Secondly, he didn't just walk up to them, open his trench coat and say "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" They were looking for stuff, so the FBI put forward a supplier.
Actually, the informant, Shahed Hussain, did go around saying things like that, in this case and another one, and federal agents have set up other people like that.
Hussain was a Pakistani immigrant who went undercover for the feds seven years ago to avoid deportation after being convicted of fraud. He was going around to mosques offering people money. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/nyregion/23informant.html And by being a government informant, (1) Hussain was getting paid a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars, as I recall) (2) He got out of prosecution and possibly prison for his own crimes (3) Instead of being deported, he was allowed to stay in the country, which for a lot of immigrants is most important of all.
Hussain was responsible for a conviction in another case http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/nyregion/11plot.html in which he entrapped two men who never had anything to do with terrorism before, and who never could have gotten such weapons before, by loaning them $50,000.
Finally, if an FBI agent *had* walked up and said "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" and they said yes, then got busted, that'd stand up in court. Offering an illegal item for sale is not legal entrapment.
Well, depending on the circumstances it can be entrapment. If the person had no predisposition to commit a crime, and the FBI agent entices him by using an unreasonable amount of pressure, such as offering a huge amount of money, it can be entrapment. It's a jury question.
Cf. John Delorean's coke bust.
DeLorean was acquitted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_De_Lorean That's a good example of entrapment, because DeLorean was offered an unreasonable amount of money, in desperate circumstances, to do something he would not otherwise do.
Or anybody who gets busted for soliciting prostitution when the prostitute turns out to be a police officer.
If someone solicits a prostitute, that would show predisposition to commit a crime.
In contrast, a person who has never committed an act of terrorism, and has nothing to do with terrorists, who is enticed to take a large amount of money and then informed that it is for terrorist purposes, is entrapped, under the law.
Unfortunately, it's easy to manipulate juries with prejudicial issues, such as the defendant's race and religion. Right now, many jurors will be prejudiced against Muslim Arabs, and it's relatively easy for a prosecutor to get a conviction against them by using scare tactics.
A good example was Hemant Lakhani, whose case was the subject of a good program on This American LIfe. http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1088 One of the jurors agreed that he was entrapped, but she felt pressured by the other jurors to go along. Most people who listen to that broadcast would come to the same conclusion. But Lakhani is in jail for the rest of his life.
Next time around, the time will come for them to be prejudiced against another ethnic group or religion.
The best reason for having a board on Craigslist advertising for commercial sex is that, otherwise, the same people will spam the m4w, w4m and *4* boards and annoy people looking for noncommercial sex.
He said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that "with the exception of the Twin Towers in New York, terrorism is an almost minuscule problem." 3,000 people is "three and a half weeks of automobile fatalities."
The number of people who die from terrorist attacks, Schelling said, "is smaller than the number of people who die in bathtubs."
I think the Nation article raises points that stand on their own merits:
Vassiliv sued John Lowenthal (and lost) for libel over Lowenthal's claim 'that Weinstein and Vassiliev "omit relevant facts" and "selectively replaced covernames with their own notion of the real names." 'that "he never met the name of Alger Hiss in the context of some cooperation with some special services of the Soviet Union."'
When Vassiliev was asked on the witness stand whether 'he'd ever seen a single document linking Alger Hiss with "Ales"--the code name of a Soviet agent in the 1940s who, Weinstein and Vassiliev insisted, had to be Hiss--he admitted he hadn't.'
Just to get an idea of where this article is coming from:
City Journal Winter 2000 The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities Howard Husock
The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities--and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their own striving, is the key to their well-being....
"It was probably broke before you checked it," is not a valid excuse for an airline to refuse baggage insurance (or any other company for that matter).
A man sues his neighbor because, he says, he loaned the neighbor a pot, and the neighbor returned the pot with a hole in it.
Here's a good, balanced story on Beike. The reporter understood what he was writing about, and he talked to some independent researchers who actually studied stem cells.
Stem-cell therapy: Cure or hoax in China? 'Some get miracles'; others are skeptical
PATRICK WHITE
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
August 23, 2007 at 9:11 AM EDT
The website for Beike Biotechnology bursts with stories that can only be categorized as medical miracles: a paraplegic can move his legs again; a man with muscular dystrophy can carry a cup of water, a stroke victim can speak.
Oh, and Western journalists are just so honest and forthright and morally upstanding and would never think of writing a story that misrepresents the truth!
It's a matter of degree. Here we have the Weekly World News, Jayson Blair, Judith Miller and Thomas Freedman, but most journalists understand the difference between the truth and making it up or hearing it from some guy.
There, most reporters don't understand what it means to get your facts right. Chinese journalists are like our bloggers. My friend showed me a Chinese news story about rats that just made up stuff about how useful rats can be.
You're basically trying to apply your own personal moral standards to an entire culture and people who you really don't care to live in the way that you think is best.
Well, yeah. Not just my moral standards but every other journalist's moral standards.
They were taking a course in Western journalism to find out how we do things, and apply for internships on American newspapers. They were asking us for our advice.
And yeah, my values are that newspapers should tell the truth, and not make things up.
Doctors should keep records to see whether they actually cure patients, not just give treatments (based on some screwball theory) that do no good and devastating harm.
Most patients would rather be cured than be crippled for life. That's my values and also Chinese values.
That's the values of modern science. Modern science isn't cultural imperialism.
There are lots of American-trained and Chinese-trained Chinese doctors that share those values. They see that acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine doesn't usually work, and Western medicine usually does.
Ignorance, superstition and stupidity isn't a Chinese cultural value. It's no more common among Chinese than it is among us.
I will go out on a limb and say that this story sounds to me like complete bullshit.
First tipoff: TFA doesn't list any citations to peer-reviewed articles. (I couldn't find any on PubMed.)
Second tipoff: Hu claims to have treated >5,087 patients for ataxia, autism, ALS, brain trauma, cerebral infarction, cerebral hemorrhage, cerebral palsy, diabetics, Guillain-Barre, encephalatropy, and spinal cord injury.
If he could have treated any one of those diseases successfully, any major medical journal would have been happy to publish his report, doctors from all over the world would be flying over to learn his techniques, and pharmaceutical companies would be offering him wheelbarrows full of money for the rights to use his techniques. And it would have been on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
Third tipoff: The reporter who wrote this sounds like she doesn't understand the story at all. She doesn't ask one substantive question (like, "what peer reviewed journals have you published your work in?"). She sounds like she's asking generic questions from a list of standard interview questions her business editor gave her.
Fourth tipoff: The word "miraculous."
I'm not taking it seriously enough to look up the citations, but Science magazine had an article a while back investigating a Chinese doctor who claimed to be treating spinal cord injured patients, and it turned out that his patients weren't getting better and he hadn't published anything significant.
The WSJ had an article about a Chinese brain surgeon who was cutting a part of the brain to supposedly cure schizophrenia, depression, and a whole list of unrelated conditions, but he wasn't curing them, a lot of his patients were left with severe brain damage, families were paying him their life savings, he was making a fortune, American brain surgeons were shocked at his irresponsibility, and he performed several times more of these procedures than the rest of the world combined.
A friend of mine taught a course in science journalism in China a while back, and he was appalled to find out that Chinese journalists would just make stories up. They didn't understand the difference between telling a good story and telling the truth.
This is from the country whose pharmaceutical industry brought us contaminated heparin, contaminated milk, cough syrup that killed babies, and pet food that killed dogs.
To quote Thomas Paine, which is more likely: that a miracle could happen or that a man could lie?
It's not anti-Chinese to say this. In the U.S., the Chinese are some of the best scientists and science journalists.
China, for all its many virtues and accomplishments, is suffering from the results of Communism, the Great Cultural Revolution, and now unregulated free-market capitalism.
China is the same zoo of quack doctors and drug companies that the U.S. was in the days of Upton Sinclair, which led to the FDA. And we still have quacks here.
Deputy health minister Yakov Litzman, a member of United Torah Judaism, said earlier this week that the name "swine flu" should not be used as it contains the name of the unkosher animal. Litzman suggested that authorities call the virus sweeping the globe "Mexican flu."
You mean herpes is kosher, so they don't have to change its name?
You really have to be Jewish to realize what an idiot this guy is. But if you're not, you can sort of get the idea.
There are medical standards for most life-threatening medical decisions, such as giving an MRI after a head injury (like Natasha Richardson had).
If there's a 0.0001% chance of a head injury patient having a fatal, curable hemorrhage, and a $5,000 test had a 100% chance of detecting it, that would save a life at a cost of $5 billion, if my zeros are correct. If the test had a 0.001% chance of detecting it, that would save a life at a cost of $5 trillion.
In the UK, they use a cost/benefit standard and plug in a figure of about $70,000 per year of life saved, and then they have a human (not an economist) review the consequences and see if it makes sense. In the U.S. the standard-setting organizations, usually professional societies or government agencies, use a similar less-formal system to make the same decisions. They might recommend a procedure if it will save a young person's life for $1 million, but they won't recommend a procedure that will cost $10 million to save a life. (If you've got $10 million you're free to pay for it yourself, but your insurance is unlikely to cover it.)
So a procedure that costs >$10 million per life saved is not going to be the standard of care. If a doctor skips it, he's not liable for malpractice. A jury is free to ignore the facts, and ignore the law, but that's the price of the jury system. (That happened a few years ago to a doctor who let a patient make his own informed decision about getting a PSA test for prostate cancer.)
I just read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine which said that we now have DNA tests with a 1/1,000 chance of detecting, say, diabetes, but they're useless.
At one time, hospitals seemed to be under-using CAT scans for head injuries. I remember reading an article that argued that if you had a 1/100 chance of detecting a hemorrhage, you should skip it. Now they'd probably use a $1,000 CAT scan if it would save a patient's life in 1/1,000 of the cases, especially in a young, healthy patient. They can narrow down the times when you actually need a CAT scan by a physical examination.
You're right. I remember seeing a long-distance handwriting machine at an airport 50 years ago, where someone in a remote city was writing messages to our city -- I think about the weather and flight delays. (I assume they could also have used teletype.)
And Harry Truman was the first president to use an Autopen to reply to constituent letters.
I agree with you in part. You should be entitled to own your own software and sell it on your own terms.
However, I think the new copyright laws as passed by U.S. Congress and the European countries are equally unfair, particularly for orphan works.
I feel obligated to follow laws that are fair. But now the whole copyright system is unfair, so I don't know what the obligations are.
For example, in the Soviet Union, musicians were paid a reasonable salary to record the entire classical canon of music, in excellent productions. These recordings used to be without copyright, the artists were happy to have more people enjoy their work, and I used to buy records of Soviet recordings very cheaply.
Under the new copyright laws, these recordings were taken out of the commons, and I'm not sure who the current copyright owner is, but it isn't the artists or their family. The U.S. libraries would be happy to post digital recordings on their web sites for the public to download, but with a few narrow exceptions, their lawyers tell them not to.
Same with Soviet film, which are quite significant. I was waiting for the day when I could get cheap digital versions of the Soviet film on my hard drive, but that day will never come.
Same with Soviet books. The Moscow Printing House translated works of science, mathematics and literature to every significant language in the world, and distributed them worldwide without copyright. I used to buy these books cheaply. Now they're gone.
Same with American works that were published more than 56 years ago. These used to go into the public domain. Now the copyright has been extended backwards retroactively, and forwards essentially forever. A few of these works are popular, but most of them are obscure, of interest only to specialists, and unavailable. It would cost more to conduct a search to find the current rights owner (who often can't be found), than it would cost to buy a book for $200 or $500 on the rare book market. These works are essentially unavailable for 100 years after the creator's death, when they would be most useful, and will probably be lost forever. Dover Publications, which started out by reprinting valuable, out-of-print math and science books, couldn't start up today.
Now I realize these works are available sporadically on the Internet, usually free. But what a scholar needs is a systematic collection, which libraries would be happy to do, for free -- except that their lawyers tell them they can't do it. (Some of this is being done by Google Scholar, which probably violates the copyright laws, but they have the clout and the legal department to just ignore a law that everybody agrees is ridiculous.)
People are willing to follow laws that are fair. These laws aren't fair. If the record companies are going to steal my rights -- of free access to works in the public domain -- then I'm not sympathetic when somebody takes their rights to more recently created work that would have been protected under the old copyright act.
As for your case, of wanting to make money out of the programs you worked hard to create -- it's unfortunate, but the old ways of making a living don't work any more. I used to work for newspapers. I feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for me. But a lot of businesses and skills have been outsourced or rendered obsolete.
You do however have my approval to beat the crap out of the guy who says, "That's the new economy, get over it."
Free text search works reasonably well with small databases, but it doesn't work with big databases. If you want precision, you have to develop a set of tags (we called them keywords). A good model is Pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed. The New York Times used to have a great text search, but they changed it (eliminated tags) and now it's awfully difficult to get through.
Basically, the researcher has a body of knowledge, and he already has a filing and organizing system (in this case, a looseleaf binder system, which is a pretty good start). You should usually try to replicate his filing and organizing system in the database, for example one field for the looseleaf, another field for the tab, and then some goodies that he couldn't search the looseleafs for, like date, author, journal citation, etc. It would probably be useful to have a controlled vocabulary of a few good keywords, but keywords should be selected carefully so they're unique and don't duplicate.
I assume he doesn't have the PDFs any more. That would have made it a lot easier.
It would be handy to scan every word of (most) every document into full text, but it may not be necessary. Why do you need everything in full digital text? Scanning of unconventional text takes a human proofreading step, and probably isn't worth it.
He'll probably want to keep complete images of the original documents anyway along with the text. You should do a few tests to see how much resolution you need. 600 dpi works for ordinary text like they use in the printed newspaper. But if you want journal articles to come out, with footnotes and superscripts, you might need higher resolution.
Somebody is going to have to enter the fields manually, which is't too bad if you've got a thousand records (looseleaf tabs) to enter (about 20 hours), but can get difficult if you've got an order of magnitude more.
Scanning should be straightforward, if everything is neatly filed away in looseleaf books already. There are many cheap consumer-grade scanners on the market that can get 600-2400 dpi (the bundled software is probably more important than the hardware specs) but they can take up to 1 minute a page; there are more expensive scanners in the =>$1,000 range that can go a lot faster. If you're at a university, look around for somebody who already has one. Law firms and libraries do a lot of this.
You might start by estimating the number of pages and documents you have.
But let me suggest an alternative: Instead of scanning everything, just enter everything into a database without scanning it. Does he really need full text search? Or would it be enough to search his looseleaf books by a dozen fields? He doesn't have to print the document out from an image file, it's right there in his looseleaf books.
If anybody knows of up-to-date articles on this subject, I'd love to know the citation.
It's easy. They'll just map the brain of developing embryos at every stage, and see how it all goes together. 2 cells, 4 cells, 8 cells -- how complicated can it get?
Me? I agree with you. I'm just recommending the NYT article as a good explanation of how NICE works. $15,000 for 6 months of good-quality life sounds reasonable to me. (The New England Journal of Medicine had another good article.)
The NYT had other stories about how U.S. health insurance companies are denying similar treatments here.
The Evidence Gap British Balance Benefit vs. Cost of Latest Drugs By GARDINER HARRIS Published: December 2, 2008
RUISLIP, England -- 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.
"Everybody should be allowed to have as much life as they can," Joy Hardy said in the couple's modest home outside London....
The Soviet Union continued to obfuscate maps available to civilians up until its demise. A friend who lived there in the '70's commented that he wasn't supposed to take pictures of bridges and the like, either.
You're not supposed to take pictures of bridges and the like here either.
Pakistani Immigrant Being Deported for Taking Pictures of NY Reservoir Speaks from Jail
Pakistani immigrant Ansar Mahmood, lost his final judicial appeal this week and is scheduled to be deported. He was first picked up in October 2001 for taking photographs of an upstate New York reservoir. No terror-related charges were ever filed against him but investigators found him in minor violation of immigration law. He joins us from prison where he has been held for nearly three years.
On the contrary. Under U.S. law, the government has a right to crush your son's testicles whenever the President deems it necessary, according to Berkeley law professor and former Justice Department legal counsel John Yoo.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, he didn't just walk up to them, open his trench coat and say "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" They were looking for stuff, so the FBI put forward a supplier.
Actually, the informant, Shahed Hussain, did go around saying things like that, in this case and another one, and federal agents have set up other people like that.
Hussain was a Pakistani immigrant who went undercover for the feds seven years ago to avoid deportation after being convicted of fraud. He was going around to mosques offering people money. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/nyregion/23informant.html And by being a government informant, (1) Hussain was getting paid a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars, as I recall) (2) He got out of prosecution and possibly prison for his own crimes (3) Instead of being deported, he was allowed to stay in the country, which for a lot of immigrants is most important of all.
Hussain was responsible for a conviction in another case http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/nyregion/11plot.html in which he entrapped two men who never had anything to do with terrorism before, and who never could have gotten such weapons before, by loaning them $50,000.
One of the plotters in the current case needed money because his brother was sick. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/05/25/2009-05-25_terror_plotter_did_it_for_me_brother.html
Finally, if an FBI agent *had* walked up and said "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" and they said yes, then got busted, that'd stand up in court. Offering an illegal item for sale is not legal entrapment.
Well, depending on the circumstances it can be entrapment. If the person had no predisposition to commit a crime, and the FBI agent entices him by using an unreasonable amount of pressure, such as offering a huge amount of money, it can be entrapment. It's a jury question.
Cf. John Delorean's coke bust.
DeLorean was acquitted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_De_Lorean That's a good example of entrapment, because DeLorean was offered an unreasonable amount of money, in desperate circumstances, to do something he would not otherwise do.
Or anybody who gets busted for soliciting prostitution when the prostitute turns out to be a police officer.
If someone solicits a prostitute, that would show predisposition to commit a crime.
In contrast, a person who has never committed an act of terrorism, and has nothing to do with terrorists, who is enticed to take a large amount of money and then informed that it is for terrorist purposes, is entrapped, under the law.
Unfortunately, it's easy to manipulate juries with prejudicial issues, such as the defendant's race and religion. Right now, many jurors will be prejudiced against Muslim Arabs, and it's relatively easy for a prosecutor to get a conviction against them by using scare tactics.
A good example was Hemant Lakhani, whose case was the subject of a good program on This American LIfe. http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1088 One of the jurors agreed that he was entrapped, but she felt pressured by the other jurors to go along. Most people who listen to that broadcast would come to the same conclusion. But Lakhani is in jail for the rest of his life.
Next time around, the time will come for them to be prejudiced against another ethnic group or religion.
What was your race and religion again?
The best reason for having a board on Craigslist advertising for commercial sex is that, otherwise, the same people will spam the m4w, w4m and *4* boards and annoy people looking for noncommercial sex.
And now that is in fact happening on Craigslist.
It's like George Carlin once said, rights aren't rights if they can be taken away from you at any time they wish.
No, rights are something you fight for. It's a line in the sand. You let people know that if they try to take away your rights you'll fight for them.
Take away my rights and I'll fuck you, motherfucker.
And I'll bring my boys to fuck you. Tough dudes from Slashdot.
I see that New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo just indicted 7 people for running a prostitution ring on Craigslist. http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/05/20/craigslist.prostitution/index.html
The last New York State Attorney General to indict people on prostitution charges was Elliot Spitzer.
Just saying.
Thomas Schelling, the Nobel laureate in economics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Schelling, agrees with you.
He said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that "with the exception of the Twin Towers in New York, terrorism is an almost minuscule problem." 3,000 people is "three and a half weeks of automobile fatalities."
The number of people who die from terrorist attacks, Schelling said, "is smaller than the number of people who die in bathtubs."
I think the Nation article raises points that stand on their own merits:
Vassiliv sued John Lowenthal (and lost) for libel over Lowenthal's claim 'that Weinstein and Vassiliev "omit relevant facts" and "selectively replaced covernames with their own notion of the real names." 'that "he never met the name of Alger Hiss in the context of some cooperation with some special services of the Soviet Union."'
When Vassiliev was asked on the witness stand whether 'he'd ever seen a single document linking Alger Hiss with "Ales"--the code name of a Soviet agent in the 1940s who, Weinstein and Vassiliev insisted, had to be Hiss--he admitted he hadn't.'
http://www.punchcartoons.com/product_info.php?products_id=1667
Just to get an idea of where this article is coming from:
City Journal Winter 2000
The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities
Howard Husock
The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities--and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their own striving, is the key to their well-being....
http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_1_the_trillion_dollar.html
The kids will do poorly because African-American culture rejects learning -- and rejects Western culture in general.
You mean Western culture like they teach at Princeton and Harvard?
You are a racist idiot, although that's redundant.
"It was probably broke before you checked it," is not a valid excuse for an airline to refuse baggage insurance (or any other company for that matter).
A man sues his neighbor because, he says, he loaned the neighbor a pot, and the neighbor returned the pot with a hole in it.
The neighbor says:
First, I never borrowed the pot.
Second, it had a hole in it when I got it.
Third, I returned it in perfect condition.
Here's a good, balanced story on Beike. The reporter understood what he was writing about, and he talked to some independent researchers who actually studied stem cells.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070823.wlstemcell23/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/home
Stem-cell therapy: Cure or hoax in China?
'Some get miracles'; others are skeptical
PATRICK WHITE
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
August 23, 2007 at 9:11 AM EDT
The website for Beike Biotechnology bursts with stories that can only be categorized as medical miracles: a paraplegic can move his legs again; a man with muscular dystrophy can carry a cup of water, a stroke victim can speak.
(more)
Oh, and Western journalists are just so honest and forthright and morally upstanding and would never think of writing a story that misrepresents the truth!
It's a matter of degree. Here we have the Weekly World News, Jayson Blair, Judith Miller and Thomas Freedman, but most journalists understand the difference between the truth and making it up or hearing it from some guy.
There, most reporters don't understand what it means to get your facts right. Chinese journalists are like our bloggers. My friend showed me a Chinese news story about rats that just made up stuff about how useful rats can be.
You're basically trying to apply your own personal moral standards to an entire culture and people who you really don't care to live in the way that you think is best.
Well, yeah. Not just my moral standards but every other journalist's moral standards.
They were taking a course in Western journalism to find out how we do things, and apply for internships on American newspapers. They were asking us for our advice.
And yeah, my values are that newspapers should tell the truth, and not make things up.
Doctors should keep records to see whether they actually cure patients, not just give treatments (based on some screwball theory) that do no good and devastating harm.
Most patients would rather be cured than be crippled for life. That's my values and also Chinese values.
That's the values of modern science. Modern science isn't cultural imperialism.
There are lots of American-trained and Chinese-trained Chinese doctors that share those values. They see that acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine doesn't usually work, and Western medicine usually does.
Ignorance, superstition and stupidity isn't a Chinese cultural value. It's no more common among Chinese than it is among us.
I will go out on a limb and say that this story sounds to me like complete bullshit.
First tipoff: TFA doesn't list any citations to peer-reviewed articles. (I couldn't find any on PubMed.)
Second tipoff: Hu claims to have treated >5,087 patients for ataxia, autism, ALS, brain trauma, cerebral infarction, cerebral hemorrhage, cerebral palsy, diabetics, Guillain-Barre, encephalatropy, and spinal cord injury.
If he could have treated any one of those diseases successfully, any major medical journal would have been happy to publish his report, doctors from all over the world would be flying over to learn his techniques, and pharmaceutical companies would be offering him wheelbarrows full of money for the rights to use his techniques. And it would have been on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
Third tipoff: The reporter who wrote this sounds like she doesn't understand the story at all. She doesn't ask one substantive question (like, "what peer reviewed journals have you published your work in?"). She sounds like she's asking generic questions from a list of standard interview questions her business editor gave her.
Fourth tipoff: The word "miraculous."
I'm not taking it seriously enough to look up the citations, but Science magazine had an article a while back investigating a Chinese doctor who claimed to be treating spinal cord injured patients, and it turned out that his patients weren't getting better and he hadn't published anything significant.
The WSJ had an article about a Chinese brain surgeon who was cutting a part of the brain to supposedly cure schizophrenia, depression, and a whole list of unrelated conditions, but he wasn't curing them, a lot of his patients were left with severe brain damage, families were paying him their life savings, he was making a fortune, American brain surgeons were shocked at his irresponsibility, and he performed several times more of these procedures than the rest of the world combined.
A friend of mine taught a course in science journalism in China a while back, and he was appalled to find out that Chinese journalists would just make stories up. They didn't understand the difference between telling a good story and telling the truth.
This is from the country whose pharmaceutical industry brought us contaminated heparin, contaminated milk, cough syrup that killed babies, and pet food that killed dogs.
To quote Thomas Paine, which is more likely: that a miracle could happen or that a man could lie?
It's not anti-Chinese to say this. In the U.S., the Chinese are some of the best scientists and science journalists.
China, for all its many virtues and accomplishments, is suffering from the results of Communism, the Great Cultural Revolution, and now unregulated free-market capitalism.
China is the same zoo of quack doctors and drug companies that the U.S. was in the days of Upton Sinclair, which led to the FDA. And we still have quacks here.
You mean herpes is kosher, so they don't have to change its name?
You really have to be Jewish to realize what an idiot this guy is. But if you're not, you can sort of get the idea.
Thank you for giving me an opportunity to correct this common misconception.
Medical malpractice occurs when a doctor fails to meet the standard of care in that community. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_malpractice
There are medical standards for most life-threatening medical decisions, such as giving an MRI after a head injury (like Natasha Richardson had).
If there's a 0.0001% chance of a head injury patient having a fatal, curable hemorrhage, and a $5,000 test had a 100% chance of detecting it, that would save a life at a cost of $5 billion, if my zeros are correct. If the test had a 0.001% chance of detecting it, that would save a life at a cost of $5 trillion.
In the UK, they use a cost/benefit standard and plug in a figure of about $70,000 per year of life saved, and then they have a human (not an economist) review the consequences and see if it makes sense. In the U.S. the standard-setting organizations, usually professional societies or government agencies, use a similar less-formal system to make the same decisions. They might recommend a procedure if it will save a young person's life for $1 million, but they won't recommend a procedure that will cost $10 million to save a life. (If you've got $10 million you're free to pay for it yourself, but your insurance is unlikely to cover it.)
So a procedure that costs >$10 million per life saved is not going to be the standard of care. If a doctor skips it, he's not liable for malpractice. A jury is free to ignore the facts, and ignore the law, but that's the price of the jury system. (That happened a few years ago to a doctor who let a patient make his own informed decision about getting a PSA test for prostate cancer.)
I just read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine which said that we now have DNA tests with a 1/1,000 chance of detecting, say, diabetes, but they're useless.
At one time, hospitals seemed to be under-using CAT scans for head injuries. I remember reading an article that argued that if you had a 1/100 chance of detecting a hemorrhage, you should skip it. Now they'd probably use a $1,000 CAT scan if it would save a patient's life in 1/1,000 of the cases, especially in a young, healthy patient. They can narrow down the times when you actually need a CAT scan by a physical examination.
Here it is.
Felderman vs. Proppenheimer, Mad Mag., 212:26.
You're right. I remember seeing a long-distance handwriting machine at an airport 50 years ago, where someone in a remote city was writing messages to our city -- I think about the weather and flight delays. (I assume they could also have used teletype.)
And Harry Truman was the first president to use an Autopen to reply to constituent letters.
I agree with you in part. You should be entitled to own your own software and sell it on your own terms.
However, I think the new copyright laws as passed by U.S. Congress and the European countries are equally unfair, particularly for orphan works.
I feel obligated to follow laws that are fair. But now the whole copyright system is unfair, so I don't know what the obligations are.
For example, in the Soviet Union, musicians were paid a reasonable salary to record the entire classical canon of music, in excellent productions. These recordings used to be without copyright, the artists were happy to have more people enjoy their work, and I used to buy records of Soviet recordings very cheaply.
Under the new copyright laws, these recordings were taken out of the commons, and I'm not sure who the current copyright owner is, but it isn't the artists or their family. The U.S. libraries would be happy to post digital recordings on their web sites for the public to download, but with a few narrow exceptions, their lawyers tell them not to.
Same with Soviet film, which are quite significant. I was waiting for the day when I could get cheap digital versions of the Soviet film on my hard drive, but that day will never come.
Same with Soviet books. The Moscow Printing House translated works of science, mathematics and literature to every significant language in the world, and distributed them worldwide without copyright. I used to buy these books cheaply. Now they're gone.
Same with American works that were published more than 56 years ago. These used to go into the public domain. Now the copyright has been extended backwards retroactively, and forwards essentially forever. A few of these works are popular, but most of them are obscure, of interest only to specialists, and unavailable. It would cost more to conduct a search to find the current rights owner (who often can't be found), than it would cost to buy a book for $200 or $500 on the rare book market. These works are essentially unavailable for 100 years after the creator's death, when they would be most useful, and will probably be lost forever. Dover Publications, which started out by reprinting valuable, out-of-print math and science books, couldn't start up today.
Now I realize these works are available sporadically on the Internet, usually free. But what a scholar needs is a systematic collection, which libraries would be happy to do, for free -- except that their lawyers tell them they can't do it. (Some of this is being done by Google Scholar, which probably violates the copyright laws, but they have the clout and the legal department to just ignore a law that everybody agrees is ridiculous.)
People are willing to follow laws that are fair. These laws aren't fair. If the record companies are going to steal my rights -- of free access to works in the public domain -- then I'm not sympathetic when somebody takes their rights to more recently created work that would have been protected under the old copyright act.
As for your case, of wanting to make money out of the programs you worked hard to create -- it's unfortunate, but the old ways of making a living don't work any more. I used to work for newspapers. I feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for me. But a lot of businesses and skills have been outsourced or rendered obsolete.
You do however have my approval to beat the crap out of the guy who says, "That's the new economy, get over it."
I wrote a few articles about this for Law Office Computing magazine
http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/txtsrch.htm
http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/lawdb.htm
http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/discover.htm
It was a long time ago, the software and hardware has changed, but the concepts are still the same, and the costs are a lot less.
Free text search works reasonably well with small databases, but it doesn't work with big databases. If you want precision, you have to develop a set of tags (we called them keywords). A good model is Pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed. The New York Times used to have a great text search, but they changed it (eliminated tags) and now it's awfully difficult to get through.
Basically, the researcher has a body of knowledge, and he already has a filing and organizing system (in this case, a looseleaf binder system, which is a pretty good start). You should usually try to replicate his filing and organizing system in the database, for example one field for the looseleaf, another field for the tab, and then some goodies that he couldn't search the looseleafs for, like date, author, journal citation, etc. It would probably be useful to have a controlled vocabulary of a few good keywords, but keywords should be selected carefully so they're unique and don't duplicate.
I assume he doesn't have the PDFs any more. That would have made it a lot easier.
It would be handy to scan every word of (most) every document into full text, but it may not be necessary. Why do you need everything in full digital text? Scanning of unconventional text takes a human proofreading step, and probably isn't worth it.
He'll probably want to keep complete images of the original documents anyway along with the text. You should do a few tests to see how much resolution you need. 600 dpi works for ordinary text like they use in the printed newspaper. But if you want journal articles to come out, with footnotes and superscripts, you might need higher resolution.
Somebody is going to have to enter the fields manually, which is't too bad if you've got a thousand records (looseleaf tabs) to enter (about 20 hours), but can get difficult if you've got an order of magnitude more.
Scanning should be straightforward, if everything is neatly filed away in looseleaf books already. There are many cheap consumer-grade scanners on the market that can get 600-2400 dpi (the bundled software is probably more important than the hardware specs) but they can take up to 1 minute a page; there are more expensive scanners in the =>$1,000 range that can go a lot faster. If you're at a university, look around for somebody who already has one. Law firms and libraries do a lot of this.
You might start by estimating the number of pages and documents you have.
But let me suggest an alternative: Instead of scanning everything, just enter everything into a database without scanning it. Does he really need full text search? Or would it be enough to search his looseleaf books by a dozen fields? He doesn't have to print the document out from an image file, it's right there in his looseleaf books.
If anybody knows of up-to-date articles on this subject, I'd love to know the citation.
It's easy. They'll just map the brain of developing embryos at every stage, and see how it all goes together. 2 cells, 4 cells, 8 cells -- how complicated can it get?
This isn't rocket science.
Me? I agree with you. I'm just recommending the NYT article as a good explanation of how NICE works. $15,000 for 6 months of good-quality life sounds reasonable to me. (The New England Journal of Medicine had another good article.)
The NYT had other stories about how U.S. health insurance companies are denying similar treatments here.
This is a good explanation of NICE for Americans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/health/03nice.html
The Evidence Gap
British Balance Benefit vs. Cost of Latest Drugs
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: December 2, 2008
RUISLIP, England -- 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.
"Everybody should be allowed to have as much life as they can," Joy Hardy said in the couple's modest home outside London....
Why does a people need clear satellite images of a school campus?
The fire department fighting fires. Emergency services generally.
The Soviet Union continued to obfuscate maps available to civilians up until its demise. A friend who lived there in the '70's commented that he wasn't supposed to take pictures of bridges and the like, either.
You're not supposed to take pictures of bridges and the like here either.
http://i1.democracynow.org/2004/7/1/pakistani_immigrant_being_deported_for_taking
July 01, 2004
Pakistani Immigrant Being Deported for Taking Pictures of NY Reservoir Speaks from Jail
Pakistani immigrant Ansar Mahmood, lost his final judicial appeal this week and is scheduled to be deported. He was first picked up in October 2001 for taking photographs of an upstate New York reservoir. No terror-related charges were ever filed against him but investigators found him in minor violation of immigration law. He joins us from prison where he has been held for nearly three years.
On the contrary. Under U.S. law, the government has a right to crush your son's testicles whenever the President deems it necessary, according to Berkeley law professor and former Justice Department legal counsel John Yoo.