My doctor was explaining to me that my blood sugar readings should not have a standard deviation of more than 1/3rd of the average blood sugar reading. Just to test if he knew what it meant, I asked him what a standard deviation was. Oh the fun when he tried to bullshit his way out of that one! He eventually told me that when I plot my data in Excel I can ask it to give me statistics on the column and it would mention what the standard deviation value was. But when I pressed on and asked him what a standard deviation is, he shooed me off and told me to go look it up. Never did he confess that he had no clue.
I think you a being silly. The core of your doctor-patient relationship should be you trust he has the knowledge and judgement to treat your condition in a professional and considered manner. If he does not understand the statistics, it should not be a concern as many primary practitioners are not specialists, especially arcane things like deriving standard deviation. Doctors are typically foremost clinicians, not chemists, mathematicians, grammar freaks, computer geeks etc... If you are not comfortable with your doctor, find another. Anyway, doctors should follow sound scientific principals in their treatment but should NOT treat on the basis of numbers alone. It is enough other trusted and respected specialists distil the relevant information and say "this is best practice in this situation". This is usually called CME (continuing medical education). Access to literature on the internet should allow you read up on whether the regimen you are on is reasonable or not. Be aware, you WILL find published articles FOR and AGAINST any kind of treatment in medical journals and the REAL skill is knowing the context and the clinical biases that can occur and whether a particular therapy is appropriate. Diseases or conditions rarely exist in total isolation or as a single entity. Doctors have enough on their daily plate without other concerns in other areas. We TRUST nurses will take accurate readings of temp, BP etc, we trust pharmacists will dispense correct dosage, we trust OT to sterilise equipment adequately and we trust EXCEL to do SD. So???
Ah, yes well... how much is your time worth? It gets tedious pretty quick trying to find something very specific and to avoid all the rubbish on P2P.
Not that I've used allofmp3.com (I find itunes mostly painless), I think the main attraction is the convenience of it all.... a universally accessible source of music (over the web), in a universally portable/playable format with a (mostly) universally accepted form of payment (and cheap, of course).... Sometimes you just want to sample some music to see if you like it,... without wanting to feel ripped off if it really isn't to your taste, and without all the cloak'n'dagger crap.
You know, the only thing I can think of that might be usable for input into any miniture device without a steep learning curve is.... (dum dum dum) a pair of bluetooth gloves.... with some sort of position/acceleration sensors so it is possible to either use sign language, virtual keyboard (tapping in the air... yes very geeky)as input, or use own combination of hand movements or gestures, or tracing letters with an index finger. Combined with a pair of VR glass for overlaying keyboard, fingertip traces, etc would be very nice too.... We could use the skillz we have now.... (just like in that application I filled out for a PHD over the internet...)
The price comparison between upper-mid to top of the line Apple and PCs are probably comparable but a lot of mums and dads who are looking for "entry level" computers for themselves or their kids can't spend the kind of money to buy a Apple system. You can easily buy a sub $1000 (Australian dollars) notebook or sub $A800 desktop that comes with a 17" LCD that will do 90% of tasks for 90% of the population (yes I made that statistic up... but hey this is/.....). From memory, one of the major chains was throwing in a printer, double-the-memory, or something at these prices. All lot of people I know are not in a position to buy premium newly released systems and would rather spend the money saved on other things, eg. internet connections, digital camera, etc. $US2000 for a desktop computer is really quite a bit for a PC. And it's just not macs themselves that cost more. All mac compatible hardware cost a fair bit as well. Try finding a mac compatible webcam for under $A150 - then try finding software compatible with mac usb cams...
I guess it is a case of getting what you are willing to pay for but it's really on the flattening part of the curve and I honestly don't see the "entry level" macs that accessible, unless you convince someone else to pay for it or you can write it off on tax.
One of the most enjoyable things I've done so far this year has been to put together a old K6 AMD computer with all the cast-away bits and pieces with my 6 yr old son who is starting to learn about computers (Macs) at school. We pulled about 3 old towers apart and and over 2-3 weeks put together a working PC running win98SE for his ABC games. We looked at bits and pieces of the PC guts. It's got 512MB of ram, 2 old 10G drives, a new PCI 11G network card, an old ISA soundblaster and an old logitech video cam. He is as happy and proud as anything. It was a very nice bonding thing, I must say and highly recommend it. He's just a bit young to understand how all the bits work together. I hope he'll get the bug for that sort of thing (I'm not in the IT industry myself, just interested).
The thing is, I'm not too sure how easy it would be with a Mac to do that sort of thing.
The trouble is we still know bugger all (in relative terms) about how neurons interact and even what some of the neurons do in the retinal layers do or capable of doing. It is difficult to see how all the donor retinal ganglion cell axons could find their own way to the the hosts primary visual cortex (assuming you could coax them to grow) and connect up properly. There is a highly organised spatial representation along the optic pathway and increasingly complex processing of visual information from the photoreceptors, retinal layers, LGN, visual cortices, association cortices, etc. During embryonic development there is a massive killing off of ganglion cells and neurons that do not connect up to the brain's liking. It is difficult to imaging re-creating this level of complexity although in young brains with a high degree of plasticity, it may be possible.
The way to go could be the bionic artificial retina - http://www.accessibility.com.au/news/regional/aus_ eye.htm
I think this involves a retinal sensor and a primary visual cortex stimulator
http://www.ingenta.com/isis/searching/ExpandTOC/in genta;jsessionid=2ekq5ppe96pdj.crescent?issue=pubi nfobike://bsc/ans/2004/00000074/00000005&index =22
and the same technology has been used successfully in ear cochlear implants.
Geoff (note to self: must learn to format/. posts)
Slashdot Mirror
My doctor was explaining to me that my blood sugar readings should not have a standard deviation of more than 1/3rd of the average blood sugar reading. Just to test if he knew what it meant, I asked him what a standard deviation was. Oh the fun when he tried to bullshit his way out of that one! He eventually told me that when I plot my data in Excel I can ask it to give me statistics on the column and it would mention what the standard deviation value was. But when I pressed on and asked him what a standard deviation is, he shooed me off and told me to go look it up. Never did he confess that he had no clue.
I think you a being silly. The core of your doctor-patient relationship should be you trust he has the knowledge and judgement to treat your condition in a professional and considered manner. If he does not understand the statistics, it should not be a concern as many primary practitioners are not specialists, especially arcane things like deriving standard deviation. Doctors are typically foremost clinicians, not chemists, mathematicians, grammar freaks, computer geeks etc... If you are not comfortable with your doctor, find another. Anyway, doctors should follow sound scientific principals in their treatment but should NOT treat on the basis of numbers alone. It is enough other trusted and respected specialists distil the relevant information and say "this is best practice in this situation". This is usually called CME (continuing medical education). Access to literature on the internet should allow you read up on whether the regimen you are on is reasonable or not. Be aware, you WILL find published articles FOR and AGAINST any kind of treatment in medical journals and the REAL skill is knowing the context and the clinical biases that can occur and whether a particular therapy is appropriate. Diseases or conditions rarely exist in total isolation or as a single entity. Doctors have enough on their daily plate without other concerns in other areas. We TRUST nurses will take accurate readings of temp, BP etc, we trust pharmacists will dispense correct dosage, we trust OT to sterilise equipment adequately and we trust EXCEL to do SD. So???
Ah, yes well... how much is your time worth? It gets tedious pretty quick trying to find something very specific and to avoid all the rubbish on P2P. Not that I've used allofmp3.com (I find itunes mostly painless), I think the main attraction is the convenience of it all.... a universally accessible source of music (over the web), in a universally portable/playable format with a (mostly) universally accepted form of payment (and cheap, of course).... Sometimes you just want to sample some music to see if you like it,... without wanting to feel ripped off if it really isn't to your taste, and without all the cloak'n'dagger crap.
You know, the only thing I can think of that might be usable for input into any miniture device without a steep learning curve is .... (dum dum dum) a pair of bluetooth gloves.... with some sort of position/acceleration sensors so it is possible to either use sign language, virtual keyboard (tapping in the air... yes very geeky)as input, or use own combination of hand movements or gestures, or tracing letters with an index finger. Combined with a pair of VR glass for overlaying keyboard, fingertip traces, etc would be very nice too.... We could use the skillz we have now.... (just like in that application I filled out for a PHD over the internet...)
The price comparison between upper-mid to top of the line Apple and PCs are probably comparable but a lot of mums and dads who are looking for "entry level" computers for themselves or their kids can't spend the kind of money to buy a Apple system. You can easily buy a sub $1000 (Australian dollars) notebook or sub $A800 desktop that comes with a 17" LCD that will do 90% of tasks for 90% of the population (yes I made that statistic up... but hey this is /. ....). From memory, one of the major chains was throwing in a printer, double-the-memory, or something at these prices. All lot of people I know are not in a position to buy premium newly released systems and would rather spend the money saved on other things, eg. internet connections, digital camera, etc. $US2000 for a desktop computer is really quite a bit for a PC. And it's just not macs themselves that cost more. All mac compatible hardware cost a fair bit as well. Try finding a mac compatible webcam for under $A150 - then try finding software compatible with mac usb cams...
I guess it is a case of getting what you are willing to pay for but it's really on the flattening part of the curve and I honestly don't see the "entry level" macs that accessible, unless you convince someone else to pay for it or you can write it off on tax.
One of the most enjoyable things I've done so far this year has been to put together a old K6 AMD computer with all the cast-away bits and pieces with my 6 yr old son who is starting to learn about computers (Macs) at school. We pulled about 3 old towers apart and and over 2-3 weeks put together a working PC running win98SE for his ABC games. We looked at bits and pieces of the PC guts. It's got 512MB of ram, 2 old 10G drives, a new PCI 11G network card, an old ISA soundblaster and an old logitech video cam. He is as happy and proud as anything. It was a very nice bonding thing, I must say and highly recommend it. He's just a bit young to understand how all the bits work together. I hope he'll get the bug for that sort of thing (I'm not in the IT industry myself, just interested). The thing is, I'm not too sure how easy it would be with a Mac to do that sort of thing.
The trouble is we still know bugger all (in relative terms) about how neurons interact and even what some of the neurons do in the retinal layers do or capable of doing. It is difficult to see how all the donor retinal ganglion cell axons could find their own way to the the hosts primary visual cortex (assuming you could coax them to grow) and connect up properly. There is a highly organised spatial representation along the optic pathway and increasingly complex processing of visual information from the photoreceptors, retinal layers, LGN, visual cortices, association cortices, etc. During embryonic development there is a massive killing off of ganglion cells and neurons that do not connect up to the brain's liking. It is difficult to imaging re-creating this level of complexity although in young brains with a high degree of plasticity, it may be possible. The way to go could be the bionic artificial retina - http://www.accessibility.com.au/news/regional/aus_ eye.htm
I think this involves a retinal sensor and a primary visual cortex stimulator
http://www.ingenta.com/isis/searching/ExpandTOC/in genta;jsessionid=2ekq5ppe96pdj.crescent?issue=pubi nfobike://bsc/ans/2004/00000074/00000005&index =22
and the same technology has been used successfully in ear cochlear implants.
Geoff (note to self: must learn to format /. posts)