3,113 karma · joined August 3, 2011
https://holehouse.wustl.edu
"OKLAHOMA CITY – An Oklahoma City surgery center is offering a new kind of price transparency, posting guaranteed all-inclusive surgery prices online. The move is revolutionizing medical billing in Oklahoma and around the world."
Around the world? Really?
I actually had an opportunity to meet with him a couple of weeks after I began the work, but not knowing who he was (or being particularly computer-history savy at the time) I didn't push it. In hindsight (not just today, but generally) I've always regretted not realizing who he was at the time.
A number foreign blogs/companies/people have displayed outrage that, given that they're not protected by the legal framework American citizens are, PRISM may give the NSA access to their data.
Irrespective of the truth associated with this, you've got to expect at least some percentage of paying customers will move business away from American companies. Considering this, is it conceivable that companies like Apple, Facebook, etc, could sue the government for lost earnings as a result of the fallout from this? Or are there a bunch of reasons why they wouldn't/couldn't (other than the obvious ones like, don't piss off the government).
Think about the heterogeneity of the data, the lack of structure, and the unpredictable nature of its generation. Frankly, I have no doubt that the NSA is not monitoring phone chatter on a mass scale, probably not because they can't, but because if they did there would be no way in hell to parse, store, process and evaluate the data generated.
We (the scientific/big data community) can barely get recommendation engines working well - engines which have one set of data (what you watched) and do one other thing (suggest what else you might want to watch). Unless the NSA is decades ahead in a number of fields (like data warehousing, statistical analysis of massive datasets, machine learning) how are they getting useful information in a systematic way, considering the pressure from the data-firehouse involved?
My guess is they're probably not - instead the data are collected, and then used in conjunction with traditional approaches. e.g. little johnny buys some fertilizer and one way plane ticket - so who's he been talking to, what's he been saying, etc.
Honestly, how the NSA is using/dealing with/storing/accessing these data is actually an incredibly interesting question, from an academic/systems perspective.
For more comprehesive coverage info see http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/06/13/supreme-...
A crucial point is the cDNA is patentable, which still makes very little sense.
Current health benefits have been largely minimal, relative to what was promised/expected (I'm actually not sure if anything was promised, so expected may be a more appropriate word). That being said, looking upon that as a failure is incredibly short sighted and one dimensional.
When the project was started, it was expected to bring about a semi-immediate revolution in medicine. As it turns out, many things relating to genes, genetic regulation, disease, etc. are more complicated than scientists had originally thought, which we discovered because of the human genome project, so this mini-renaissance hasn't really happened. However, to develop new techniques and approaches, new ways of thinking and understanding, we needed to know about this complexity.
Arguing that the HGP has failed patient care (in whatever metrics you choose) is the equivalent to punching a horse you bought to take you on an uncharted journey which turned out to be a lot longer than anticipated. You have to go the distance anyway, no one is to blame for the extra distance, and the horse got you a lot further than you would have on foot.
Still - that's in 4-5 months - plenty of time to be hugely productive while keeping living costs to a minimum.
Of course, there's an element of judgement in deciding what meetings are worth recording or not. I'm doing a PhD, so typically I only record meetings where information is being presented (of which I have a lot), but not those which exist exclusively for making decisions or whatever.
Over the last five-six years I've become a meticulous note taker - it's vastly improved my comprehension, retention productivity. However, more recently, I've started recording meetings with a dictaphone and then I write them up after. This allows me to both interact and engage in a meeting, while documenting the crucial details at a later date.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/05/29/science.1...
"Lets bullet-proof your project in 7 days or less. Get started for free right now."
"Lets" should be "Let's" (it's a contraction).
I find that really off putting. I guess I shouldn't, but I do.
Super-impressed that it's been fixed so fast. I hate it when people nitpick, but occasionally I feel like it's relevant/worth it. That said, I still feel a bit dirty now.
However, there have also been some excruciatingly embarrassing situations where I've re-introduced myself (or ignored) people I actually know, although typically I've only met them a couple of times. Bizarrely, I'm worst with caucasian blonde women.
Essentially, the only thing that unites cancers together is that they represent a class of diseases in which your own cells multiply in an uncontrolled manner. Beyond this idea of "out of control growth", there are a number of common ways which these distinct phenotypes occurs (such as too much of pro-growth molecules, not enough "slow down" molecules etc) but genetically/molecularly there are many, many different routes which these phenotypes can be achieved.
This, again, is still only touching on the surface. After you have the molecular underpinnings of the "out of controlness", you have genetic and non-genetic factors relating to things like where the tumour is, how do the cells change once the cancer begins to progress, how your body reacts to the cancer, how your body reacts to drugs etc.
In 100 years time, I'm confident we'll look back on our present day way of thinking about cancer in the same way people now look back at our previous ideas relating to mental illness 200 years ago, or general diseases 500 years ago.