How about teaching English, Math, Science and such first? US students are in many cases barely able to read and fail miserably at math. Let's get everyone up to a first world level before we worry about computer science for everyone. CS should be an elective.
Jeff Atwood for Education Secretary.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opi... Learning to code is overrated: An accomplished programmer would rather his kids learn to read and reason BY Jeff Atwood NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sunday, September 27, 2015, 5:00 AM
Mayor de Blasio is winning widespread praise for his recent promise that, within 10 years, all of New York City’s public schoolchildren will take computer science classes. But as a career programmer who founded two successful software startups, I am deeply skeptical about teaching all kids to code.
When I became fascinated with computers as a teenager in the early 1980s, computers booted up to a black screen and a blinking cursor. You had to learn the right commands to get them to do anything at all. In other words, you were forced to become a computer programmer in order to be a computer user.
One of the great achievements of modern computing is that we no longer need to be programmers to create, build and get things done with the amazing supercomputers that everyone carries around in their pockets.
That’s a victory we should claim for our kids — rather than purposefully, almost gleefully sending them back to the era before computers became user-friendly tools.
I’m not saying young people should be oblivious to the way the sausage is made, any more than they should be oblivious to where their food comes from. Indeed, in the coming decades, there are thousands if not millions of good jobs waiting for skilled programmers and creative thinkers who understand the logic of programming.
But as someone who’s been immersed in the digital world for most of his life, I can attest: Computer science is less an intellectual discipline than a narrow vocational skill.
If someone tells you “coding is the new literacy” because “computers are everywhere today,” ask them how fuel injection works. By teaching low-level coding, I worry that we are effectively teaching our children the art of automobile repair. A valuable skill — but if automobile manufacturers and engineers are doing their jobs correctly, one that shouldn’t be much concern for average people, who happily use their cars as tools to get things done without ever needing to worry about rebuilding the transmission or even change the oil.
There’s nothing wrong with basic exposure to computer science. But it should not come at the expense of fundamental skills such as reading, writing and mathematics — and unfortunately today our schools, with limited time, have tons of pressure on them to convey those basics better.
I’ve known so many programmers who would have been much more successful in their careers if they had only been better writers, better critical thinkers, better back-of-the-envelope estimators, better communicators. And aside from success in careers, we have to ask the broader question: What kinds of people do we want children to grow up to be?
It’s true. Anyone can learn to code. But very few people can explain why they wrote a line of code, what that code does or convince other people to use it and help them build it. These are all essential human skills that have everything to do with the art of communicating with other people, and nothing at all to do with the writing code that a computer can understand.
Learning to talk to the computer is the easiest part. Computers, for better or worse, do exactly what you tell them to do, every time, in exactly the same way. The people — well . . . you’ll spend the rest of your life figuring that out.
Or how about this one? "Results from a recent AAS survey were reported at the last week's plenary session on harassment, defined as unwelcome conduct that is based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetic information. Some 82% of astronomers have heard sexist remarks from their peers; 44% heard sexist remarks from supervisors; 9% experienced physical harassment from peers or supervisors."
Those articles do not read like SJWs and the do seem to indicate some sort of a problem.
I read that bullet-point summary cited in the article and they didn't define unwelcome conduct. That can be as innocuous as inviting someone to have dinner after a conference. Or striking up an unwelcome conversation. Or criticizing a scientist's paper. Or anything that anyone subjectively decided was unwelcome conduct.
Anything could wind up in that survey as unwelcome conduct, whether it was reasonable conduct or not.
Oh, yes, Shurat HaDin, the Israel governent operation that brings frivolous lawsuits against critics of Israel.
This isn't a valid social science experiment, it's just lawyers and hasbara operatives gathering allegations to fill up the documents in what they openly admit are frivolous lawsuits to harass Palestinians and their supporters.
What they've proven is that Facebook is more likely to respond to a threatening picture of an adult with a gun than of a child with a slingshot. It would be interesting to see what kind of results a social scientist would get with matched photos.
I'm sure they know that this is a frivolous lawsuit in the US, where our free speech is protected by the First Amendment.
Of course, you can never tell what a judge or a jury in the Southern District of New York will do. So it does have some intimidation value -- for suppressing free speech.
Palestinians who try to sue the Israeli government for its illegal killings don't get anywhere.
It's like the mice trying to sue the cats with a judge and jury of cats.
You may know that doctors used the aircraft industry as a model of rational system design.
Anesthesiologists lowered their malpractice rate from one of the highest to one of the lowest of the medical specialties by adopting standard aircraft engineering principles. One of their problems was that different hospitals had different anesthesiology equipment, and the controls were all different. Anesthesiologists would often work in more than one hospital in a single day, so they would be moving among different controls. It was like the early days of aircraft, when controls like throttles weren't standardized, so the controls on one plane would make it point up, while the same motion on another plane would make it point down. Since then, aircraft engineers have standardized the controls.
The conventional wisdom in medicine now is that they should adopt the methods of the aircraft industry. It doesn't always work, maybe because of cultural differences. It's hard to stop prescribing antibiotics inappropriately and sometimes fatally, when patients demand antibiotics for every ill, and give doctors a bad writeup on Yelp when they don't agree to those demands. It's hard to stop unnecessary surgery when a high volume surgeon can make upwards of $300,000 a year, and a low volume surgeon can be asked to leave the practice.
Interestingly, quality management seems to work well in the government-run British NHS and the US VA hospital system.
One of the best critics of EMRs is Robert Wachter, a professor of medicine at UCSF, who wrote a book called The Digital Doctor which has a chapter on Epic. Wachter went to Boeing and spent time with the engineers who designed the cockpits.
At my own hospital, in 2013 we gave a teenager a 39-fold overdose of a common antibiotic. The initial glitch was innocent enough: A doctor failed to recognize that a screen was set on “milligrams per kilogram” rather than just “milligrams.” But the jaw-dropping part of the error involved alerts that were ignored by both physician and pharmacist. The error caused a grand mal seizure that sent the boy to the I.C.U. and nearly killed him.
How could they do such a thing? It’s because providers receive tens of thousands of such alerts each month, a vast majority of them false alarms. In one month, the electronic monitors in our five intensive care units, which track things like heart rate and oxygen level, produced more than 2.5 million alerts. It’s little wonder that health care providers have grown numb to them.
That's like the UN Security Council. If China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States agree, they can do what they want.
That would probably mean their police agencies deciding among themselves.
Let's look at real cases.
If you had a news service, like Wikileaks, that managed to annoy all of them (as a good news organization should do), they could agree to go after that news organization.
And what are the politically-correct grounds for using the back door? Child pornography? Human trafficking? Tax evasion? Drug dealing? Bribery? Terrorism? Capital crimes? Weapons of mass destruction? Waging war?
What if Miss "A" claims that Julian Assange raped her on one night, though she had enthusiastic sex the nights before and after?
Whether it's immoral is irrelevant. Do you want economic growth or do you not? Growth demands consumption. Without, no economy will survive for long.
You're assuming that all economic growth and consumption is the same, or fungible. I disagree. I want economic growth, but only useful economic growth. A lot of economic growth is wasted.
Take health care. Canada spends about $4,000 a year per capita. We spend about $8,000. (Rounding off to simplify calculations.)
About $2,000 of that $4,000 difference goes to the cost of administeration and profits of the insurance industry. (Go to your insurance company's web site and look for the "loss ratio," which is the amount they actually pay providers, usually 10-15%. Then add in the 15% that your doctor spends dealing with the insurance company.)
So the Canadian GDP for health care is $4,000 per capita, and they're spending pretty much all of it on health care. The American GDP for health care is $8,000, but we're spending $6,000 on health care and $2,000 on administration and profits for the insurance industry.
That's a totally useless $2,000, because the Canadians don't have that expense and they do just fine. Yet it's calculated in our GDP and in our economic growth.
So it seems to me that we could have an economy without health insurance companies, and all those insurance company employees could be released to do something useful, like giving actual health care, and our economy would grow fast enough.
Or you could even let them sit on the beach and go swimming, and include that in the GDP as the value of recreation.
That economy would grow fast enough for me. I just want to have enough doctors to care for me when I get sick. I don't need insurance company employees arguing with me and my doctors over payments. I certainly don't want my doctor to spend an hour a day feeding data into a computer that has no value except for insurance companies.
In a free market without government regulation, cronyism is more powerful. After we had the effective regulation of the FDA in this country, it was easier to fight cronyism.
Yes, I disagree. It shows that college is associated with higher income, but not that college causes higher income.
It's consistent with the alternative hypothesis that (1) today, for the most part, only students from wealthy families can afford to go to college. (2) People from wealthy families tend to make more money than people from low-income families.
I'd be very interested in data that shows causation. Then we could for example sort it by fields of study to find out which fields of study were most effective in raising income.
Association is not causation. That's an important principle in social science (or any science). Economists keep ignoring that.
This comparison does not mean much, because it does confuses cause and effect.
A proper experiment would involve two groups of equal ability. One group receives a free college education, the other group receives the equivalent cash and is told to start working. Each group is instructed to make as much money as possible.
When Bernie Sanders went to Brooklyn College, tuition was free. Now tuition is significant.
Students who come from wealthy families are more able and likely to get a college degree. Once they graduate, they still have all the benefits of a wealthy family.
If your father is a lawyer, you graduate law school and use your father's connections to get a job. But people who work their way through law school have a hard time getting a job. I know lawyers and the difference is striking. One guy from a good family graduates Harvard or Yale and goes to work for a top corporate law firm. Another guy from a working class family graduates Fordham and goes to work in immigration law or criminal practice.
Yes, the free market is not perfect, but there is probably nothing worse than a capitalist economy which is being prevented from receiving any negative market signals by government action.
A monopoly in an imperfect free market can be pretty bad and sometimes worse.
Americans don't realize this because it's been so long since we had a market that was really unregulated by the government. But you can look around the world for examples.
A year after "communism was destroyed" along with the Soviet Union, we had a handful of oligarchs with as much power and monopoly as the previous Soviet oligarchs and even less accountability.
Rather than running a cotton processing plant, they could make more profits by closing the plant, firing the workers, and selling the unprocessed cotton on the international market to cotton processors in India or China.
Or look at the unregulated Chinese pharmaceutical industry, which was the subject of a New York Times series a few years ago.
The Chinese chemical manufacturers would sell powdered milk for infant formulas, and add a toxic chemical that gave a false reading when the wholesale buyers analyzed it, and made it look like it had higher protein content and therefore commanded a higher price. But infants would get sick and die.
The Chinese chemical manufacturers sold a syrup for children's cough medicine, but substituted a cheaper toxic product for the more expensive pharmaceutical product. (I think they substituted ethylene glycol for glycerine.) On the order of 100 children died as a result.
Things like this were common in the U.S. in the 19th century and early 20th century, which is why we created the Food & Drug Administration and why we have government regulations. Once you remove the regulations, the same things happen again.
In Europe the free market gave us Thalidomide. Then they started regulating again.
*Free because college graduates pay back more in taxes to the government in 6 years than the cost of their education.
OK, I've heard of a lot of statements regarding our college graduates, but this bullshit takes the cake.
Why? Well because technically you need a fucking job in order to actually pay taxes on it.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi... How US students get a university degree for free in Germany By Franz Strasser BBC News, Germany 3 June 2015 While the cost of college education in the US has reached record highs, Germany has abandoned tuition fees altogether for German and international students alike. An increasing number of Americans are taking advantage and saving tens of thousands of dollars to get their degrees. More than 4,600 US students are fully enrolled at Germany universities, an increase of 20% over three years. At the same time, the total student debt in the US has reached $1.3 trillion (£850 billion). (Hunter Bliss, South Carolina.) Each semester, Hunter pays a fee of â111 ($120) to the Technical University of Munich (TUM), one of the most highly regarded universities in Europe, to get his degree in physics. Included in that fee is a public transportation ticket that enables Hunter to travel freely around Munich. Health insurance for students in Germany is â80 ($87) a month, much less than what Amy would have had to pay in the US to add him to her plan. To cover rent, mandatory health insurance and other expenses, Hunter's mother sends him between $6,000-7,000 each year. At his nearest school back home, the University of South Carolina, that amount would not have covered the tuition fees. Even with scholarships, that would have totalled about $10,000 a year. Housing, books and living expenses would make that number much higher. Research shows that the system is working, says Sebastian Fohrbeck of DAAD, and that 50% of foreign students stay in Germany. "Even if people don't pay tuition fees, if only 40% stay for five years and pay taxes we recover the cost for the tuition and for the study places so that works out well."
Oh, the irony. That's what happens when you destroy socialism in the Soviet Union and unleash entrepreneurs to come to this country and show us how to make money in a free market.
The free market is like a trans-uranium element. It lasts for about 10^-6 seconds before it degrades into a monopoly.
Here in America, we see that the winner-take-all economy leaves us with monopolies that are even more inefficient, greedy and unresponsive than the unions and regulated monopolies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... And you saw what Uber did to their competitors like Lyft.
Once Uber has driven its competition out of business, they'll be able to raise prices for riders and drive their "contractors" (employees without rights) down to third-world wages by getting them to compete with each other to be the lowest bidder.
A socialist pipedream in which college education is free.*
Good luck paying off your college loans, and your children's college loans, suckers. ____ *Free because college graduates pay back more in taxes to the government in 6 years than the cost of their education.
isn't an agreement to continue offering housing at a stated rate exactly what a signed lease is?
It is quite common for a lease to include a clause detailing how many days notice the landlord must provide the tenant in the event of an eviction involving the sale of the home. 60-day notice is the most common, mostly because this time frame is mandated by the rent control ordinances of many states. Considering how business friendly Texas is, I assume landlords have no problems legally evicting tenants when the property is sold as long as sufficient notice is given.
A contract that any party can terminate at any time at his sole discretion is not a contract.
Contracts are regulated and limited by laws. In New York City, we have pretty strong laws to protect tenants. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07...
In most circumstances, a landlord must renew a New York City residential lease. If they want to end the lease, they have to buy the tenants out. What's a reasonable buyout? A housing lawyer told me: Enough for the tenant to be able to afford to move to a similar apartment elsewhere in the neighborhood. Buyouts of $100,000 or more are common.
In effect, under New York City housing law, a tenant doesn't just rent an apartment, he acquires a property interest in the apartment too. A tenant who lives in the middle of a proposed multi-million dollar development can make a killing just like a small building owner who lives in the middle of the development.
We used to have a pretty good public housing system in New York City. Middle-class people, teachers, firemen, cops, mailmen, waiters, salesmen, could all afford to live in public housing, and most of the public housing projects were pretty good.
Then the Republicans and neocon Democrats tried to destroy public housing, and they did a lot of damage. http://alexisandjesse.tumblr.c...
I always hoped that we could get rid of rent control. Let the government build and improve affordable public housing for me to live in, and let the landlords and real estate developers get rich in the free market if they've got the stuff. Go ahead and compete, and see who does a better job.
But instead we're left with rent control and all its irrationalities. So the relationship between landlords and tenants is a little more adversarial than it has to be.
But we've got the votes, and we've passed laws that give tenants strong protections. Tenants in Austin and other places would be wise to follow our example.
Law 101: Some agreements can be made orally. Other agreements are only valid if they're made in writing. (An agreement in this context is the same as a contract.)
I know a lot of professional photographers, and I'm pretty sure that in the US they need a written, signed model release in order to use a person's recognizable likeness for commercial purposes.
They have more freedom to use photos for artistic purposes. For example, a photographer took photos of pedestrians on the street, and exhibited them in an art gallery. One of his recognizable subjects sued the photographer. The photographer won.
Another photographer used a photo of a black man walking through a train station to illustrate a New York Times magazine story, "The Black Middle Class." The subject sued the New York Times, arguing that it caused him ridicule. The subject won.
But if the photograph is newsworthy or serves a public purpose, you don't need permssion of the subject. If you take a video of the cops beating up a suspect, as they often do, the cops can't use privacy laws to stop you from showing it.
There are so many combinations of circumstances under which you can take and use pictures that the law gets very complicated. At the very least you'd have to look at the cases, and if it was important to know for sure, you'd have to ask a lawyer who specializes in these things.
Take them for all the money that can be had. False arrest charges would be nice too.
Victims of police misconduct have been suing them, and getting big damages, but it hasn't made much difference so far. I figure that in Chicago, the payouts are about $50,000 per cop per year.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... U.S. cities pay out millions to settle police lawsuits By Radley Balko October 1, 2014 The Chicago Sun-Times reported earlier this year that the city has payed out nearly half a billion dollars in settlements over the past decade, and spent $84.6 million in fees, settlements, and awards last year. The Chicago Police Department is about three times the size of the Baltimore PD. Chicago the city has about four times as many people as Baltimore. Crunch those numbers as you wish. Bloomberg News reported that in 2011, Los Angeles paid out $54 million, while New York paid out a whopping $735 million, although those figures include negligence and other claims unrelated to police abuse. Oakland Police Beat reported in April that the city had paid out $74 million to settle 417 lawsuits since 1990. Thatâ(TM)s a little more than $3 million per year. The Denver Post reported in August that the Mile High City paid $13 million over 10 years. The Dallas Morning News reported in May that the city has forked over $6 million since 2011. And last month, Minneapolis Public Radio put that cityâ(TM)s payout at $21 million since 2003.
Cell phone videos are the worst thing that ever happened to violent cops. After a few big outrageous headline cases, juries are more likely to give big awards to the victims. But juries are still really unlikely to convict a cop of a crime. And it's almost impossible for a city or police department to fire those cops, even after they cost the city big civil damages.
You might wonder, at what point would the taxpayers decide that they're spending so much on bad cops that we should fire them, but I haven't seen any sign of it. A lot of politicians (including GWB and Obama) are enthusiastic about firing teachers, on much weaker charges.
It's hard to believe how powerful the police unions are and how the police can get away with almost any crime without being fired. Not only are they an occupying army in the streets, they're an occupying army in the government.
Actually, we do have the abstract and the entire article. PLOS Medicine is open source. http://journals.plos.org/plosm... I think you can even follow the links to the original questionnaire.
There's a pretty strong consensus among epidemiologists, including the ones who gave the talk I linked to https://www.elsevier.com/conne... , that you can't infer causation from association.
But any statistical study worth their salt will check the data for bias and other effects.
Yes, they'll check, but without a randomized, controlled trial, it's impossible to rule out bias and other effects.
This is what happens when you adapt computerized records in medical practice using more money than brains, as we do here in the U.S.
You quickly get huge databases of patients. Any medical resident looking for a cheap, easy journal publication can take a medical record database, run some standard statistical packages, and spit out correlations at p LT 0.05. https://xkcd.com/882/
Then they say, "Our statistical software https://blog.stackoverflow.com... corrected for cigarette smoking and every other known factor, and we're left with this correlation."
I'm dismayed that so many people don't understand this simple distinction, which has caused so much damage.
For example, the Nurses' Health Study found out that post-menopausal women who took hormone replacement drugs were less likely to have heart disease. The drug companies used this in a classic marketing campaign to sell hormone replacement drugs to post-menopausal women.
Then it turned out that hormone replacement drugs caused more breast cancer. This was responsible for a major uptick (epidemic) of breast cancer in the US. The correlation was spurious because some women tried to have healthy behaviors -- diet, exercise, weight loss, and hormone replacement drugs in the mistaken belief that the drugs were "healthy".
So you can expect a lot more studies and news stories like this in the future.
"Frequent fish consumption was associated with a 50% reduction in the relative risk of dying from a heart attack." Her editor's reaction? Slash. Too wordy, too passive. The editor's rewrite? "Women who ate fish five times a week cut their risk of dying later from a heart attack by half."
Slashdot Mirror
How about teaching English, Math, Science and such first? US students are in many cases barely able to read and fail miserably at math. Let's get everyone up to a first world level before we worry about computer science for everyone. CS should be an elective.
Jeff Atwood for Education Secretary.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opi...
Learning to code is overrated: An accomplished programmer would rather his kids learn to read and reason
BY Jeff Atwood
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, September 27, 2015, 5:00 AM
Mayor de Blasio is winning widespread praise for his recent promise that, within 10 years, all of New York City’s public schoolchildren will take computer science classes. But as a career programmer who founded two successful software startups, I am deeply skeptical about teaching all kids to code.
When I became fascinated with computers as a teenager in the early 1980s, computers booted up to a black screen and a blinking cursor. You had to learn the right commands to get them to do anything at all. In other words, you were forced to become a computer programmer in order to be a computer user.
One of the great achievements of modern computing is that we no longer need to be programmers to create, build and get things done with the amazing supercomputers that everyone carries around in their pockets.
That’s a victory we should claim for our kids — rather than purposefully, almost gleefully sending them back to the era before computers became user-friendly tools.
I’m not saying young people should be oblivious to the way the sausage is made, any more than they should be oblivious to where their food comes from. Indeed, in the coming decades, there are thousands if not millions of good jobs waiting for skilled programmers and creative thinkers who understand the logic of programming.
But as someone who’s been immersed in the digital world for most of his life, I can attest: Computer science is less an intellectual discipline than a narrow vocational skill.
If someone tells you “coding is the new literacy” because “computers are everywhere today,” ask them how fuel injection works. By teaching low-level coding, I worry that we are effectively teaching our children the art of automobile repair. A valuable skill — but if automobile manufacturers and engineers are doing their jobs correctly, one that shouldn’t be much concern for average people, who happily use their cars as tools to get things done without ever needing to worry about rebuilding the transmission or even change the oil.
There’s nothing wrong with basic exposure to computer science. But it should not come at the expense of fundamental skills such as reading, writing and mathematics — and unfortunately today our schools, with limited time, have tons of pressure on them to convey those basics better.
I’ve known so many programmers who would have been much more successful in their careers if they had only been better writers, better critical thinkers, better back-of-the-envelope estimators, better communicators. And aside from success in careers, we have to ask the broader question: What kinds of people do we want children to grow up to be?
It’s true. Anyone can learn to code. But very few people can explain why they wrote a line of code, what that code does or convince other people to use it and help them build it. These are all essential human skills that have everything to do with the art of communicating with other people, and nothing at all to do with the writing code that a computer can understand.
Learning to talk to the computer is the easiest part. Computers, for better or worse, do exactly what you tell them to do, every time, in exactly the same way. The people — well . . . you’ll spend the rest of your life figuring that out.
I can't afford American health care any more.
Or how about this one? "Results from a recent AAS survey were reported at the last week's plenary session on harassment, defined as unwelcome conduct that is based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetic information. Some 82% of astronomers have heard sexist remarks from their peers; 44% heard sexist remarks from supervisors; 9% experienced physical harassment from peers or supervisors."
Those articles do not read like SJWs and the do seem to indicate some sort of a problem.
I read that bullet-point summary cited in the article and they didn't define unwelcome conduct. That can be as innocuous as inviting someone to have dinner after a conference. Or striking up an unwelcome conversation. Or criticizing a scientist's paper. Or anything that anyone subjectively decided was unwelcome conduct.
Anything could wind up in that survey as unwelcome conduct, whether it was reasonable conduct or not.
Oh, yes, Shurat HaDin, the Israel governent operation that brings frivolous lawsuits against critics of Israel.
This isn't a valid social science experiment, it's just lawyers and hasbara operatives gathering allegations to fill up the documents in what they openly admit are frivolous lawsuits to harass Palestinians and their supporters.
What they've proven is that Facebook is more likely to respond to a threatening picture of an adult with a gun than of a child with a slingshot. It would be interesting to see what kind of results a social scientist would get with matched photos.
I'm sure they know that this is a frivolous lawsuit in the US, where our free speech is protected by the First Amendment.
Of course, you can never tell what a judge or a jury in the Southern District of New York will do. So it does have some intimidation value -- for suppressing free speech.
Palestinians who try to sue the Israeli government for its illegal killings don't get anywhere.
It's like the mice trying to sue the cats with a judge and jury of cats.
Facebook is currently in a lawsuit over this for allowing "kill Israelis" pages and only banning "kill Arabs" pages.
I couldn't find that with a Google search. Could you give me a source for that?
You may know that doctors used the aircraft industry as a model of rational system design.
Anesthesiologists lowered their malpractice rate from one of the highest to one of the lowest of the medical specialties by adopting standard aircraft engineering principles. One of their problems was that different hospitals had different anesthesiology equipment, and the controls were all different. Anesthesiologists would often work in more than one hospital in a single day, so they would be moving among different controls. It was like the early days of aircraft, when controls like throttles weren't standardized, so the controls on one plane would make it point up, while the same motion on another plane would make it point down. Since then, aircraft engineers have standardized the controls.
The conventional wisdom in medicine now is that they should adopt the methods of the aircraft industry. It doesn't always work, maybe because of cultural differences. It's hard to stop prescribing antibiotics inappropriately and sometimes fatally, when patients demand antibiotics for every ill, and give doctors a bad writeup on Yelp when they don't agree to those demands. It's hard to stop unnecessary surgery when a high volume surgeon can make upwards of $300,000 a year, and a low volume surgeon can be asked to leave the practice.
Interestingly, quality management seems to work well in the government-run British NHS and the US VA hospital system.
One of the best critics of EMRs is Robert Wachter, a professor of medicine at UCSF, who wrote a book called The Digital Doctor which has a chapter on Epic. Wachter went to Boeing and spent time with the engineers who designed the cockpits.
Wachter btw wrote this http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03...
At my own hospital, in 2013 we gave a teenager a 39-fold overdose of a common antibiotic. The initial glitch was innocent enough: A doctor failed to recognize that a screen was set on “milligrams per kilogram” rather than just “milligrams.” But the jaw-dropping part of the error involved alerts that were ignored by both physician and pharmacist. The error caused a grand mal seizure that sent the boy to the I.C.U. and nearly killed him.
How could they do such a thing? It’s because providers receive tens of thousands of such alerts each month, a vast majority of them false alarms. In one month, the electronic monitors in our five intensive care units, which track things like heart rate and oxygen level, produced more than 2.5 million alerts. It’s little wonder that health care providers have grown numb to them.
That's like the UN Security Council. If China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States agree, they can do what they want.
That would probably mean their police agencies deciding among themselves.
Let's look at real cases.
If you had a news service, like Wikileaks, that managed to annoy all of them (as a good news organization should do), they could agree to go after that news organization.
And what are the politically-correct grounds for using the back door? Child pornography? Human trafficking? Tax evasion? Drug dealing? Bribery? Terrorism? Capital crimes? Weapons of mass destruction? Waging war?
What if Miss "A" claims that Julian Assange raped her on one night, though she had enthusiastic sex the nights before and after?
You incorrectly assume that we live in a different system. In our system, you need to work to get money.
Not if you're in the top 0.1%. As C. Wright Mills said, they don't have to work. They can do whatever they want. For them work is a hobby.
And they seem to get most of the income and wealth in this country.
Whether it's immoral is irrelevant. Do you want economic growth or do you not? Growth demands consumption. Without, no economy will survive for long.
You're assuming that all economic growth and consumption is the same, or fungible. I disagree. I want economic growth, but only useful economic growth. A lot of economic growth is wasted.
Take health care. Canada spends about $4,000 a year per capita. We spend about $8,000. (Rounding off to simplify calculations.)
About $2,000 of that $4,000 difference goes to the cost of administeration and profits of the insurance industry. (Go to your insurance company's web site and look for the "loss ratio," which is the amount they actually pay providers, usually 10-15%. Then add in the 15% that your doctor spends dealing with the insurance company.)
So the Canadian GDP for health care is $4,000 per capita, and they're spending pretty much all of it on health care. The American GDP for health care is $8,000, but we're spending $6,000 on health care and $2,000 on administration and profits for the insurance industry.
That's a totally useless $2,000, because the Canadians don't have that expense and they do just fine. Yet it's calculated in our GDP and in our economic growth.
So it seems to me that we could have an economy without health insurance companies, and all those insurance company employees could be released to do something useful, like giving actual health care, and our economy would grow fast enough.
Or you could even let them sit on the beach and go swimming, and include that in the GDP as the value of recreation.
That economy would grow fast enough for me. I just want to have enough doctors to care for me when I get sick. I don't need insurance company employees arguing with me and my doctors over payments. I certainly don't want my doctor to spend an hour a day feeding data into a computer that has no value except for insurance companies.
You have cronyism in every economic system.
In a free market without government regulation, cronyism is more powerful. After we had the effective regulation of the FDA in this country, it was easier to fight cronyism.
Yes, I disagree. It shows that college is associated with higher income, but not that college causes higher income.
It's consistent with the alternative hypothesis that (1) today, for the most part, only students from wealthy families can afford to go to college. (2) People from wealthy families tend to make more money than people from low-income families.
I'd be very interested in data that shows causation. Then we could for example sort it by fields of study to find out which fields of study were most effective in raising income.
Association is not causation. That's an important principle in social science (or any science). Economists keep ignoring that.
The huge capital costs of lobbying legislators in places like Colorado.
That's an interesting article. I agree with one of the comments:
When Bernie Sanders went to Brooklyn College, tuition was free. Now tuition is significant.
Students who come from wealthy families are more able and likely to get a college degree. Once they graduate, they still have all the benefits of a wealthy family.
If your father is a lawyer, you graduate law school and use your father's connections to get a job. But people who work their way through law school have a hard time getting a job. I know lawyers and the difference is striking. One guy from a good family graduates Harvard or Yale and goes to work for a top corporate law firm. Another guy from a working class family graduates Fordham and goes to work in immigration law or criminal practice.
Yes, the free market is not perfect, but there is probably nothing worse than a capitalist economy which is being prevented from receiving any negative market signals by government action.
A monopoly in an imperfect free market can be pretty bad and sometimes worse.
Americans don't realize this because it's been so long since we had a market that was really unregulated by the government. But you can look around the world for examples.
A year after "communism was destroyed" along with the Soviet Union, we had a handful of oligarchs with as much power and monopoly as the previous Soviet oligarchs and even less accountability.
Rather than running a cotton processing plant, they could make more profits by closing the plant, firing the workers, and selling the unprocessed cotton on the international market to cotton processors in India or China.
Or look at the unregulated Chinese pharmaceutical industry, which was the subject of a New York Times series a few years ago.
The Chinese chemical manufacturers would sell powdered milk for infant formulas, and add a toxic chemical that gave a false reading when the wholesale buyers analyzed it, and made it look like it had higher protein content and therefore commanded a higher price. But infants would get sick and die.
The Chinese chemical manufacturers sold a syrup for children's cough medicine, but substituted a cheaper toxic product for the more expensive pharmaceutical product. (I think they substituted ethylene glycol for glycerine.) On the order of 100 children died as a result.
Things like this were common in the U.S. in the 19th century and early 20th century, which is why we created the Food & Drug Administration and why we have government regulations. Once you remove the regulations, the same things happen again.
In Europe the free market gave us Thalidomide. Then they started regulating again.
*Free because college graduates pay back more in taxes to the government in 6 years than the cost of their education.
OK, I've heard of a lot of statements regarding our college graduates, but this bullshit takes the cake.
Why? Well because technically you need a fucking job in order to actually pay taxes on it.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
How US students get a university degree for free in Germany
By Franz Strasser BBC News, Germany
3 June 2015
While the cost of college education in the US has reached record highs, Germany has abandoned tuition fees altogether for German and international students alike. An increasing number of Americans are taking advantage and saving tens of thousands of dollars to get their degrees.
More than 4,600 US students are fully enrolled at Germany universities, an increase of 20% over three years. At the same time, the total student debt in the US has reached $1.3 trillion (£850 billion).
(Hunter Bliss, South Carolina.)
Each semester, Hunter pays a fee of â111 ($120) to the Technical University of Munich (TUM), one of the most highly regarded universities in Europe, to get his degree in physics.
Included in that fee is a public transportation ticket that enables Hunter to travel freely around Munich.
Health insurance for students in Germany is â80 ($87) a month, much less than what Amy would have had to pay in the US to add him to her plan.
To cover rent, mandatory health insurance and other expenses, Hunter's mother sends him between $6,000-7,000 each year.
At his nearest school back home, the University of South Carolina, that amount would not have covered the tuition fees. Even with scholarships, that would have totalled about $10,000 a year. Housing, books and living expenses would make that number much higher.
Research shows that the system is working, says Sebastian Fohrbeck of DAAD, and that 50% of foreign students stay in Germany.
"Even if people don't pay tuition fees, if only 40% stay for five years and pay taxes we recover the cost for the tuition and for the study places so that works out well."
Oh, the irony. That's what happens when you destroy socialism in the Soviet Union and unleash entrepreneurs to come to this country and show us how to make money in a free market.
The free market is like a trans-uranium element. It lasts for about 10^-6 seconds before it degrades into a monopoly.
Here in America, we see that the winner-take-all economy leaves us with monopolies that are even more inefficient, greedy and unresponsive than the unions and regulated monopolies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... And you saw what Uber did to their competitors like Lyft.
Once Uber has driven its competition out of business, they'll be able to raise prices for riders and drive their "contractors" (employees without rights) down to third-world wages by getting them to compete with each other to be the lowest bidder.
A socialist pipedream in which college education is free.*
Good luck paying off your college loans, and your children's college loans, suckers.
____
*Free because college graduates pay back more in taxes to the government in 6 years than the cost of their education.
Who would have thought?
isn't an agreement to continue offering housing at a stated rate exactly what a signed lease is?
It is quite common for a lease to include a clause detailing how many days notice the landlord must provide the tenant in the event of an eviction involving the sale of the home. 60-day notice is the most common, mostly because this time frame is mandated by the rent control ordinances of many states. Considering how business friendly Texas is, I assume landlords have no problems legally evicting tenants when the property is sold as long as sufficient notice is given.
A contract that any party can terminate at any time at his sole discretion is not a contract.
Contracts are regulated and limited by laws. In New York City, we have pretty strong laws to protect tenants. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07...
In most circumstances, a landlord must renew a New York City residential lease. If they want to end the lease, they have to buy the tenants out. What's a reasonable buyout? A housing lawyer told me: Enough for the tenant to be able to afford to move to a similar apartment elsewhere in the neighborhood. Buyouts of $100,000 or more are common.
In effect, under New York City housing law, a tenant doesn't just rent an apartment, he acquires a property interest in the apartment too. A tenant who lives in the middle of a proposed multi-million dollar development can make a killing just like a small building owner who lives in the middle of the development.
We used to have a pretty good public housing system in New York City. Middle-class people, teachers, firemen, cops, mailmen, waiters, salesmen, could all afford to live in public housing, and most of the public housing projects were pretty good.
Then the Republicans and neocon Democrats tried to destroy public housing, and they did a lot of damage. http://alexisandjesse.tumblr.c...
I always hoped that we could get rid of rent control. Let the government build and improve affordable public housing for me to live in, and let the landlords and real estate developers get rich in the free market if they've got the stuff. Go ahead and compete, and see who does a better job.
But instead we're left with rent control and all its irrationalities. So the relationship between landlords and tenants is a little more adversarial than it has to be.
But we've got the votes, and we've passed laws that give tenants strong protections. Tenants in Austin and other places would be wise to follow our example.
Law 101: Some agreements can be made orally. Other agreements are only valid if they're made in writing. (An agreement in this context is the same as a contract.)
I know a lot of professional photographers, and I'm pretty sure that in the US they need a written, signed model release in order to use a person's recognizable likeness for commercial purposes.
They have more freedom to use photos for artistic purposes. For example, a photographer took photos of pedestrians on the street, and exhibited them in an art gallery. One of his recognizable subjects sued the photographer. The photographer won.
Another photographer used a photo of a black man walking through a train station to illustrate a New York Times magazine story, "The Black Middle Class." The subject sued the New York Times, arguing that it caused him ridicule. The subject won.
But if the photograph is newsworthy or serves a public purpose, you don't need permssion of the subject. If you take a video of the cops beating up a suspect, as they often do, the cops can't use privacy laws to stop you from showing it.
There are so many combinations of circumstances under which you can take and use pictures that the law gets very complicated. At the very least you'd have to look at the cases, and if it was important to know for sure, you'd have to ask a lawyer who specializes in these things.
Take them for all the money that can be had. False arrest charges would be nice too.
Victims of police misconduct have been suing them, and getting big damages, but it hasn't made much difference so far. I figure that in Chicago, the payouts are about $50,000 per cop per year.
Cell phone videos are the worst thing that ever happened to violent cops. After a few big outrageous headline cases, juries are more likely to give big awards to the victims. But juries are still really unlikely to convict a cop of a crime. And it's almost impossible for a city or police department to fire those cops, even after they cost the city big civil damages.
You might wonder, at what point would the taxpayers decide that they're spending so much on bad cops that we should fire them, but I haven't seen any sign of it. A lot of politicians (including GWB and Obama) are enthusiastic about firing teachers, on much weaker charges.
It's hard to believe how powerful the police unions are and how the police can get away with almost any crime without being fired. Not only are they an occupying army in the streets, they're an occupying army in the government.
Actually, we do have the abstract and the entire article. PLOS Medicine is open source. http://journals.plos.org/plosm... I think you can even follow the links to the original questionnaire.
There's a pretty strong consensus among epidemiologists, including the ones who gave the talk I linked to https://www.elsevier.com/conne... , that you can't infer causation from association.
But any statistical study worth their salt will check the data for bias and other effects.
Yes, they'll check, but without a randomized, controlled trial, it's impossible to rule out bias and other effects.
This is what happens when you adapt computerized records in medical practice using more money than brains, as we do here in the U.S.
You quickly get huge databases of patients. Any medical resident looking for a cheap, easy journal publication can take a medical record database, run some standard statistical packages, and spit out correlations at p LT 0.05. https://xkcd.com/882/
Then they say, "Our statistical software https://blog.stackoverflow.com... corrected for cigarette smoking and every other known factor, and we're left with this correlation."
I'm dismayed that so many people don't understand this simple distinction, which has caused so much damage.
For example, the Nurses' Health Study found out that post-menopausal women who took hormone replacement drugs were less likely to have heart disease. The drug companies used this in a classic marketing campaign to sell hormone replacement drugs to post-menopausal women.
Then it turned out that hormone replacement drugs caused more breast cancer. This was responsible for a major uptick (epidemic) of breast cancer in the US. The correlation was spurious because some women tried to have healthy behaviors -- diet, exercise, weight loss, and hormone replacement drugs in the mistaken belief that the drugs were "healthy".
So you can expect a lot more studies and news stories like this in the future.
You beat me to it.
Citation needed.
http://www.healthnewsreview.or...
"Frequent fish consumption was associated with a 50% reduction in the relative risk of dying from a heart attack." Her editor's reaction? Slash. Too wordy, too passive. The editor's rewrite? "Women who ate fish five times a week cut their risk of dying later from a heart attack by half."
https://www.elsevier.com/conne...