As somebody who was just in the market for an ultrabook and ended up running away, let me tell you why the ultrabooks don't sell. The ultrabooks best but narrow market are people who are willing to pay a premium for a combination of good performance, light weight and long battery life. PC manufacturers want to sell a lot of ultrabooks, so they compromise an all three points and as a result loose in competition with their other offerings. Netbooks and tablets offer comparable or even better battery life for 3-4 times less money. Regular laptops offer significantly better performance for 30 to 50% less.
I was looking for a ultrabook with 8GB RAM, 256SSD and no dedicated video card (the onboard intel 4000 chips are perfectly fine) for about $1600. How hard could it be? RAM is so cheap that shipping costs more than the chip and SSD prices have come down to a buck per GB.
After couple of months of trying I gave up, bought myself a Lenovo X230, swapped the hard drive with 512GB SSD and brought the RAM to 16GB. The bill came to
more that $1600 but I am happy with the result. I would have paid more if a PC maker would have bothered to offer a comparable system.
The type of fraud described in the article is not restricted by medicare but is pretty much standard practice in most medical offices that use electronic billing.It is a simple play on the "power of the default" that makes it difficult for doctors to behave honestly even if they don't intend to carry out fraud. The way it works is that when a doctor or a nurse pulls a page for a particular task, all possible tests and procedures are checked by default. In many cases there are a dozen or so check boxes that the doctor will have to actively uncheck if he/she needs to just take the pulse of the patient. Naturally, doctors don't have neither the time nor the patience to click around the screen. They also don't have the incentive to reduce their income while wasting their time. An obvious and simple solution would be to set the default to all procedures unchecked and require manual input for to check the boxes. If I remember correctly this is how electronic records are handled in the Keiser hospitals.
Another thing that should be required is to retain and provide unique tracking information for every sample and test being done. This is also not difficult because the sample tracking is already part of the software. Finally it should be legislated that the medical records belong to the patient, not the medical office. I don't see why I have to repeat the same panel of tests and fill same questionnaires every time I choose to ask for a second opinion or if due to various reasons I seek help from a different practitioner.
You wish!
In fact the article points out that your polygamy may be good for your grand-grand-grand-children, should you manage survive the variety of STDs you may pick while fooling around. So go ahead have fun and if your are lucky your progeny will be thank you for that.
This guy is perfectly in line with the most stupid aruments in support of eugenics:
1. He takes one simple genetic disorder (Down syndrome) and uses it to extrapolate to all posible "disorders" that potentially have a genetic component. This is such a basic logical fallacy that he should be stripped from his professor of phylosophy title.
2. He assumes, contrary to established facts, that genetic mutations are either "good" or "bad". In fact the phenotype of genetic variations strongly depends on the environment and mutations that are manifested as bad in one context may be good in another. For example mutations that give you sickle cell anemia will also protect you from malaria.
3. His approach will eliminate genetic diversity within the population that applies it. Elimination of genetic diversity is one of the best ways to kill off a population.
You need to inject yourself with the said toothpaste. If you insist on eating it you will need to eat a lot more tootpaste to get the same blood concentration as the one you get from injection.
Excellent question, which should have had its answer in the summary. The dose is 12.5mg/kg injected interperitoneally. This dose will cause 20% reduction in muscle strength for a short period after the injection. In humans TCS is metabolized and inactivated rapidly (according to the article), although people with genetic effects may retain the drug for longer periods. It is unclear if the mice on which the experiments were done metabolize the drug with the same efficiency. If the drugs has to be absorbed through the skin or ingested you will need to be exposed to a significantly higher dose that the one used in the study.
In summary if you are not being injected with high concentration of the drug, you have nothing to worry about. Please put down the pitchforks and the torches. Nothing to see here.
Because quick profits and millisecond gains are the king in US. The utilities are trying to save both on infrastructure and maintenance. Having the power lines been buried, like in pretty much every first world country, they would have had a lot less problems from a little wind. I am pretty sure that the next post would be how this is too expensive because of the 'low' population density and the 'rural' populations and I call this complete bollocks. The utility poles are as prevalent in urban areas as they are out in the country. So, you saved on infrastructure and this is probably OK, but then you need to maintain it. And this means keeping the trees away from the poles, not overloading the wooden poles to the point where a little wind will snap them and replacing them before they rot completely away. Now this makes the cheap infrastructure a lot more expensive, unless you skip on the maintenance, which is what most utilities cheerfully do. This is by no means the only utilities fault. Any investment cost will need to be passed to the consumers and they will have none of it.
1. Canada and the UK have socialised medicine handled by the government. You don't have to buy insurance, you just pay taxes, fill out some paperwork, and voila, medicare (however, in Canada, different provinces have different schemes for drug insurance) I don't understand this idea of forcing Americans to BUY insurance. Isn't it usual that if the government forces people to BUY something for whatever reason (eg: you have to goto drivers school to get a drivers license), then the thing they are buying will suddenly sky rocket in price?
Not is there is competition in the market. Car insurance is one example.
2. What are HMOs?
Insurance companies specializing in health care is the simple answer. The more complicated answer involves explaining a really weird system of milking both doctors and patients for profits. Patients usually get squeezed harder because what are they going to do - it is their money or their life.
3. Why are Americans so convinced that amoral profit seeking corporations have their best interests at heart, and not an elected government whose power is given to them by the people?
Beats me! But the Republican party deserves the entire credit for convincing Americans that this is the case. It is not an easy task if you think of it, but then they also have large part of the population convinced that consumer protection hurts consumers, that the they need to get rid of the government and if they don't pay taxes they will have stronger society and so on and so forth. The anti-government part is actually more puzzling than anything else, because they use this as a platform to get elected and govern. Go figure that one out.
No, they'll go up faster because the insurance companies can say "We have to pay for Obamacare," when in fact they are benefiting from it as you mentioned. This is the way most corporations, especially insurance corporations, work.
That is not true. The law also includes provision that the overhead (aka expenses and profit for the insurance companies) is limited to 20%. If they collect premiums in excess of that they have to return the money. Current estimates are that as a result of ACA (or Obamacare if you prefer it) insurance companies have to return 1.3 billion from the premiums collected in 2011. The only thing they can do to keep the extra premiums is to jack up the costs and launder the money trough subsidiaries. This however is illegal and very risky.
The Stop all science now! exclamation on Slashdot should have been enough to identify the post as sarcasm. It is beyond me why ot got labeled 'Ineteresting' instead of 'Funny'. If the moderators insist on taking it seriously a 'Troll' label may have been more appropriate.
If you read the recommendations they are not aimed at reducing the number of PhDs in training. They are aimed at reducing the training time for biomedical PhDs to about 5 years with stated maximum of 6. This is stupid on several levels:
1. We need to train a lot less PhDs in biomedical sciences. Reducing the training period will only mean that we will train more PhDs not less. There aren't enough jobs to absorb all the PhD's trained in US. Most of the graduates that stay in the field compete for jobs that would require only MSc degree. Quite a large number of graduates end up with jobs that have little to do heir training (sales reps, etc).The whole biomedical jobs field is a pyramid with a broad base of grad students and post docs and veri narrow tip of academic and high skill industry jobs.
2. Putting artificial limits on the training period will reduce the quality of the training. The reason why a PhD degree takes 6,7 or more years is that it requires peer review journal publications and the bar on these has rapidly risen in the past years. Such publications require in depth studies, often involving animal models or clinical data that take years to generate and analyze.
It would make more sense to re-purpose graduate programs to training MSc and then offer the opportunity to those students who are passionate about science to pursue PhDs.
Strangely, I don't see any estimates in the report on the projected numbers of jobs requiring PhDs or the carriers undertaken by PhD graduates.
You got to love the logic of the person who wrote the letter. The first thing that disqualifies Feynman as scientific adviser is:
Technical ability to review scientific data
And then there is:
Experience in formulating and laying out the groundwork for complex patterns of activity that extend well into the future
and
A practical aptitude for dealing with mechanical and electronic devices
The funny part is that this is exactly the kind of things that would send you to a camp if you were in the soviet block at that time. And people on the other side of the iron curtain were writing exactly the same letters but substituting 'communist' for 'imperialist'.
Should I be excited that NASA can use the hardware to move projects off the backburner or should I be depressed that NRO is so well funded that they are building toys they don't really need? Now that's the kind of news that can give you bipolar disorder. How can people who have been pinching NASA's pennies for years now can justify secretly building not one but two Hubble class telescopes for which they have no use?
There is this thing called inertia, and it is a bitch, especially at 0 G with no/little friction to help. Once the 1000 pounds of stuff gets in motion it will bounce around the place until everything gets smashed to pieces.
Research subject consent and the associated paperwork is already required by ethics rules that are strictly enforced in US. I am not aware of signal study in US that does not do that. In fact the US government and all private sponsors of research that I know of will not fund such studies. From what I see most of the law is just formalizing the status quo. The only silly thing is the requirement that only people named in the original consent from will be allowed to access the information. I am sure that this will be ironed out before the law goes into effect. Usually there is tiered access to such data that allows data that can not directly identify a person to be shared, while protecting information that can harm the privacy of the individual. My guess is that the bill is aimed against 'ancestry' web sites that also offer genetic testing and can do as they please with your genetic information according to their typical EULAs.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple solved the antenna problem with a sleeve. I am sure this purple glare can be eliminated with a pair of colored glasses or contact lenses.
As somebody who was just in the market for an ultrabook and ended up running away, let me tell you why the ultrabooks don't sell. The ultrabooks best but narrow market are people who are willing to pay a premium for a combination of good performance, light weight and long battery life. PC manufacturers want to sell a lot of ultrabooks, so they compromise an all three points and as a result loose in competition with their other offerings. Netbooks and tablets offer comparable or even better battery life for 3-4 times less money. Regular laptops offer significantly better performance for 30 to 50% less.
I was looking for a ultrabook with 8GB RAM, 256SSD and no dedicated video card (the onboard intel 4000 chips are perfectly fine) for about $1600. How hard could it be? RAM is so cheap that shipping costs more than the chip and SSD prices have come down to a buck per GB.
After couple of months of trying I gave up, bought myself a Lenovo X230, swapped the hard drive with 512GB SSD and brought the RAM to 16GB. The bill came to more that $1600 but I am happy with the result. I would have paid more if a PC maker would have bothered to offer a comparable system.
The type of fraud described in the article is not restricted by medicare but is pretty much standard practice in most medical offices that use electronic billing.It is a simple play on the "power of the default" that makes it difficult for doctors to behave honestly even if they don't intend to carry out fraud. The way it works is that when a doctor or a nurse pulls a page for a particular task, all possible tests and procedures are checked by default. In many cases there are a dozen or so check boxes that the doctor will have to actively uncheck if he/she needs to just take the pulse of the patient. Naturally, doctors don't have neither the time nor the patience to click around the screen. They also don't have the incentive to reduce their income while wasting their time. An obvious and simple solution would be to set the default to all procedures unchecked and require manual input for to check the boxes. If I remember correctly this is how electronic records are handled in the Keiser hospitals. Another thing that should be required is to retain and provide unique tracking information for every sample and test being done. This is also not difficult because the sample tracking is already part of the software. Finally it should be legislated that the medical records belong to the patient, not the medical office. I don't see why I have to repeat the same panel of tests and fill same questionnaires every time I choose to ask for a second opinion or if due to various reasons I seek help from a different practitioner.
Exactly! One could imagine that a professor teaching statistic would know better than to base conclusions on a limited data set (N=1).
Sounds like a nice piece of hardware, but does it run Linux (read Android or MeeGo)?
I imagine his movies are distributed under the same restrictive license. Is he also trying to loosen up the cpyright restrictions on his creations?
You wish! In fact the article points out that your polygamy may be good for your grand-grand-grand-children, should you manage survive the variety of STDs you may pick while fooling around. So go ahead have fun and if your are lucky your progeny will be thank you for that.
This guy is perfectly in line with the most stupid aruments in support of eugenics:
1. He takes one simple genetic disorder (Down syndrome) and uses it to extrapolate to all posible "disorders" that potentially have a genetic component. This is such a basic logical fallacy that he should be stripped from his professor of phylosophy title.
2. He assumes, contrary to established facts, that genetic mutations are either "good" or "bad". In fact the phenotype of genetic variations strongly depends on the environment and mutations that are manifested as bad in one context may be good in another. For example mutations that give you sickle cell anemia will also protect you from malaria.
3. His approach will eliminate genetic diversity within the population that applies it. Elimination of genetic diversity is one of the best ways to kill off a population.
You need to inject yourself with the said toothpaste. If you insist on eating it you will need to eat a lot more tootpaste to get the same blood concentration as the one you get from injection.
What was the dose?
Excellent question, which should have had its answer in the summary. The dose is 12.5mg/kg injected interperitoneally. This dose will cause 20% reduction in muscle strength for a short period after the injection. In humans TCS is metabolized and inactivated rapidly (according to the article), although people with genetic effects may retain the drug for longer periods. It is unclear if the mice on which the experiments were done metabolize the drug with the same efficiency. If the drugs has to be absorbed through the skin or ingested you will need to be exposed to a significantly higher dose that the one used in the study.
In summary if you are not being injected with high concentration of the drug, you have nothing to worry about. Please put down the pitchforks and the torches. Nothing to see here.
CNN has news?!? Last time I checked the US edition it was composed exclusively of commercials and punditry bash outs.
Because quick profits and millisecond gains are the king in US. The utilities are trying to save both on infrastructure and maintenance. Having the power lines been buried, like in pretty much every first world country, they would have had a lot less problems from a little wind. I am pretty sure that the next post would be how this is too expensive because of the 'low' population density and the 'rural' populations and I call this complete bollocks. The utility poles are as prevalent in urban areas as they are out in the country. So, you saved on infrastructure and this is probably OK, but then you need to maintain it. And this means keeping the trees away from the poles, not overloading the wooden poles to the point where a little wind will snap them and replacing them before they rot completely away. Now this makes the cheap infrastructure a lot more expensive, unless you skip on the maintenance, which is what most utilities cheerfully do. This is by no means the only utilities fault. Any investment cost will need to be passed to the consumers and they will have none of it.
Phineas and Ferb are on Netflix.
1. Canada and the UK have socialised medicine handled by the government. You don't have to buy insurance, you just pay taxes, fill out some paperwork, and voila, medicare (however, in Canada, different provinces have different schemes for drug insurance) I don't understand this idea of forcing Americans to BUY insurance. Isn't it usual that if the government forces people to BUY something for whatever reason (eg: you have to goto drivers school to get a drivers license), then the thing they are buying will suddenly sky rocket in price?
Not is there is competition in the market. Car insurance is one example.
2. What are HMOs?
Insurance companies specializing in health care is the simple answer. The more complicated answer involves explaining a really weird system of milking both doctors and patients for profits. Patients usually get squeezed harder because what are they going to do - it is their money or their life.
3. Why are Americans so convinced that amoral profit seeking corporations have their best interests at heart, and not an elected government whose power is given to them by the people?
Beats me! But the Republican party deserves the entire credit for convincing Americans that this is the case. It is not an easy task if you think of it, but then they also have large part of the population convinced that consumer protection hurts consumers, that the they need to get rid of the government and if they don't pay taxes they will have stronger society and so on and so forth. The anti-government part is actually more puzzling than anything else, because they use this as a platform to get elected and govern. Go figure that one out.
No, they'll go up faster because the insurance companies can say "We have to pay for Obamacare," when in fact they are benefiting from it as you mentioned. This is the way most corporations, especially insurance corporations, work.
That is not true. The law also includes provision that the overhead (aka expenses and profit for the insurance companies) is limited to 20%. If they collect premiums in excess of that they have to return the money. Current estimates are that as a result of ACA (or Obamacare if you prefer it) insurance companies have to return 1.3 billion from the premiums collected in 2011. The only thing they can do to keep the extra premiums is to jack up the costs and launder the money trough subsidiaries. This however is illegal and very risky.
So having kids is GM too, then?
Guess a few people would get a stroke if they knew that.
Of course it is. What makes it worse is that it is a combination of GM and human cloning.
Selective pressure hybridization is just a really low-tech form of genetic modification.
Saying this is not a GM crop is misleading.
And so is evolution. This is why all the GM hoopla is missing the point.
The Stop all science now! exclamation on Slashdot should have been enough to identify the post as sarcasm. It is beyond me why ot got labeled 'Ineteresting' instead of 'Funny'. If the moderators insist on taking it seriously a 'Troll' label may have been more appropriate.
1. We need to train a lot less PhDs in biomedical sciences. Reducing the training period will only mean that we will train more PhDs not less. There aren't enough jobs to absorb all the PhD's trained in US. Most of the graduates that stay in the field compete for jobs that would require only MSc degree. Quite a large number of graduates end up with jobs that have little to do heir training (sales reps, etc).The whole biomedical jobs field is a pyramid with a broad base of grad students and post docs and veri narrow tip of academic and high skill industry jobs.
2. Putting artificial limits on the training period will reduce the quality of the training. The reason why a PhD degree takes 6,7 or more years is that it requires peer review journal publications and the bar on these has rapidly risen in the past years. Such publications require in depth studies, often involving animal models or clinical data that take years to generate and analyze.
It would make more sense to re-purpose graduate programs to training MSc and then offer the opportunity to those students who are passionate about science to pursue PhDs. Strangely, I don't see any estimates in the report on the projected numbers of jobs requiring PhDs or the carriers undertaken by PhD graduates.
Technical ability to review scientific data
And then there is:
Experience in formulating and laying out the groundwork for complex patterns of activity that extend well into the future
and
A practical aptitude for dealing with mechanical and electronic devices
The funny part is that this is exactly the kind of things that would send you to a camp if you were in the soviet block at that time. And people on the other side of the iron curtain were writing exactly the same letters but substituting 'communist' for 'imperialist'.
Should I be excited that NASA can use the hardware to move projects off the backburner or should I be depressed that NRO is so well funded that they are building toys they don't really need? Now that's the kind of news that can give you bipolar disorder. How can people who have been pinching NASA's pennies for years now can justify secretly building not one but two Hubble class telescopes for which they have no use?
There is this thing called inertia, and it is a bitch, especially at 0 G with no/little friction to help. Once the 1000 pounds of stuff gets in motion it will bounce around the place until everything gets smashed to pieces.
You forgot:
Juror 3: What is this Oracle company doing? Never heard of them.
Juror 4 (while pulling his android phone out): Me neither. Let me Google them.
Yep. It's way less than they pay their president (~ $800K including perks)
Research subject consent and the associated paperwork is already required by ethics rules that are strictly enforced in US. I am not aware of signal study in US that does not do that. In fact the US government and all private sponsors of research that I know of will not fund such studies. From what I see most of the law is just formalizing the status quo. The only silly thing is the requirement that only people named in the original consent from will be allowed to access the information. I am sure that this will be ironed out before the law goes into effect. Usually there is tiered access to such data that allows data that can not directly identify a person to be shared, while protecting information that can harm the privacy of the individual. My guess is that the bill is aimed against 'ancestry' web sites that also offer genetic testing and can do as they please with your genetic information according to their typical EULAs.