you don't want them voting on every crappy decision.
there needs to be some personal disincentive to call a vote about stuff that doesn't matter.
look at the mature democracies - they don't have crappy electronic votey things.
if there is a vote, they have to get up out of their seats and go somewhere
you could have a lobby that they have to go through a yes or no channel with a barcoded badge but better (and more geeky)- how about if they have an RFID badge each and then go and stand at the YES or NO end of the debating chamber ( where a sensor picks them up)
This is a pretty vacuous vox pop study that doesn't really tell me anything I didn't know.
The problem with this approach goes back to BF Skinner and his teaching machines in the 1950s. Essentially it is that all the interaction has to be scripted, and if you think about even the large free roaming games like GTA, all the key interactions are pre-determined.
The problem with humans is that they do not act in linear predictable ways, and that is what makes them so interesting, and challenging. A VR environment can not yet portray the level of detail necessary for complex human-human interaction to be realistic.
The problem with medical students is that progressive generations of well meaning medical education 'innovation' mean that they spend less and less time interacting with patients. Only this, structured and supervised properly, is good training for what you want them to be able to do at the end - to interact with patients.
I do see a time in the future when some good learning will be possible in a true virtual environment, but for now, like other simulation based training, it is limited to the relatively few situations when the situation portrayed is adequately realistic and the stuff being taught is simple e.g. Pavlov's dog stimulus-response stuff - things like resuscitation. It is not appropriate for teaching, even less for testing, complex human-human interaction.
[CoI IAAD, have masters in MedEd, and teach in (allegedly) the top medical school in the UK]
IAAD, but an emergency physician so people generally don't have time to look stuff up. Or if they do, by definition, it's not an emergency. And the waiting room is in a Faraday cage, so their iphones don't work either, a very satisfactory arrangement.
When I talk to my GP (family physician) colleagues about this, they say you have to work with it, and this phenomenon always occurred to a certain extent, it's just that in the old days the nutters had to go to the medical libraries, and so were easier to identify. Nowadays, quite rational people look up their symptoms and get things right, and this is good.
There are real medical problems with the internet and increased accessibility of information, but far more than increasing anxiety, I would say worse problems are:
Astroturfing by pharmaceutical companies - pressure groups, patient groups with suspiciously slick websites
quack cures
aggressive libel laws stifling scientific debate which in the old days would have been shielded from lawyers.
looneys can find each other and associate more easily, and act aggressively to those who do not share their very strange view of the world - e.g. 'Myalgic Encephalitis sufferers' (an alleged condition that is neither myalgic or encephalitis and it is everyone else who does the suffering).
Patients usually give you a clue that they are a looney though, which is very helpful. Favoured tell-tale signs are wearing tinted glasses, a soft neck collar or making notes in purple ink or with RANDOM capitalised words, or using one of those obesity scooter things. But if they seem relatively normal, I listen carefully and explain, because quite often they are right.
BTW, I presume you were referring to this? Although some other conditions can do this as well.
the problem is that we then end up with a monoculture, whereby the only IT people hired are Microtards, because they are the cheapest and sheepest.
Now we have a hospital that is riddled with malware because the Microtards don't know what they are doing. i.e. we spend loads of cash encrypting everybody's hard disk, and then install conficker etc. on all the workstations.
And this is not a small hospital - it is a world famous name that this is happening in.
I think the OP is in NZ as they have district health boards there.
the reason to harvest cord blood rather than anything else is because it is free, easy to collect, and has more than average stem cells.
if in the future one of these people needs a bone marrow transplant, they have a perfect match.
Research causes are also in there, but I very much doubt the legal/forensic side of things was considered in all this, and usually medical databases are quite thoroughly tied down in this respect.
I have recently written a textbook, and I have written it for a series that I know will get widely pirated, because the pages are A4 sized and photocopy really well and it will appear as a torrent quite quickly.
I will not make a lot of money from the book - probably $5k per edition, but writing it will enable me to share my vision with a lot of people, and I regard that as a privilege. The more it is pirated, the more it will help my career.
Agree completely.
Leopards and spots- I make a real effort to avoid any Belkin products.
OTOH I spoke to my publisher the other day about my book and she said that I should get people to review it (i.e. favourably) on Amazon.
I think that is probably legitimate as they will have read it and they do not work for me, and I would have no control over what they wrote, but would be interested to know if I am selling out.
The Scientology guy was just using the "Broken Record Technique" which is spectacularly annoying, to great affect.
The problem for the BBC guy is that he was not prepared for this, and lost it completely, and loses face, which means that he is still a way off OT III, I reckon.
As a medical doctor who uses computer terminals to view my images, my medico-legal/ Quality Assurance framework will clearly reject any computer capable of degrading image quality, esp without informing the viewer.
We have enough problem with the lusers having the resolution of the TFTs set wrong. This is a no-brainer - we cannot afford the risks of a doctor missing a fracture because someone has viewed something on a computer and the output has been downgraded to VGA.
Interestingly, apple seems to be doing very well in the medical imaging market, courtesy of OSIRIX. Maybe this will tip the balance.
Vista is Microsoft's version of 'jumping the shark', The Duke Nuke'm Forever of operating systems.
The best analogy is probably that Vista will be billg's Spruce Goose - an enormous triumph of technology over common sense built by a slightly creepy multi-billionaire.
Behavioural interviewing is a very dodgy 'science'. It is based on the premise that if you ask someone what they would do in a certain situation, then assess their reply. Obviously there may well be a difference between what they say they would do, and what they would do.
Behavioural interviewing has been seized on by HR people as being somehow more valid than any other technique. There is no evidence to support this, and it is more likely that they are just clutching at the nearest pseudo-scientific theory to fill the inner emptiness in their lives.
It is probably more likely that the on-line test is just a Myers Briggs type test where they are looking at Introvert/Extrovert/ Thinking/Feeling/ Perceiving/Judging scales. In this case, don't worry. They still can't tell that you are a dangerous psychopath.
My delivery date has just gone from shipping on 15th and delivery on 17th to shipping on 28th Feb and delivery on 2 March, so this is probably the reason that we are getting a free upgrade.
I am ok with that as long as the end result is worth having, as this is the first apple I have bought, but a bit annoying.
I understood that macbooks will have socketed processeors (?? for upgrade).
So if I have to send my new macbook (delivery 15th Feb haha believe it when I see it) back for a newer faster processor sometime down the track I won't lose any sleep over it.
I have used VMWare on my PC laptops for a couple of years and it is great. I have an old powerbook as well, but virtual PC is just horrible, and have been holding off buying a mac until the intel ones came out so that VMWare would run on it.
I think they will shift a lot of VMware workstation software when they do this, as a lot of developers I know love the mac concept and stability, but have to run Windows stuff as well.
you could buy a secondhand real toshiba with that.
I have had real toshibas for the last 9 years and they last well and are spectacularly well made (especially my portege 7200s, which I still use with linux), and I have bought over 20 for other people. Now waiting for a yonah powerbook.
There is one check that you must do though to make sure you are not buying crud. Turn it over, and read the bottom. If it doesn't say 'made in Japan', just walk away.
Real toshibas are made in Japan, the consumer crap is a toshiba label on some OEM crap, as you have found out!
It is quite striking how quickly Ubuntu has become a very mature and very user friendly distribution.
While it could all have been bankrolled by St Mark Shuttleworth, I wondered at the time whether it could have been a trojan horse for development of a Google OS. We will know soon enough. It could be very smart long-term marketing, and a massive PR coup to be doing something actively helpful to developing countries instead of trying to sell them a crippled OS (who could I be talking about ??).
[thanks]
It is possible that it is a result of the extreme immune activation, and the mode of death seems to be fluid leakage from lung capilliaries that is usually seen in patients with severe bacterial infections.
Against this theory is the fact that older/ less fit people do not seem to die in these pandemics, which you would expect them to do in most illnesses. The current guess is that the reason for this is that older people's immune systems were exposed to previous pandemics (good news for me, as I was just there for 1968), and therefore had immune memory (through B cells) of previous generations of viruses. They are therefore able to gear up their immune response more quickly than those who have no such immune memory.
The population group for this pandemic is very different to that of previous generations, as due to general health improvements we have many chronically sick people (lung/ heart/ kidney failure, diabetes, AIDS) and many more elderly/ very elderly than previous pandemics. Therefore the 'only kills young people' label may not be right this time.
There is a groovy little flash vid showing how these antivirals help slow down replication (prob. drug company funded, as it looks pretty and uses the tradename, despite the.org domain)
These drugs are not used for normal influenza in most countries as their impact is borderline at best. The trials supporting their use were drug company funded and were done in ways which would be difficult to generalise to a 'normal' population. As such their sales had been very disappointing until H5N1 came along.
You're right about spending a lot of money on oseltamivir being a bit of a waste. Your ideas, while fine from a lab point of view, are not possible in the 'real world', which is why public health people/ epidemiologists generally run the show in this kind of event, not lab people like your girlfriend, or clinicians (like me), although I am on a committee of 20 planning for pandemic influenza covering about 1m people.
Part of the problem with the purchase of oseltamivir from a political point of view is that it is necessary to be seen to be doing something, and the snake oil salesmen are only too happy to try to cash in, as you rightly point out.
Unfortunately you cannot build a vaccine straight away, and all the work being done now may not pay off.
In addition to the research component, there are also major manufacturing problems, as most countries will nationalise existing vaccine production facilities.
This means if you are in a poor country, forget about vaccine. America is relatively underprovided but is building facilities - I think. Europe is OK, and I think Japan and Australia/NZ will be OK.
Just storing and distributing the vaccine will be a nightmare. We are planning armed guards, military storage depots etc. as the potential for theft/ fraud/ corruption and general unhappiness is large.
oseltamivir (the real name of TamiFlu) is a viral inhibitor which helps protect cells. It does not work like some antibiotics which (often) actually kill the harmful agent. It may reduce the severity of symptoms, but we know that most of the time it doesn't make a lot of difference. The liklihood of it working in H5N1 has probably not been helped by the Chinese spraying their flocks of chicken with these types of drugs, which will tend to select resistant strains.
If there is one lesson you learn from this, it should be this:
only vaccination of large numbers of people will prevent significant disease. If your government is telling you that you will be fine because they are stockpiling oseltamivir, the experts in virology/ infectious disease/ emergency planning/ public health suggest otherwise.
The problem is we don't know what the pandemic will be. Current H1N5 'Bird Flu' is only one candidate virus for combination with a 'traditional' influenza virus to make a new mutant strain to which most of the population has no resistance.
[IAAD, am involved with pandemic influenza planning]
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you don't want them voting on every crappy decision. there needs to be some personal disincentive to call a vote about stuff that doesn't matter. look at the mature democracies - they don't have crappy electronic votey things.
if there is a vote, they have to get up out of their seats and go somewhere
you could have a lobby that they have to go through a yes or no channel with a barcoded badge but better (and more geeky)- how about if they have an RFID badge each and then go and stand at the YES or NO end of the debating chamber ( where a sensor picks them up)
This is a pretty vacuous vox pop study that doesn't really tell me anything I didn't know.
The problem with this approach goes back to BF Skinner and his teaching machines in the 1950s. Essentially it is that all the interaction has to be scripted, and if you think about even the large free roaming games like GTA, all the key interactions are pre-determined.
The problem with humans is that they do not act in linear predictable ways, and that is what makes them so interesting, and challenging. A VR environment can not yet portray the level of detail necessary for complex human-human interaction to be realistic.
The problem with medical students is that progressive generations of well meaning medical education 'innovation' mean that they spend less and less time interacting with patients. Only this, structured and supervised properly, is good training for what you want them to be able to do at the end - to interact with patients.
I do see a time in the future when some good learning will be possible in a true virtual environment, but for now, like other simulation based training, it is limited to the relatively few situations when the situation portrayed is adequately realistic and the stuff being taught is simple e.g. Pavlov's dog stimulus-response stuff - things like resuscitation. It is not appropriate for teaching, even less for testing, complex human-human interaction.
[CoI IAAD, have masters in MedEd, and teach in (allegedly) the top medical school in the UK]
IAAD, but an emergency physician so people generally don't have time to look stuff up. Or if they do, by definition, it's not an emergency. And the waiting room is in a Faraday cage, so their iphones don't work either, a very satisfactory arrangement.
When I talk to my GP (family physician) colleagues about this, they say you have to work with it, and this phenomenon always occurred to a certain extent, it's just that in the old days the nutters had to go to the medical libraries, and so were easier to identify. Nowadays, quite rational people look up their symptoms and get things right, and this is good.
There are real medical problems with the internet and increased accessibility of information, but far more than increasing anxiety, I would say worse problems are:
Patients usually give you a clue that they are a looney though, which is very helpful. Favoured tell-tale signs are wearing tinted glasses, a soft neck collar or making notes in purple ink or with RANDOM capitalised words, or using one of those obesity scooter things. But if they seem relatively normal, I listen carefully and explain, because quite often they are right.
BTW, I presume you were referring to this? Although some other conditions can do this as well.
As a doctor, I suggest that your navicular bone is more likely to be found in your foot than your wrist. I'd stick to cars!
the problem is that we then end up with a monoculture, whereby the only IT people hired are Microtards, because they are the cheapest and sheepest.
Now we have a hospital that is riddled with malware because the Microtards don't know what they are doing.
i.e. we spend loads of cash encrypting everybody's hard disk, and then install conficker etc. on all the workstations.
And this is not a small hospital - it is a world famous name that this is happening in.
I think the OP is in NZ as they have district health boards there.
the reason to harvest cord blood rather than anything else is because it is free, easy to collect, and has more than average stem cells.
if in the future one of these people needs a bone marrow transplant, they have a perfect match. Research causes are also in there, but I very much doubt the legal/forensic side of things was considered in all this, and usually medical databases are quite thoroughly tied down in this respect.
never heard Godwin used as a verb before, but if you can google, then why not.
Who said innovation was dead? (not CoS obviously).
I have recently written a textbook, and I have written it for a series that I know will get widely pirated, because the pages are A4 sized and photocopy really well and it will appear as a torrent quite quickly.
I will not make a lot of money from the book - probably $5k per edition, but writing it will enable me to share my vision with a lot of people, and I regard that as a privilege. The more it is pirated, the more it will help my career.
I live very nearby - it is not very large.
It is a non-academic holding pen for chavs and pikies until they can claim benefits. This is the purpose of education in the UK.
If the kit has not been stolen and is still working in a month's time I will eat a hat shop.
Agree completely.
Leopards and spots- I make a real effort to avoid any Belkin products.
OTOH I spoke to my publisher the other day about my book and she said that I should get people to review it (i.e. favourably) on Amazon.
I think that is probably legitimate as they will have read it and they do not work for me, and I would have no control over what they wrote, but would be interested to know if I am selling out.
The Scientology guy was just using the "Broken Record Technique" which is spectacularly annoying, to great affect. The problem for the BBC guy is that he was not prepared for this, and lost it completely, and loses face, which means that he is still a way off OT III, I reckon.
As a medical doctor who uses computer terminals to view my images, my medico-legal/ Quality Assurance framework will clearly reject any computer capable of degrading image quality, esp without informing the viewer.
We have enough problem with the lusers having the resolution of the TFTs set wrong. This is a no-brainer - we cannot afford the risks of a doctor missing a fracture because someone has viewed something on a computer and the output has been downgraded to VGA.
Interestingly, apple seems to be doing very well in the medical imaging market, courtesy of OSIRIX. Maybe this will tip the balance.
Vista is Microsoft's version of 'jumping the shark', The Duke Nuke'm Forever of operating systems.
The best analogy is probably that Vista will be billg's Spruce Goose - an enormous triumph of technology over common sense built by a slightly creepy multi-billionaire.
And it will not fly.
Behavioural interviewing is a very dodgy 'science'. It is based on the premise that if you ask someone what they would do in a certain situation, then assess their reply. Obviously there may well be a difference between what they say they would do, and what they would do.
Behavioural interviewing has been seized on by HR people as being somehow more valid than any other technique. There is no evidence to support this, and it is more likely that they are just clutching at the nearest pseudo-scientific theory to fill the inner emptiness in their lives.
It is probably more likely that the on-line test is just a Myers Briggs type test where they are looking at Introvert/Extrovert/ Thinking/Feeling/ Perceiving/Judging scales. In this case, don't worry. They still can't tell that you are a dangerous psychopath.
This is interesting because this is what patients with chronic fatigue/ ME / neurasthenia etc do (or rather don't do)
They stay in bed and their muscles and bones fall to bits, and surprise surprise, when they try to walk again it is painful and difficult.
If there is a lesson here that humans work best when they are exposed to regular doses of gravity.
The Heisenberg Effect is a good geeky example, but the correct/ relevant the social sciences equivalent is the Hawthorne Effect.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
My delivery date has just gone from shipping on 15th and delivery on 17th to shipping on 28th Feb and delivery on 2 March, so this is probably the reason that we are getting a free upgrade.
I am ok with that as long as the end result is worth having, as this is the first apple I have bought, but a bit annoying.
April the first comes early this year
I understood that macbooks will have socketed processeors (?? for upgrade).
So if I have to send my new macbook (delivery 15th Feb haha believe it when I see it) back for a newer faster processor sometime down the track I won't lose any sleep over it.
I have used VMWare on my PC laptops for a couple of years and it is great. I have an old powerbook as well, but virtual PC is just horrible, and have been holding off buying a mac until the intel ones came out so that VMWare would run on it.
I think they will shift a lot of VMware workstation software when they do this, as a lot of developers I know love the mac concept and stability, but have to run Windows stuff as well.
you could buy a secondhand real toshiba with that.
I have had real toshibas for the last 9 years and they last well and are spectacularly well made (especially my portege 7200s, which I still use with linux), and I have bought over 20 for other people. Now waiting for a yonah powerbook.
There is one check that you must do though to make sure you are not buying crud.
Turn it over, and read the bottom. If it doesn't say 'made in Japan', just walk away.
Real toshibas are made in Japan, the consumer crap is a toshiba label on some OEM crap, as you have found out!
It is quite striking how quickly Ubuntu has become a very mature and very user friendly distribution.
While it could all have been bankrolled by St Mark Shuttleworth, I wondered at the time whether it could have been a trojan horse for development of a Google OS. We will know soon enough. It could be very smart long-term marketing, and a massive PR coup to be doing something actively helpful to developing countries instead of trying to sell them a crippled OS (who could I be talking about ??).
[thanks]
It is possible that it is a result of the extreme immune activation, and the mode of death seems to be fluid leakage from lung capilliaries that is usually seen in patients with severe bacterial infections.
Against this theory is the fact that older/ less fit people do not seem to die in these pandemics, which you would expect them to do in most illnesses. The current guess is that the reason for this is that older people's immune systems were exposed to previous pandemics (good news for me, as I was just there for 1968), and therefore had immune memory (through B cells) of previous generations of viruses. They are therefore able to gear up their immune response more quickly than those who have no such immune memory.
The population group for this pandemic is very different to that of previous generations, as due to general health improvements we have many chronically sick people (lung/ heart/ kidney failure, diabetes, AIDS) and many more elderly/ very elderly than previous pandemics. Therefore the 'only kills young people' label may not be right this time.
There is a groovy little flash vid showing how these antivirals help slow down replication (prob. drug company funded, as it looks pretty and uses the tradename, despite the
These drugs are not used for normal influenza in most countries as their impact is borderline at best. The trials supporting their use were drug company funded and were done in ways which would be difficult to generalise to a 'normal' population. As such their sales had been very disappointing until H5N1 came along.
You're right about spending a lot of money on oseltamivir being a bit of a waste. Your ideas, while fine from a lab point of view, are not possible in the 'real world', which is why public health people/ epidemiologists generally run the show in this kind of event, not lab people like your girlfriend, or clinicians (like me), although I am on a committee of 20 planning for pandemic influenza covering about 1m people.
Part of the problem with the purchase of oseltamivir from a political point of view is that it is necessary to be seen to be doing something, and the snake oil salesmen are only too happy to try to cash in, as you rightly point out.
Unfortunately you cannot build a vaccine straight away, and all the work being done now may not pay off. In addition to the research component, there are also major manufacturing problems, as most countries will nationalise existing vaccine production facilities.
This means if you are in a poor country, forget about vaccine. America is relatively underprovided but is building facilities - I think. Europe is OK, and I think Japan and Australia/NZ will be OK. Just storing and distributing the vaccine will be a nightmare. We are planning armed guards, military storage depots etc. as the potential for theft/ fraud/ corruption and general unhappiness is large.
The bad news for geeks is that it is the under 30s who will probably have the highest mortality: a sobering account from the 1918 flu pandemic in this week's British Medical Journal. On the other hand, if you survive, there will be plenty of job opportunities...
oseltamivir (the real name of TamiFlu) is a viral inhibitor which helps protect cells. It does not work like some antibiotics which (often) actually kill the harmful agent. It may reduce the severity of symptoms, but we know that most of the time it doesn't make a lot of difference. The liklihood of it working in H5N1 has probably not been helped by the Chinese spraying their flocks of chicken with these types of drugs, which will tend to select resistant strains.
If there is one lesson you learn from this, it should be this: only vaccination of large numbers of people will prevent significant disease. If your government is telling you that you will be fine because they are stockpiling oseltamivir, the experts in virology/ infectious disease/ emergency planning/ public health suggest otherwise.
The problem is we don't know what the pandemic will be. Current H1N5 'Bird Flu' is only one candidate virus for combination with a 'traditional' influenza virus to make a new mutant strain to which most of the population has no resistance.
[IAAD, am involved with pandemic influenza planning]