neuro_imager

Outcomes (including complication rates) are typically recorded based on history, clinical examination and lab and imaging results.

- History and physical exam are extremely subjective.

- Medical notes and records can be massaged to sound better than reality (The patient didn't have a stroke after their operation. They had "minor lower limb weakness which we anticipate will improve over the next few weeks") or attributed to all sorts of things (patient's cognitive function hasn't worsened, they have some "fatigue" following surgery).

- People can be very selective about which studies are ordered.

- Junior and ancillary staff are reluctant to report poor outcomes about established senior people.

I'll give a real-life example: Professor X is a "world-renowned expert" on neurosurgery at an academic mecca. He claims a "1-2%" complication rate on aneurysm surgeries in the clinic and at any conferences. His residents know he performs outdated surgeries with spectacularly bad outcomes but no one would be willing to talk about this openly unless they want to torpedo their career prospects.

By "reputation based", do you mean patient report outcomes or something else? Could you expand on "openly evaluated experiments", maybe with an example?

As a physician, I often think about how we lack truely objective assessment of patient outcomes (either in the context of evaluating physician competence or, probably more importantly, assessing and improving upon clinical practises).

I would really appreciate insight on how this could be achieved.

There are several issues which are particularly vexing:

- The distinct lack of verifiable, objective markers of physician competence.

- Each patient's case is unique and cases with the highest levels of difficulty are often treated by the most experienced people. These cases, of course, are likely to have worse outcomes than simple cases which may be treated by less experienced (worse?) physicians.

- Clinical outcomes are largely recorded by the same people treating the patient so reported outcomes are often erroneous or frankly fraudulent.

- This is made worse by the hierarchical nature of clinical medicine and deference to seniority and title.

- Medicine is parochial so clinical practises for the same disorder vary tremendously. You might be treated a dozen different ways for the same disorder and presentation depending on the facility and especially on the specialty that ends up treating you.

- Outcomes are not necessarily determined by clinician ability. There are several other factors at play: the pre- and post-care (such as work-up by ancillary staff or ICU care after a surgery), the cohesiveness of the facility and its efficiencies (or lack thereof), availability and preferences for resources such as medical devices, drugs and hospital equipment which may be largely out of the hands of the physician.

I'm interested to see how this will evolve.

Right now you can use bitcoin's network effects to some degree with altcoins. eg. You use xmr.to to buy anything that you can buy with bitcoin with Monero.

This is a band-aid of sorts for the time being but I don't see why services that currently allow you to use bitcoin could not upgrade to include a better currency/currencies?

Unfortunately I don't see a way this can be avoided.There has never been a weapon humanity imagined, designed, and built that it has not used. AI will be no different.

A ban would be impossible to implement. What exactly would you ban? AI? Drones? facial recognition? Once you have a certain level of capability in these technologies, weaponising these things is the easy part.

Good, you understood me. Well done.

Appallingly simplistic (if not entirely wrong).

And I've never met someone in management that belonged on the right side of an IQ bell curve.

"We need to come to an acceptance of the changing times and decide what it means to still have a society. Either we agree that we (USA Inc) make more than enough money for everyone in the country to have a good life (which we do), and work out the redistribution problem (which could take many forms), or we continue as we are with a whole lot of fellow citizens suffering needlessly."

As a foreigner living in the USA I'm sad to say that I both agree wholeheartedly with this comment and realise that it can never come to pass.

The entire political landscape of the US is built on ideological caricatures like the strong, independent, free American and the demon of socialism (or anything that even vaguely represents it).

The unfortunate consequence of this is a society sorely lacking in social concern with massive impediments to developing core infrastructure. Of course this benefits the ruling class who don't have to spend money on developing facilities that could benefit the lives of Americans.

I'm curious about your roll-out strategy:

Why start up world wide? Why not start only in jurisdictions where what you're doing is legal? Wouldn't that give yourselves an opportunity to build and test all the layers of your company in a relatively safe environment before moving into markets like the US?

Please stop talking about mental health in this context.

You may or may not be correct in your prediction about the legal ramifications of this person's actions actions but making comments about their mental health is completely erroneous.

thank you

A couple questions:

- Aren't zerocoin and zerocash two different currencies? Did you mean to say zerocash in your previous comment?

- If what Matt Green is saying is true, is there a way to create a backdoor in Monero or any other new crypto that comes along?

- One of the reservations that I have around z-cash is the "don't roll your own crypto" mantra even if you are an experienced, academic cryptographer? Is z-cash inherently more risky because its using newer crypto?

Just FYI for anyone not aware - Snowden dismissed Monero on the basis of a bug that was resolved several months ago.

Is this even news? Is there any doubt this has been happening since the dawn of SM.

I'm really interested in Monero but I lack a comprehensive understanding of the underlying technology. Is there a good resource (apart from the Monero community itself) that explains Ring signatures and similar technologies, including their limitations?

From your answer, you sound very knowledgable in this area - could you advise some good resources to learn more?

Yes I know, but mining is an enormous source of revenue in China and the workarounds you mention are costly. So again, why give away money?

Thank you so much for doing this and posting it online. I have learned a tremendous amount from your coursera course.

Whilst I appreciate that you are not seeking to teach the details of specific currencies, could you use some of the newer currencies to teach by example?

For example, could you discuss some of the concepts detailed in several of the white papers (and the legitimacy thereof) such as IOTA's tangle or some of the features of the new coins built on ethereum or the utilisation of XRP by banks?

Could you discuss future possibilities such as decentralized exchanges?

Thank you again.

I'm new to cryptocurrency and it astounds me the amount of information I have to hand over just in order to buy currency on an exchange. Presumably this is a source of de-anonymization? I thought the whole point was that you don't have to give away information to a third party?

Does anyone know how to get cryptocurrency without going through this process? Is there a way just to buy cryptocurrency with a simple credit card transaction?

"Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed. He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world." Chuck Palahniuk

Does anyone have any knowledge/experience of brickblock.io?

How would I go about investing via a hedge fund like Polychain Capital? I can't seam to find contact information online. Do I need to go through a broker?

This article is interesting but misleading. (I do surgeries on patients with strokes):

CCMs (cavernous malformations) are vascular lesions, rare vascular lesions and relatively rarely they can bleed and cause "strokes" (as in neurological deficits in patients).

However CCMs that bleed make up a minuscule fraction of a percentage of all patients who have strokes (which are generally caused by ischemia - blockages to vessels with decreased oxygenated blood to the brain).

The title should read 'gut bacteria can potentially trigger rare type of brain vascular malformations'.

The real issue here is not perks for physicians but the corrupt, inefficient, self-serving system that insurance companies and hospital bureaucrats have devised for the American public.

This is the sort of idiocy that promotes the rise of demagogues like Trump.

The time from infection to clinical presentation is likely to be a lot longer in the case of a neurological disorder which effects adults than in utero consequences.

If there is a substantial increase in neurological sequelae, we're likely to only see this uptick several years from now.

Altucher basically makes a living from extrapolating from things that most people without definitive knowledge assume to be true.

His writing is the worst kind of merger of self-help, armchair psychology and social commentary.

Please would you elaborate on this? Or provide some sort of reference?

How is this built exactly? In a petri-dish?

I'm being slightly facetious.

As a generalisation though, many (or most) doctors:

- Have lousy work hours.

- Have a lot of work-related stress and are therefore often quite moody and irritable.

- Often have poor social skills, and can be particularly bad at resolving conflicts.

- Have a tendency towards narcissism and can therefore be quite high maintenance.

- Don't have an off-switch when it comes to work, so may bore you to death with work-related stories and complaints.

Blood tests vary from reasonably simple to extremely complex, extremely reliable to extremely variable and requiring no further action (as in your case) to requiring multiple possible further decisions.

Understanding the results of multiple medical blood tests requires some knowledge of multiple subjects including biochemistry, chemical pathology, microbiology and immunology.

There's also the question of what to do next - do you repeat the test, get additional blood tests, get other tests (such as radiology or biopsies) and most critically do you actually have a diagnosis and do you need treatment? (If so, what?)

Then there's the issue of false positives and false negatives which most people get wrong (especially if you're in a low prevalence population).

The doctor needs to be involved because there's no guarantee that things will be normal.

Also depending on the test you may or may not understand what "normal" means.

Here's a quick test - These are some of the most commonly ordered blood tests: Which of these tests would you be happy to interpret yourself?:

- CBC (Including HB, platelets, differential blood count, neutrophils, leucocytes)

- Urea and electrolytes (Sodium, potassium, urea, creatinine, U/Cr ratio, chloride, bicarbonate, Anion gap)

- Liver function tests (ALP, AST, ALT, CBr, UBr) If abnormal - Hepatitis serology (including HBsAg, anti-HBc, IgM anti-HBc, anti-HBs)

- CMP (Free calcium, bound calcium, protein, magnesium, phosphate)