> It's a larger data-set not a more complex problem.
Ummmm... yeah, scaling the kinds of algorithms that one might apply to this sort of problem up to larger data sets is often extremely difficult.
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Ummmm... yeah, scaling the kinds of algorithms that one might apply to this sort of problem up to larger data sets is often extremely difficult.
As a sibling commenter noted, the trick is then getting the hospital, partner's family, etc. to recognize the PoA document; while the law surrounding powers of attorney is generally quite clear, there are certainly plenty of horror stories of hospitals, families, etc. ignoring such documents. I imagine that the likelihood of this happening varies from state to state, hospital to hospital, possibly even doctor to doctor, and so on.
That said, in the US, basically all of the time, you'll be _far_ better off for having drawn up a durable power of attorney than you would be if you hadn't. Definitely money well-spent if you're in an unmarried partnership. I suggest finding a lawyer who specializes in LGBTQ family law; they generally will be happy to take any couple on as clients, regardless of whether they are same/opposite sex, cis/trans, etc., and they have literally "seen it all," which means that they know about all kinds of legal edge cases that can cause trouble for people in a non-married partnership.
As an aside, I'm continually amazed by how many _married_ couples don't have wills, PoA documents, advance directives, etc. etc. filled out. Even if it's not strictly necessary from a legal perspective, having one's wishes and instructions written down explicitly is a relatively small-seeming thing that can make a very bad situation noticeably less awful (or so I've heard from people who've been there).
It's a great tool, and I use it all the time, but it's certainly no replacement to a properly-managed bibliographic database.
You probably know about this already, but if you're interested in anything biomedical in nature, the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed interface to the MEDLINE database (also managed by the NLM) is exactly what you describe: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
MEDLINE is a bibliographic database that indexes all of the abstracts going back to the 1960s from literally every major (and almost all minor) journals that do anything even remotely related to biomedicine, and also include a surprising number of physics and CS journals. It features a robust and easy-to-use API, and has since the 1990s. All MEDLINE entries include obvious bibliographic metadata (titles, authors, abstracts, dates, etc.) but also include human-curated index headings, which makes searching way easier. PubMed's interface makes it easy to construct complicated and accurate queries, and the NLM offers online access to their reference librarians, as well.
Furthermore, any published research that is funded by the US National Institutes of Health has to have its full text (including figures, references, etc.) posted to PubMed Central (PMC), which is another online database that the NLM maintains. This is an actual law- if you get money from the NIH, your publications have to end up in PMC following a short embargo period- I think it's about six months post-publication?
All of the PMC content is available free of charge, and it also has an API. It is not a complete full-text mirror of MEDLINE, because not everything in MEDLINE was NIH-funded, but for research going back over the last 7-10 years or so it is often surprisingly complete.
This is one area where biomedicine is way ahead of computer science. As somebody who's worked a lot in both fields, I definitely find myself missing PubMed whenever I need to look for CS literature...
As an aside, the National Library of Medicine is truly one of the hidden jewels of the US government. Its budget is tiny, but it somehow manages to produce fabulous work and performs a vital service for the research community. And almost nobody has heard of it!
HOWTO get started:
1. Pick a recent conference;
2. Click on the titles of any articles that look interesting;
3. When you get to the end of each article, dig through its bibliography. Many/most of the paper's references will also be available in the ACL Anthology; if not, Google Scholar will probably be a good resource for chasing them down. GOTO step 2.
Enjoy!
Obviously it can't be too much of a big deal, since the (very nifty) example works just fine, but I'm curious about what's going on here.
Of course, the converse is generally true: the laughably incorrect explanations that "government people" always seem to come up with for "our" behavior often are the result of them interpreting events, statements, etc. through their lens- a lens informed by a completely different set of optical principles than the ones that we are used to using (to abuse the figure of speech a little bit).
In other words, when you read or hear about a "government person" doing or saying something head-deskingly stupid, the odds are very good that the statement or action made perfect sense in the context of that government person's world. It's not that they're (necessarily) stupid, or even ignorant- just that they're not living in our world, and so have dramatically different motivations, constraints, first principles, etc. etc. Their actions may be perfectly follow an internal logic- but it's not our logic, and so we have a hard time making sense of it.
And all of this goes double or triple when we're talking about military or IC people. The classified nature of their work, with its attendant organizational, cultural, technical, political, and psychological distortions, makes their "bubble" look more like a bathysphere.
I still don't think that lets Google off the hook, though; it just makes it more important that their personalization strategy be backed by very flexible, granular, and technically meaningful privacy controls. It means that Google should be setting an even higher bar in terms of educating their users about precisely what data gets collected and exactly how it gets used- and they should empower their users to control how that personal data impacts their experience using Google's products.
The number of their users who actually care about this stuff right now is basically a rounding error when compared to their total user numbers, but that doesn't mean it isn't important. And hopefully, as more and more of our life is conducted online, the number of people who care about this will increase.
It makes more sense, of course, if we interpret such statements through the lens of the Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man." :-D
Citation needed.
I'd actually be quite satisfied if the current state of the art for general-purpose web IR stayed about where it is now- it's pretty dang good! I can't remember the last time I needed to find something using text search and was unable to. And when Google folks talk about making search "better", what they seem to generally be talking about these days is making it more "personalized", which strikes me as a questionable goal in terms of costs and benefits. Cost: living in an electronic panopticon the likes of which Orwell could never have envisioned, having my private information used as a raw material for somebody else's monetization strategy, etc. etc. Benefit: marginally better IR?
Note that I'm not writing this as some sort of technophobic Luddite- I'm actually an academic researcher who works on IR problems. I guess it's just that I, as a potential end user, don't see enough value in hyper-personalized search to be worth the inevitable tradeoffs in terms of privacy and information centralization.
Plus, I'm absolutely not anti-Google, or full of conspiracy theories, or anything like that- but I still find it more than a little creepy to think about just how much information they have about me. Just sayin', is all.
So your advisor probably shouldn't try to keep you totally in the dark if there are political shenanigans going on in your department or university... but they should do what it takes to ensure that those shenanigans are "not your problem." In other words, said shenanigans should be educational (possibly even entertaining), but not distracting, stressful, or have any other impact on your primary purpose in life: getting your dissertation out the door.
Mitchell, M., Dunlop, A., and Roark, B. (2011). Semi-Supervised Modeling for Prenominal Modifier Ordering. Proceedings of ACL 2011. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11-2041.pdf
From TFA:
When new violations are found, Apple requires its suppliers to return the workers back to a school chosen by the family and finance their education. "In addition, the children must continue to receive income matching what they received when they were employed. We also follow up regularly to ensure that the children remain in school and that the suppliers continue to uphold their financial commitment," wrote Apple in its latest report.