I thought that medical records were like that. If it's wrong, you legibly strike it out.
I remember in the (not-so) old days of paper records medical students were taught that when they corrected a mistake in a patient chart, they should strike out the incorrect information and write the correction next to it -- but never cover the old information with white-out, and never cross it out heavily enough to obliterate it.
Coincidentally, my friend's wife happened to work in the records room of his HMO (it's name rhymes with 'gyp'), and snuck his medical records out. The widow received a large wrongful death settlement only because of her having physical possession of his records, else no one would have known the true cause of his provider's negligence.
That doesn't sound right. In New York State, and I think in every other state, a deceased patient's relatives have a right to get copies of the records. Apart from that right, if they're considering suing the hospital, a lawyer can demand copies of the records.
Actually, this country has a long history of boycotting fiction over the creator's belief. We had lots of blacklisted authors, like Dalton Trumbo, during the McCarthy days. There was a book called Red Channels that listed everyone on the blacklist. There were also a lot of musicians and actors, like Paul Robeson. They couldn't work in the U.S., and they couldn't get a passport to leave the U.S. to work abroad.
You can draw 2 conclusions:
1. American blacklists were bad, so we shouldn't blacklist anybody.
2. American blacklists were bad, but that's the way people play politics, so we have to fight the way they do or we'll lose.
I would prefer choice 1, but that's not the way American politics is played.
Back before Stonewall, you could rob and murder somebody, and get off with it using the defense that he was a homosexual. I can understand why gays get nervous when people attack them.
The pressure release valve jammed in the open position, and released a lot of coolant. That's what I meant by "blow." It's like a whale. The loss of coolant led to a partial meltdown.
I used to think that Michio Kaku was an irresponsible sensationalist. I went to a meeting a few days after the accident where he showed a slide of a melted reactor core, and said, "That's what Three Mile Island looks like inside." I thought he was going beyond the evidence. Then it turned out that the core was melted. Kaku was right. I was wrong. I turned my skepticism up a notch.
I did find the uninformed anti-nuclear rhetoric annoying (like any uninformed rhetoric), but the pro-nuclear side suffered from technological hubris.
A nuclear reactor offers the promise of unlimited, cheap, carbon-free energy. OTOH, there is a small risk of a very big catastrophe, Are great benefits worth great risks? Hard to say. We now have Chernobyl as one real-world worst-case scenario.
Three Mile Island wasn't reassuring either. The reason why it blew, you may recall, is that a relief valve, made by Dresser, failed. It had a classic design flaw, a piston diameter that was too large for its length, like a wide window that gets wedged into the frame when you try to open it. This valve had been tested before -- and failed, about 2% of the time. Scientific American, itself a nuclear power advocate, had a good article about this.
Dresser for its own part was defending itself by taking out full-page newspaper ads, and denouncing anti-nuclear activists as Communists. Edward Teller said that Ralph Nader opposed nuclear power because he was an Arab, and he wanted the U.S. to be dependent on Arab oil.
I would like to live in a country where we make technical decisions on the basis of the facts and the analysis of experts. Unfortunately I live in a country where we make technical decisions (and any decisions) on the basis of who can muster the strongest political power and lobbying (which usually translates into, who has the most money to spend on it). I really wish the nuclear industry had been run by people who stuck to the facts and tried to resolve their disagreements with their critics with reason, rather than steamroller them with negative PR campaigns and campaign contributions.
I believe nuclear power could have worked, and might someday. One of the problems is that we seized on essentially one design, a scaled-up version of the one used on nuclear submarines. There were other designs that were inherently safer. It seems that American capitalism needs the government to do its R&D for it.
I always favored a free-market solution: The Price-Anderson Act absolved the nuclear industry of liability for any accident, and instead had the government step in, to compensate everyone for the damage (up to $120 million, which wouldn't go too far in Chernobyl). My solution: Repeal the Price-Anderson Act, and let the nuclear power industry get its liability insurance on the free market like everyone else. If they're so safe, let them convince the insurance industry. It seems that American capitalism always needs a government handout.
Then there's the part in Atlas Shrugged where all the creators leave the moochers behind and go off to Gault Gulch and live off their perpetual motion machines.
I encourage you to teach your daughter as much about biology and science as she can understand. It would help if she's already heard the term "DNA" early on so that when she comes across it again, with a jumble of other terms, it will at least be familiar.
I'm sure there are 3-year-old children where both parents are scientists http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2899#comic and talk about biology over the dinner table. They would have a better understanding of DNA than normal children.
However, teachers and psychologists tell me that one of the important things about child development is that children can learn certain things at certain stages of development. If you try to teach them something before they reach that stage of development, they just can't learn it.
I tried to teach my niece to draw at the age of 5. She couldn't -- and wouldn't -- draw realistically, so I stopped pushing it. Then I read that most children can't draw realistically until the age of 6 or 7. When she turned 7, she started drawing faces, and she drew them pretty well.
In biology, for the most part you have to learn ideas in sequence. You start with the basics and then go to the details. For example, high school teachers don't teach the names of proteins. Kids learn a few age-appropriate concepts, and come back to them in greater detail in their college biology courses.
Richard Feynmann had a good essay on science education and what it means to understand science, as opposed to just memorizing terms. I can't find it immediately.
Maybe your daughter is growing up in an unusually enriched environment, and maybe she can understand some of the basics of DNA at 3 1/2. Since kids can learn card games, maybe they can learn the basics of DNA. I'd like to see it. I am a great advocate of teaching biology to children, and if it works, despite my skepticism, fine.
But I don't think those rural Indian kids in TFA understood anything about DNA. And I won't believe it until I see evidence.
I taught my 5-year-old niece about T cells and B cells too, but I didn't think she really knew what was going on. It was like teaching her about Punch and Judy. I don't think kids her age were capable of making the link between T/B cells and sickness.
How does she know that cells exist? Did you show her cells under a microscope? And if you did, would she understand what she was seeing under a microscope? I look at photographs of pathology slides, and sometimes I can't figure out what's going on, even with a caption.
As I say, it's easy to get kids to parrot phrases, but they don't understand those phrases.
Teachers break these ideas down into learning concepts, and they make sure their students understand the concepts before they go on to the next concept. They have ways of testing to make sure kids are understanding it.
True story: A kindergarten teacher took her children for a walk in the woods. They saw a woodpecker for the first time. One of the children said, "Oh, it's eating insects." That's learning science. They observed the world and formed a hypothesis.
Showing kids videos of AT and CG pairs, etc., isn't looking at the real world. They're learning about pictures of AT and CG pairs. Or maybe they see plastic AT and CG pairs, like a museum exhibit I saw. But they don't actually see AT and CG pairs. They have no way of knowing whether AT and CG pairs exist, except from authority. And learning from authority isn't science. Science is learning from observation of the real world.
I could show kids a video of Santa's elves making proteins inside tiny cells. How do they know that AT and CG pairs make proteins, rather than Santa's elves? Videos of AT and CG pairs aren't a testable hypothesis. They're not observations of the real world.
I thought that it should be pretty easy for kids to understand AT and CG pairs, too. They're just like video games, right? http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/dna_double_helix/ Kids come away using words like "DNA" so they must be learning something, right?
Then I read the science teaching literature, including the National Science Education Standards http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=4962 Actually, according to the science teachers who worked on the standards, even the concept of molecules are difficult for most high school students. That's what they say, and they have the experience.
You can get kids to repeat phrases -- and the way a lot of tests are designed, you can get kids to give the "right" answer to test questions without understanding what the words mean. The textbooks say, "surface tension is caused by molecular attraction.", Then the test says, "What causes surface tension?" and the kids answer, "Molecular attraction." But they don't understand molecular attraction. They're just repeating the words (which kids are very good at, since their minds are programmed to learn language). The proof is, you could just as easily write textbooks that say, "Surface tension is caused by Jesus," and the kids would answer, "Jesus." You could say, "Surface tension is caused by asdfj." Kids will repeat it. But they won't understand it.
You're right. I don't believe it. There's no way that children from a rural village in India could understand DNA. Even well-educated western children can't understand DNA even in middle school or high school (unless they have parents who are very well educated).
At best, you could teach them to parrot phrases that they don't understand, like "mistakes in DNA replication cause diseases."
You could just as easily teach them to parrot phrases like "Disobeying God causes disease," and it would mean as much to them.
He went to a tiny village in India and put a computer there with software about DNA replication (in English, even though they did not speak or read English). When he came back months later, a group of young children said, 'We don't understand anything — except that mistakes in DNA replication cause diseases.'
I don't believe it. Young children can't understand DNA -- or even molecules. I particularly don't believe that young children from a rural village in India could understand anything meaningful about DNA. You might be able to teach them to parrot phrases like "mistakes in DNA replication cause diseases" if you repeated it to them a lot. But they won't understand what they're talking about. You could just as easily teach them to say, "Disobeying God causes diseases." It certainly has nothing to do with teaching science.
I did some research into elementary and high school science education, and read what the teachers with hands-on experience said. A friend of mine had lots of stories about how he taught science in the Peace Corps in Africa.
Surprisingly, even high school kids have a difficult time with science concepts that seem to be simple and basic -- for example, molecules.
Think about it. Science is hands-on. The main lesson of science is that you make a hypothesis, and then test the hypothesis against the real world to see if your hypothesis actually works. How can you demonstrate to a high school student that molecules exist? I read in my history of science books the saga of how chemists finally figured out and proved what molecules and atoms were, starting in about the 18th century. It's a great story. It would be very difficult for high school students to replicate those experiments, and even more difficult to understand what they were doing. We don't have mercury barometers any more. How do you prove that atoms and molecules really exist? In my niece's middle school science class, it was an appeal to authority -- the book says so.
I was particularly interested in the efforts to teach elementary school students about DNA. What's the point? You're not demonstrating the existence of DNA or genes to them. You're not showing them anything in the real, testable world. You're just showing them pictures and animations. The Harry Potter movies also have animations. Why should they believe your animations any more than Harry Potter movies? Or creationist Bible movies? The American Museum of Natural History had a show on DNA. They had exhibits for children demonstrating DNA. I asked the kids to explain it -- and they couldn't do it. They had a big, colorful, impressive exhibit for kids on DNA, and none of the kids understood it. Although you could get a grant for it.
In the world of pundits and foundation grants, there are lots of people who make extravagant claims about what their thing can do, their technical trick or their computers.
There are lots of things about science that you can teach kids, hands-on, starting as young as 3 years old. Seymour Simon http://www.seymoursimon.com/ had books for 4-year-olds that taught them how to discover for themselves principles of engineering using paper and clay to build arches. Science teachers take their kids out into the woods -- or a vacant lot -- and show them what you can find there.
But teaching rural Indian children to understand anything about DNA? With materials in a language they don't understand? I don't believe it.
It seems as if the Ada Initiative was using the same power dynamic to force the conference to ban Violet Blue's talk that rapists use to force sex onto unwilling women (by some definitions of rape).
Employer: "If you have sex with me I'll send you to that conference you want to attend so badly."
They're also arguing that they be the ones who decide what people are allowed to talk about and when.
They enforce their decisions by threatening demonstrations that will embarrass or disrupt the conferences.
The "creeper cards" threaten violence:
CREEPER MOVE!
If you have received this card, you have done something wildly inappropriate or otherwise harassed the person who handed this to you. You should be happy you got a card and not a punch in the face. Check yourself — you might not be this lucky twice!
I've read a lot of articles in the major medical journals (and the Wall Street Journal) about the different health care systems around the world. I know what the people at Reason magazine call a free market, I know what people on the WSJ editorial page call a free market, and I know what the different markets in health care and other industries look like.
A lot of times the medical journals will draw a chart of the different health care systems with cost on one axis and some proxy for quality, like life expectancy, on the other axis. There are many ways of doing things.
I know what the conservative policy analysts in the WSJ call a free market. There is no successful health care system in the world with a free market, by any of their definitions.
Transparency and choice doesn't work in health care. Kenneth Arrow, the Nobel laureate in economics, wrote an article explaining why in technical detail.
That's true, there is no free market in health care. The free market (in most things) is like one of those transuranium elements that last only a few miliseconds after you create it. Then it turns into something else.
Offhand, I can't think of any free market in America right now. For a while, we had something like a free market in the computer components industry (most of which moved to China, subsidized by their government). I read Adam Smith. There are benefits to the free market and also costs. I like to be able to look for a cheap restaurant or supermarket. But if those employees are getting paid so little that they can't survive, and need government subsidies of food stamps and Medicaid, then the government has to step in and regulate their salaries.
I've studied health care systems around the world, and I can't think of a single system in which a free market works. Sometimes limited free markets can be useful, like competition for generics, but that takes a lot of government regulations.
I do get copies of the bills from my insurer, stamped "This is not a bill. Do not pay." So I know what they paid.
I once copy-edited a book on management accounting, which is the branch of accounting that deals with calculating inter-organization costs. I learned that particularly in an institution like a hospital, it's impossible, in principle, to assign a specific cost to a particular product or service. Most of the charges are arbitrary. You can buy an aspirin for 5 cents in the drug store, but it costs a few dollars of a nurse's time to administer it, and another few dollars to pay for a system to make sure that you get an aspirin and not a dangerous drug. Doctors have to spend time reviewing the latest medical literature to see whether aspirin is appropriate to what you've got. The hospital has a computer department, a legal department, and lots of other departments which are necessary to run the hospital. How do you charge the cost of the comptuer department to that aspirin?
And furthermore, in a free market, or whatever we've got, different parties negotiate different prices, even for the same service with the same supplier. McDonald's buys potatoes a lot cheaper per pound than I do. Employees who know how profitable their employer is can negotiate higher salaries. Unions can negotiate higher salaries than individual workers. That's part of the free market.
In fact, throwing darts at a dartboard can indeed be part of a rational negotiating strategy.
(I read the Steven Brill article in Time, so I didn't have to watch the Daily Show. And I already knew about Chargemaster.)
Slashdot Mirror
Did it turn out that the dizziness was indeed a side effect of gall bladder attacks?
I thought that medical records were like that. If it's wrong, you legibly strike it out.
I remember in the (not-so) old days of paper records medical students were taught that when they corrected a mistake in a patient chart, they should strike out the incorrect information and write the correction next to it -- but never cover the old information with white-out, and never cross it out heavily enough to obliterate it.
Coincidentally, my friend's wife happened to work in the records room of his HMO (it's name rhymes with 'gyp'), and snuck his medical records out. The widow received a large wrongful death settlement only because of her having physical possession of his records, else no one would have known the true cause of his provider's negligence.
That doesn't sound right. In New York State, and I think in every other state, a deceased patient's relatives have a right to get copies of the records. Apart from that right, if they're considering suing the hospital, a lawyer can demand copies of the records.
the comparison is -- at best -- weak-minded drivel.
When you've learned how to conduct a rational conversation without insults, I'll take you seriously.
I was trying to think of people who were blacklisted because of their political ideas, even though their politics had nothing to do with their work.
Actually, this country has a long history of boycotting fiction over the creator's belief. We had lots of blacklisted authors, like Dalton Trumbo, during the McCarthy days. There was a book called Red Channels that listed everyone on the blacklist. There were also a lot of musicians and actors, like Paul Robeson. They couldn't work in the U.S., and they couldn't get a passport to leave the U.S. to work abroad.
You can draw 2 conclusions:
1. American blacklists were bad, so we shouldn't blacklist anybody.
2. American blacklists were bad, but that's the way people play politics, so we have to fight the way they do or we'll lose.
I would prefer choice 1, but that's not the way American politics is played.
Back before Stonewall, you could rob and murder somebody, and get off with it using the defense that he was a homosexual. I can understand why gays get nervous when people attack them.
Couple of communications satellites, telescopes in orbit.
So the free market, where consumers make rational choices, doesn't work?
You don't like NASA?
The pressure release valve jammed in the open position, and released a lot of coolant. That's what I meant by "blow." It's like a whale. The loss of coolant led to a partial meltdown.
I used to think that Michio Kaku was an irresponsible sensationalist. I went to a meeting a few days after the accident where he showed a slide of a melted reactor core, and said, "That's what Three Mile Island looks like inside." I thought he was going beyond the evidence. Then it turned out that the core was melted. Kaku was right. I was wrong. I turned my skepticism up a notch.
I did find the uninformed anti-nuclear rhetoric annoying (like any uninformed rhetoric), but the pro-nuclear side suffered from technological hubris.
A nuclear reactor offers the promise of unlimited, cheap, carbon-free energy. OTOH, there is a small risk of a very big catastrophe, Are great benefits worth great risks? Hard to say. We now have Chernobyl as one real-world worst-case scenario.
Three Mile Island wasn't reassuring either. The reason why it blew, you may recall, is that a relief valve, made by Dresser, failed. It had a classic design flaw, a piston diameter that was too large for its length, like a wide window that gets wedged into the frame when you try to open it. This valve had been tested before -- and failed, about 2% of the time. Scientific American, itself a nuclear power advocate, had a good article about this.
Dresser for its own part was defending itself by taking out full-page newspaper ads, and denouncing anti-nuclear activists as Communists. Edward Teller said that Ralph Nader opposed nuclear power because he was an Arab, and he wanted the U.S. to be dependent on Arab oil.
I would like to live in a country where we make technical decisions on the basis of the facts and the analysis of experts. Unfortunately I live in a country where we make technical decisions (and any decisions) on the basis of who can muster the strongest political power and lobbying (which usually translates into, who has the most money to spend on it). I really wish the nuclear industry had been run by people who stuck to the facts and tried to resolve their disagreements with their critics with reason, rather than steamroller them with negative PR campaigns and campaign contributions.
I believe nuclear power could have worked, and might someday. One of the problems is that we seized on essentially one design, a scaled-up version of the one used on nuclear submarines. There were other designs that were inherently safer. It seems that American capitalism needs the government to do its R&D for it.
I always favored a free-market solution: The Price-Anderson Act absolved the nuclear industry of liability for any accident, and instead had the government step in, to compensate everyone for the damage (up to $120 million, which wouldn't go too far in Chernobyl). My solution: Repeal the Price-Anderson Act, and let the nuclear power industry get its liability insurance on the free market like everyone else. If they're so safe, let them convince the insurance industry. It seems that American capitalism always needs a government handout.
Then there's the part in Atlas Shrugged where all the creators leave the moochers behind and go off to Gault Gulch and live off their perpetual motion machines.
I encourage you to teach your daughter as much about biology and science as she can understand. It would help if she's already heard the term "DNA" early on so that when she comes across it again, with a jumble of other terms, it will at least be familiar.
I'm sure there are 3-year-old children where both parents are scientists http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2899#comic and talk about biology over the dinner table. They would have a better understanding of DNA than normal children.
However, teachers and psychologists tell me that one of the important things about child development is that children can learn certain things at certain stages of development. If you try to teach them something before they reach that stage of development, they just can't learn it.
I tried to teach my niece to draw at the age of 5. She couldn't -- and wouldn't -- draw realistically, so I stopped pushing it. Then I read that most children can't draw realistically until the age of 6 or 7. When she turned 7, she started drawing faces, and she drew them pretty well.
In biology, for the most part you have to learn ideas in sequence. You start with the basics and then go to the details. For example, high school teachers don't teach the names of proteins. Kids learn a few age-appropriate concepts, and come back to them in greater detail in their college biology courses.
Richard Feynmann had a good essay on science education and what it means to understand science, as opposed to just memorizing terms. I can't find it immediately.
Maybe your daughter is growing up in an unusually enriched environment, and maybe she can understand some of the basics of DNA at 3 1/2. Since kids can learn card games, maybe they can learn the basics of DNA. I'd like to see it. I am a great advocate of teaching biology to children, and if it works, despite my skepticism, fine.
But I don't think those rural Indian kids in TFA understood anything about DNA. And I won't believe it until I see evidence.
I taught my 5-year-old niece about T cells and B cells too, but I didn't think she really knew what was going on. It was like teaching her about Punch and Judy. I don't think kids her age were capable of making the link between T/B cells and sickness.
How does she know that cells exist? Did you show her cells under a microscope? And if you did, would she understand what she was seeing under a microscope? I look at photographs of pathology slides, and sometimes I can't figure out what's going on, even with a caption.
As I say, it's easy to get kids to parrot phrases, but they don't understand those phrases.
Teachers break these ideas down into learning concepts, and they make sure their students understand the concepts before they go on to the next concept. They have ways of testing to make sure kids are understanding it.
True story: A kindergarten teacher took her children for a walk in the woods. They saw a woodpecker for the first time. One of the children said, "Oh, it's eating insects." That's learning science. They observed the world and formed a hypothesis.
Showing kids videos of AT and CG pairs, etc., isn't looking at the real world. They're learning about pictures of AT and CG pairs. Or maybe they see plastic AT and CG pairs, like a museum exhibit I saw. But they don't actually see AT and CG pairs. They have no way of knowing whether AT and CG pairs exist, except from authority. And learning from authority isn't science. Science is learning from observation of the real world.
I could show kids a video of Santa's elves making proteins inside tiny cells. How do they know that AT and CG pairs make proteins, rather than Santa's elves? Videos of AT and CG pairs aren't a testable hypothesis. They're not observations of the real world.
I thought that it should be pretty easy for kids to understand AT and CG pairs, too. They're just like video games, right? http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/dna_double_helix/ Kids come away using words like "DNA" so they must be learning something, right?
Then I read the science teaching literature, including the National Science Education Standards http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=4962 Actually, according to the science teachers who worked on the standards, even the concept of molecules are difficult for most high school students. That's what they say, and they have the experience.
You can get kids to repeat phrases -- and the way a lot of tests are designed, you can get kids to give the "right" answer to test questions without understanding what the words mean. The textbooks say, "surface tension is caused by molecular attraction.", Then the test says, "What causes surface tension?" and the kids answer, "Molecular attraction." But they don't understand molecular attraction. They're just repeating the words (which kids are very good at, since their minds are programmed to learn language). The proof is, you could just as easily write textbooks that say, "Surface tension is caused by Jesus," and the kids would answer, "Jesus." You could say, "Surface tension is caused by asdfj." Kids will repeat it. But they won't understand it.
Interference and direction like explaining the scientific method.
Or how to use the library.
You're right. I don't believe it. There's no way that children from a rural village in India could understand DNA. Even well-educated western children can't understand DNA even in middle school or high school (unless they have parents who are very well educated).
At best, you could teach them to parrot phrases that they don't understand, like "mistakes in DNA replication cause diseases."
You could just as easily teach them to parrot phrases like "Disobeying God causes disease," and it would mean as much to them.
He went to a tiny village in India and put a computer there with software about DNA replication (in English, even though they did not speak or read English). When he came back months later, a group of young children said, 'We don't understand anything — except that mistakes in DNA replication cause diseases.'
I don't believe it. Young children can't understand DNA -- or even molecules. I particularly don't believe that young children from a rural village in India could understand anything meaningful about DNA. You might be able to teach them to parrot phrases like "mistakes in DNA replication cause diseases" if you repeated it to them a lot. But they won't understand what they're talking about. You could just as easily teach them to say, "Disobeying God causes diseases." It certainly has nothing to do with teaching science.
I did some research into elementary and high school science education, and read what the teachers with hands-on experience said. A friend of mine had lots of stories about how he taught science in the Peace Corps in Africa.
Surprisingly, even high school kids have a difficult time with science concepts that seem to be simple and basic -- for example, molecules.
Think about it. Science is hands-on. The main lesson of science is that you make a hypothesis, and then test the hypothesis against the real world to see if your hypothesis actually works. How can you demonstrate to a high school student that molecules exist? I read in my history of science books the saga of how chemists finally figured out and proved what molecules and atoms were, starting in about the 18th century. It's a great story. It would be very difficult for high school students to replicate those experiments, and even more difficult to understand what they were doing. We don't have mercury barometers any more. How do you prove that atoms and molecules really exist? In my niece's middle school science class, it was an appeal to authority -- the book says so.
I was particularly interested in the efforts to teach elementary school students about DNA. What's the point? You're not demonstrating the existence of DNA or genes to them. You're not showing them anything in the real, testable world. You're just showing them pictures and animations. The Harry Potter movies also have animations. Why should they believe your animations any more than Harry Potter movies? Or creationist Bible movies? The American Museum of Natural History had a show on DNA. They had exhibits for children demonstrating DNA. I asked the kids to explain it -- and they couldn't do it. They had a big, colorful, impressive exhibit for kids on DNA, and none of the kids understood it. Although you could get a grant for it.
In the world of pundits and foundation grants, there are lots of people who make extravagant claims about what their thing can do, their technical trick or their computers.
There are lots of things about science that you can teach kids, hands-on, starting as young as 3 years old. Seymour Simon http://www.seymoursimon.com/ had books for 4-year-olds that taught them how to discover for themselves principles of engineering using paper and clay to build arches. Science teachers take their kids out into the woods -- or a vacant lot -- and show them what you can find there.
But teaching rural Indian children to understand anything about DNA? With materials in a language they don't understand? I don't believe it.
Sounds like somebody who wants to see his midterms cancelled.
The most obvious difference in circumstances is that we've let terrorists use our biological weapons to kill people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks and Pakistan hasn't.
It seems as if the Ada Initiative was using the same power dynamic to force the conference to ban Violet Blue's talk that rapists use to force sex onto unwilling women (by some definitions of rape).
Employer: "If you have sex with me I'll send you to that conference you want to attend so badly."
They're also arguing that they be the ones who decide what people are allowed to talk about and when.
They enforce their decisions by threatening demonstrations that will embarrass or disrupt the conferences.
The "creeper cards" threaten violence:
CREEPER MOVE!
If you have received this card, you have done something wildly inappropriate or otherwise harassed the person who handed this to you. You should be happy you got a card and not a punch in the face. Check yourself — you might not be this lucky twice!
I've read a lot of articles in the major medical journals (and the Wall Street Journal) about the different health care systems around the world. I know what the people at Reason magazine call a free market, I know what people on the WSJ editorial page call a free market, and I know what the different markets in health care and other industries look like.
A lot of times the medical journals will draw a chart of the different health care systems with cost on one axis and some proxy for quality, like life expectancy, on the other axis. There are many ways of doing things.
I know what the conservative policy analysts in the WSJ call a free market. There is no successful health care system in the world with a free market, by any of their definitions.
Transparency and choice doesn't work in health care. Kenneth Arrow, the Nobel laureate in economics, wrote an article explaining why in technical detail.
That's true, there is no free market in health care. The free market (in most things) is like one of those transuranium elements that last only a few miliseconds after you create it. Then it turns into something else.
Offhand, I can't think of any free market in America right now. For a while, we had something like a free market in the computer components industry (most of which moved to China, subsidized by their government). I read Adam Smith. There are benefits to the free market and also costs. I like to be able to look for a cheap restaurant or supermarket. But if those employees are getting paid so little that they can't survive, and need government subsidies of food stamps and Medicaid, then the government has to step in and regulate their salaries.
I've studied health care systems around the world, and I can't think of a single system in which a free market works. Sometimes limited free markets can be useful, like competition for generics, but that takes a lot of government regulations.
I do get copies of the bills from my insurer, stamped "This is not a bill. Do not pay." So I know what they paid.
I once copy-edited a book on management accounting, which is the branch of accounting that deals with calculating inter-organization costs. I learned that particularly in an institution like a hospital, it's impossible, in principle, to assign a specific cost to a particular product or service. Most of the charges are arbitrary. You can buy an aspirin for 5 cents in the drug store, but it costs a few dollars of a nurse's time to administer it, and another few dollars to pay for a system to make sure that you get an aspirin and not a dangerous drug. Doctors have to spend time reviewing the latest medical literature to see whether aspirin is appropriate to what you've got. The hospital has a computer department, a legal department, and lots of other departments which are necessary to run the hospital. How do you charge the cost of the comptuer department to that aspirin?
And furthermore, in a free market, or whatever we've got, different parties negotiate different prices, even for the same service with the same supplier. McDonald's buys potatoes a lot cheaper per pound than I do. Employees who know how profitable their employer is can negotiate higher salaries. Unions can negotiate higher salaries than individual workers. That's part of the free market.
In fact, throwing darts at a dartboard can indeed be part of a rational negotiating strategy.
(I read the Steven Brill article in Time, so I didn't have to watch the Daily Show. And I already knew about Chargemaster.)
Gov: *middle finger*
You're referring to Justice Scalia, I assume?
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-280_162-1444503.html