652 karma · joined December 8, 2011
In no way is it an "open question' if "light smoking" is even bad for you: "light and intermittent smoking pose substantial risks; the adverse health outcomes parallel dangers observed among daily smoking, particularly for cardiovascular disease."
Her website is still up:
Just kidding with you some. But I think we're done here. Have a nice day.
So Cringely points out widely acknowledged problems at TMI, including human factors and operators acting "inappropriately.
I'm also not sure why you're fixated on "the operators", but Cringely's observations there are not in dispute:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Huma... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Inve... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island:_A_Nuclear_Cr...
You and the parent for some reason also want to vehemently argue a really strange, irrelevant point, that Chernobyl was worse than TMI. Is that in dispute?
So what? The Apollo I fire was not as bad as the Space Shuttle disasters. Your point is....what?
Apollo I, Challenger, Columbia, Chernobyl, and TMI came about in large measure precisely as a result of the kind of silliness that Feynman decries, and that you and the parent for some reason don't want to address.
Are you trying to advance the theory that management had no hand in the terrible decision-making around TMI, including the numerous shortcuts that Cringely noted (nb: you are hardly using an engineering approach when you resort to ad hominem criticism of Cringely as a "journalist" without responding to any of the legitimate problems he noted). Or are you trying to advance the theory that no engineering mistakes were made at TMI?
And are you trying to advance the theory here that somehow, magically, management will not continue to make NASA-like management mistakes in current and future nuclear facilities?
Because if so, that's precisely Feynman's point, which you seem to be ignoring.
And c'mon, you're merely moving goal-posts around when you focus on the severity of Chernobyl vs TMI. That isn't speaking at all to how technology was misused in both instances by people making exactly the kinds of errors Feynman emphasizes.
> A Chernobyl-style incident will never happen with a LWR reactor [emphasis added]. That much is known, and the experts - nuclear engineers - are unanimous on this point [emphasis added].
Really? Never? Unanimous? That sounds like a really interesting engineering judgment. Could you kindly link to the unanimous consensus statement from nuclear engineers that support that strong but odd statement?
Because that sounds an awful lot like NASA management who claimed that the chances of loss of a space shuttle were so remote as to be negligible.
And your statement is even more curious when we read review papers like the one[1] from nuclear engineer Bah Sehgal[2] of the National Academy of Engineering, who concludes:
"The presently-installed LWR plants in Western countries have been addressing their safety performance from the day they were installed and operating...Clearly, not all the severe accident issues have been resolved for the presently-installed plants [emphasis added].
"The presently-installed LWR plants made improvements in components, systems, operator training, man-machine interface, safety culture, etc., thereby significantly reducing the probability of a severe accident occurring. They also instituted severe accident management backfits, systems and procedures, which are providing assurance of the elimination of an uncontrolled and large release of radioactivity even in case a severe accident occurs. Still, the presently-installed plants can not provide assurance of coolability of a melt pool/debris bed, which could be formed during a bounding severe accident. In that situation, the LWR owner can not assure the public that the accident has been terminated and that there is no further danger of the release of radioactivity. [emphasis added]"
Sorry. It is you with your pronouncements of never who is absolutely not getting Feynman's point whatsoever. In particular, he decried management and others with their own wishful pronouncements of never, which stood in stark contrast with the concerns of engineers who were well aware that there were quantifiable and real risks associated with their technology.
I really don't think you want to use Three-Mile Island as some sort of exemplar of safe technology:
The lessons of Three Mile Island have been, for the most part, forgotten. The nuclear industry changed and improved somewhat, but the deep understanding of what went wrong was lost on the public in general and the real lessons that we could have learned as a society were, too. The financial mess we are experiencing right now isn’t all that different from Three Mile Island. If we’d taken better to heart the true lessons of TMI we might not be in our present jam.
Looking back at the accident with the benefit of knowing what it took to clean it up and what the workers found when they were finally able to send robots inside the containment, the TMI accident was very bad indeed. There were pressure spikes during the accident that would have cracked an average containment vessel, releasing radioactive gases into the atmosphere. Fortunately the Unit 2 containment wasn’t average. TMI-2 was built on the final approach path to Harrisburg International Airport, a former U.S. Air Force base, and was therefore beefed-up specifically to withstand the impact of a B-52 hitting the structure at 200 knots. A normal containment would have been breached.
TMI wasn’t caused by a computer failure but the accident was made vastly worse by an error of computer design. Specifically, TMI-2 had a terrible user interface.
What happened at Unit 2 was a little more complex. A cascading series of events caused the computer to notice SEVEN HUNDRED things wrong in the first few minutes of the accident. The ONE audible alarm started ringing and stayed ringing continuously until someone turned it off as useless. The ONE visual alarm was activated and blinked for days, indicating nothing useful at all. The line printer queue quickly contained 700 error reports followed by several thousand error report updates and corrections. The printer queue was almost instantly hours behind, so the operators knew they had a problem (700 problems actually, though they couldn’t know that) but had no idea what the problem was.
So they guessed.
Not good.
http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/31/three-mile-island-memorie...
EDIT: The actual paper's [2] title and abstract reads "Boosting Oxygenation During Acute Respiratory Failure - A new microparticle-based oxygen-delivery technology has been developed for short-term resuscitation of pulmonary function" [emphasis added].
The real problem is ultimately ventilation, or gas exchange at the alveoli. When it's impaired, both oxygenation and removal of carbon dioxide are affected. One result is respiratory acidosis. There is some literature[1] indicating the body can tolerate such acidosis better in the absence of hypoxemia so the cited idea may have merit as a stopgap measure, but I'm not sure how effective this scheme would be in near or complete absence of ventilation - like the example cited where the little girl's lungs are full of blood.
[1] - Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome: Adjuncts to Lung-Protective Ventilation; http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/410886_2
[2] - http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/140/140fs21.abstract?sid...
http://projects.csail.mit.edu/church/wiki/Church
and Oleg's and Ken Shan's fantastic OCaml library Hansei:
http://okmij.org/ftp/kakuritu/index.html
Pedantic nit: probablistic vs probabilistic....
http://programming-musings.org
is full of Scheme goodness, and he has another site devoted to Emacs hacks at
Dirac ignored Schrodinger's theory in his PhD thesis "Quantum Mechanics", the first to be submitted anywhere on the subject. The thesis was a great success with his examiners who took the unusual step on 19 June of sending him a short hand written letter congratulating him on the "exceptional distinction" of his work.
....Dirac disliked celebrations and formality, so he was almost certainly not looking forward to the ceremony. He could have taken the degree without attending it but decided to be there in person for the sake of his proud parents, especially this father, who had given him the money that enabled him to begin his Cambridge studies.
...Wearing evening dress with a white bow tie, a small black cap and black silk down with a scarlet-lined hood, he knelt on a velvet cushion, placed his hands together and held them out to be grasped by the Vice Chancellor, who delivered a prayer-like oration. Dirac arose, a doctor.
Like his father, he had no need of holidays – the long vacations were not for relaxing but for hard work. The university was about to hibernate for the summer and would be virtually devoid of social distractions for the few scholars remaining. It was the perfect environment for Dirac to concentrate even more intensively on his work. Heisenberg and Schrodinger had knifed a sack of gemstones, and the race was on to pick out the diamonds.
-- Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man
Are you actually trying to advance the theory that the "genetics" of a particular minority group is a "determinant", rather than social class?
A lack of socioeconomic resources is linked to the practice of riskier health behaviors, which can lead to the contraction of HIV. These behaviors include earlier initiation of sexual activity and less frequent use of condoms (Adler, 2006).
Unstable housing has been linked to risk for HIV infection, including IV drug use and unsafe sexual behaviors (Aidala, Cross, Stall, Harre, & Sumartojo, 2005).
Individuals who are homeless or in unstable housing arrangements are significantly more likely to be infected with HIV compared to individuals in more stable housing environments (Culhane, Gollub, Kuhn, & Shpaner, 2001).
Lack of socioeconomic resources is also associated with risk factors for neuropsychiatric dysfunction, such as exposure to environmental toxins and injuries. These factors can make persons with HIV more vulnerable to the central nervous system effects of the virus, including more rapid cognitive decline and onset of dementia (Satz, 1993).
HIV status often has a negative impact on socioeconomic status by constraining an individual’s ability to work and earn income. Research indicates that up to 45 percent of people living with HIV are unemployed (Rabkin, McElhiney, Ferrando, Van Gorp, & Lin, 2004).
The effects of HIV on physical and mental functioning can make maintaining regular employment difficult. Patients with HIV infection may also find that their work responsibilities compete with their health care needs. Individuals infected with HIV are often discriminated against in the workplace, leading to their termination or forced resignation (Dray-Spira, Lert, Marimoutou, Bouhnik, & Obadia, 2003; Kass et al., 1994).
Children infected with HIV often exhibit cognitive deficits when compared with their uninfected peers (Martin et al., 2006). These deficits can adversely affect learning and earning ability later in life.
SES status often determines access to HIV treatment. Individuals of low SES have delayed treatment initiation relative to more affluent patients, reducing their chances of survival (Joy et al., 2008).
Patients of lower SES with HIV have increased morbidity and mortality rates. Research suggests a correlation between low SES and earlier death from HIV/AIDS (Cunningham et al., 2005).
Accordingly, individuals of higher SES levels experience slower progression of HIV infection (Schechter et al., 1994).
Decreased access to health insurance and preventive services is a major contributor to health disparities between high- and low-SES individuals. Low-income individuals are not likely to have health coverage or receive optimal treatment and care for HIV/AIDS, such as Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) (Wood et al., 2002)
Source: http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/factsheet-h...
Psueodoscience and outright bigotry is "rarely PC", that's for damned sure.
This is not to pathologize behaviors people choose which don't interfere with quality of life, but my gut reaction is that many of those described in the article would benefit from treatment with psychotherapy and/or medication. However, I'm told that significant stigma is attached to seeking evaluation and treatment for such issues in Japan (and obviously elsewhere, including the west).
The move to get this on the ballot was led by a former warden of California's San Quentin prison, Jeanne Woodford:
“California is on the brink of replacing the death penalty with a sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole as the maximum punishment for murder,” Woodford said. “In November, voters will have the first opportunity ever to decide between the death penalty and a sentence of life in prison with absolutely no chance of parole. Back in 1978, we did not have an alternative sentence that would keep convicted killers behind bars forever. We certainly did not know that we would spend $4 billion on 13 executions. Our system is broken, expensive and it always will carry the grave risk of a mistake. SAFE California offers a solution with savings at a time when we’re laying off teachers and cutting vital services.”
I urge support of this measure:
http://apps.keithflower.org/?page_id=152
I'm about to release an update to match the iOS version accompanying Gambit v4.6.5 (as close as I can get).
The paper investigates routes of exposure.
Reading the actual paper may help:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...?
"In terms of acute toxicity (based on the oral LD50 of 2.8 ng/bee [23]), the amount of clothianidin on a single maize seed at the rate of 0.5 mg/kernel contains enough active ingredient to kill over 80,000 honey bees. However, the overall level of risk has been more difficult to quantify, as there has not been a clear mechanism whereby honey bees could be exposed to high levels of these compounds – once the treated seed is planted, opportunities for honey bee exposure to concentrations of neonicotinoids over a wide area should drop dramatically (although see [19]). Our results suggest that of the factors we quantified in this study, used talc exhausted during and after planting (the latter would occur during routine cleaning of planting equipment) stands out as potential routes for exposure that should be prioritized for further quantification and remediation."
"Detection of clothianidin in pollen, both in stored pollen in cells and in pollen traps is a critical finding because clothianidin is even more toxic when administered to bees orally, with an LD50 of 2.8–3.7 ng/bee. Given an average weight of 80–100 mg/bee, some of our pollen sample concentrations exceed the oral LD50. This, combined with the result that our samples of dead and dying honey bees consistently demonstrated the presence of clothianidin, suggests that the levels of both clothianidin and thiamethoxam found in our sampling of stored pollen in May of 2011 may have contributed to the deaths of the bees we analyzed. However, our analytical methods do not allow us to determine what fraction of the pesticide is on the surface of bees (contact toxicity, due to drift of soil or planter exhaust) vs. inside the body (oral toxicity, due to ingestion of contaminated pollen or guttation droplets). A combination of these exposure modalities is not unlikely.
[1] US Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Pesticide Programs. Factsheet Clothianidin (2003) EPA Publication 7501C; www.epa.gov/opprd001/factsheets/clothianidin.pdf.
[2] National Agriculture Statistics Service (NASS), online database: Crop production 2010 summary (2010) Available: http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.d.... Accessed 2011 July 10.
[3] Laurino D, Porporato M, Patetta A, Manino A (2011) Toxicity of neonicotinoid insecticides to honey bees: laboratory tests. Bull Insectol 64: 107–113. FIND THIS ARTICLE ONLINE
[4] US Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (2011) PC Code: 044309. Memorandum: Clothianidin registration of Prosper T400 seed treatment on mustard seed and Poncho/Votivo seed treatment on cotton. (2010). Available: www.epa.gov/pesticides/chem_search/cleared_reviews/csr_PC-044309_2-Nov-10_b.pdf Accessed 2011 Aug 1.
"Debunking Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance" http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf
Now for the anecdotes: in my experience there has been plenty of outright racial and gender discrimination in computing, science, math, and even medicine. I've seen it. I suspect most if not all of you have seen it. It persists into the 21st century.
That needs to continue to change.
-First, thanks for your teaching. It's a tough job. I suspect this particular class will get better, and the fact you're trying to do a great job for these students comes through loud and clear from your post.
-How do you personally feel about the course material? Are you personally interested in it and enthusiastic about it? If not, it'll be hard to get others interested and it's tough to fake it. If you are, are you communicating that passion?
-Have you asked for someone to observe a class or two? Or videotaped a class for your own review? There may be some subtle things that you're not even aware of that's detrimental - extra eyes or seeing yourself teach can be revealing. What feedback is your TA giving you?
-Maybe the audience actually is wrong. I'm a big believer in "no bad students, just bad teaching", too, but I suspect we're dealing with a low N here...it's conceivable you're doing everything well and your first calculus class is just not that into the material for any number of reasons. Although you didn't say, I'm assuming this freshman calc class isn't necessarily filled with math majors.
-Great job on soliciting feedback from students - I assume you did something more than the same old dry "evaluations" we hand out and sometimes just skim over.
-Are students coming to your office hours? If not, why not? In some classes, I've set up appointments with each student at least once a semester, just so I have a chance to know them and their own motivations/plans/strengths, etc. It tends to work well. It's another great time obviously to ask them each what's working and not working in a more personal setting.
Again, thanks for your teaching and your obvious desire to improve things for your students.
"Novartis, for instance, makes both branded and generic versions of Ritalin; Shire Pharmaceuticals does the same for Adderall XR. In both cases, the companies have ensured that supplies of branded drugs are adequate while allowing generic versions to go wanting."
Note that "branded" means the more expensive, non-generic version of the medication.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/health/policy/fda-is-findi...
Just sent out another batch of emails to other friends and colleagues who may still use them, and will help them switch.
Mobile technology presents providers "with a very long list of legal concerns," they point out. "Privacy and security of patient data, compliance with state and federal laws (including Stark and anti-kickback statutes), assumption of risk and liability, along with many other critical issues, should be addressed in the contract between the healthcare provider and vendor of such software."
Unless I'm missing something, this "certification" from Infogard doesn't appear to speak much to these concerns, if at all, which are the overwhelming concerns of physicians with these kind of non-hospital cloud-based system.
The "certification" that the application meets "meaningful use" just means that app use may allow physicians to qualify for the government incentive money for adopting an EHR.
http://www.infogard.com/resources/healthcare_it/meaningful_u...
Security, security, security is the real issue. The drchrono CEO says that a "security audit" was done, but the article gives no details. Who did it, at what level, and where are the results?
Does drchrono assume all risk and liability for patient confidentiality? Is that spelled out contractually? Unfortunately, the problem is that even with such verbiage in a contract, individual physicians would likely not escape the rightful wrath of patients and regulatory bodies if a data breach occurred. Frankly, even if physicians did adopt a system like this, they'd have to provide disclosure and go through an informed consent process with their individual patients about the use of drchrono, and get written approval from individual patients to store their info this way. What happens when many (if not all) patients opt-out? Maintain two systems?
"Tell the court, Dr. Incentive, what drove your use of drchrono? Were you convinced that the system provided any benefits whatsoever to the patients who now have their HIV status, mental health diagnoses, and street drug use information plastered all over the net....or were you more interested in the $44,000 benefit you got from adopting the software?"
But, he [CEO of drchrono] says, with the iPad connected to drchrono's cloud-based platform, "there's no information stored on the iPad except a temporary cache ... it's more secure than locally stored laptops and servers."
This statement makes no sense. We've seen countless breaches and releases of protected health information from cloud-based systems. How is highly sensitive information transmitted to and stored on drchrono and/or third-party servers possibly more secure than leaving patients' data on local systems which are locally controlled, physically fenced (easily quarantined from the net), easily whole-disk encrypted, locally backed-up, locally audited, with locally set retention policies, and locally destroyed when needed?
Our technology is improving. Rigorous, evidence-based practice is the standard of care.
And yet we often fail to help.
Oft-used aphorisms in medical training include, "The secret of care of the medical patient is caring about the patient" and "Recommend to your patients what you'd recommend to your own family". Yet that approach often vanishes somewhere during training or soon after. Some may start viewing people as "consumers" rather than "patients".
Compassion is curative, and by that I don't mean a bunch of hand-waving mumbo-jumbo. I mean that people will seek preventive care, trust diagnosis and treatment, stay in treatment, and work with docs when they feel they'll be heard, when their pain and fears (often unspoken) and questions will be addressed, and when their choices will be respected.
For lack of a better phrase, there remains a science and an art to medicine. Both need to advance lock-step.
Best wishes to Xeni. Her writing has always been brave as it is here, and selflessly sharing what she's going through will help others.
> He's right; nested includes are a modern C idiom.
No doubt they are found a lot. The request was for counterexamples. Fashion/style vs engineering practice assertions may be passing like ships on a nighttime C here.
>...for projects ranging from MongoDB to Ruby and Python...
Python....why, even Tim Peters asserts that "Flat is better than nested"...wink...
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/
/irrelevant quote
There are numerous examples of projects which follow that recommendation. I'm told, for example, that the recommendation on the excellent Blender 3-D graphics system is to avoid nested includes. Other examples:
NASA: http://sunland.gsfc.nasa.gov/info/cstyle.html
European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite (EMBOSS) http://emboss.sourceforge.net/developers/c-standards_new.htm...
Atacama Large Millimeter Array (astronomy): http://www.alma.nrao.edu/development/computing/docs/joint/00...
Clinical Neutron Therapy System (for radiation oncology): http://staff.washington.edu/jon/cnts/impl.pdf
EDIT: You supplemented Clojure's implementation of miniKanren (core.logic) with great macros like defrel, facts, extend-rel, and a lot of other stuff. Those are the kinds of things that seemed a bit more convenient to me in Kanren (the optimized Scheme version), maybe because they seem more "Prolog-like" to me, especially extend-rel. I need to go back and look at RS miniKanren again to see how easy/desirable it would be to have those macros. Any thoughts?