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User: eric_harris_76

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  1. Re:Clearly not... on Is an Octopus Too Smart For Us To Eat? · · Score: 1

    Is your real name Jeffrey Dahmer?

    Because I heard he was dead. (But not eaten.)

  2. Re:Inverse Wi-fi law on Marriott Fined $600,000 For Jamming Guest Hotspots · · Score: 1

    Expensive hotels do a lot of business for people on expense accounts who often don't have much choice about where they stay. Cheap hotels tend to cater to people who are spending their own money, and get to choose where they stay.

    The people who run hotels and motels know this or, if they don't, still act as though they do.

  3. ICD-10 (was:HL7?) on Back To Faxes: Doctors Can't Exchange Digital Medical Records · · Score: 1

    ANSI X12 healthcare-related formats (837, 835, 277U, 277CA, etc.) are oriented around insurance claims, but some include actual medical information (diagnosis codes, dates of service, etc.). The diagnosis codes were to change from ICD-9 to the somewhat less antiquated ICD-10 on October 1, 2014.

    Supposedly, one of the benefits of ICD-10 will be that more automation of acceptance/rejection decisions will be possible. ICD-10 codes are more granular, with a hierarchical taxonomy, and the subfield of the codes are more orthogonal. A possibly inaccurate example: the broken limb code is short, followed by one or more subfields that indicate left/right, upper (arm)/lower (leg), proximal/distal. And for those subfields, "unspecified" is an option. The subfields aren't necessarily about location, but also might include severity, apparent cause, chronic/temporary, etc.

    How granular and orthogonal? There's a code for "burns suffered while operating a personal watercraft", for instance. When I heard that, I was skeptical, so I went looking. Google found it. Also, one for an injury resulting from stepping on a turtle, or something like that. And so on.

    Naturally, there's no automatic conversion of codes from ICD-9 to ICD-10, or the other way. There are "crosswalk tables" that will list for a code the possible equivalents in the other, with a short textual description to help figure out which one is the best match.

    The mandated switchover from ICD-9 to ICD-10 was delayed a year by an amendment attached to the annual "boy did we screw up Medicare reimbursement decades ago" fix. Apparently a lot of folks in health care and supporting industries who will be negatively impacted wanted more time to prepare: update software, install updated software, train claim coders the bazillion new and different codes in ICD-10, arrange a line of credit to cover the temporary loss of revenue as claim rejections rise during the first months of the switch-over, etc.

    Line of credit? Yep. A previous ANSI X12 change caused a lot of payments to be delayed while providers corrected a larger-than-normal number of claim rejections. Or punted, because the effort of correcting and resubmitting smaller claims wasn't worth the effort. ICD-10 will have a similar effect on doctors, hospitals, dentists, chiropractors, ambulance services, etc.

    Expect ICD-10 to be required in October 2015. (Unless it gets delayed again.)

  4. Re:I am an economics nub on eBay To Spin Off PayPal · · Score: 1

    Sounds reasonable. My employer, long before I hired on, did much the same thing.

    They split off one part of the business as a separate company, since the one company's customers were customers of the other company. This meant that the customers of the spun-off company's competitors were at a disadvantage. Or were perceived to be.

    Post-spinoff, Company S's customers wouldn't be locked in to using Company E. And customers of companies competing with Company S wouldn't feel like they were getting less attention than customers of Company S, if they chose to go with Company E.

  5. Re:Hypotheticals on Secret Service Critics Pounce After White House Breach · · Score: 1

    Nor can I.

    Blaming or crediting presidents for a situation is rarely justified. They are not kings, not dictators.

    We're seeing that change, as each new administration invents new powers for the presidency, and gets away with it.

  6. Re:Hypotheticals on Secret Service Critics Pounce After White House Breach · · Score: 1

    "The problem is that there are a lot of nutjobs who think that killing one person will somehow solve the world's problems"

    And even more who think that electing one person will.

    And sad to say, they vote.

  7. Re:It's just simple economics on A DC-10 Passenger Plane Is Perfect At Fighting Wildfires · · Score: 1

    There may be some safety concerns with using "junkyard parts" (or not), but if so, they aren't as important when a vehicle carries two orders of magnitude fewer people.

    Now to await 2 or 3 angry responses from people who totally missed the point, because they lose their ability to think clearly when lives are on the line.

  8. Re:Fear of changing code.... on Ask Slashdot: Have You Experienced Fear Driven Development? · · Score: 1

    A nice turn of phrase: "extremely interesting failure scenarios".

  9. Re:Not good enough on Say Goodbye To That Unwanted U2 Album · · Score: 1

    Actually, I hear he's gotten better. At least, his politics have gotten better. (I'll not speak to his music.)

  10. "Publish or persish" + publications' criteria on How Scientific Consensus Has Gotten a Bad Reputation · · Score: 1

    Academics gotta publish. Novel results are more publishable than confirmations of previous research. "If you torture the data enough, it will confess." Even honest researchers will mistake randomness for a pattern, especially if they like the result for ideological, personal, or professional reasons.

    Combine these and other things, and you get the reason for this paper: " Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"

    http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124

    This was from 2005. I wonder if since then any published research findings confirm his conclusions?

  11. Re:+-2000 deaths? on US Scientists Predict Long Battle Against Ebola · · Score: 1

    One appalling aspect of the Spanish Flu epidemic is that, due to wartime censorship, information about the disease was suppressed, including information about where it was, and how to avoid it.

    Not in Spain, though. The disease was in a lot of places, including Spain. Spain wasn't in WW 1, so wartime censorship did not apply there.

    Information about it was in Spanish newspapers, and that's how it got the name -- even though it apparently started in Kansas, and spread through overcrowded US military barracks and troop ships.

  12. the MOOC "dropout rate" is the wrong metaphor on The MOOC Revolution That Wasn't · · Score: 1

    As was stated in a podcast -- http://www.econtalk.org/archiv... -- failure to finish doesn't mean much.

    If you can get what you came for after a few hours, or after doing 90% of the course, why bother to go on? You got value from it.

    And if you quit after a quick look, is that a bug or a feature? Do people always attend every university they visit? Does people ever drop a class when they realize after a session or two that it isn't going to work for them?

    There may not be a "right" metaphor for this, but if there is, it's probably not related to academia.

    A MOOC is more like a library book than a college class. You're not obligated to complete what you start, and it's silly to suggest that not completing it is some kind of "failure".

  13. "On August 6, U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga ordered the Executive Branch ..."

    One of my pet peeves: the journalistic practice of pretending that the federal judiciary is not part of the federal government.

    Sounds even stupider when I put it into words.

  14. Re:Haply so, but exec orders and agencies on The Executive Order That Led To Mass Spying, As Told By NSA Alumni · · Score: 1

    Well, if 95+% of the elected, appointed and hired people in the federal government are busy being punished -- presumably by arrest, prosecution and imprisonment, but I'd settle for hickory switches methodically administered in a measured number of strokes for each infraction, by the nearest available taxpayer -- who's going to run the government?

    I dunno, but wouldn't it be nice to find out?

  15. It didn't quit being evil just because it ended. History is chock-full of examples of things that worked out badly. It's important to remember them.

    I'd offer some obvious examples, but I'm trying to avoid Godwin's Law.

  16. Re:Citation Needed on The Evolution of Diet · · Score: 1

    "I shot an error into the air ..."

  17. statute of limitations on South Carolina Student Arrested For "Killing Pet Dinosaur" · · Score: 1

    The statute of limitations is apparently over 65 million years. That doesn't explain how a 16 year old could have done it. Maybe there's a typo, and he's really 160 million years old?

  18. Bruce Willis and Kevin Smith knew on It's Easy To Hack Traffic Lights · · Score: 1

    They were both in that Die Hard movie that demonstrated the consequences of bad people gaining control of traffic lights -- among other things.

  19. The only problem with practical fusion power on If Fusion Is the Answer, We Need To Do It Quickly · · Score: 1

    As best I can tell, the only problem with practical fusion power is that it doesn't exist. Other than that, it's prefect.

  20. Re:The Discovery channel? on Kevlar Protects Cables From Sharks, Experts Look For Protection From Shark Week · · Score: 1

    It's nicknamed the Conspiracy Channel now? Before I quit cable, it was the War Channel.

  21. And if they can't? on The Billion-Dollar Website · · Score: 1

    And if the federal government can't improve its processes for such things, perhaps it will quit attempting them. After all, screw up enough things badly enough, and it'll run out of money, and go away. Such is the nature of failed institutions.

    Oh, wait. That won't happen. Two reasons: IRS and Federal Reserve.

    Of course, it could go away without running out of money. Two examples: Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe. The places were still there, but they had dramatic changes in management.

    Such is the nature of failed institutions.

  22. Chicken Little lacks orginality. on Humans Need Not Apply: a Video About the Robot Revolution and Jobs · · Score: 1

    There were people seeing this "menace" back in the 1970s, and offering similar "solutions". http://duckduckgo.com/?s=the.t... (I'm seeing the upside of becoming an old fart. Perspective. Spotting patterns of alarmism.)

    There will still be need for people to make lace and stockings and cloth, after the machines take over, Mr. Ludd. (Whoops! Wrong iteration.)

    There will still be need for people to do whatever it is that machines can't, or can't do at an competitive price.

    "Can't" is a bigger category than technological infeasibility. People still commission oil painting portraits, after over a century of photography. There are still restaurants, and not a proliferation of automats. ("Automats"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) One-off tasks -- organizing a conference, for instance -- could be automated to a degree, but ultimately someone is going to have to conceive of it, identify key participants, convince them to attend, obtain sponsors, etc.

    "At a competitive price". It may be possible to design a robot that picks up cigarette butts and other minor debris in every possible location and situation, or to do gardening of every conceivable landscape, but to do it well enough might just be too damn expensive. Centralizing pre-made decisions has proven damnably hard to do well, at any cost. It won't be any different when they are in software and about litter or about aesthetics and locally-suitable horticulture.

    Moore's Law would not have made Soviet Union workable, and isn't going to help in many situations in the future. Not help enough to matter. Even free computing and data gathering and data transmission won't do it People on the scene are flexible, and have knowledge distant theoreticians don't even know to acquire. (http://duckduckgo.com/?s=I.pencil+ferrule+graphite )

    The real problem will be the pace. Personal adaptability allowed some blacksmiths to become auto-mobile mechanics, and the rest were able to get by during the transition, sticking with the horses. The important skill in the future will not be a specialization in any area or guessing what skills will not automate (people will always need shrinks or whores or physical therapists or tactful portraitists or wine stewards or ...), but the ability to make transitions over and over, as necessary.

    Hardly an original thought. As I recall, skeptics were offering it back in the 1970s. (And, I bet, back in the 1770s.)

  23. Rather than encourage the use of capital goods ... on Humans Need Not Apply: a Video About the Robot Revolution and Jobs · · Score: 1

    The substitution of capital goods for labor is more appealing when interest rates are low.

    Central banks attempt to keep interest rates artificially low -- at least for certain borrowers. (Guess who?)

    Yet another way governments use central banks to screw over "the little guy".

  24. Re:Similar on Correcting Killer Architecture · · Score: 1

    Chanting crowd: WHAT DO WE WANT?

    Chanting crowd: TIME TRAVEL!

    Chanting crowd: WHEN DO WE WANT IT?

    Chanting crowd: THAT'S IRRELEVANT!

  25. Re:COBOL was better than JavaScript. on The Technologies Changing What It Means To Be a Programmer · · Score: 1

    In his defense, I've heard that he cobbled it together pretty quickly for a demo/deadline/proof-of-concept, and was only after he delivered it did it transpire that what he delivered was what was to be used in the real world. Oops.

    As I recall, this story came from Crockford, who I'm given to understand is not the most mellow of folks. If he's cutting Eich some slack, it's likely deserved.