How is this as an alternate approach to this whole mess.
Make copyright-lengths reasonable and you will more likely than not avoid much of these problems. Secondly, I do believe the government has the right and the duty to mandate where, when and how publicly funded research money is used for not just the research, but the final publication. This money comes from the people, and we through our legislators should dictate how it is put to use.
Keep in mind that many of the issues we now face are new ones. The patent issue didn't come up 'til the 70s and 80s. Prior to that, government funded research always found its way to the public domain (patent wise). We now pay private companies to do research that they can then use to rape us.
I feel the bloat argument has been over-used lately. Yes, computers are more powerful and doing similar tasks, but they also tend to be more user friendly and have a nicer user experience. They also have to cater to a broader audience.
No meaning lost and so much shorter!
I think what most people making this argument mean is that the gains in computing do not justify the gains in system resources needed to achieve them.
The vast majority of Windows users do not have any documents in the OOXML format. The handful of people I know who use newer versions of office are pissed off everytime they forget to "save as" into an older format and that is because of where I work. All work computers are setup with an older version of office (can't remember the version number off the top of my head). These people usually end up switching to an older version of office and I have been able to con some of them into using openoffice.org. A handful have been happy with oo.org, but most just wanted the same version of office as they have at work.
I agree that binary compatibility should be strived for, but it is not ooxml that needs compatability. its the older binary office formats that need to be standardized against. What needs to be done about ooxml is a concerted effort to prevent adoption. This means pushing organizations to switch away from newer versions of office. This also means helping oo.org or your fav alternate office suite getting competitive (assuming u have any means to help).
at my work, people use powerpoint and recently access (my fault - i needed something that was there and people could use). oo presentation is good enough (import and export from powerpoint), but database capabilities are severely lacking.
augmentin is amoxocillin-clavulante which is not the only clavulanate containing antibiotic. there is also a ticarcillin-clavulanate (timentin - IV only)
piperacillin-tazobactam (zosyn) is another ampicillin-sulbactam (unasyn)
this said, one can choose to combine any of the beta-lactamase inhibitors with a beta-lactam antibiotic (PCN or cephalosporin) of their choice though in reality one would most likely go with one of the above cominations as they have been clinically tested.
Was going to post separately, but I'll just throw it in here. Some microorganisms have an inducible beta-lactamase, so in the presence of a betalactam, they will produce more of the inhibitor thus potentially being able to survivie by overwhelming the betalactamase inhibitors in the blood.
well, I don't think the corporate suit types are the ones he was targetting. He was targetting those sitting in the audience that truly question the system and furthermore are willing to take a stand to change it.... essentially, Yale is not the place to be for this sort of thing because he will essentially be talking to those who idolize those who rose to the top in out current system and for the most part will choose to emulate them. They probably wouldn't listen to what he had to say even if he were in a suit (though I do agree with you that they would probably pay more attention if he were in a suit).
Now the Steve Balmer types only see one thing when he is on stage.. RMS walking back and forth rallying his troops by yelling: "commies! commies! commies!"
you are absolutely correct about that - I vaguely remember hearing about these things before... the fact that I don't remember kinda makes me think this isn't as successful as it should be.
Beastie Boys have offered up free goods and if I'm not mistaken they also have used the creative commons license.
Weird Al has released stuff on his myspace site.
if we want to push the issue, someone should start promoting a band that releases their material on a site like youtube... haven't seen anything of note myself... yet.
Most likely not; however, Radiohead grew up in a time of labels. The labels control of the market is still unbelievably strong. This will not change until people start adopting sites like you-tube or something similar as their primary source for new media content.
Essentially, everyone will continue to ask the question "Do we still need the labels?" until we have a band become successful without them. On the flip side, the lack of a successful artist without one will never remove the question of whether they are needed.
Essentially, I think the question posed is pointless. The utility of the labels is being determined now because this is the first attempt of independence by a big name. Smaller names won't get a chance until a means to discover them becomes popular.
Regulations are in place.
as for ownership. The paper/film/media the records are on belong to the doctor/hospital/practice, but the data itself belongs to the patient.
you can read about the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996
http://www.patientprivacyrights.org/site/PageServer#
RBC fragility is likely more significant than the effects of one vasodilator
Multiple unnecessary (or necessary) transfusions may lead to iron overload similar to that found in people with hemachromatosis
TRALI
I am not attacking their work, but there are so many other reasons to be vary of transfusions - the significance of this one seems like it would be minimal, but I do applaud their work in trying to minimize complications of transfusion.
This is true in areas with higher rates of blood-born parasites, and may explain why the prevalence remains so high now; however, in temperate climates you would expect a drop in the prevalence of HbSS - with the implementation of therapy (and until fairly recently, there wasn't a lot of sickle cell in the northern areas), this drop would be slowed dramatically or could potentially stop or reverse.
Sickle cell trait is protective - sickle cell disease is potentially lethal so there is a selective pressure against normal beta chains as well as homozygous sickle cell mutations in tropical environments. With advances in medical science, there may be no selective pressure on either of the homozygous traits.
thank you. If I had mod points, I would boost you up and call it a day.
Part of what evolution teaches is a thing called "Selective pressure". If there is no pressure, then functionality is lost. For example, species that adapt to caves tend to go blind because destructive mutations to the eyes pose no greater survival risk.
The same is true for the lower classes vs middle vs upper classes as mentioned in parent. As sickle cell, thalessemia, reactive airway diseases become more treatable, their prevalence will increase or at least come to a steady state. This will also allow other diseases or complications of these conditions to manifest. An example of this would be side-effects of anti-retroviral agents. They can be quite devestating in some cases, but does that mean we stop prescribing them? You can only justify that if you - like Hitler (I thank thee Godwin for this one) - feel that the weak should die to strengthen the gene pool.
Many people are opposed to the idea of going on hemodialysis or getting an organ transplant. They site examples of people doing poorly on these therapies - about the amount of time they spend in the hospital - about the slew of medications they are on. One must bear in mind that these complications are far better than the alternative - a short miserable existence.
Look at the life-expectancy of the lower classes vs the middle class and you will see that hygiene has some significant advantages. Soap and antimicrobial agents are one of the few medical instruments that have had a great impact on the overall life-span of society. Most other advances barely left a dent in the overall life-span.
if someone says its better to have rampant cholera and dysentery wiping out huge populations of children - potentially doubling or tripling infant mortality - just so we don't have as much appendicitis, I would question their judgement greatly.
As for air purifiers (mentioned somewhere in this thread) - they possibly prevent interstitial lung disease on top of removing allergens.
YES, 893217 makes the cut. Now, for me to practice my current great hit: random noise 44, soon to be followed by random noise 45. For those that missed random noise 1-43, I am afraid you will never get that opportunity as they're kind of hard to repeat... and I am not exactly sure how they go anymore.
maybe I'm being nit-picky or am missing something, but what's the advantage of converting to FLAC - ever? Whatever loss in quality exists as an mp3 has already occurred. Switching to FLAC will only increase the size of the file at this point. Why not keep the files archived in mp3 format on read only medium to prevent clobbering. If they need to be converted to another format for whatever reason, just convert them from the original mp3.
Is this about mp3 not being a patent encumbered format? if so, I still don't see the point. you already have the file and obviously the tools to convert to another format. More likely than not, no one will be able to put mp3's under wraps anymore.
intersting thoughts. I am in medicine; however, only a small fraction of the programs are related to medicine. I have in there general utilities that I have used for mass conversion of file formats (usually one text file format to another), or to allow me to get access to datasets others have published.
Some of the programs are for personal use - such as to automate the creaation of a photoalbum for web publishing.
I just don't see the problem with letting people know that I am not a good programmer. I have the essential knowledge to program, I just don't care about taking the time to polish off a program - becaue to me they are just tools. I understand why a programmer would be upset about releasing poor code, but for someone who considers programming more of a hobby, I don't see the point.
I agree with your sentiments as well; however, I got over that sense of embarassment. I am not a computer scientist by profession. I write code to accomplish a task I wanted to do. The code is largely funcional, but may break around end cases or often has poor exception handling. Every now and then, I'll go back and clean some code up. I decided that there may be people who are willing to take this code and fix it up, or maybe somebody who can't program is looking for something quick and dirty to do what I have already done. For this reason, I released a substantial number of my programs as a single package on sourceforge. Some functionality is redundant to other projects, some is not.
Heck, I just realized I could recruit people here;) if they are willing to help.
Would something like
This product placed in homes surrounding say a public library with free wifi be legal? How far can you repeat a signal?
This is not an endorsement of a brand or anything, just the quickest link I could find. This would shift some of the burden to the townsfolk, but maybe the city could provide rebates to people within certain neighborhoods to have these installed?
I agree with your sentiments. It would be nice to be able to use existing devices on this network without having to buy a new card or somehow connect it to a phone.
I have a simple question. How legal would it be to say put 802.11b/g repeaters all over town in private residences?
Maybe zone a city by region. I know this would be a rather slow connection, but just to provide basic wifi throughout town? Maybe only have like 9-10 base stations in a small town? and use commoditiy hardware?
to elaberate on "making assumptions" about underlying data prior to doing a study. In the field of medicine many experiments and studies can not be done for obvious ethical concerns. Sometimes something that may not be the best for a patient is continued despite the prospect for "better therapy" because existing therapy is better than no therapy. Do you deny someone existing therapy to test a new methodology? That would more likely than not be considered unethical; however, if the standard of care is not available in a population and you were to then introduce your newer therapy you can potentially save lives. At this point you may be able to do a study comparing one populations survival with the other; however, this study makes an astounding number of assumptions about the similarity and comparability of the two populations. Despite this, you may go ahead and use this comparison to substantiate a better randomized double blinded study later. Its often better to do observational and retrospective studies prior to doing controlled trials despite their reliance on unscientific assumptions because its not always appropriate to do a "proper" study without having substantiated some aspects of your claim. Observational studis often get proven wrong; however, this doesn't mean that they don't play an important role or should be completely marginalized as bad science.
Publicfunding can be used to obtain private patents in this nation. Until such fundamental rules change there will be heavy pressure from administrators to impede open publication as much as possible.
I agree with you that current publication methods are a bit ludicrous; however, it will be at least half a generation before those in charge have any grasp of how to publish.
Right now, there already are a whole slew of online publications some of which are open access. The issue is one of prestige and acceptance. If I were to do major research, do I go to a newer publication whose reputation for peer review is still not well established or do I go with a big name. Having something in the New England Journal of Medicine is a big deal. It can establish a career for someone. At that point the fact that its not open access becomes a secondary concern - the journal is widely available to whom it would matter. This brings me to another point - elitism. It would have to be overcome before people will be fully willing to hand over access to these sources.
My experience has been that the resistance to open access runs deep. People question whether an open access journal could maintain the quality of the traditional sources.
well, there are a few issues with your suggestion - well at least things I think would be issues
1) copyright - how do you copy relevant portions of a publication without getting caught up in this nightmare? could you imagine the price of journals if this were required? There are now plenty of journals that allow you to read content for free.
2) not everything can be made explicit. There are many aspects of any scientific field that are "fundamental" and would be tedious to have to re-explain everytime
3) putting that much data into an article may make it too large and unwieldy to read. If people have issues with something, they can pay or do whatever else it takes.
4) to state that any assumption will look sloppy may be true; however, unless you are willing to conduct many more experiments prior to leading up to whatever your studying, wouldn't you be forced to make some assumptions. sometimes - esp for a small study - you are willing to leave certain things unanswered so you can publish and get the money that you may need to prove your assumptions were true to begin with. As long as disclaimers are made in your original paper stating further study needs to be done, this may not be an issue
normalization is not done on an annual basis. It is done per pool of selected questions and covers multiple testing sessions, so over a couple of years there can be a fall in the average score though that would get corrected out once they redo the grading - at least that's my understanding. The other thing is that they can look at the raw score and see a trend in that as well - well at least the board that creates the test can.
Slashdot Mirror
This guy is trying to shut down slashdot?!
well,
How is this as an alternate approach to this whole mess.
Make copyright-lengths reasonable and you will more likely than not avoid much of these problems. Secondly, I do believe the government has the right and the duty to mandate where, when and how publicly funded research money is used for not just the research, but the final publication. This money comes from the people, and we through our legislators should dictate how it is put to use.
Keep in mind that many of the issues we now face are new ones. The patent issue didn't come up 'til the 70s and 80s. Prior to that, government funded research always found its way to the public domain (patent wise). We now pay private companies to do research that they can then use to rape us.
Let me unbloat that comment for ya
I feel the bloat argument has been over-used lately. Yes, computers are more powerful and doing similar tasks, but they also tend to be more user friendly and have a nicer user experience. They also have to cater to a broader audience.
No meaning lost and so much shorter!
I think what most people making this argument mean is that the gains in computing do not justify the gains in system resources needed to achieve them.
The vast majority of Windows users do not have any documents in the OOXML format. The handful of people I know who use newer versions of office are pissed off everytime they forget to "save as" into an older format and that is because of where I work. All work computers are setup with an older version of office (can't remember the version number off the top of my head). These people usually end up switching to an older version of office and I have been able to con some of them into using openoffice.org. A handful have been happy with oo.org, but most just wanted the same version of office as they have at work.
I agree that binary compatibility should be strived for, but it is not ooxml that needs compatability. its the older binary office formats that need to be standardized against. What needs to be done about ooxml is a concerted effort to prevent adoption. This means pushing organizations to switch away from newer versions of office. This also means helping oo.org or your fav alternate office suite getting competitive (assuming u have any means to help).
at my work, people use powerpoint and recently access (my fault - i needed something that was there and people could use). oo presentation is good enough (import and export from powerpoint), but database capabilities are severely lacking.
augmentin is amoxocillin-clavulante which is not the only clavulanate containing antibiotic. there is also a ticarcillin-clavulanate (timentin - IV only)
piperacillin-tazobactam (zosyn) is another
ampicillin-sulbactam (unasyn)
this said, one can choose to combine any of the beta-lactamase inhibitors with a beta-lactam antibiotic (PCN or cephalosporin) of their choice though in reality one would most likely go with one of the above cominations as they have been clinically tested.
Was going to post separately, but I'll just throw it in here. Some microorganisms have an inducible beta-lactamase, so in the presence of a betalactam, they will produce more of the inhibitor thus potentially being able to survivie by overwhelming the betalactamase inhibitors in the blood.
then use your omnipotence to become omniscient and you will know!
well, I don't think the corporate suit types are the ones he was targetting. He was targetting those sitting in the audience that truly question the system and furthermore are willing to take a stand to change it.... essentially, Yale is not the place to be for this sort of thing because he will essentially be talking to those who idolize those who rose to the top in out current system and for the most part will choose to emulate them. They probably wouldn't listen to what he had to say even if he were in a suit (though I do agree with you that they would probably pay more attention if he were in a suit).
Now the Steve Balmer types only see one thing when he is on stage.. RMS walking back and forth rallying his troops by yelling: "commies! commies! commies!"
you are absolutely correct about that - I vaguely remember hearing about these things before... the fact that I don't remember kinda makes me think this isn't as successful as it should be.
Beastie Boys have offered up free goods and if I'm not mistaken they also have used the creative commons license.
Weird Al has released stuff on his myspace site.
if we want to push the issue, someone should start promoting a band that releases their material on a site like youtube... haven't seen anything of note myself... yet.
its just a matter of time
Most likely not; however, Radiohead grew up in a time of labels. The labels control of the market is still unbelievably strong. This will not change until people start adopting sites like you-tube or something similar as their primary source for new media content.
Essentially, everyone will continue to ask the question "Do we still need the labels?" until we have a band become successful without them. On the flip side, the lack of a successful artist without one will never remove the question of whether they are needed.
Essentially, I think the question posed is pointless. The utility of the labels is being determined now because this is the first attempt of independence by a big name. Smaller names won't get a chance until a means to discover them becomes popular.
Regulations are in place. as for ownership. The paper/film/media the records are on belong to the doctor/hospital/practice, but the data itself belongs to the patient. you can read about the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 http://www.patientprivacyrights.org/site/PageServer#
Well, not having read the study I can not comment on its significance; however, there is far more to blood transfusion dangers than NO depletion.
Lets get to some significant points: NO is produced locally at the tissues that need it.
RBC fragility is likely more significant than the effects of one vasodilator
Multiple unnecessary (or necessary) transfusions may lead to iron overload similar to that found in people with hemachromatosis
TRALI
I am not attacking their work, but there are so many other reasons to be vary of transfusions - the significance of this one seems like it would be minimal, but I do applaud their work in trying to minimize complications of transfusion.
This is true in areas with higher rates of blood-born parasites, and may explain why the prevalence remains so high now; however, in temperate climates you would expect a drop in the prevalence of HbSS - with the implementation of therapy (and until fairly recently, there wasn't a lot of sickle cell in the northern areas), this drop would be slowed dramatically or could potentially stop or reverse.
Sickle cell trait is protective - sickle cell disease is potentially lethal so there is a selective pressure against normal beta chains as well as homozygous sickle cell mutations in tropical environments. With advances in medical science, there may be no selective pressure on either of the homozygous traits.
thank you. If I had mod points, I would boost you up and call it a day.
Part of what evolution teaches is a thing called "Selective pressure". If there is no pressure, then functionality is lost. For example, species that adapt to caves tend to go blind because destructive mutations to the eyes pose no greater survival risk.
The same is true for the lower classes vs middle vs upper classes as mentioned in parent. As sickle cell, thalessemia, reactive airway diseases become more treatable, their prevalence will increase or at least come to a steady state. This will also allow other diseases or complications of these conditions to manifest. An example of this would be side-effects of anti-retroviral agents. They can be quite devestating in some cases, but does that mean we stop prescribing them? You can only justify that if you - like Hitler (I thank thee Godwin for this one) - feel that the weak should die to strengthen the gene pool.
Many people are opposed to the idea of going on hemodialysis or getting an organ transplant. They site examples of people doing poorly on these therapies - about the amount of time they spend in the hospital - about the slew of medications they are on. One must bear in mind that these complications are far better than the alternative - a short miserable existence.
Look at the life-expectancy of the lower classes vs the middle class and you will see that hygiene has some significant advantages. Soap and antimicrobial agents are one of the few medical instruments that have had a great impact on the overall life-span of society. Most other advances barely left a dent in the overall life-span.
if someone says its better to have rampant cholera and dysentery wiping out huge populations of children - potentially doubling or tripling infant mortality - just so we don't have as much appendicitis, I would question their judgement greatly.
As for air purifiers (mentioned somewhere in this thread) - they possibly prevent interstitial lung disease on top of removing allergens.
YES, 893217 makes the cut. Now, for me to practice my current great hit: random noise 44, soon to be followed by random noise 45. For those that missed random noise 1-43, I am afraid you will never get that opportunity as they're kind of hard to repeat... and I am not exactly sure how they go anymore.
thanks. I missed the word prime. I was confused by the grandparent to your post. Reread it. Thanks for the clarification.
maybe I'm being nit-picky or am missing something, but what's the advantage of converting to FLAC - ever? Whatever loss in quality exists as an mp3 has already occurred. Switching to FLAC will only increase the size of the file at this point. Why not keep the files archived in mp3 format on read only medium to prevent clobbering. If they need to be converted to another format for whatever reason, just convert them from the original mp3.
Is this about mp3 not being a patent encumbered format? if so, I still don't see the point. you already have the file and obviously the tools to convert to another format. More likely than not, no one will be able to put mp3's under wraps anymore.
intersting thoughts. I am in medicine; however, only a small fraction of the programs are related to medicine. I have in there general utilities that I have used for mass conversion of file formats (usually one text file format to another), or to allow me to get access to datasets others have published.
Some of the programs are for personal use - such as to automate the creaation of a photoalbum for web publishing.
I just don't see the problem with letting people know that I am not a good programmer. I have the essential knowledge to program, I just don't care about taking the time to polish off a program - becaue to me they are just tools. I understand why a programmer would be upset about releasing poor code, but for someone who considers programming more of a hobby, I don't see the point.
I agree with your sentiments as well; however, I got over that sense of embarassment. I am not a computer scientist by profession. I write code to accomplish a task I wanted to do. The code is largely funcional, but may break around end cases or often has poor exception handling. Every now and then, I'll go back and clean some code up. I decided that there may be people who are willing to take this code and fix it up, or maybe somebody who can't program is looking for something quick and dirty to do what I have already done. For this reason, I released a substantial number of my programs as a single package on sourceforge. Some functionality is redundant to other projects, some is not.
;) if they are willing to help.
Heck, I just realized I could recruit people here
Would something like This product placed in homes surrounding say a public library with free wifi be legal? How far can you repeat a signal?
This is not an endorsement of a brand or anything, just the quickest link I could find. This would shift some of the burden to the townsfolk, but maybe the city could provide rebates to people within certain neighborhoods to have these installed?
I agree with your sentiments. It would be nice to be able to use existing devices on this network without having to buy a new card or somehow connect it to a phone. I have a simple question. How legal would it be to say put 802.11b/g repeaters all over town in private residences? Maybe zone a city by region. I know this would be a rather slow connection, but just to provide basic wifi throughout town? Maybe only have like 9-10 base stations in a small town? and use commoditiy hardware?
to elaberate on "making assumptions" about underlying data prior to doing a study. In the field of medicine many experiments and studies can not be done for obvious ethical concerns. Sometimes something that may not be the best for a patient is continued despite the prospect for "better therapy" because existing therapy is better than no therapy. Do you deny someone existing therapy to test a new methodology? That would more likely than not be considered unethical; however, if the standard of care is not available in a population and you were to then introduce your newer therapy you can potentially save lives. At this point you may be able to do a study comparing one populations survival with the other; however, this study makes an astounding number of assumptions about the similarity and comparability of the two populations. Despite this, you may go ahead and use this comparison to substantiate a better randomized double blinded study later. Its often better to do observational and retrospective studies prior to doing controlled trials despite their reliance on unscientific assumptions because its not always appropriate to do a "proper" study without having substantiated some aspects of your claim. Observational studis often get proven wrong; however, this doesn't mean that they don't play an important role or should be completely marginalized as bad science.
Public funding can be used to obtain private patents in this nation. Until such fundamental rules change there will be heavy pressure from administrators to impede open publication as much as possible.
I agree with you that current publication methods are a bit ludicrous; however, it will be at least half a generation before those in charge have any grasp of how to publish.
Right now, there already are a whole slew of online publications some of which are open access. The issue is one of prestige and acceptance. If I were to do major research, do I go to a newer publication whose reputation for peer review is still not well established or do I go with a big name. Having something in the New England Journal of Medicine is a big deal. It can establish a career for someone. At that point the fact that its not open access becomes a secondary concern - the journal is widely available to whom it would matter. This brings me to another point - elitism. It would have to be overcome before people will be fully willing to hand over access to these sources.
My experience has been that the resistance to open access runs deep. People question whether an open access journal could maintain the quality of the traditional sources.
well, there are a few issues with your suggestion - well at least things I think would be issues
1) copyright - how do you copy relevant portions of a publication without getting caught up in this nightmare? could you imagine the price of journals if this were required? There are now plenty of journals that allow you to read content for free.
2) not everything can be made explicit. There are many aspects of any scientific field that are "fundamental" and would be tedious to have to re-explain everytime
3) putting that much data into an article may make it too large and unwieldy to read. If people have issues with something, they can pay or do whatever else it takes.
4) to state that any assumption will look sloppy may be true; however, unless you are willing to conduct many more experiments prior to leading up to whatever your studying, wouldn't you be forced to make some assumptions. sometimes - esp for a small study - you are willing to leave certain things unanswered so you can publish and get the money that you may need to prove your assumptions were true to begin with. As long as disclaimers are made in your original paper stating further study needs to be done, this may not be an issue
if enough people figure out what DRM is, the content providers will change the name and declare DRM dead.
normalization is not done on an annual basis. It is done per pool of selected questions and covers multiple testing sessions, so over a couple of years there can be a fall in the average score though that would get corrected out once they redo the grading - at least that's my understanding. The other thing is that they can look at the raw score and see a trend in that as well - well at least the board that creates the test can.