tv, and it looked weird without the depth cues.
Over the next decade, we'll see a transition to 3D movies and you'll start seeing 3D setups at home as well (first for games, such as the solution being offered by NVidia). Eventually 3D will roll out to the masses and people will go back and convert the classic 2D movies into 3D. Old people will cry out that 2D is the way it was supposed to be watched, but companies will do it anyway and consumers will buy them up.
I work for a healthcare organization and we've had an EMR for over ten years.
In terms of backups, we have on-site backups as well as off-site backups. The off-site backups are taken to another city, two hours away. If our data center is hit by an asteroid, there's a plan to recreate it elsewhere (though it would take some time, obviously). We've discussed having a hot backup data center, but the costs are very high.
We have a similar backup strategy for imaging data. Fortunately the cost of storage and backups have kept up with the huge volumes of stuff people want to store. Having images electronic is a huge benefit to many people, as sending film around is expensive and complicated.
Abuse is a broad term. We have people who audit access to our medical system, manditory staff training on appropriate use, and lots of privacy policies in place. So far, most of our data breaches have been relatively small (e.g. an employee looking up a patient they know but are not treating). It is admittedly scary to read about huge data breaches in other organizations.
We have folks who run reports against patient data, though much of it is made anonymous or highly summarized. I don't think I've seen any evil plans for global domination coming through our project request system.
I work for a healthcare organization that was one of the first to switch to an EMR. You make a lot of good points, and I'd like to follow up.
In terms of privacy, we audit all access to our medical records and have a team of auditors who monitor access. I've been responsible for writing exception reports and such. It's far easier to tell who's accessing your medical records than paper copies laying around.
Data load is a big deal. We have our main EMR and multiple data repositories where we can do reporting and other non-operational work. Lots of people support all that infrastructure. On the plus side, that infrastructure lets us do things that saves money and lives.
Server outages have been pretty bad, but we have assorted downtime procedures and downtime systems. An example is a downtime database located in the various medical record office that are constantly updated with patient allergies.
Our staff has gotten quite used to working with an EMR, but there are still cultural issues. For example, what a physician writes in a medical record may be visible to the patient. They have concerns about speaking plainly (e.g. describing a patient as alcoholic). At the same time, patients have a right to know how they're being treated.
My biggest worry about the new plan to convert paper records is that there are so many EMR systems. Will they pick one of the existing vendors? Build a new one? The ideal for the patient is to have a single nation-wide EMR that they can take wherever they go. This has a huge impact on existing EMR vendors and installs, though, so I doubt people will take that approach.
I recently felt that same way, that it was mostly due to people downloading weird stuff. Then I browsed a cached version of a Google page, which launched some JavaScript and completely destroyed my install of Windows Server 2003 (it wouldn't boot up at all). Afterwards I switched my home browsing to Firefox with NoScript and AdBlock Plus.
Fast forward to work a couple weeks ago, running IE7, Norton Anti-Virus, and the typical corporate firewalls. All I did was have a pop-up ad from a boring site and my computer was infected through the IE 7 vulnerability.
I think what has to happen is that browsers have to be locked down and sandboxed to the point where external sources have no access to the inner workings of a machine. Otherwise there's simply too much risk with ordinary browsing.
I recently had the opportunity to fly up to Edmonton to visit Bioware and get a peek at the new Dragon Age toolset (I'm in the middle here). While it was interesting to see what the new game engine could do, the most fun was just spending time with the Bioware folks. I do software development for a healthcare organization, so it was a treat to see how thing were run in a gaming company. Many concepts were the same, but there was indeed a big break room full of food and gaming systems. I also was pelted during a Nerf shootout by the toolset developers. Their goal for the day was to see how many visitors they could get in a day.
The gaming industry has come far with Dragon Age. The technology has improved immensely, along with the effort required to make high-quality games. From what little I've seen, I'm hopeful Dragon Age will indeed be the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate.
I got multiple job offers after writing Dreamcatcher, including Bioware. Valve also encourages people to develop mods, and have hired many of the more successful people.
That being said, being published in other areas can help as well, though I still feel that writing for games is a very different skill set than typical writing.
Our healthcare organization has all sorts of protections against this.
The first is obviously education and awareness. We have annual training that talks about what people can and can't do.
We also have the ability to flag certain patients as "do not announce", which means that clinicians can't even mention folks are in the hospital. Furthermore, records can be marked as limited access, with only a few people being able to see them (this is rarely done, as preventing legitimate access is dangerous). What's more common is to "self-authorize" when accessing a patient you wouldn't normally see. They basically click a warning box and someone later reviews it.
I would think that for telecommunication companies, it would be relatively easy to maintain a list of high profile phone numbers. If anyone wants to access those, a message pops up asking "Are you sure? A manager will be notified." If they say yes and have a valid reason, there won't be a problem.
As a parent of a five year-old and a nearly ten year-old, I find that a lack of activity and too-quick transitions tend to lead to aggression. When my son has been playing video games for longer than normal and we immediately yank him off, it causes frustration and acting out. If he's been active that day and we give him warnings that his time is coming to an end, things seem to go more smoothly.
Good parenting is more than a series of yes/no decisions.
In other news, the auto industry is asking for loans, which some classify as a bail out. This is mostly because no one is buying SUVs and other low-mpg vehicles.
The irony is delicious.
It's a Family game
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I played a bit of Spore and found it somewhat fun, if not greatly gripping. My five and nine year-old kids love it, though. It's been incredibly cute to watch my five year-old talk about all her adventures as a cell, though I admittedly had to correct her use of "flagella".
I'm withholding judgement until I play each stage, but so far my kids have loved the creature creator aspect as well as exploring to see what's over the next ridge.
I think they did a great job leveraging the content that everyone is creating and put it back into the game. I'm big into creating Neverwinter Nights modules, so I'm familiar with some of the traditional methods. This new approach is very innovative (if perhaps slightly devious). I love the fact that players create content as part of the game, which then gets shared with everyone else.
We've only played through the cell and creature phase, but the kids love it. I played a little this morning and enjoyed it as well.
Spore is not a hardcore game on par with Grand Theft Auto. It's a Sims game, with no story and only vague goals. So far my favorite part is the fact that when I wander around, half the creatures were created by other people. That's fairly unique in a single player game, and it's a subtle but interesting aspect.
I won't give my final opinion until I get through the space stage, but I played some last night and this morning and generally enjoyed it. There's some repetitive aspects that I can see might get to me, but the stages go quickly and you don't have to ever repeat them again. I think the space stage will be the decider, as it's where people could spend most of the game.
For starters, they didn't use pluripotent cells, but rather adult cells. Next, no viruses were used, but rather relatively safe proteins. Finally, this was in live mice rather than the typical test tubes.
I think what we'll see in the decades to come is a clear roadmap of the cellular signals that differentiate cells from one another. This is the basis of more practical technologies such as organ replacement and repair, which has a good chance of extending longevity.
I do a "science news of the day" at dinner with the wife and kids, picking out the best science news stories I read. Needless to say, this one just shot to the top of the list.
Since I actually live in Eugene, this one was kinda weird. For those of you who aren't familiar with our little part of the world, it's know for rain, runners, and an aging hippie population.
I'm not familiar with any human computers or FBI conspiracies, but maybe those are just "his" mind control methods in action.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, we IE users are spoofing our user agent to make it seem like we're Firefox whenever we visit Slashdot.
I've got a reputation as a nerd to uphold, after all.
I think this already exists in the form of "Skype Darts". Essentially you set up Skype at two locations, focusing the webcam on a dart board. Each player then tosses the dart in an attempt to score points.
What's great is that the billions of physics calculations needed to perform accurate dart-throwing (taking into account wind resistance, muscle fatigue, and other factors), are outsourced to the external site. In this way, "Reality" is able to accurately simulate the dart game, down to the molecular level. This is all streamed to the other player in real-time, with very little lag.
As an ex-biology teacher, one of my professor's pet peeves was that there was no single "scientific method". There are a some general approaches and a lot of techniques, but no single, official approach.
For example, it may be that doing double-blind studies are often a great idea, but we regularly accept studies without it as being scientifically valid. I'm actually partial to the "guess and check" method for solving lots of problems. Different problems work better with different methods.
Well, I guess that explains why that's how they'll say damn in the future.
It turns out they didn't use viruses, but instead transposons to get their genetic code in a cell. The catch is that transposons (aka jumping genes) are mutagenic. They did use a certain enzyme in mouse cells to remove them, but it's still possible they caused damage to the DNA. If it can be safely removed, that's great, but I'd be a little nervous about this approach.
It may be possible to achieve the same approach using raw strands of RNA that never modifies the DNA, but I'm sure smarter people than me may know reasons why that's difficult.
This was a common misconception until recently. You can read about it here.
I saw Coraline in a 3D theater last weekend and I was surprised how effective it was. I left the theater and passed a flat screen tv, and it looked weird without the depth cues.
Over the next decade, we'll see a transition to 3D movies and you'll start seeing 3D setups at home as well (first for games, such as the solution being offered by NVidia). Eventually 3D will roll out to the masses and people will go back and convert the classic 2D movies into 3D. Old people will cry out that 2D is the way it was supposed to be watched, but companies will do it anyway and consumers will buy them up.
I work for a healthcare organization and we've had an EMR for over ten years.
In terms of backups, we have on-site backups as well as off-site backups. The off-site backups are taken to another city, two hours away. If our data center is hit by an asteroid, there's a plan to recreate it elsewhere (though it would take some time, obviously). We've discussed having a hot backup data center, but the costs are very high.
We have a similar backup strategy for imaging data. Fortunately the cost of storage and backups have kept up with the huge volumes of stuff people want to store. Having images electronic is a huge benefit to many people, as sending film around is expensive and complicated.
Abuse is a broad term. We have people who audit access to our medical system, manditory staff training on appropriate use, and lots of privacy policies in place. So far, most of our data breaches have been relatively small (e.g. an employee looking up a patient they know but are not treating). It is admittedly scary to read about huge data breaches in other organizations.
We have folks who run reports against patient data, though much of it is made anonymous or highly summarized. I don't think I've seen any evil plans for global domination coming through our project request system.
I work for a healthcare organization that was one of the first to switch to an EMR. You make a lot of good points, and I'd like to follow up.
In terms of privacy, we audit all access to our medical records and have a team of auditors who monitor access. I've been responsible for writing exception reports and such. It's far easier to tell who's accessing your medical records than paper copies laying around.
Data load is a big deal. We have our main EMR and multiple data repositories where we can do reporting and other non-operational work. Lots of people support all that infrastructure. On the plus side, that infrastructure lets us do things that saves money and lives.
Server outages have been pretty bad, but we have assorted downtime procedures and downtime systems. An example is a downtime database located in the various medical record office that are constantly updated with patient allergies.
Our staff has gotten quite used to working with an EMR, but there are still cultural issues. For example, what a physician writes in a medical record may be visible to the patient. They have concerns about speaking plainly (e.g. describing a patient as alcoholic). At the same time, patients have a right to know how they're being treated.
My biggest worry about the new plan to convert paper records is that there are so many EMR systems. Will they pick one of the existing vendors? Build a new one? The ideal for the patient is to have a single nation-wide EMR that they can take wherever they go. This has a huge impact on existing EMR vendors and installs, though, so I doubt people will take that approach.
I recently felt that same way, that it was mostly due to people downloading weird stuff. Then I browsed a cached version of a Google page, which launched some JavaScript and completely destroyed my install of Windows Server 2003 (it wouldn't boot up at all). Afterwards I switched my home browsing to Firefox with NoScript and AdBlock Plus.
Fast forward to work a couple weeks ago, running IE7, Norton Anti-Virus, and the typical corporate firewalls. All I did was have a pop-up ad from a boring site and my computer was infected through the IE 7 vulnerability.
I think what has to happen is that browsers have to be locked down and sandboxed to the point where external sources have no access to the inner workings of a machine. Otherwise there's simply too much risk with ordinary browsing.
I recently had the opportunity to fly up to Edmonton to visit Bioware and get a peek at the new Dragon Age toolset (I'm in the middle here). While it was interesting to see what the new game engine could do, the most fun was just spending time with the Bioware folks. I do software development for a healthcare organization, so it was a treat to see how thing were run in a gaming company. Many concepts were the same, but there was indeed a big break room full of food and gaming systems. I also was pelted during a Nerf shootout by the toolset developers. Their goal for the day was to see how many visitors they could get in a day.
The gaming industry has come far with Dragon Age. The technology has improved immensely, along with the effort required to make high-quality games. From what little I've seen, I'm hopeful Dragon Age will indeed be the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate.
I searched around for a more readable graph and found one here, at the bottom of the page.
I got multiple job offers after writing Dreamcatcher, including Bioware. Valve also encourages people to develop mods, and have hired many of the more successful people.
That being said, being published in other areas can help as well, though I still feel that writing for games is a very different skill set than typical writing.
Our healthcare organization has all sorts of protections against this.
The first is obviously education and awareness. We have annual training that talks about what people can and can't do.
We also have the ability to flag certain patients as "do not announce", which means that clinicians can't even mention folks are in the hospital. Furthermore, records can be marked as limited access, with only a few people being able to see them (this is rarely done, as preventing legitimate access is dangerous). What's more common is to "self-authorize" when accessing a patient you wouldn't normally see. They basically click a warning box and someone later reviews it.
I would think that for telecommunication companies, it would be relatively easy to maintain a list of high profile phone numbers. If anyone wants to access those, a message pops up asking "Are you sure? A manager will be notified." If they say yes and have a valid reason, there won't be a problem.
I think Washington D.C. will become a radioactive wasteland and the survivors will spend their waking hours hunting mutant ants in collapsed subways.
Oh, wait. My copy of Fallout 3 arrived yesterday and that's all I can think about.
As a parent of a five year-old and a nearly ten year-old, I find that a lack of activity and too-quick transitions tend to lead to aggression. When my son has been playing video games for longer than normal and we immediately yank him off, it causes frustration and acting out. If he's been active that day and we give him warnings that his time is coming to an end, things seem to go more smoothly.
Good parenting is more than a series of yes/no decisions.
The price of gas just dropped to $2.33 at Costco. We won!
In other news, the auto industry is asking for loans, which some classify as a bail out. This is mostly because no one is buying SUVs and other low-mpg vehicles.
The irony is delicious.
I played a bit of Spore and found it somewhat fun, if not greatly gripping. My five and nine year-old kids love it, though. It's been incredibly cute to watch my five year-old talk about all her adventures as a cell, though I admittedly had to correct her use of "flagella".
I'm withholding judgement until I play each stage, but so far my kids have loved the creature creator aspect as well as exploring to see what's over the next ridge.
I think they did a great job leveraging the content that everyone is creating and put it back into the game. I'm big into creating Neverwinter Nights modules, so I'm familiar with some of the traditional methods. This new approach is very innovative (if perhaps slightly devious). I love the fact that players create content as part of the game, which then gets shared with everyone else.
We've only played through the cell and creature phase, but the kids love it. I played a little this morning and enjoyed it as well.
Spore is not a hardcore game on par with Grand Theft Auto. It's a Sims game, with no story and only vague goals. So far my favorite part is the fact that when I wander around, half the creatures were created by other people. That's fairly unique in a single player game, and it's a subtle but interesting aspect.
I won't give my final opinion until I get through the space stage, but I played some last night and this morning and generally enjoyed it. There's some repetitive aspects that I can see might get to me, but the stages go quickly and you don't have to ever repeat them again. I think the space stage will be the decider, as it's where people could spend most of the game.
. . . will show a black screen with the following phrase:
The cake is a lie.
For starters, they didn't use pluripotent cells, but rather adult cells. Next, no viruses were used, but rather relatively safe proteins. Finally, this was in live mice rather than the typical test tubes.
I think what we'll see in the decades to come is a clear roadmap of the cellular signals that differentiate cells from one another. This is the basis of more practical technologies such as organ replacement and repair, which has a good chance of extending longevity.
I do a "science news of the day" at dinner with the wife and kids, picking out the best science news stories I read. Needless to say, this one just shot to the top of the list.
"But honey, it's for my health!"
Since I actually live in Eugene, this one was kinda weird. For those of you who aren't familiar with our little part of the world, it's know for rain, runners, and an aging hippie population.
I'm not familiar with any human computers or FBI conspiracies, but maybe those are just "his" mind control methods in action.
I'm looking forward to playing improvisational jazz on the lids of garbage cans and raking in the money from their big pot o' cash.