Basic accounting does not consider a loan as profit. The Balance Sheet is defined as Assets = Liabilities + Equity. The loan increases cash(assets) and increases liabilities (obligation to repay). Profit appears on the Income Statement. Profit = revenue from sales less expenses of those sales over a defined time period.
Counter-examples include Microsoft, Apple, Whole Foods (selling high priced organic food against mass market producers), Cisco Systems, Oracle, Sun Microsystems,...
->rant> Two years ago, the competition were doing nothing. Apple steps in, re-invents the smart phone making it a delight to use. One year ago, they produced the 3G enabled phone. Meanwhile, the rest of the "smart phone" companies said, "hey, we can copy that!"
Now, journalists and analysts are stating what Apple "must do." Whatever happened to reporters "reporting" news and not trying to show how they could run a company better than its management? ->/rant>
In the phone business, people will (a) buy what they want, or (b) use what their company allows them to use on the company plan. So, big companies will do big deals and stick with what they have, small companies will not get the great deals and have more flexibility, and consumers will buy what they want.
Think about it in comparison to "counting" which everyone does every day, and the *THEORY* of mathematical systems (rings, fields, etc.) which are abstractions of counting.
The value of an abstraction is that it can eliminate bias in thinking; we all try to map our perception of reality onto a model. When we create an abstraction, it enables us to think about the model in the absence of reality. Then, when one gets interesting results, one can then attempt to map them back to reality, and examine what that means in the real world.
It was the development of number theory and the abstraction of counting that led to the understanding of number systems, base 10 and base 2 arithmetic, and binary arithmetic, the basis of today's computing engines.
Quantifications such as "quite a few," "quite rare," and "quite often," are non-quantifications which sound meaningful, but carry no information.
Having clean water availability and adequate sewerage disposal are most responsible for reducing enteric transmitted infections, as that is their means of transmission. That's been documented in public health studies. However, there's no evidence that such issues have anything to do with cancer incidence (as has been proven with smoking and lung cancer), or heart disease (smoking again).
Medications, like anything else, have both benefits and limitations. The desire to find a better medication comes from identifying the weaknesses and seeking a modification that has a similar benefit with a reduced limitation. Regarding antibiotics, bacteria evolve to be drug-resistant to a particular drug (if you kill the bugs that are sensitive to the drug, the relatively insensitive ones become the dominant population. Multiple drug resistant tuberculosis is a good example).
Eating good, healthy food makes good common sense, and highly nutritious foods without unnecessary calorie-loaded additives (such as high-fructose corn syrup) are a good choice.
is that Cold War strategists realized that military equipment movement within the US was limited. The Eisenhower Interstate System was to connect major US military bases with roads spec'ed to carry military equipment.
How about a piece of data to support your generalization of physician income? The MEDIAN income for a family physician in the MGMA Compensation survey was $188,000, pediatricians $197,000, and for internists, $202,000. These are not small numbers, but then neither is the cost of 4 years of college, 4 years of medical school, and then 3-5 years of residency at a trainee salary. A doctor finishes residency at the age of 30 to 36(for thoracic surgeons) and $100,000 to $200,000 in debt for medical school tuition.
Your observation about 30%-plus profit margins also doesn't stand up to the data. In general, hospitals run net operating margins of 5-15%, which is the money they use to replace aging equipment, build and repair buildings, and other "luxuries."
This is not a sob story to pity the poor doctor, but your generalization doesn't match the data. In particular, your shot at people going into medicine because of the lack of vacancies in B-school is cute, but there's no data to that point.
There is data to support the fact that the most health care dollars are spent in the last two years of life. Preventive care may delay those last two years, but everyone's still going to have them. Our bodies don't come with a warranty and replacement parts aren't cheap.
The ultimate choice is how the money can best be spent to provide quality of life.
But, what if you had gone home, your daughter went to bed, and the next morning you found her dead. Upon autopsy, you find that she had an intracranial bleed that would have been easily detectible on a CT scan.
Do you -
A. say, "we made the right choice, but the odds went against us."
B. say, "that doctor led us down the wrong path to save the insurance company a few bucks. We're suing for $5M."
In many cases, dealing with the grief of loss through anger and retribution are the response of choice. Especially when an attorney says, "I'll take the case on contingency; it won't cost you a thing. I'll take care of everything." Then, in court, with a picture of the child in the background, the grieving parents sitting there, the attorney says, "Three questions, Doctor. First, did you have access to a CT scanner? Second, wouldn a CT scan have shown this? Third, what's more important - saving this child or saving a few bucks?"
Since it's "malpractice insurance" that pays the bill, the jury awards $10M.
The doctor's malpractice insurance premiums go up because he's had a judgment against him.
The doctor starts CTing every child because of the suit.
The insurance premiums go up for all of the insurance company's members to cover "medical inflation."
The doctor's reputations is hurt, and he is more at risk in future suits. Attorney,"Doctor, has any other person died in the past because of your medical decisions? Just a simple yes or no, sir."
The fundamental problem is that people expect medicine to be perfect because the media and legal profession have set that expectation and anything less is "malpractice or negligence," even good decisions with bad outcomes.
and this concern about access to medical records is paranoia.
Federal law (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act - or HIPAA) levels serious legal liability on "any doctor who asks" (or any other person in a health-care organization who looks at a medical record outside of their job responsibilities. By definition, this, then is not "public sharing of information." XYZ company is not entitled to look at your health information.
Do errors occur? Hell, yes, they do. Laptops get stolen, people screw up. But to deny the benefits of having access to critical information in emergency situations, or to avoid repeating a test done last week, or to avoid a person getting a medication that doesn't work because another doctor recently changed another of the meds, or to get a drug that can be fatal to a person because the information wasn't available, is to say that you'd rather life be a crap-shoot.
The way for this technology to get better is for people to work on the solutions to the issues of security and privacy, not to keep medicine in the stone-age of information utility.
For an interesting read about why this is so important, read the Medicare Annual Report. Everyone's payroll taxes have to go up 3.5 percent to cover the estimated shortfall of Medicare for the next 75 years (I expect to retire sometime in that timeframe). With life expectancy increasing, and the baby boom generation in retirement for the next 40-50 years, OASDI and MMS look take a bigger bite out of everyone's paycheck.
One solution to this projected problem is to reduce the cost of healthcare by reducing errors, repeating unnecessary tests because of lack of access to a record, having technology that alerts clinical staff (doctors aren't going to be the only people providing medical care) to potential interactions, matching medications/treatments to genetic likelihood of therapeutic benefit, and enabling greater home health care. All of these opportunities require increasing use of information technology.
If such problems continue to happen, then President Obama's administration is the one doing it, and where's the "Change" in that?
(P.S. I dislike the phrase "the reality is..." because that implies there is a reality beyond an individual or group's perception, when all each of us has access to is our own perceptions. Some of the world's greatest advances have come when someone ignores the perceived present "reality" and takes everyone to a new place. )
I've just finished reading this novel. The interesting theme that Card points out is that intensive partisanship is a destructive force.
In an even more interesting afterword, Card identifies himself as a recipient of both radical and reactionary ostracism as a tendency away from moderation and idiological tolerance.
My personal opinion is that the world has more serious issues to deal with than a witchhunt into the past. I'd rather the new administration be forward-looking, constructive, and collaborative instead of backward-focused, destructive, and contentious. Difficult times call for solving present problems in the future, not solving past problems in the present. The election did the latter.
What made Apple lose the PC war was the fact that Microsoft's product foundation was built on IBM's hardware foundation (the IBM PC), which was tolerable to large businesses because IBM stood behind the product and had largely won the large system computer company wars of the 70's and 80's. Remember IBM and the BUNCH (Burroughts, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell).
The IBM PC hardware was, in fact, very well engineered. It was IBM's backing that provided security to businesses to take the risk to bring in a PC.
Apple, being "anti-establishment" and "creative," didn't fit with big business culture. Businesses buy lots of tightly vertical integrated products. What they want in return is risk reduction. Picking Apple over IBM seemed (at the time) to be a long shot.
The last time I looked into this (several years ago), it was over $50,000,000 USD to bring a single drug from research to first market in the US. That cost includes development, manufacture, testing, and regulatory oversight. For a drug that doesn't make it through testing, some portion of that is expended with no return (other than knowledge).
Just as seeing the moon doesn't require the same amount of effort as landing on it, reading a DNA sequence doesn't mean that selective modification is "just around the corner."
Real applications of this, however, include looking for gene sequences in adults which predispose them to diseases (e.g. breast cancer) and then providing counseling and monitoring commensurate with that risk, a far less expensive effort than monitoring everyone for the same disease, even if they aren't at risk. Also, one could use this on embryonic cells obtained through amniocentesis to screen for hereditary diseases is families where there are risk factors.
If the article had stated that the cost were $1,000,000 to do the sequence, then the potential applications of the technology would be severely limited. Getting the cost (not the charge for the service) down creates the opportunity for more studies to be performed, more financial accessibility for patients, and less resistance for insurance companies or Medicare to deny charging for the study when it's indicated.
In medicine, the cost of a study, as well as its reliability, availability, and predictive value, enters into the decisions made in clinical management.
Nope. I knew the word I wanted to use. Sarcasm. It was in response to your sarcasm.
When a response to a point of view is delivered as an attack on the person's state or capacity with denigration or sarcasm, it weakens the intellectual argument and the potential for a moment of education.
Perhaps there's more to know about life than Blake's Seven contained.
I agree that likely both are happening. That's why, in my post, I said that I wasn't against taking preventative action. Removing a contributory factor likely cannot make the situation worse and may help improve it.
I agree with your position that fossil fuels have a finite life expectancy, and that, as their costs rise, (better, I hope) alternatives will be found. I would like to see in the United States better mass transit (we're a BIG country), more efficient vehicles (we've come quite far, but we should go further), movement to more reuse, and lower per-capita energy consumption. I hope we don't cause problems with shifts in food production to energy, use of genetic engineering, and some of the other proposed approaches.
There will always be new problems caused by solutions to current problems.
Thank you so much for your wonderful offer to take me under wing and shed your glorious awareness of the true state of the universe and to dispel my limited sophistication. I'll begin your reading list right away!
I'm glad that in this one particular area that the final, absolute, irrevocable truth has been found, unlike every other scientific area.
I am always skeptical of anyone who thinks the final answer has been determined.
What we know is that (1) CO2 levels have risen over the last 200 years, due to increasing use of fossil fuels, and (2) the earth's atmosphere has risen a tad. So, one possible explanation of (2) is (1).
What this assumes, of course, is that finding a possible answer is the same as finding the correct answer.
Since there's evidence of multiple cycles of warming and cooling on the planet, another reason might be that cycling warming and cooling is a normal pattern for our planet.
I'm not against taking preventative action in the event that the current theory of global warming (greenhouse gases) is correct, but I think that some healthy skepticism is warranted.
But the lawyers got 25% of the settlement, or $6M for two years work. Assuming a $100,000/yr salary with 25% overhead, that's 48 man/years of work by the law firm. Since the above reference site says they worked 2 years on the case, that's 24 FTE's or half the law firm.
Since it's unlikely that any law firm would put all their efforts on one and only one case, I'm figuring 4 lawyers billing at $600,000/yr, or a billing rate of $300/hr.
$6M/4 is a much bigger win than $18M/14,000 or $1200/claimant.
Actually, PC got fat because Uncle IBM hired him into his company, bought him a suit, and sent him off to work in corporations, which were conservative and already bought the uncle's products. When he grew up, he decided to launch a corporate takeover, undermining his uncle's business to the benefit of his own. He then declared himself brilliant and innovative.
Before you choose, you should understand why you are going to college, and what you will learn. Listed below are what I think are the most enduring skills learned in college, in order of significance.
1. Self-sufficiency. You need to be able to manage yourself and your affairs. Eating meals, prioritizing work, rest, exercise, and social life are all managed activities which your parents have been your partner with up til now. In college, you become your own ideal parent. You also learn to manage success (no gloating), failure (no despondency), disappointment (no self-pity), and courage (no quitting "just because").
2. Interpersonal relationships. You need to be able to navigate and function in a complex world, filled with a large variety of people. You'll learn better how to deal with people who are smarter, better-looking, more talented, less sophisticated, less academic, narrowly focussed, and weird. That's real life and you'd better have a sense of who and what you are to be able to develop and understand relationships with every one of them. And some of those people will be your professors, some will be other students, and some will be the people you meet in the college town. After college, they will be your boss, your co-workers, and your friends.
3. Individuality. Part of who you are is based on the history and perspective of culture, both your own and that of others. Your individualism is enhanced by understanding what has stimulated or constrained development, so that you can recognize, and then reduce or enhance, those cultural effects on your own development. Learning to "be who you are" is not easy.
4. Academic discipline. It is important for you to find something that captures your dreams, your aspirations, your interest and your commitment. To engage your mind in exploring some facet of life (whether english literature or computer language theory) creates a lifelong pursuit that becomes uniquely you. This study also gives you proficiency in recognizing and dealing with the unknown, and then applying your energy to learning what you want or need to know.
5. Job skills. The most important job skills are listed above, in order of importance. This last category includes the non-technical (writing your ideas clearly, speaking articulately, organizing and categorizing information in a meaningful way) and technical (both historical and current theory and practice of your chosen discipline).
6. Specific knowledge and practice. You'll learn the foundation in these areas, but they are also the most ephemeral part of your college education.
So, evaluate yourself. Where are you in these areas and where do you want or need to grow the most? Then ask, which of my college choices will give me the most opportunity to develop?
Actually, there's pretty good data to show that first adopters (known in the trade as "first movers") generally exhibit "pioneer syndrome," namely, they catch the arrows. Where a business may want to be strategically is an early adopter ("cutting edge" vs "bleeding edge").
First mover advantage was touted by the Big 7..6..5..4.... consulting firms during the Internet bubble as a means of garnishing consulting business, as if they had any expertise in being "first movers." In fact, the internet bubble was not a first mover event, as the internet was, by then a decade old, and business access to it was over 8 years old under the "Acceptible Uses Policy" of the National Science Foundation.
First movers are generally the people with the new ideas, but there are rough edges and perhaps failures associated with being a first mover. The classic example, of course, are the early hobbyist personal computers, portable computers, and, as a software example, the first mover in spreadsheets - Visicalc. Lotus was NOT a first mover, but an early adopter after they saw that Visicalc had a good idea, and Lotus refined them and came out with a more polished and packaged version.
First movers also generally suffer two significant expenses, namely the development of the necessary internal capabilities and the creation of the external market. Early adopters generally can gain significant advantage by seeing, and correcting, the deficiencies of the first mover, thereby reducing start-up expense and also by benefiting from the emerging market that's been generated by the first mover without having to create it.
The message is that, like any other long distance race, being first at the start doesn't mean first over the finish line. However, getting too far behind the pack can eliminate you from the running. Many businesses tend to think of IT capability as an elective expense, but it's only elective to where in the pack you want to be compared to your competition.
Just to throw in a few facts here, MUMPS, like every language evolves. And, the stuff works.
The VA's VistA uses it, Meditech (installed in hundreds of hospitals) uses it, EPIC (one of the most rapidly growing vendors) uses it, and numerous other smaller healthcare applications use it.
It's important to realize that most applications in health care are not database applications, but file management applications: select one patient's record and look around at the information. So, languages like MUMPS are fast, and efficient. But wait, there's more!
Because of the internal structure of the data, data retrievals across patients can run pretty darn fast, too. So a MUMPS system can be an efficient file management system and database system too.
Finally, since the end user is more concerned about the application than the platform, the question of the data management tool becomes relatively minor in the business decision of the application. (For example, who's the manufacturer and what is the horsepower of the compressor in your refrigerator? Does it matter to you as long as your refrigerator works and and can call the refrigerator company to come fix it?)
I'm not advocating MUMPS, by any means. But there's plenty of data to counter the position of its being "a platform without much of a future."
Slashdot Mirror
Basic accounting does not consider a loan as profit. The Balance Sheet is defined as Assets = Liabilities + Equity. The loan increases cash(assets) and increases liabilities (obligation to repay). Profit appears on the Income Statement. Profit = revenue from sales less expenses of those sales over a defined time period.
Counter-examples include Microsoft, Apple, Whole Foods (selling high priced organic food against mass market producers), Cisco Systems, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, ...
->rant>
Two years ago, the competition were doing nothing. Apple steps in, re-invents the smart phone making it a delight to use. One year ago, they produced the 3G enabled phone. Meanwhile, the rest of the "smart phone" companies said, "hey, we can copy that!"
Now, journalists and analysts are stating what Apple "must do." Whatever happened to reporters "reporting" news and not trying to show how they could run a company better than its management?
->/rant>
In the phone business, people will (a) buy what they want, or (b) use what their company allows them to use on the company plan. So, big companies will do big deals and stick with what they have, small companies will not get the great deals and have more flexibility, and consumers will buy what they want.
Think about it in comparison to "counting" which everyone does every day, and the *THEORY* of mathematical systems (rings, fields, etc.) which are abstractions of counting.
The value of an abstraction is that it can eliminate bias in thinking; we all try to map our perception of reality onto a model. When we create an abstraction, it enables us to think about the model in the absence of reality. Then, when one gets interesting results, one can then attempt to map them back to reality, and examine what that means in the real world.
It was the development of number theory and the abstraction of counting that led to the understanding of number systems, base 10 and base 2 arithmetic, and binary arithmetic, the basis of today's computing engines.
But you all knew that.
Having clean water availability and adequate sewerage disposal are most responsible for reducing enteric transmitted infections, as that is their means of transmission. That's been documented in public health studies. However, there's no evidence that such issues have anything to do with cancer incidence (as has been proven with smoking and lung cancer), or heart disease (smoking again).
Medications, like anything else, have both benefits and limitations. The desire to find a better medication comes from identifying the weaknesses and seeking a modification that has a similar benefit with a reduced limitation. Regarding antibiotics, bacteria evolve to be drug-resistant to a particular drug (if you kill the bugs that are sensitive to the drug, the relatively insensitive ones become the dominant population. Multiple drug resistant tuberculosis is a good example).
Eating good, healthy food makes good common sense, and highly nutritious foods without unnecessary calorie-loaded additives (such as high-fructose corn syrup) are a good choice.
is that Cold War strategists realized that military equipment movement within the US was limited. The Eisenhower Interstate System was to connect major US military bases with roads spec'ed to carry military equipment.
Your observation about 30%-plus profit margins also doesn't stand up to the data. In general, hospitals run net operating margins of 5-15%, which is the money they use to replace aging equipment, build and repair buildings, and other "luxuries."
This is not a sob story to pity the poor doctor, but your generalization doesn't match the data. In particular, your shot at people going into medicine because of the lack of vacancies in B-school is cute, but there's no data to that point.
There is data to support the fact that the most health care dollars are spent in the last two years of life. Preventive care may delay those last two years, but everyone's still going to have them. Our bodies don't come with a warranty and replacement parts aren't cheap.
The ultimate choice is how the money can best be spent to provide quality of life.
Do you -
A. say, "we made the right choice, but the odds went against us."
B. say, "that doctor led us down the wrong path to save the insurance company a few bucks. We're suing for $5M."
In many cases, dealing with the grief of loss through anger and retribution are the response of choice. Especially when an attorney says, "I'll take the case on contingency; it won't cost you a thing. I'll take care of everything." Then, in court, with a picture of the child in the background, the grieving parents sitting there, the attorney says, "Three questions, Doctor. First, did you have access to a CT scanner? Second, wouldn a CT scan have shown this? Third, what's more important - saving this child or saving a few bucks?"
Since it's "malpractice insurance" that pays the bill, the jury awards $10M.
The doctor's malpractice insurance premiums go up because he's had a judgment against him.
The doctor starts CTing every child because of the suit.
The insurance premiums go up for all of the insurance company's members to cover "medical inflation."
The doctor's reputations is hurt, and he is more at risk in future suits. Attorney,"Doctor, has any other person died in the past because of your medical decisions? Just a simple yes or no, sir."
The fundamental problem is that people expect medicine to be perfect because the media and legal profession have set that expectation and anything less is "malpractice or negligence," even good decisions with bad outcomes.
Federal law (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act - or HIPAA) levels serious legal liability on "any doctor who asks" (or any other person in a health-care organization who looks at a medical record outside of their job responsibilities. By definition, this, then is not "public sharing of information." XYZ company is not entitled to look at your health information.
Do errors occur? Hell, yes, they do. Laptops get stolen, people screw up. But to deny the benefits of having access to critical information in emergency situations, or to avoid repeating a test done last week, or to avoid a person getting a medication that doesn't work because another doctor recently changed another of the meds, or to get a drug that can be fatal to a person because the information wasn't available, is to say that you'd rather life be a crap-shoot.
The way for this technology to get better is for people to work on the solutions to the issues of security and privacy, not to keep medicine in the stone-age of information utility.
For an interesting read about why this is so important, read the Medicare Annual Report. Everyone's payroll taxes have to go up 3.5 percent to cover the estimated shortfall of Medicare for the next 75 years (I expect to retire sometime in that timeframe). With life expectancy increasing, and the baby boom generation in retirement for the next 40-50 years, OASDI and MMS look take a bigger bite out of everyone's paycheck.
One solution to this projected problem is to reduce the cost of healthcare by reducing errors, repeating unnecessary tests because of lack of access to a record, having technology that alerts clinical staff (doctors aren't going to be the only people providing medical care) to potential interactions, matching medications/treatments to genetic likelihood of therapeutic benefit, and enabling greater home health care. All of these opportunities require increasing use of information technology.
Good luck with that heart condition.
If such problems continue to happen, then President Obama's administration is the one doing it, and where's the "Change" in that?
(P.S. I dislike the phrase "the reality is..." because that implies there is a reality beyond an individual or group's perception, when all each of us has access to is our own perceptions. Some of the world's greatest advances have come when someone ignores the perceived present "reality" and takes everyone to a new place. )
My personal opinion is that the world has more serious issues to deal with than a witchhunt into the past. I'd rather the new administration be forward-looking, constructive, and collaborative instead of backward-focused, destructive, and contentious. Difficult times call for solving present problems in the future, not solving past problems in the present. The election did the latter.
Maybe the iPhone developers could use the same machines that the Microsoft Office for Mac developers do?
The IBM PC hardware was, in fact, very well engineered. It was IBM's backing that provided security to businesses to take the risk to bring in a PC.
Apple, being "anti-establishment" and "creative," didn't fit with big business culture. Businesses buy lots of tightly vertical integrated products. What they want in return is risk reduction. Picking Apple over IBM seemed (at the time) to be a long shot.
The last time I looked into this (several years ago), it was over $50,000,000 USD to bring a single drug from research to first market in the US. That cost includes development, manufacture, testing, and regulatory oversight. For a drug that doesn't make it through testing, some portion of that is expended with no return (other than knowledge).
Real applications of this, however, include looking for gene sequences in adults which predispose them to diseases (e.g. breast cancer) and then providing counseling and monitoring commensurate with that risk, a far less expensive effort than monitoring everyone for the same disease, even if they aren't at risk. Also, one could use this on embryonic cells obtained through amniocentesis to screen for hereditary diseases is families where there are risk factors.
In medicine, the cost of a study, as well as its reliability, availability, and predictive value, enters into the decisions made in clinical management.
When a response to a point of view is delivered as an attack on the person's state or capacity with denigration or sarcasm, it weakens the intellectual argument and the potential for a moment of education.
Perhaps there's more to know about life than Blake's Seven contained.
I agree with your position that fossil fuels have a finite life expectancy, and that, as their costs rise, (better, I hope) alternatives will be found. I would like to see in the United States better mass transit (we're a BIG country), more efficient vehicles (we've come quite far, but we should go further), movement to more reuse, and lower per-capita energy consumption. I hope we don't cause problems with shifts in food production to energy, use of genetic engineering, and some of the other proposed approaches.
There will always be new problems caused by solutions to current problems.
I'm glad that in this one particular area that the final, absolute, irrevocable truth has been found, unlike every other scientific area.
I am always skeptical of anyone who thinks the final answer has been determined.
What this assumes, of course, is that finding a possible answer is the same as finding the correct answer.
Since there's evidence of multiple cycles of warming and cooling on the planet, another reason might be that cycling warming and cooling is a normal pattern for our planet.
I'm not against taking preventative action in the event that the current theory of global warming (greenhouse gases) is correct, but I think that some healthy skepticism is warranted.
Since it's unlikely that any law firm would put all their efforts on one and only one case, I'm figuring 4 lawyers billing at $600,000/yr, or a billing rate of $300/hr.
$6M/4 is a much bigger win than $18M/14,000 or $1200/claimant.
Actually, PC got fat because Uncle IBM hired him into his company, bought him a suit, and sent him off to work in corporations, which were conservative and already bought the uncle's products. When he grew up, he decided to launch a corporate takeover, undermining his uncle's business to the benefit of his own. He then declared himself brilliant and innovative.
1. Self-sufficiency. You need to be able to manage yourself and your affairs. Eating meals, prioritizing work, rest, exercise, and social life are all managed activities which your parents have been your partner with up til now. In college, you become your own ideal parent. You also learn to manage success (no gloating), failure (no despondency), disappointment (no self-pity), and courage (no quitting "just because").
2. Interpersonal relationships. You need to be able to navigate and function in a complex world, filled with a large variety of people. You'll learn better how to deal with people who are smarter, better-looking, more talented, less sophisticated, less academic, narrowly focussed, and weird. That's real life and you'd better have a sense of who and what you are to be able to develop and understand relationships with every one of them. And some of those people will be your professors, some will be other students, and some will be the people you meet in the college town. After college, they will be your boss, your co-workers, and your friends.
3. Individuality. Part of who you are is based on the history and perspective of culture, both your own and that of others. Your individualism is enhanced by understanding what has stimulated or constrained development, so that you can recognize, and then reduce or enhance, those cultural effects on your own development. Learning to "be who you are" is not easy.
4. Academic discipline. It is important for you to find something that captures your dreams, your aspirations, your interest and your commitment. To engage your mind in exploring some facet of life (whether english literature or computer language theory) creates a lifelong pursuit that becomes uniquely you. This study also gives you proficiency in recognizing and dealing with the unknown, and then applying your energy to learning what you want or need to know.
5. Job skills. The most important job skills are listed above, in order of importance. This last category includes the non-technical (writing your ideas clearly, speaking articulately, organizing and categorizing information in a meaningful way) and technical (both historical and current theory and practice of your chosen discipline).
6. Specific knowledge and practice. You'll learn the foundation in these areas, but they are also the most ephemeral part of your college education.
So, evaluate yourself. Where are you in these areas and where do you want or need to grow the most? Then ask, which of my college choices will give me the most opportunity to develop?
First mover advantage was touted by the Big 7..6..5..4.... consulting firms during the Internet bubble as a means of garnishing consulting business, as if they had any expertise in being "first movers." In fact, the internet bubble was not a first mover event, as the internet was, by then a decade old, and business access to it was over 8 years old under the "Acceptible Uses Policy" of the National Science Foundation.
First movers are generally the people with the new ideas, but there are rough edges and perhaps failures associated with being a first mover. The classic example, of course, are the early hobbyist personal computers, portable computers, and, as a software example, the first mover in spreadsheets - Visicalc. Lotus was NOT a first mover, but an early adopter after they saw that Visicalc had a good idea, and Lotus refined them and came out with a more polished and packaged version.
First movers also generally suffer two significant expenses, namely the development of the necessary internal capabilities and the creation of the external market. Early adopters generally can gain significant advantage by seeing, and correcting, the deficiencies of the first mover, thereby reducing start-up expense and also by benefiting from the emerging market that's been generated by the first mover without having to create it.
The message is that, like any other long distance race, being first at the start doesn't mean first over the finish line. However, getting too far behind the pack can eliminate you from the running. Many businesses tend to think of IT capability as an elective expense, but it's only elective to where in the pack you want to be compared to your competition.
The VA's VistA uses it, Meditech (installed in hundreds of hospitals) uses it, EPIC (one of the most rapidly growing vendors) uses it, and numerous other smaller healthcare applications use it.
It's important to realize that most applications in health care are not database applications, but file management applications: select one patient's record and look around at the information. So, languages like MUMPS are fast, and efficient. But wait, there's more!
Because of the internal structure of the data, data retrievals across patients can run pretty darn fast, too. So a MUMPS system can be an efficient file management system and database system too.
Finally, since the end user is more concerned about the application than the platform, the question of the data management tool becomes relatively minor in the business decision of the application. (For example, who's the manufacturer and what is the horsepower of the compressor in your refrigerator? Does it matter to you as long as your refrigerator works and and can call the refrigerator company to come fix it?)
I'm not advocating MUMPS, by any means. But there's plenty of data to counter the position of its being "a platform without much of a future."