Actually humans need to move their skin to scan a surface to be able to "read" it, this skin can read the surface without scanning/rubbing over it. So in a sense it already has surpassed an index finger.
Actually humans can scan a surface statically, there is just more information available if a scan is used.
Your index finger can detect spatial form on a surface with a 2 mm range. You can detect surface asperities as small as a 4-5 microns in scanned touch, and detect vibrations of 1-2 microns at 250 Hz.
This fake skin has great spatial acuity, but nearly no dynamic range compared to our static sense of touch. In a sense (pun intended), it is not operating in the right range. Our static sense of touch has spatial acuity of a little less than a mm, and threshold close to 25 microns (static threshold), and 2 mm dynamic range. These nanotech films are nowhere near the right range (more sensitive and better spatial acuity), and will probably be useless as substitutes or encoders for natural touch. There are plenty of other applications for them, though...
[quote]I'm not sure you would even need to be born with the limb, those experiments with the monkeys where they controlled electronic arms with thought worked out ok. I guess they did establish control over the arms by initially tying the movement of the mechanical arm to the movement of the monkeys actual arm, so who knows. Perhaps the lower communication barrier with a human would make it possible to establish control simply through visual feedback. You can't exactly explain to Bobo that he should try to "think" the arm to do things.[/quote]
We are a long way away from prosthetics that can perform useful tasks. However, they may be able to allow trapped patients to communicate effectively, and that would be huge.
Those monkey experiments have used principally visual feedback, not tactile feedback. The monkey-robot-arm experiments were done open loop, the robot arm merely mimicked the monkey arm, and was not used under feedback control. Sure it is a first step, but the feedback part of the equation has stumped prosthetic engineers for over a decade already.
We typically use mechanoreceptor feedback from our fingertips to determine when an object in our hands begins to slip. We increase grip force until the slip stops with a reasonable margin of safety.
With such feedback picking up an egg safely is easy. Without it picking up the egg is nearly impossible. Experiments have been done in which the skin but not the proprioceptors are anesthetized. Even simple manual tasks become very difficult.
We can live without vision or hearing, but we cannot live without touch.
Just wanted to add to all of the great stuff you said by also pointing out that titanium is also a pain to work with in pretty much every other way. It's tough to machine
I hear this a lot, but CP titanium machines like butter. I use it in a lot of applications where corrosion resistance is critical but strength is not. It is substantially easier to machine than lots of higher strength aluminiums, and they all machine easier than steel (especially stainless, yuck!)
Its that 6/4 stuff that people like to use that is tough to machine. It cuts kinda like a hard rubber, rather flexible (low modulus) but high yield strength, so it bends far before it fails, and it gets real grabby on the machining bit.
Now, to celebrate, I'm going to the lathe to cut a 5 mil ribbon off some titanium bar stock, and then light it! Better than magnesium, but keep it 5 mil or thinner!
One is that some subset of distiller is in Microsoft Word under an agreement with Adobe. If you install Adobe Acrobat (not the reader, the full version), it adds a subset of distiller to Word.
There is a LOT of business out there that converts Word documents to PDF. Adobe makes a lot of money from it, and Microsoft is speculating that when they add PDF capabilities to Word for no extra charge, that this market will be quashed and Adobe will lose money.
Kinda like when Microsoft gave away IE while Netscape was charging for their browser. Killed the browser market, killed Netscape.
I'm told Apple has long had this running in the Cupertino lab -- Intel Macs running OS X while mixing Apple and XP applications. This is not a guess or a rumor, this something that has been demonstrated and observed by people who have since reported to me.
Fundamentally, TV advertisers pay for TV in order to market to you. If you make it easy to get the TV content for free, without advertising, TV will go away completely.
That's not really going to happen, what IS happening is TiVO is doing the best tracking of TV viewing habits ever. Their hope is that the targetted TV viewing habits can lead to targetted TV advertising in the same way that Google Ads allow targetted advertising of WWW users. Targetted ads are much more valuable than un-targetted ads, and you can measure click through rates.
TiVO has technology that advertisers can access RIGHT NOW. With a single click you can 1) enable a background download to your hard drive "Click to download this 10 minute informercial on RedHat linux" 2) run a Java app 3) enable scheduling the recording of a regularly scheduled program
If they make this work TiVOs will be free for every cable user, and TiVO will develop a healthy revenue stream from their targetted advertising.
Personally, I think Google is going to buy them, it fits their business model.
I thought that too. Cringely says, here in his 420 column, that Apple has Darwin running with a full Windows API implemented in-house, and has the rights to release this from a prior Microsoft/Apple agreement. The possibility is that all Windows apps would run in OS X natively. Closing the Intel-Darwin source under a "security" excuse could be exactly what they need to do to upgrade everyone's machine to run Darwin with a Windows API, possibly on a native BSD instead of a BSD over Mach...
Microsoft's business is Office and Windows. Those make a ton of $$$$.
Microsoft loses money on almost everything else.
Every market they've tried to move into and make money on, they've failed.
They did pretty well against Netscape - giving away the browser seemed to kill their market completely, and thus kill Netscape. But Microsoft didn't make money on that. They lost money and killed a competitor.
But Google has a different model. They run internet advertising on the back of the best internet search engine. Microsoft cannot give away search for free, Google already does that. They can entice users to use their own search, but users used Google before when they had to find it.
It is easy to forget pre-Google searches. Every search engine was MILES behind Google. They came along, and all of a sudden you could find what you wanted. They intelligently leveraged that into becoming the Internet advertising leader.
Still, Microsoft could get a chunk of the market if 1) the next IE has an MSN search box built in 2) defaults to MSN homepage 3) And MSN search rivals Googles in its ability to return good results
I think that is the looming battle. Microsoft needs more leverage from IE, and a better search engine. And they will spend whatever it takes to get the latter. Google, meanwhile, is probably locking down IP on internet searching as much as they can.
Second, give your writing to a member of your potential audience. Then, after he/she reads it once, quiz him on it. Re-write it, give it to a new member of your potential audience. Repeat. Once your audience gets the main points, and doesn't get stuck on anything, you are done...
That's the problem. A friend of mine in high school in the 80s hot-rodded a beetle. It could crank well over 100 MPH. The problem, of course, is lift-off. The beetle had all the weight in the back, at 100 MPH the front wheels would bob up and down. The bubble-like shape of the beetle generates a LOT of aerodynamic lift.
Now, the new Beetles weigh more and have the weight more in the front, but that sucker is going to take off somewhere between 100 and 180 MPH. My guess, based on high school, is that it tries to take off around 150 MPH.
You would think someone who would invest $250,000 in modding his car would actually think about using a reasonable high-speed car shape for the mod...unless he was more interested in firing those tailpipes in the company parking lot than actually making a fast car.
It is clear to anyone who looks at the raw economics and measures of successful health care that if we could magically change to socialized medicine overnight, we would save a lot of money and improve the health of the US. citizens.
Another looming problem is the doctor to patient ratio and the baby boomers approaching 70+ years of age. We would be wise to think of this as well when a socialized medical program is instituted.
"You'd have a hard time making an argument that health care in the USA is better than Cuba, if you used normal markers of health, like life expectancy, infant mortality, sick days, etc."
And I didn't have a hard time at all. It was amazingly easy, took thirty seconds.
Why didn't you do it before you made such a ridiculous assertion that is factually incorrect?
The USA has higher disease rates than Cuba for virtually every disease for which effective vaccines exist. Look it up. They do this because they have socialized medicine, and everyone gets a vaccine whether they like it or not. It makes a difference. Here are some search terms to get you started
Even for AIDS they are lower than the US. Much lower.
And besides that, there are other estimates of the infant mortality rate and life expectancy than the ones you cited, In some the US is better. In some Cuba is better. For just one, check the CIA factbook pages. My point was not that Cuba is a slam dunk choice for medical care over the US, just that you would have a hard time arguing the US is better. In retrospect I should have said "clearly better". But when you start to look at disease rates, and at diseases for which vaccines exist, Cuba looks better and better. And that is because medicine is socialized, so everyone gets treated. It has a very large negative impact on vaccination programs when every sixth person is passed over because they do not have insurance. What everyone needs to understand is that passing over someone for vaccination costs everyone money in the long run - a lot of money.
What you have just proposed is drafting and enslaving doctors. You you want to be treated by a doctor who is working at gunpoint?
Enormous problems facing our society, like this one, are not solved by this kind of rhetoric.
We spend 50% more than Switzerland on health care, and have worse outcome measures of health care. We can and should do better.
Doctors are going to be enslaved in some sense soon - those that already are not. Talk to a few. Those that see patients are booked to the gills right now, and their requested case load is going up year by year, and this is happening nearly across the board to clinicians. No one can ask them to work more than they are working now.
It would take a lot more than a Slashdot post to explain where all the money goes....needless to say the doctors are only part of the picture. And, the exact structure of the future system is undetermined.
What has been determined is that we can cut our health care costs by 40% or more, and get better health care, with socialized medicine.
Where this will lead in America is still largely unknown...maybe we'll just suck it up, and health care will take over.
Cuba's life expectancy- Lower than the US Cuba's unfant mortality- higher than the US
When you look across nations, Cuba has very similar infant mortality (6.8 vs 7.5) and life expectancy (76.2 vs 77.1) as the US.
Neither is close to the best.
The US has the best trained doctors, and best medical expertise in the world. There is no reason we should not also have the best health care, but we do not, by a long shot. We're closer to Cuba than to Japan or Switzerland or Sweden...
I might follow that with the supposition that everyone in medicine in the USA KNOWS there is a big shakeup coming, and no one really has any idea what it will entail.
The baby boomers will be 70 in 9 years. That is a major point of expenditure for health care costs, so the need for doctors and nurses will go up dramatically. Even in the most generous models, at current man-hour rates of health care, there are not enough doctors to see all the patients that there will be in another 10 years. We are not training enough, and cannot train enough.
Health care as a fraction of GDP is 15%. It rises as a fraction of GDP every year. It is unsustainable. Health care takes a larger chunk of the US dollar every year. All the while, a 30-40% savings can be realized once conversion to a socialized medicine system is complete.
So what is going to happen? No one has any idea. The government needs to install a socialized medical system with a reasonable transition, for cost-savings alone. Ideally the system would allow a greater doctor:patient ratio as well, and then by the time 2015 rolls around we won't have dying baby boomers who kick off before their doctor can see them. The pain and suffering, especially for our senior citizens, that is coming if we do nothing is substantial...
Most other westernized countries will have similar doctor shortages, some worse than others (Japan will be really bad).
Wait, I thought the free market and privatization was supposed to make things cheaper? While state-run systems like the British NHS were supposed to be horribly inefficient and expensive?
Any economists care to explain what's going on here? Is the free market a failure, or is this the way it's supposed to be? Are those extortionate health costs translating into increased prosperity for America in some way?
Its an easy answer, a very easy answer.
Westernized countries with socialized medicine have better across-the-board health than the USA, and spend 8-9% of their GDP on health care. In the USA, we spend 15% of the GDP on healthcare, and fully 1 out of 6 people have no health insurance.
Our health system fails miserably compared to socialized medicine in terms of cost (even when normalized by GDP), and most measures of how healthy you are. The common straw man is that the [Canadian][UK][French] system won't work, but there are a dozen different socialized medicine models out there, and some of them look quite good at all levels compared to the USA.
You'd have a hard time making an argument that health care in the USA is better than Cuba, if you used normal markers of health, like life expectancy, infant mortality, sick days, etc.
1. Reading the story and the paper doesn't tell you what Deep Brain Stimulation actually is. What'd you think? Phoebe Buffet was going to climb on and reach deep into your skull and start the massage?
In this case, a probe was lowered into the anterior cingulate region of the cerebral cortex (close to the midline, in front of the ears, pretty close to the middle of the cranium). The probe has 2 contacts. They alternately stimulate with electrical pulses at 125 Hz. This rate of stimulation keeps a damper on activity in the region in which it is placed. For example, it is used to calm activity in Parkinson's patients. It is NOT a pacemaker, it is a shut-off switch. The anterior cingulate is hyperactive in some depressed patients.
2. Shock treatment (as in for the loonies) has been making a comeback for the previous decade or so as an attempt to rebalance those who are severely depressed or those who are Bipolor (or Manic-Depressive) but spend more time on the down side than the up side.
Patients who will not respond to pharmacological treatment can pose huge risks to themselves or others (suicide, mainly). ECT helps some of those. Many think DBS will be a LOT better. Including me.
3. Regardless of the treatment, many seriously believe "fixing" this, particularly the down or depressed side will decrease or neutralize the creative side of those who are exceptionally creative.
The people in the study were willing to let neurosurgeons do experimental brain surgery in which a 2-3 mm wide probe is lowered 10-12 cm into the brain, with a possible side effect of death. Of course, these procedures are now reasonably common in Parkinson's treatment, so the risks are low, but still - experimental brain surgery!!! The patients want to live without the fog of depression daunting their every motivation.
Obviously, if you are not so negatively affected you want someone to do brain surgery to try to fix it, you have a choice. You can always refuse treatment.
Also, one other thing about DBS, is that you can turn the stimulator off, and your brain is largely intact as it was when the probe was first placed. ie: it is reversible. In these studies, they alternately turned the probes off and on, and people went from full-on depression to reasonably normal in minutes.
There are HUGE numbers of patients with general depression, bipolar, or schizophrenia, and a large number of them do not respond well to conventional pharmacological treatment. We're talking roughly 13-14% of all people over 40 have been diagnosed by a psychiatrist with one of these psychoaffective disorders. Now, DBS offers SOME hope (small hope at this time) to some of the depressed patients who are severely affected and are not rendered reasonably functional with antidepressants of any kind. Given the safety and efficacy record of DBS in treating Parkinson's syndrome, it seems a very good course to investigate.
Shouldnt memory play a role in this? I was under the impression that memory (basically hippocampus and amygdala) was the reason we chose items.
I think you are wrong to assume that memory has no role in this.
Without prior experience, the responses of these neurons would have no reflection of value at all.
Also, whereas declarative memory coding is mediated at least in part by the hippocampus and closely associated areas, the memory and retrieval are not. It is quite possible, some would say likely, that memory of value of these items is stored in part by these cortical areas.
My "interpretation" of this would be that the animals have experienced these items before. They have been reinforced in conjunction with them, both through experience and through chemical composition (how much sugar, which odors, etc). This experience has caused the memory of the value of the items to be reflected in orbitofrontal cortex (which is heavily connected to taste/smell cortical inputs).
Commercial breaks are usually 3 minutes long. Hit the 30 second skip button 6 times. If you are not back to the show, keep hitting it.
Once you see the show, back up using the backwards skip button (opposing the 30 second skip button). It is only 5 or 10 seconds, so you hit it 3-4 time, and you are back to TV.
If you try it both ways, the 30 second skip button is both much faster and requires less attention during the commercials.
Didn't nearly -all- shareware programs do this (like... forever)? (I mean, you send'em some money and software version (some number that -identifies- the software), and they send you a key to unlock features of that version).
And I remember seeing DRM keys for -serial- devices for a -while- (since at least 1994); mostly for CASE tools, etc., (stuff that costs $5k per license).
As always, the key to a patent is its specificity. The first patent says 1) We send you the software and a product key. 2) You register that product with that key 3) We send you a second password for that product 4) You use the second password indefinitely
With shareware you skip the step where each copy of software has a unique key. This patent makes each shipped copy of software uniquely accessible.
Also, the key with the DRM is the same. 1) We send you the product with a product key 2) You register it by sending us an authentication code
that includes information about YOUR DRM. 3) We send you a second authentication that requires you
have both the original software AND the DRM machine
Again, this is just a second-tier of protection over most schemes, making each shipped copy of software uniquely accessible only on one DRM machine.
Please note, I am trying to interpret the relevant patent, and not defending whether it should have been issued in the first place!
You send the customer the product and a password/key. They enter the password/key and register, and you send them a second password/key, which they use to run the software thereafter.
Filed in 1998.
------------------
The second patent extends to DRM to DRM-enable password authentication. Filed in 2003. Basically makes it so that running the software requires checking a DRM-registered authentication code with a DRM enabled device.
-------------
As it stands this guy is going cash a check for every DRM enabled software program. He wrote two very basic broad patents to cover protection against digital piracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually humans need to move their skin to scan a surface to be able to "read" it, this skin can read the surface without scanning/rubbing over it. So in a sense it already has surpassed an index finger.
Actually humans can scan a surface statically, there is just more information available if a scan is used.
Your index finger can detect spatial form on a surface with a 2 mm range. You can detect surface asperities as small as a 4-5 microns in scanned touch, and detect vibrations of 1-2 microns at 250 Hz.
This fake skin has great spatial acuity, but nearly no dynamic range compared to our static sense of touch. In a sense (pun intended), it is not operating in the right range. Our static sense of touch has spatial acuity of a little less than a mm, and threshold close to 25 microns (static threshold), and 2 mm dynamic range. These nanotech films are nowhere near the right range (more sensitive and better spatial acuity), and will probably be useless as substitutes or encoders for natural touch. There are plenty of other applications for them, though...
[quote]I'm not sure you would even need to be born with the limb, those experiments with the monkeys where they controlled electronic arms with thought worked out ok. I guess they did establish control over the arms by initially tying the movement of the mechanical arm to the movement of the monkeys actual arm, so who knows. Perhaps the lower communication barrier with a human would make it possible to establish control simply through visual feedback. You can't exactly explain to Bobo that he should try to "think" the arm to do things.[/quote]
We are a long way away from prosthetics that can perform useful tasks. However, they may be able to allow trapped patients to communicate effectively, and that would be huge.
Those monkey experiments have used principally visual feedback, not tactile feedback. The monkey-robot-arm experiments were done open loop, the robot arm merely mimicked the monkey arm, and was not used under feedback control. Sure it is a first step, but the feedback part of the equation has stumped prosthetic engineers for over a decade already.
We typically use mechanoreceptor feedback from our fingertips to determine when an object in our hands begins to slip. We increase grip force until the slip stops with a reasonable margin of safety.
With such feedback picking up an egg safely is easy. Without it picking up the egg is nearly impossible. Experiments have been done in which the skin but not the proprioceptors are anesthetized. Even simple manual tasks become very difficult.
We can live without vision or hearing, but we cannot live without touch.
Just wanted to add to all of the great stuff you said by also pointing out that titanium is also a pain to work with in pretty much every other way. It's tough to machine
I hear this a lot, but CP titanium machines like butter. I use it in a lot of applications where corrosion resistance is critical but strength is not. It is substantially easier to machine than lots of higher strength aluminiums, and they all machine easier than steel (especially stainless, yuck!)
Its that 6/4 stuff that people like to use that is tough to machine. It cuts kinda like a hard rubber, rather flexible (low modulus) but high yield strength, so it bends far before it fails, and it gets real grabby on the machining bit.
Now, to celebrate, I'm going to the lathe to cut a 5 mil ribbon off some titanium bar stock, and then light it! Better than magnesium, but keep it 5 mil or thinner!
There's different possibilities.
One is that some subset of distiller is in Microsoft Word under an agreement with Adobe. If you install Adobe Acrobat (not the reader, the full version), it adds a subset of distiller to Word.
There is a LOT of business out there that converts Word documents to PDF. Adobe makes a lot of money from it, and Microsoft is speculating that when they add PDF capabilities to Word for no extra charge, that this market will be quashed and Adobe will lose money.
Kinda like when Microsoft gave away IE while Netscape was charging for their browser. Killed the browser market, killed Netscape.
All three volumes by Knuth.
And refuse to write letters and papers in anything but straight TeX using vi as your editor.
No one would doubt you.
Quoth Cringely:
I'm told Apple has long had this running in the Cupertino lab -- Intel Macs running OS X while mixing Apple and XP applications. This is not a guess or a rumor, this something that has been demonstrated and observed by people who have since reported to me.
Very interesting...
Fundamentally, TV advertisers pay for TV in order to market to you. If you make it easy to get the TV content for free, without advertising, TV will go away completely.
That's not really going to happen, what IS happening is TiVO is doing the best tracking of TV viewing habits ever. Their hope is that the targetted TV viewing habits can lead to targetted TV advertising in the same way that Google Ads allow targetted advertising of WWW users. Targetted ads are much more valuable than un-targetted ads, and you can measure click through rates.
TiVO has technology that advertisers can access RIGHT NOW. With a single click you can
1) enable a background download to your hard drive "Click to download this 10 minute informercial on RedHat linux"
2) run a Java app
3) enable scheduling the recording of a regularly scheduled program
If they make this work TiVOs will be free for every cable user, and TiVO will develop a healthy revenue stream from their targetted advertising.
Personally, I think Google is going to buy them, it fits their business model.
I thought that too. Cringely says, here in his 420 column, that Apple has Darwin running with a full Windows API implemented in-house, and has the rights to release this from a prior Microsoft/Apple agreement. The possibility is that all Windows apps would run in OS X natively. Closing the Intel-Darwin source under a "security" excuse could be exactly what they need to do to upgrade everyone's machine to run Darwin with a Windows API, possibly on a native BSD instead of a BSD over Mach...
I think that is why they are number one. They don't send any ads at some before they search, and load fast.
Once they search, they throw unobtrusive ads at the searching user. Those are highly targetted, very valuable, ads.
When you go to msn.com and there is a blank page with a search box, you'll know they get it.
Microsoft's business is Office and Windows. Those make a ton of $$$$.
Microsoft loses money on almost everything else.
Every market they've tried to move into and make money on, they've failed.
They did pretty well against Netscape - giving away the browser seemed to kill their market completely, and thus kill Netscape. But Microsoft didn't make money on that. They lost money and killed a competitor.
But Google has a different model. They run internet advertising on the back of the best internet search engine. Microsoft cannot give away search for free, Google already does that. They can entice users to use their own search, but users used Google before when they had to find it.
It is easy to forget pre-Google searches. Every search engine was MILES behind Google. They came along, and all of a sudden you could find what you wanted. They intelligently leveraged that into becoming the Internet advertising leader.
Still, Microsoft could get a chunk of the market if
1) the next IE has an MSN search box built in
2) defaults to MSN homepage
3) And MSN search rivals Googles in its ability to return good results
I think that is the looming battle. Microsoft needs more leverage from IE, and a better search engine. And they will spend whatever it takes to get the latter. Google, meanwhile, is probably locking down IP on internet searching as much as they can.
Agreed completely. First, get Strunk and White.
Second, give your writing to a member of your potential audience. Then, after he/she reads it once, quiz him on it. Re-write it, give it to a new member of your potential audience. Repeat. Once your audience gets the main points, and doesn't get stuck on anything, you are done...
That's the problem. A friend of mine in high school in the 80s hot-rodded a beetle. It could crank well over 100 MPH. The problem, of course, is lift-off. The beetle had all the weight in the back, at 100 MPH the front wheels would bob up and down. The bubble-like shape of the beetle generates a LOT of aerodynamic lift.
Now, the new Beetles weigh more and have the weight more in the front, but that sucker is going to take off somewhere between 100 and 180 MPH. My guess, based on high school, is that it tries to take off around 150 MPH.
You would think someone who would invest $250,000 in modding his car would actually think about using a reasonable high-speed car shape for the mod...unless he was more interested in firing those tailpipes in the company parking lot than actually making a fast car.
I should re-phrase.
It is clear to anyone who looks at the raw economics and measures of successful health care that if we could magically change to socialized medicine overnight, we would save a lot of money and improve the health of the US. citizens.
Another looming problem is the doctor to patient ratio and the baby boomers approaching 70+ years of age. We would be wise to think of this as well when a socialized medical program is instituted.
But you still didn't answer my question.
Your claim was
"You'd have a hard time making an argument that health care in the USA is better than Cuba, if you used normal markers of health, like life expectancy, infant mortality, sick days, etc."
And I didn't have a hard time at all. It was amazingly easy, took thirty seconds.
Why didn't you do it before you made such a ridiculous assertion that is factually incorrect?
The USA has higher disease rates than Cuba for virtually every disease for which effective vaccines exist. Look it up. They do this because they have socialized medicine, and everyone gets a vaccine whether they like it or not. It makes a difference. Here are some search terms to get you started
measles
hemophilia influenza
polio
rubella
pertussis
diphtheria
Even for AIDS they are lower than the US. Much lower.
And besides that, there are other estimates of the infant mortality rate and life expectancy than the ones you cited, In some the US is better. In some Cuba is better. For just one, check the CIA factbook pages. My point was not that Cuba is a slam dunk choice for medical care over the US, just that you would have a hard time arguing the US is better. In retrospect I should have said "clearly better". But when you start to look at disease rates, and at diseases for which vaccines exist, Cuba looks better and better. And that is because medicine is socialized, so everyone gets treated. It has a very large negative impact on vaccination programs when every sixth person is passed over because they do not have insurance. What everyone needs to understand is that passing over someone for vaccination costs everyone money in the long run - a lot of money.
What you have just proposed is drafting and enslaving doctors. You you want to be treated by a doctor who is working at gunpoint?
Enormous problems facing our society, like this one, are not solved by this kind of rhetoric.
We spend 50% more than Switzerland on health care, and have worse outcome measures of health care. We can and should do better.
Doctors are going to be enslaved in some sense soon - those that already are not. Talk to a few. Those that see patients are booked to the gills right now, and their requested case load is going up year by year, and this is happening nearly across the board to clinicians. No one can ask them to work more than they are working now.
It would take a lot more than a Slashdot post to explain where all the money goes....needless to say the doctors are only part of the picture. And, the exact structure of the future system is undetermined.
What has been determined is that we can cut our health care costs by 40% or more, and get better health care, with socialized medicine.
Where this will lead in America is still largely unknown...maybe we'll just suck it up, and health care will take over.
Cuba's life expectancy- Lower than the US
Cuba's unfant mortality- higher than the US
When you look across nations, Cuba has very similar infant mortality (6.8 vs 7.5) and life expectancy (76.2 vs 77.1) as the US.
Neither is close to the best.
The US has the best trained doctors, and best medical expertise in the world. There is no reason we should not also have the best health care, but we do not, by a long shot. We're closer to Cuba than to Japan or Switzerland or Sweden...
I might follow that with the supposition that everyone in medicine in the USA KNOWS there is a big shakeup coming, and no one really has any idea what it will entail.
The baby boomers will be 70 in 9 years. That is a major point of expenditure for health care costs, so the need for doctors and nurses will go up dramatically. Even in the most generous models, at current man-hour rates of health care, there are not enough doctors to see all the patients that there will be in another 10 years. We are not training enough, and cannot train enough.
Health care as a fraction of GDP is 15%. It rises as a fraction of GDP every year. It is unsustainable. Health care takes a larger chunk of the US dollar every year. All the while, a 30-40% savings can be realized once conversion to a socialized medicine system is complete.
So what is going to happen? No one has any idea. The government needs to install a socialized medical system with a reasonable transition, for cost-savings alone. Ideally the system would allow a greater doctor:patient ratio as well, and then by the time 2015 rolls around we won't have dying baby boomers who kick off before their doctor can see them. The pain and suffering, especially for our senior citizens, that is coming if we do nothing is substantial...
Most other westernized countries will have similar doctor shortages, some worse than others (Japan will be really bad).
Wait, I thought the free market and privatization was supposed to make things cheaper? While state-run systems like the British NHS were supposed to be horribly inefficient and expensive?
Any economists care to explain what's going on here? Is the free market a failure, or is this the way it's supposed to be? Are those extortionate health costs translating into increased prosperity for America in some way?
Its an easy answer, a very easy answer.
Westernized countries with socialized medicine have better across-the-board health than the USA, and spend 8-9% of their GDP on health care. In the USA, we spend 15% of the GDP on healthcare, and fully 1 out of 6 people have no health insurance.
Our health system fails miserably compared to socialized medicine in terms of cost (even when normalized by GDP), and most measures of how healthy you are. The common straw man is that the [Canadian][UK][French] system won't work, but there are a dozen different socialized medicine models out there, and some of them look quite good at all levels compared to the USA.
You'd have a hard time making an argument that health care in the USA is better than Cuba, if you used normal markers of health, like life expectancy, infant mortality, sick days, etc.
1. Reading the story and the paper doesn't tell you what Deep Brain Stimulation actually is. What'd you think? Phoebe Buffet was going to climb on and reach deep into your skull and start the massage?
In this case, a probe was lowered into the anterior cingulate region of the cerebral cortex (close to the midline, in front of the ears, pretty close to the middle of the cranium). The probe has 2 contacts. They alternately stimulate with electrical pulses at 125 Hz. This rate of stimulation keeps a damper on activity in the region in which it is placed. For example, it is used to calm activity in Parkinson's patients. It is NOT a pacemaker, it is a shut-off switch. The anterior cingulate is hyperactive in some depressed patients.
2. Shock treatment (as in for the loonies) has been making a comeback for the previous decade or so as an attempt to rebalance those who are severely depressed or those who are Bipolor (or Manic-Depressive) but spend more time on the down side than the up side.
Patients who will not respond to pharmacological treatment can pose huge risks to themselves or others (suicide, mainly). ECT helps some of those. Many think DBS will be a LOT better. Including me.
3. Regardless of the treatment, many seriously believe "fixing" this, particularly the down or depressed side will decrease or neutralize the creative side of those who are exceptionally creative.
The people in the study were willing to let neurosurgeons do experimental brain surgery in which a 2-3 mm wide probe is lowered 10-12 cm into the brain, with a possible side effect of death. Of course, these procedures are now reasonably common in Parkinson's treatment, so the risks are low, but still - experimental brain surgery!!! The patients want to live without the fog of depression daunting their every motivation.
Obviously, if you are not so negatively affected you want someone to do brain surgery to try to fix it, you have a choice. You can always refuse treatment.
Also, one other thing about DBS, is that you can turn the stimulator off, and your brain is largely intact as it was when the probe was first placed. ie: it is reversible. In these studies, they alternately turned the probes off and on, and people went from full-on depression to reasonably normal in minutes.
There are HUGE numbers of patients with general depression, bipolar, or schizophrenia, and a large number of them do not respond well to conventional pharmacological treatment. We're talking roughly 13-14% of all people over 40 have been diagnosed by a psychiatrist with one of these psychoaffective disorders. Now, DBS offers SOME hope (small hope at this time) to some of the depressed patients who are severely affected and are not rendered reasonably functional with antidepressants of any kind. Given the safety and efficacy record of DBS in treating Parkinson's syndrome, it seems a very good course to investigate.
Shouldnt memory play a role in this?
I was under the impression that memory (basically hippocampus and amygdala) was the reason we chose items.
I think you are wrong to assume that memory has no role in this.
Without prior experience, the responses of these neurons would have no reflection of value at all.
Also, whereas declarative memory coding is mediated at least in part by the hippocampus and closely associated areas, the memory and retrieval are not. It is quite possible, some would say likely, that memory of value of these items is stored in part by these cortical areas.
My "interpretation" of this would be that the animals have experienced these items before. They have been reinforced in conjunction with them, both through experience and through chemical composition (how much sugar, which odors, etc). This experience has caused the memory of the value of the items to be reflected in orbitofrontal cortex (which is heavily connected to taste/smell cortical inputs).
Padoa-Schioppa and Assad are a sharp guys.
Commercial breaks are usually 3 minutes long. Hit the 30 second skip button 6 times. If you are not back to the show, keep hitting it.
Once you see the show, back up using the backwards skip button (opposing the 30 second skip button). It is only 5 or 10 seconds, so you hit it 3-4 time, and you are back to TV.
If you try it both ways, the 30 second skip button is both much faster and requires less attention during the commercials.
Didn't nearly -all- shareware programs do this (like... forever)? (I mean, you send'em some money and software version (some number that -identifies- the software), and they send you a key to unlock features of that version).
And I remember seeing DRM keys for -serial- devices for a -while- (since at least 1994); mostly for CASE tools, etc., (stuff that costs $5k per license).
As always, the key to a patent is its specificity. The first patent says
1) We send you the software and a product key.
2) You register that product with that key
3) We send you a second password for that product
4) You use the second password indefinitely
With shareware you skip the step where each copy of software has a unique key. This patent makes each shipped copy of software uniquely accessible.
Also, the key with the DRM is the same.
1) We send you the product with a product key
2) You register it by sending us an authentication code
that includes information about YOUR DRM.
3) We send you a second authentication that requires you
have both the original software AND the DRM machine
Again, this is just a second-tier of protection over most schemes, making
each shipped copy of software uniquely accessible only on one DRM machine.
Please note, I am trying to interpret the relevant patent, and not defending whether it should have been issued in the first place!
Here's the key to their first patent.
You send the customer the product and a password/key. They enter the password/key and register, and you send them a second password/key, which they use to run the software thereafter.
Filed in 1998.
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The second patent extends to DRM to DRM-enable password authentication.
Filed in 2003. Basically makes it so that running the software requires checking a DRM-registered authentication code with a DRM enabled device.
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As it stands this guy is going cash a check for every DRM enabled software program. He wrote two very basic broad patents to cover protection against digital piracy.
simply press select-play-select-3-0-select
Works for me fine on a series 2 bought from TiVO last December.
That's the most valuable key on the whole box!