In order for AP to use Manuel Garcia's photos, Garcia had to give them a written license or contract stating the rights he was giving them (first use, non-exclusive rights, all rights, domestic rights, international rights, etc.).
What was the contract that Garcia signed with AP? If he didn't sign anything, then AP wouldn't have any rights to use his work at all. If he signed over all his rights, AP owns the work. If he signed over certain rights to use them in newspapers and magazines, but kept all other rights for himself, then he owns the rights. Depending on the contract he used, he might have kept the right to make derivative merchandise.
Garcia's legal papers don't mention anything about the contract he signed with AP.
Are there any photographers out there? What are the provisions in the usual contract you sign with an agency like AP? Do you sell all rights? What rights do you keep?
I believe in freedom of speech. There is a small risk that this could lead to anti-Semitism and violence, but there's a greater risk that censorship could lead to things that are as bad or worse. And I think that getting this out in the open is the best way to deal with it.
Don't the Brits still read Milton's Areopagitica and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty any more?
BTW, Simon Sheppard seems to have a case of arrested sexual development, even by Slashdot standards. http://www.heretical.com/sexsci/index.html Or maybe not by Slashdot standards.
Some genes are turned on and off in sperm cells, and other genes are turned on and off in egg cells. There's currently no way to figure out which is turned on and off.
So scientists tried to make artificial sperm and egg (with mice) in the 1980s and they failed.
(I think they wound up with mice that died soon after birth.)
Yes, militant lesbians were disappointed.
The Newcastle researchers claimed to produce sperm, but the only way to prove that they produced viable, healthy sperm is to produce a healthy offspring from it, and they haven't done that. (For ethical reasons, very conveniently.)
So we don't know whether it's really sperm. Sperm that can't produce offspring isn't really sperm, is it?
How come they didn't try it on a mouse first? If they produced sperm from mouse stem cells, and got a female mouse pregnant with it, and produced healthy offspring, then they could say they produced sperm from stem cells.
From your post, I'm pretty sure you've never had to get health care in the U.S. for someone who didn't have any money. Correct?
There are some sicknesses that socialized healthcare either will not cover or will not cover thoroughly enough to really cure.
Name one.
In the U.K., under the NICE system, they set a price limit on every condition. If they can save a year of life for about $50,000, they will do it. If it costs more than that, NICE recommends against it, but if people complain about it, the government usually gives in and pays for it anyway. They try to avoid giving out $100,000 drugs that have minimal effectiveness, but they treat long-term conditions better than we do in the U.S.
The U.K. is the cheapest, stingiest system in Europe. Sweden probably has the best care in the world.
But even in the US you can usually get on so many programs and with the aid of various non-profits and a good story in the newspaper or TV news station get enough help to get the care you need.
I just spent several days on the phone over the last few months trying to help a friend of mine who lost his job and health insurance get on Medicaid, so I know something about what actually happens. The city welfare agency just delayed his application for months. He had one condition that required lifetime medication to save his life, so it was a serious business. I made half a dozen calls to those non-profits and got nowhere.
But don't take my word for it. Here's a story in the Wall Street Journal that demonstrates how you can die in the U.S. if you can't afford health care.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06339/743713-84.stm The WSJ had a whole series like that. (This is for people who don't believe Michael Moore.)
Granted, you will probably be in debt till you die, but even if you are poor you can usually *get* the initial treatments
As the WSJ story shows, that's not true.
but with socialized healthcare you get placed in "review hell" because A) the doctors get paid the same really no matter what they do and B) there are many other doctors/clinics.
So how come the Mayo Clinic, where doctors are on salary and get paid the same whatever they do, has some of the best outcomes in the country?
If you say you need antibiotics for something, chances are in the US you can get them for whatever weak reason,
That's supposed to be a benefit? If you take antibiotics when you don't need them, you're growing antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which could kill you later.
with socialized healtcare if you have a non-common illness the answer will always be to wait longer.
Ridiculous. I just read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in which French doctors described how they were treating cryopyrin-associated periodic syndrome in their socialist system. Is that non-common enough for you? They were using canakinumab, which will probably cost tens of thousands of dollars per year.
If I pay to collect the data & generate a database that doesn't mean that I can be forced to give the data away. But also, I can't stop anybody else from collecting the data & making their own database. If you don't want to buy it from me go forth & make your own database
That's an interesting argument, and it's logical from where you're coming from.
But the copyright law comes at it from a different direction.
If you go to a lot of effort to collect data, that's commendable. In copyright law, that's called "sweat of the brow."
But in copyright law, you can't copyright data that you've collected just by sweat of the brow. It also takes some kind of creativity or innovation or judgment.
We fought a Communist dictatorship which, for all its brutality, built housing with electricity, phones and running water, roads, a health care system, and (most significantly) an educational system which was quite good and educated women, who had significant equality. They were allied to the Soviet Union, a country that was trying to develop better relations with the U.S. (and did under Gorbachev).
We replaced the Communists with gangs of illiterate Mujahadin and then Taliban warlords who were even more brutal than the Communists, who cut the country up into feudal feifs, destroyed everything and built nothing, who drove out Doctors Without Borders (after 30 years), and whose idea of education was having boys (not girls) read the Koran which they then interpret to mean "Anything we want it to mean." They were allied with lunatics like Osama bin Ladin who used all our training against the Soviets to attack us, and with the Pakistani islamists.
Our support for the Mujahadeen against the Soviets was in our interest only in the mind of an unrepentant lunatic cold warrior.
If the Russians would help us today in Afghanistan, we would be overjoyed (because it would mean fewer dead Americans).
If we had left them alone, Afghanistan would have been in more competent hands, with a secular or non-sectarian society, with more freedom than they have today, and with less of a threat to the U.S. than they are today.
Because they can selectively release video of me doing things that are frowned upon in polite society, without everyone realizing that *everyone* does things that are frowned upon in polite society?
Because of the similarly Orwellian bank reporting requirements, New York State governor Eliot Spitzer was caught using an escort service, and forced to resign.
His lieutenant governor, David Patterson, replaced him as governor. By all accounts Patterson is a nice guy who is totally ineffectual and incapable of handling a tough fight.
The Democrats held a 32-30 majority of the state Senate. To simplify a complicated story, one of those Democrats, who is being investigated in a bribery case, switched over to the Republicans, leaving the Senate tied 31-31, and they can't do anything. Normally, the Lieutenant Governor would break the tie, but there is no Lieutenant Governor now.
These cameras will allow the unaccountable volunteers who are running them to spy on the sex life of everyone in Lancaster, including government officials, and release the information or not as they choose.
Morales says he refuses all other requests. "The divorce lawyer who wants video of a husband coming out of a bar with his mistress, we won't do it," he said.
It seems that the guy doesn't know that a divorce lawyer can subpoena the video.
Any judge in any legal proceeding who decides that it's in the interests of justice to have the video can issue a subpoena for it.
That system doesn't just cover bars. It covers every public street. Even people who are single might not want a video record of everybody who walked through their door and spent the night with them.
The New York Times
December 3, 2008
The Evidence Gap
British Balance Gain Against the Cost of the Latest Drugs
By GARDINER HARRIS
RUISLIP, England â" When Bruce Hardy's kidney cancer spread to his lung, his doctor recommended an expensive new pill from Pfizer. But Mr. Hardy is British, and the British health authorities refused to buy the medicine. His wife has been distraught.
FWIW, I recently sent the following email to a friend with prostate cancer who asked for my advice.
The most useful parts are the links to the free NEJM articles.
Note the study that followed men 55-59 with Gleason Grade 6 localized prostate cancer. 15% died from prostate cancer at 15 years. I think that's the number you're looking for.
They said you can often make a good case for "watchful waiting," essentially no treatment. Good story about the guy who got off the table right before the operation and decided not to have surgery. (They deliberately chose a case where there isn't enough evidence to make an easy decision.)
Note also that they had 1,200 surgeries with no fatalities, so the surgery is a lot safer than it was in your father's day.
Dear _______
The best, most reliable source of information to make a decision on prostate cancer that I ever found is The New England Journal of Medicine. There are 2 problems: (1) It can be difficult reading, although they know patients will be reading some of their articles and they try to edit those articles to be as understandable as possible. I think it's easier to read one difficult article that gives you the information you want than to read ten easy articles that don't. (2) Often in medicine, especially in prostate cancer, they don't have enough scientific evidence to make a clear, easy decision. But if you have to make a difficult decision, it's easier if you at least have the best evidence.
I remembered 2 articles in the NEJM in particular. One was free online; I'm attaching a PDF of the other. These articles are technical but you should be able to understand them by reading slowly and carefully (as I do). They do a good job of telling you how a doctor thinks about prostate cancer. You can find an explanation of anything you don't understand on Wikipedia. I'm also giving you my own notes that I made when I read the articles, and it might be easier to scan them first for an overview. Your best source of information should be your own doctor, but these articles will help you talk to him.
One article was a survey of patients and their wives on the outcomes of prostate cancer surgery and radiation. The standard question about prostate cancer surgery is, "What's the probability of sexual impotence?" You assume that you'r going to have the best odds, with a surgeon who does a lot of cases, at a hospital that does a lot of cases. Surgeons (and the American Cancer Society) like to make reassuring claims, so you have to be skeptical about how they define impotence. I got the impression that it was about 50%, and that's what this article reported. However, the results are better for younger patients -- 75-year-old men have low sexual functioning to start with. This article also discusses the problems of urinary incontinence, which as I recall wasn't as much of a problem. There is a basic tradeoff between surgery (radical prostatectomy) and radiation (either external beam radiation or brachytherapy): surgery is more likely to cause urinary problems, radiation is more likely to cause rectal inflammation. This article got a lot of press coverage so you can search Google News for further discussion and explanation.
The other was a case history of a 55-year old man with a Gleason score of 6 (grade 3+3) who decided in 1996 to get surgery, and then changed his mind at the last minute and walked out of the operating room. He's been followed ever since and the cancer hasn't metastasized. The NEJM likes to give cases that are in the very grey area of the evidence, with the hardest decisions, and this is one of them. They have experts explain the evidence and their thinking behind each option, there isn't any right answer, and any of the options would be a reasonable choice. I've attached a PDF of that article.
They followed up that article by inviting 3 more advocates for each of the 3 options to argue their case, and then invited readers to vote in an on-line poll. That article is free
It's hard to compare to 'normal' people, because someone like Steve Jobs would have had an team of the very best surgeons working on him, and generally the best medical care that money could buy..
I've talked to a few transplant surgeons from the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia, and I've followed the medical literature.
Everybody who gets a transplant gets the best medical care money can buy. It's an all or nothing thing.
Hospitals monitor their results carefully, and if the success rates go down, the hospital better figure out why and correct the problem, or they can't do any more transplants.
I once heard a medical ethicist (I think Arthur Caplan) who worked with transplant programs say that they do discriminate against the poor -- black people were less likely to get transplants, etc. But the discrimination comes before they get to the transplant center.
Most U.S. centers will make sure a patient can pay for the transplant before they accept the patient into the program. (It can be Medicaid.) That's where the economic discrimination comes from. Once they get into the program, everybody gets the best treatment the hospital can give.
There are other (arguably unfair) criteria like "social support." They can decide that somebody who lives alone in a rooming house and is too confused to follow his medication schedule might not be able to handle the post-transplant regimen, while a married person with a spouse and supportive family could.
Super-wealthy and celebrity patients do get better personal treatment, but not better medical treatment. I'm sure the doctors return Steve Jobs' phone calls faster. After all, he might endow them with a research wing. But I would expect that he would get the same medical treatment, with the same outcomes, as a Medicaid patient who managed to get into the transplant program.
(This being Slashdot, I would add that some transplant surgeons are really hot chicks.)
h+: There has been a lot of discussion about the dangers of people doing this sort of research at home. Do you think this is over-exaggerated?
MP: I really do. The chances of someone accidentally creating a dangerous organism and the chances of it surviving in the environment outside a laboratory are vanishingly low.
Rudy Rucker has a great quote on that, "I have a mental image of germ-size MIT nerds putting on gangsta clothes and venturing into alleys to try some rough stuff. And then they meet up with the homies who've been keeping it real for a billion years or so." The bare facts of it are that there's nothing random about synthetic biology research. When we design a transgenic organism, we're deliberately adding one specific piece of new functionality, maybe a small pathway that leads to a new piece of functionality -- and the organism has to expend energy on producing the new proteins that those new genes code for. Because of this, the synthetic organism is necessarily less competitive than its wild-type relatives who are much better suited for the niche they already occupy in the environment.
So any accidental release is fated to die out within a few generations, because itâ(TM)s just not competitive enough.
That's right. When rabbits were introduced in Australia, they died off right away because they were less competitive than their wild-type relatives who were much better suited to the niche they already occupied.
I'm trying to think of a downside to making all medications and supplements require FDA approval.
The downside is that the process produces both:
- long delays (during which people suffer and perhaps die) and:
- enormous costs (which keep some safe-and-effective drugs from reaching the market and raise the costs of medications which DO make it through the gauntlet - and must pay for both themselves and their share of the ones that fail).
When the legislation was first proposed it was estimated that if it added six months to the introduction of new medications it was a net loss. Now it takes years and tens of millions of dollars per new drug that starts testing.
One estimate of these costs - in a Wall Street Journal headline - is that the delay required for approving the use of Beta Blockers in the US to prevent secondary heart attacks (after they were approved for that in Europe) resulted in 100,000 deaths.
That was a Wall Street Journal editorial page essay -- which is a completely different thing from the reliable WSJ news stories.
If I recall correctly (can't find it on the WSJ's lame search engine) the author of that essay was a doctor who gave up the practice of medicine to work on Wall Street, and then became an FDA official under the Bush Administration. He has a right to give up medicine for finance, and work for a Republican administration, but it shows the free-market ideology that he's coming from.
Yes, it takes longer to approve drugs, during which the people who would have been helped by those drugs have to do without and in theory might die sooner. (BTW, there are very few "life-saving" drugs these days. Most of those drugs at best extend life by a few months. A drug that extends the life of a lung cancer or colon cancer patient by 3 months is a big deal.)
But when they put drugs on the market without enough testing, as they did when free-market conservatives ruled the FDA, they sold drugs that did more harm than good, like Vioxx and fen-phen.
So less regulation actually killed people rather than saving lives.
If you have a bunch of useful drugs, mixed up with a bunch of harmful drugs, and you can't tell which is which, those drugs can overall do more harm than good. You can't just throw drugs out on the free market and wait to see whether they save more people than they kill.
You can't figure it out from economic theory alone. You have to look at the facts. Before we had regulation, drug companies used to sell useless drugs that would kill people. When the Republicans cut back on regulations, drug companies sold more useless drugs that kill people. Regulation saves more lives than they cost.
National Center of Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 0200. marshali@health.qld.gov.au
OBJECTIVES: Interest in zinc as a treatment for the common cold has grown following the recent publication of several controlled trials. The objective of this review was to assess the effects of zinc lozenges for cold symptoms.
SEARCH STRATEGY: A search was made of the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register, MEDLINE, EMBASE and reference lists of articles. Searches were run to the end of 1997.
SELECTION CRITERIA: Randomised double blind placebo-controlled trials of zinc for acute upper respiratory tract infection or cold.
DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Two reviewers independently extracted data and assessed trial quality.
MAIN RESULTS: Seven trials involving 754 cases were included. With the exception of one study, the methodological quality was rated as medium to high. For most outcome measures different summary estimates were used across the studies to describe the duration, incidence and severity of respiratory symptoms. This limited the ability to pool results. Results from two trials (04 - Mossad; 08 - Smith) suggested zinc lozenges reduced the severity and duration of cold symptoms. However, there was significant potential for bias, and further research is required to substantiate these findings. Overall, the results suggest that treatment with zinc lozenges did not reduce the duration of cold symptoms.
REVIEWER'S CONCLUSIONS: Evidence of the effects of zinc lozenges for treating the common cold is inconclusive. Given the potential for treatment to produce side effects, the use of zinc lozenges to treat cold symptoms deserves further study.
(This meta-analysis was actually withdrawn, and I don't know why, maybe to evaluate more recent data.)
I wrote a few articles about that for Law Office Computing magazine, so I'm very interested in these comments. It was a long time ago, and the software has changed, but the concepts are still the same.
They were imaging and indexing up to several million documents. During a civil suit, in discovery, companies on each side of the lawsuit have to disclose every relevant document to each other.
Lawyers probably use the most flexible and all-encompassing systems, since they have to deal with every industry, every profession, everything. They also spend more money on their systems than most people can afford. They told me it costs them about $1 a page to thoroughly index big databases.
Information scientists told me the best model of a document database was PubMed, which indexes virtually every significant published medical article. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed
The big limitation of Google is that you can't search too well by date. Another limitation of text searches is that you can't search for concepts -- just words. Sometimes words (particularly names) match concepts very well, but if they don't, you've got a problem.
Yeah, it would have been nice if you had set up coding and naming conventions at the beginning, so the original authors could have sorted them as you went along. It may be difficult or impossible to go back and re-code them after the fact. It could wind up costing $1 a document. OTOH, you could be lucky -- some industries have been using standardized filing schemes and standardized jargon since the days of slide rules and T-squares.
There should be standard filing schemes and procedures throughout your industry, so your solutions may be industry-specific. There should be consultants that deal with your industry who would be happy to talk to you (for the prospect of maybe getting your business). There should be trade magazines in your industry that have covered the same issue for companies of your size. (Hell, if the price is right I'll write a roundup for them.) Or you might have a trade or professional association with some friendly people who have done it before. Trade and professional associations usually have a computer or information technology section, and if you're a member of the association, you can call up the members of the section.
Bowles has recently studied the way that people are motivated by selfishness and the desire to maximize their own income, as compared to altruism and the desire to do a good job and be well-regarded by others. Real-world experiments show that, contrary to traditional economic theories, market incentives destroy cooperation and are less efficient than voluntary, altruistic behavior "in most cases."[3]
People act not only for material interests but also "to constitute themselves as dignified, autonomous, and moral individuals," he wrote.
Behavioral experiments suggest that "economic incentives may be counterproductive when they signal that selfishness is an appropriate response" and "undermine the moral values that lead people to act altruistically."
For example, "In Haifa, at six day care centers, a fine was imposed on parents who were late picking up their children at the end of the day. Parents responded to the fine by doubling the fraction of time they arrived late. When after 12 weeks the fine was revoked, their enhanced tardiness persisted unabated." This illustrates a "negative synergy" between economic incentives and moral behavior. "The fine seems to have undermined the parents' sense of ethical obligation to avoid inconveniencing the teachers and led them to think of lateness as just another commodity they could purchase."
When I read the Science magazine article on girls and math, buried in the fine print they admitted that they didn't really have statistically significant data for high-performing girls.
So I won't take this seriously until I can read the original article.
3. Most normal people will commit war crimes just like the Nazis did if they are placed in an environment like the Nazis were in. This was proven by the social scientists Stanley Milgram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment and Philip Zimbardo. http://www.prisonexp.org/ . This was confirmed by the real-world experience of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq.
These government agents are professionals at manipulating people. You are an amateur at defending yourself from their manipulation. You don't know what you could be manipulated or tricked into doing.
The government informer threatened to kill John DeLorean's daughter. Would you have let them kill your family?
You can't condemn someone else by saying that you would never have done such a thing. You don't know.
You show me a person who says "Yeah, sure" to an offer of blowing up a Synagogue for cash and I'll show you a person with a predisposition to do that anyway.
If you had read psychologists like Stanley Milgram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_milgram you'd know that most people could be manipulated to do exactly what the Nazis did by someone who is a skillful manipulator -- and informers are skillful manipulators. If you read testimony at these trials, you'll see that the defendants made innocent decisions that would have seemed reasonable at the time, and one thing led to another.
If you had been in that situation, an undercover agent might have manipulated you into going along with the plot.
Prejudice against Muslims? Hardly. You *have* noticed that the people going around doing this are primarily young, primarily Muslim, primarily male, right?
If moderate Muslims want Islam to be respected rather than suspected, they need to stand up and denounce terror and denounce terrorists. Even when those terrorists are state actors.
That is such bullshit I don't want to go through the details. You'll have to look up Gershom Gorenberg's articles yourself. Let's just say that I was working to free Muslims from jail who were imprisoned for denouncing terrorism.
What's my race and religion? You can call me Irish Catholic. In some parts of the world, that might have gotten me some extra scrutiny once upon a time and I wouldn't call it unfair. People with names like mine and a religion like mine were planting bombs in London, and some here in the US were helping to finance them. If our terrorism problems here were with people of Irish ancestry and Catholic religion, I'd be quite understanding if that got me secondary screening when I fly, and I wouldn't be whining that it's racism or prejudice.
There's at least one case that I can remember of a group of innocent Irish people who were convicted of terrorism charges in England and who served decades in jail, where one of them died, until it turned out that the scientific evidence against them, of nitrates, was faulty and they were released.
1. The idea of committing the crime came from law enforcement officers, rather than the defendant.
2. The law enforcement officers induced the person to commit the crime.
3. The defendant was not ready and willing to commit this type of crime before being induced to do so.
Many of these terrorist cases meet all 3 requirements.
Repeatedly, an informer went to American residents who had previously had no contact with Islamic terrorism.
Repeatedly, the informer came up with the plot, and encouraged the defendant to participate by offering him substantial amounts of money.
Repeatedly, the defendant had never participated in this kind of activity before, and would never have done so if the informer hadn't suggested it and facilitated it, often by providing bogus "weapons."
The prosecutors claim that the defendants would or might have some day participated in terrorism anyway. That's speculation which would only convince jurors who are prejudiced to believe that Muslims or Arabs are terrorists.
Slashdot Mirror
That is all fine and dandy to say when you are not a Jewish person living in the UK....
I'm a Jewish person living in the US.
I knew a lot of Jewish people who had been living in Germany and the USSR.
We do occasionally send people to jail in the U.S. for nonviolently expressing their beliefs (our Bill of Rights notwithstanding). A disproportionate number were Jewish people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_goldman http://law.jrank.org/pages/3012/Hollywood-Ten-Trials-1948-50.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbie_hoffman
Overall, I'd take the problems of free speech over the problems of making speech a crime.
What was the contract that Garcia signed with AP? If he didn't sign anything, then AP wouldn't have any rights to use his work at all. If he signed over all his rights, AP owns the work. If he signed over certain rights to use them in newspapers and magazines, but kept all other rights for himself, then he owns the rights. Depending on the contract he used, he might have kept the right to make derivative merchandise.
Garcia's legal papers don't mention anything about the contract he signed with AP.
Are there any photographers out there? What are the provisions in the usual contract you sign with an agency like AP? Do you sell all rights? What rights do you keep?
I believe in freedom of speech. There is a small risk that this could lead to anti-Semitism and violence, but there's a greater risk that censorship could lead to things that are as bad or worse. And I think that getting this out in the open is the best way to deal with it.
Don't the Brits still read Milton's Areopagitica and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty any more?
BTW, Simon Sheppard seems to have a case of arrested sexual development, even by Slashdot standards. http://www.heretical.com/sexsci/index.html Or maybe not by Slashdot standards.
Here's the Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Sheppard_(far-right_activist) and here's his index page http://www.heretical.com/main.html#directory I believe the British term is "nutter."
It's his way of saying that y(n)=a(n)e^bx) has different values of b for different values of n.
Corel v. Bridgeman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_v._Bridgeman, that's what I was trying to remember. Thank you.
DNA is a universal code, but it's also methylated http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_methylation and acetylated http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylation to turn some genes on and off.
Some genes are turned on and off in sperm cells, and other genes are turned on and off in egg cells. There's currently no way to figure out which is turned on and off.
So scientists tried to make artificial sperm and egg (with mice) in the 1980s and they failed.
(I think they wound up with mice that died soon after birth.)
Yes, militant lesbians were disappointed.
The Newcastle researchers claimed to produce sperm, but the only way to prove that they produced viable, healthy sperm is to produce a healthy offspring from it, and they haven't done that. (For ethical reasons, very conveniently.)
So we don't know whether it's really sperm. Sperm that can't produce offspring isn't really sperm, is it?
How come they didn't try it on a mouse first? If they produced sperm from mouse stem cells, and got a female mouse pregnant with it, and produced healthy offspring, then they could say they produced sperm from stem cells.
Until then, I don't believe it.
There are some sicknesses that socialized healthcare either will not cover or will not cover thoroughly enough to really cure.
Name one.
In the U.K., under the NICE system, they set a price limit on every condition. If they can save a year of life for about $50,000, they will do it. If it costs more than that, NICE recommends against it, but if people complain about it, the government usually gives in and pays for it anyway. They try to avoid giving out $100,000 drugs that have minimal effectiveness, but they treat long-term conditions better than we do in the U.S.
The U.K. is the cheapest, stingiest system in Europe. Sweden probably has the best care in the world.
But even in the US you can usually get on so many programs and with the aid of various non-profits and a good story in the newspaper or TV news station get enough help to get the care you need.
I just spent several days on the phone over the last few months trying to help a friend of mine who lost his job and health insurance get on Medicaid, so I know something about what actually happens. The city welfare agency just delayed his application for months. He had one condition that required lifetime medication to save his life, so it was a serious business. I made half a dozen calls to those non-profits and got nowhere.
But don't take my word for it. Here's a story in the Wall Street Journal that demonstrates how you can die in the U.S. if you can't afford health care. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06339/743713-84.stm The WSJ had a whole series like that. (This is for people who don't believe Michael Moore.)
Granted, you will probably be in debt till you die, but even if you are poor you can usually *get* the initial treatments
As the WSJ story shows, that's not true.
but with socialized healthcare you get placed in "review hell" because A) the doctors get paid the same really no matter what they do and B) there are many other doctors/clinics.
So how come the Mayo Clinic, where doctors are on salary and get paid the same whatever they do, has some of the best outcomes in the country?
If you say you need antibiotics for something, chances are in the US you can get them for whatever weak reason,
That's supposed to be a benefit? If you take antibiotics when you don't need them, you're growing antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which could kill you later.
with socialized healtcare if you have a non-common illness the answer will always be to wait longer.
Ridiculous. I just read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in which French doctors described how they were treating cryopyrin-associated periodic syndrome in their socialist system. Is that non-common enough for you? They were using canakinumab, which will probably cost tens of thousands of dollars per year.
How about something like this? http://tobaccodocuments.org/
If I pay to collect the data & generate a database that doesn't mean that I can be forced to give the data away. But also, I can't stop anybody else from collecting the data & making their own database. If you don't want to buy it from me go forth & make your own database
That's an interesting argument, and it's logical from where you're coming from.
But the copyright law comes at it from a different direction.
If you go to a lot of effort to collect data, that's commendable. In copyright law, that's called "sweat of the brow."
But in copyright law, you can't copyright data that you've collected just by sweat of the brow. It also takes some kind of creativity or innovation or judgment.
That's what the Supreme Court decided in Feist. Phone numbers can't be copyrighted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service
Gee - last I heard - you couldn't copyright a database.
Yeah, that's what I heard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service
We replaced the Communists with gangs of illiterate Mujahadin and then Taliban warlords who were even more brutal than the Communists, who cut the country up into feudal feifs, destroyed everything and built nothing, who drove out Doctors Without Borders (after 30 years), and whose idea of education was having boys (not girls) read the Koran which they then interpret to mean "Anything we want it to mean." They were allied with lunatics like Osama bin Ladin who used all our training against the Soviets to attack us, and with the Pakistani islamists.
Our support for the Mujahadeen against the Soviets was in our interest only in the mind of an unrepentant lunatic cold warrior.
If the Russians would help us today in Afghanistan, we would be overjoyed (because it would mean fewer dead Americans).
If we had left them alone, Afghanistan would have been in more competent hands, with a secular or non-sectarian society, with more freedom than they have today, and with less of a threat to the U.S. than they are today.
Because they can selectively release video of me doing things that are frowned upon in polite society, without everyone realizing that *everyone* does things that are frowned upon in polite society?
Because of the similarly Orwellian bank reporting requirements, New York State governor Eliot Spitzer was caught using an escort service, and forced to resign.
His lieutenant governor, David Patterson, replaced him as governor. By all accounts Patterson is a nice guy who is totally ineffectual and incapable of handling a tough fight.
The Democrats held a 32-30 majority of the state Senate. To simplify a complicated story, one of those Democrats, who is being investigated in a bribery case, switched over to the Republicans, leaving the Senate tied 31-31, and they can't do anything. Normally, the Lieutenant Governor would break the tie, but there is no Lieutenant Governor now.
These cameras will allow the unaccountable volunteers who are running them to spy on the sex life of everyone in Lancaster, including government officials, and release the information or not as they choose.
Morales says he refuses all other requests. "The divorce lawyer who wants video of a husband coming out of a bar with his mistress, we won't do it," he said.
It seems that the guy doesn't know that a divorce lawyer can subpoena the video.
Any judge in any legal proceeding who decides that it's in the interests of justice to have the video can issue a subpoena for it.
That system doesn't just cover bars. It covers every public street. Even people who are single might not want a video record of everybody who walked through their door and spent the night with them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/health/03nice.html
The New York Times
December 3, 2008
The Evidence Gap
British Balance Gain Against the Cost of the Latest Drugs
By GARDINER HARRIS
RUISLIP, England â" When Bruce Hardy's kidney cancer spread to his lung, his doctor recommended an expensive new pill from Pfizer. But Mr. Hardy is British, and the British health authorities refused to buy the medicine. His wife has been distraught.
The most useful parts are the links to the free NEJM articles.
Note the study that followed men 55-59 with Gleason Grade 6 localized prostate cancer. 15% died from prostate cancer at 15 years. I think that's the number you're looking for.
They said you can often make a good case for "watchful waiting," essentially no treatment. Good story about the guy who got off the table right before the operation and decided not to have surgery. (They deliberately chose a case where there isn't enough evidence to make an easy decision.)
Note also that they had 1,200 surgeries with no fatalities, so the surgery is a lot safer than it was in your father's day.
Dear _______
The best, most reliable source of information to make a decision on prostate cancer that I ever found is The New England Journal of Medicine. There are 2 problems: (1) It can be difficult reading, although they know patients will be reading some of their articles and they try to edit those articles to be as understandable as possible. I think it's easier to read one difficult article that gives you the information you want than to read ten easy articles that don't. (2) Often in medicine, especially in prostate cancer, they don't have enough scientific evidence to make a clear, easy decision. But if you have to make a difficult decision, it's easier if you at least have the best evidence.
I remembered 2 articles in the NEJM in particular. One was free online; I'm attaching a PDF of the other. These articles are technical but you should be able to understand them by reading slowly and carefully (as I do). They do a good job of telling you how a doctor thinks about prostate cancer. You can find an explanation of anything you don't understand on Wikipedia. I'm also giving you my own notes that I made when I read the articles, and it might be easier to scan them first for an overview. Your best source of information should be your own doctor, but these articles will help you talk to him.
One article was a survey of patients and their wives on the outcomes of prostate cancer surgery and radiation. The standard question about prostate cancer surgery is, "What's the probability of sexual impotence?" You assume that you'r going to have the best odds, with a surgeon who does a lot of cases, at a hospital that does a lot of cases. Surgeons (and the American Cancer Society) like to make reassuring claims, so you have to be skeptical about how they define impotence. I got the impression that it was about 50%, and that's what this article reported. However, the results are better for younger patients -- 75-year-old men have low sexual functioning to start with. This article also discusses the problems of urinary incontinence, which as I recall wasn't as much of a problem. There is a basic tradeoff between surgery (radical prostatectomy) and radiation (either external beam radiation or brachytherapy): surgery is more likely to cause urinary problems, radiation is more likely to cause rectal inflammation. This article got a lot of press coverage so you can search Google News for further discussion and explanation.
The other was a case history of a 55-year old man with a Gleason score of 6 (grade 3+3) who decided in 1996 to get surgery, and then changed his mind at the last minute and walked out of the operating room. He's been followed ever since and the cancer hasn't metastasized. The NEJM likes to give cases that are in the very grey area of the evidence, with the hardest decisions, and this is one of them. They have experts explain the evidence and their thinking behind each option, there isn't any right answer, and any of the options would be a reasonable choice. I've attached a PDF of that article.
They followed up that article by inviting 3 more advocates for each of the 3 options to argue their case, and then invited readers to vote in an on-line poll. That article is free
An overactive immune system is just as dangerous as an underactive immune system.
An overactive immune system causes autoimmune diseases, like asthma, multiple sclerosis, lupus, etc.
Fortunately most of the snake oil peddled to "boost" the immune system has no effect at all.
It's hard to compare to 'normal' people, because someone like Steve Jobs would have had an team of the very best surgeons working on him, and generally the best medical care that money could buy..
I've talked to a few transplant surgeons from the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia, and I've followed the medical literature.
Everybody who gets a transplant gets the best medical care money can buy. It's an all or nothing thing.
Hospitals monitor their results carefully, and if the success rates go down, the hospital better figure out why and correct the problem, or they can't do any more transplants.
I once heard a medical ethicist (I think Arthur Caplan) who worked with transplant programs say that they do discriminate against the poor -- black people were less likely to get transplants, etc. But the discrimination comes before they get to the transplant center.
Most U.S. centers will make sure a patient can pay for the transplant before they accept the patient into the program. (It can be Medicaid.) That's where the economic discrimination comes from. Once they get into the program, everybody gets the best treatment the hospital can give.
There are other (arguably unfair) criteria like "social support." They can decide that somebody who lives alone in a rooming house and is too confused to follow his medication schedule might not be able to handle the post-transplant regimen, while a married person with a spouse and supportive family could.
Super-wealthy and celebrity patients do get better personal treatment, but not better medical treatment. I'm sure the doctors return Steve Jobs' phone calls faster. After all, he might endow them with a research wing. But I would expect that he would get the same medical treatment, with the same outcomes, as a Medicaid patient who managed to get into the transplant program.
(This being Slashdot, I would add that some transplant surgeons are really hot chicks.)
h+: There has been a lot of discussion about the dangers of people doing this sort of research at home. Do you think this is over-exaggerated?
MP: I really do. The chances of someone accidentally creating a dangerous organism and the chances of it surviving in the environment outside a laboratory are vanishingly low.
Rudy Rucker has a great quote on that, "I have a mental image of germ-size MIT nerds putting on gangsta clothes and venturing into alleys to try some rough stuff. And then they meet up with the homies who've been keeping it real for a billion years or so." The bare facts of it are that there's nothing random about synthetic biology research. When we design a transgenic organism, we're deliberately adding one specific piece of new functionality, maybe a small pathway that leads to a new piece of functionality -- and the organism has to expend energy on producing the new proteins that those new genes code for. Because of this, the synthetic organism is necessarily less competitive than its wild-type relatives who are much better suited for the niche they already occupy in the environment.
So any accidental release is fated to die out within a few generations, because itâ(TM)s just not competitive enough.
That's right. When rabbits were introduced in Australia, they died off right away because they were less competitive than their wild-type relatives who were much better suited to the niche they already occupied.
I'm trying to think of a downside to making all medications and supplements require FDA approval.
The downside is that the process produces both:
- long delays (during which people suffer and perhaps die) and:
- enormous costs (which keep some safe-and-effective drugs from reaching the market and raise the costs of medications which DO make it through the gauntlet - and must pay for both themselves and their share of the ones that fail).
When the legislation was first proposed it was estimated that if it added six months to the introduction of new medications it was a net loss. Now it takes years and tens of millions of dollars per new drug that starts testing.
One estimate of these costs - in a Wall Street Journal headline - is that the delay required for approving the use of Beta Blockers in the US to prevent secondary heart attacks (after they were approved for that in Europe) resulted in 100,000 deaths.
That was a Wall Street Journal editorial page essay -- which is a completely different thing from the reliable WSJ news stories.
If I recall correctly (can't find it on the WSJ's lame search engine) the author of that essay was a doctor who gave up the practice of medicine to work on Wall Street, and then became an FDA official under the Bush Administration. He has a right to give up medicine for finance, and work for a Republican administration, but it shows the free-market ideology that he's coming from.
Yes, it takes longer to approve drugs, during which the people who would have been helped by those drugs have to do without and in theory might die sooner. (BTW, there are very few "life-saving" drugs these days. Most of those drugs at best extend life by a few months. A drug that extends the life of a lung cancer or colon cancer patient by 3 months is a big deal.)
But when they put drugs on the market without enough testing, as they did when free-market conservatives ruled the FDA, they sold drugs that did more harm than good, like Vioxx and fen-phen.
So less regulation actually killed people rather than saving lives.
If you have a bunch of useful drugs, mixed up with a bunch of harmful drugs, and you can't tell which is which, those drugs can overall do more harm than good. You can't just throw drugs out on the free market and wait to see whether they save more people than they kill.
You can't figure it out from economic theory alone. You have to look at the facts. Before we had regulation, drug companies used to sell useless drugs that would kill people. When the Republicans cut back on regulations, drug companies sold more useless drugs that kill people. Regulation saves more lives than they cost.
Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2000;(2):CD001364.
Update in: Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2006;(3):CD001364.
Zinc for the common cold. Marshall I.
National Center of Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 0200. marshali@health.qld.gov.au
OBJECTIVES: Interest in zinc as a treatment for the common cold has grown following the recent publication of several controlled trials. The objective of this review was to assess the effects of zinc lozenges for cold symptoms.
SEARCH STRATEGY: A search was made of the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register, MEDLINE, EMBASE and reference lists of articles. Searches were run to the end of 1997.
SELECTION CRITERIA: Randomised double blind placebo-controlled trials of zinc for acute upper respiratory tract infection or cold.
DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Two reviewers independently extracted data and assessed trial quality.
MAIN RESULTS: Seven trials involving 754 cases were included. With the exception of one study, the methodological quality was rated as medium to high. For most outcome measures different summary estimates were used across the studies to describe the duration, incidence and severity of respiratory symptoms. This limited the ability to pool results. Results from two trials (04 - Mossad; 08 - Smith) suggested zinc lozenges reduced the severity and duration of cold symptoms. However, there was significant potential for bias, and further research is required to substantiate these findings. Overall, the results suggest that treatment with zinc lozenges did not reduce the duration of cold symptoms.
REVIEWER'S CONCLUSIONS: Evidence of the effects of zinc lozenges for treating the common cold is inconclusive. Given the potential for treatment to produce side effects, the use of zinc lozenges to treat cold symptoms deserves further study.
(This meta-analysis was actually withdrawn, and I don't know why, maybe to evaluate more recent data.)
http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/txtsrch.htm
http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/lawdb.htm
http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/discover.htm
They were imaging and indexing up to several million documents. During a civil suit, in discovery, companies on each side of the lawsuit have to disclose every relevant document to each other.
Lawyers probably use the most flexible and all-encompassing systems, since they have to deal with every industry, every profession, everything. They also spend more money on their systems than most people can afford. They told me it costs them about $1 a page to thoroughly index big databases.
Information scientists told me the best model of a document database was PubMed, which indexes virtually every significant published medical article. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed
The big limitation of Google is that you can't search too well by date. Another limitation of text searches is that you can't search for concepts -- just words. Sometimes words (particularly names) match concepts very well, but if they don't, you've got a problem.
Yeah, it would have been nice if you had set up coding and naming conventions at the beginning, so the original authors could have sorted them as you went along. It may be difficult or impossible to go back and re-code them after the fact. It could wind up costing $1 a document. OTOH, you could be lucky -- some industries have been using standardized filing schemes and standardized jargon since the days of slide rules and T-squares.
There should be standard filing schemes and procedures throughout your industry, so your solutions may be industry-specific. There should be consultants that deal with your industry who would be happy to talk to you (for the prospect of maybe getting your business). There should be trade magazines in your industry that have covered the same issue for companies of your size. (Hell, if the price is right I'll write a roundup for them.) Or you might have a trade or professional association with some friendly people who have done it before. Trade and professional associations usually have a computer or information technology section, and if you're a member of the association, you can call up the members of the section.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Bowles_(economist)
Bowles has recently studied the way that people are motivated by selfishness and the desire to maximize their own income, as compared to altruism and the desire to do a good job and be well-regarded by others. Real-world experiments show that, contrary to traditional economic theories, market incentives destroy cooperation and are less efficient than voluntary, altruistic behavior "in most cases."[3]
People act not only for material interests but also "to constitute themselves as dignified, autonomous, and moral individuals," he wrote.
Behavioral experiments suggest that "economic incentives may be counterproductive when they signal that selfishness is an appropriate response" and "undermine the moral values that lead people to act altruistically."
For example, "In Haifa, at six day care centers, a fine was imposed on parents who were late picking up their children at the end of the day. Parents responded to the fine by doubling the fraction of time they arrived late. When after 12 weeks the fine was revoked, their enhanced tardiness persisted unabated." This illustrates a "negative synergy" between economic incentives and moral behavior. "The fine seems to have undermined the parents' sense of ethical obligation to avoid inconveniencing the teachers and led them to think of lateness as just another commodity they could purchase."
But when I looked up the article on PNAS http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8801.abstract it was subscription only.
When I read the Science magazine article on girls and math, buried in the fine print they admitted that they didn't really have statistically significant data for high-performing girls.
So I won't take this seriously until I can read the original article.
If anyone wants to look at the facts and decide whether I'm right or gujo-odori is right, my position is supported by:
1. Israelis commit just as much terrorism as the Palestinians (and the Israelis have killed far more Palestinians than vice versa)
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE02/005/2002
2. The U.S. government commits entrapment by having its paid informers entice otherwise law-abiding Muslims into breaking the law.
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1088
3. Most normal people will commit war crimes just like the Nazis did if they are placed in an environment like the Nazis were in. This was proven by the social scientists Stanley Milgram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment and Philip Zimbardo. http://www.prisonexp.org/ . This was confirmed by the real-world experience of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq.
These government agents are professionals at manipulating people. You are an amateur at defending yourself from their manipulation. You don't know what you could be manipulated or tricked into doing.
The government informer threatened to kill John DeLorean's daughter. Would you have let them kill your family?
You can't condemn someone else by saying that you would never have done such a thing. You don't know.
You show me a person who says "Yeah, sure" to an offer of blowing up a Synagogue for cash and I'll show you a person with a predisposition to do that anyway.
If you had read psychologists like Stanley Milgram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_milgram you'd know that most people could be manipulated to do exactly what the Nazis did by someone who is a skillful manipulator -- and informers are skillful manipulators. If you read testimony at these trials, you'll see that the defendants made innocent decisions that would have seemed reasonable at the time, and one thing led to another.
If you had been in that situation, an undercover agent might have manipulated you into going along with the plot.
Prejudice against Muslims? Hardly. You *have* noticed that the people going around doing this are primarily young, primarily Muslim, primarily male, right?
Prejudice unsupported by facts. The Israelis commit just as much terrorism as Arabs and Muslims. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yigal_Amir http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE02/005/2002 And the U.S. has supported many terrorist movements against Cuba, Nicaragua, etc.
If moderate Muslims want Islam to be respected rather than suspected, they need to stand up and denounce terror and denounce terrorists. Even when those terrorists are state actors.
That is such bullshit I don't want to go through the details. You'll have to look up Gershom Gorenberg's articles yourself. Let's just say that I was working to free Muslims from jail who were imprisoned for denouncing terrorism.
What's my race and religion? You can call me Irish Catholic. In some parts of the world, that might have gotten me some extra scrutiny once upon a time and I wouldn't call it unfair. People with names like mine and a religion like mine were planting bombs in London, and some here in the US were helping to finance them. If our terrorism problems here were with people of Irish ancestry and Catholic religion, I'd be quite understanding if that got me secondary screening when I fly, and I wouldn't be whining that it's racism or prejudice.
There's at least one case that I can remember of a group of innocent Irish people who were convicted of terrorism charges in England and who served decades in jail, where one of them died, until it turned out that the scientific evidence against them, of nitrates, was faulty and they were released.
According to this article in Slate, http://www.slate.com/id/1003657/ entrapment requires 3 things:
1. The idea of committing the crime came from law enforcement officers, rather than the defendant.
2. The law enforcement officers induced the person to commit the crime.
3. The defendant was not ready and willing to commit this type of crime before being induced to do so.
Many of these terrorist cases meet all 3 requirements.
Repeatedly, an informer went to American residents who had previously had no contact with Islamic terrorism.
Repeatedly, the informer came up with the plot, and encouraged the defendant to participate by offering him substantial amounts of money.
Repeatedly, the defendant had never participated in this kind of activity before, and would never have done so if the informer hadn't suggested it and facilitated it, often by providing bogus "weapons."
The prosecutors claim that the defendants would or might have some day participated in terrorism anyway. That's speculation which would only convince jurors who are prejudiced to believe that Muslims or Arabs are terrorists.
For example, listen to the case of Hemant Lakhani on This American Life. http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1088 .