1,186 karma · joined May 27, 2009
For whatever it's worth, it is a really, really, really great checking account. And their online and mobile tools have gotten pretty good in recent years. Not anywhere near the level of, say, BankSimple, but certainly more than usable.
My one gripe thus far is that there isn't as much keyboard control over the prediction interface as I'd like, but that could just be that I haven't found the shortcuts yet.
One thing I quite like about it is that there's a built-in "feedback" feature- any time the "predictive UI bar" is showing, there's a button you can press to send semi-structured feedback about what's currently showing, suggest other things you'd like to appear in similar situations, and so on. I've used it already to suggest a few changes the prediction UI for ListPlot.
Apparently, you're not the only person who feels that way. From an interview on "Fresh Air" last year with Dayna and Robert Baer, two former CIA clandestine service agents, came this bit of institutional wisdom:
GROSS: Yeah, sometimes when people start seeing each other who work together, they try to keep it secret for a while because they don't want everybody in the office to know. Did you do that?
Ms. BAER: A little bit, to some extent.
Mr. BAER: We used good tradecraft.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. BAER: Car pickups, dead drops and the rest of it. You know, in the CIA they say if you can't carry on an affair in secret, you're not worth your salt.
(Soundbite of laughter)
GROSS: Is it that common that there's sayings about it?
Ms. BAER: Yes.
Mr. BAER: Oh, absolutely.
Ms. BAER: Absolutely.
Mr. BAER: I mean the divorce rate there must be astronomical. You know, they won't - that's a secret too, but I'm sure it is.
There's also the fact that many-if-not-most hackers are... shall we say... "unsuited" (in terms of their temperament) to the kind of work environment found in government security agencies. Let's just say that your tolerance for pointy-haired administrative BS had better be pretty dang high (like, somewhere between "ISS" and "Earth-Moon L1") if you're going to go down that particular professional path.
I can safely say that I feel much more positively about the value of my PhD now than I did when I was finishing it; some part of it is increased emotional distance ("time heals all wounds...", etc.), but I think that a larger part of it is that I've had more time to reflect on the experience and am able to more rationally evaluate what I got from it (and what it cost me, in terms both financial and otherwise).
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/04/06/149867092/indian...
Obviously, that's just one program, and in just one city in just one country, but I thought it was pretty neat.
If your content is intended for use or distribution by a US federal agency, or was created using federal dollars or as part of a federal contract, you are responsible for ensuring that it is compliant with section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which specifies that your content be accessible to individuals with disabilities.
Leaving aside for a moment the larger question of whether specific blind and/or deaf individuals consider their sight/hearing status to be a disability or not, section 508 is generally interpreted to mean that your content needs to be as accessible as you can make it. That means (among other things) working to make sure that screen readers and other such software are able to make full use of your site's functionality.
In my experience, the process of getting a project compliant with section 508 is generally very valuable- it makes you think a lot about how your content is organized, and rewards use of semantic markup. It can be frustrating at times, but the end result is definitely worth it for a wide range of reasons.
Here are a couple of places to get started learning about 508 issues:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_Re...
> With terminologies like SNOMED-CT, you run into coverage issues and end up pre/post coordinating lot of knowledge.
Well, yes, SNOMED is a post-coordinated vocabulary, so that's sort of the point- it's a feature, not a bug. Of course, there are so many ways to do post-coordination that you can easily end up in trouble when you try to exchange data with somebody else...
I agree 100% in principle, but I think that in reality this won't work. Why? Because the people that would benefit from that approach (focusing on the user experience, etc.) are not the people that make the decisions about which system to buy. Those people could care less about what it looks like, or how usable it is.
That's the reason why so many EHRs have UIs that look like they belong up on blocks in somebody's front yard, and even worse-looking APIs- a misalignment of interests between the users of the system and the people who make the purchasing decisions.
It's like a little microcosm of everything that's wrong with the entire medical system... :-)
You hit the nail on the head, here. There's a fine line between "bold, fearless, and usefully foolish" and "too ignorant of an extremely complicated domain to accomplish anything useful", and in medical informatics that line is even finer than in many other fields.
> I don't think any company in their right mind would use Metathesaurus as their base vocabulary, may be synonyms, mappings etc but not as a coding vocabulary.
Just to chime in (in case anybody reading this comment thread is thinking about getting into this stuff), you're 100% correct: the UMLS is in no way supposed to be used as a coding vocabulary. If you try and use it as such, you're Doing It Wrong(tm). That's what clinical terminologies e.g. SNOMED-CT are for.
Of course, that doesn't mean that plenty of people haven't tried- it's just such a tempting-looking resource...
That said, I certainly wouldn't want to dissuade anybody from learning how to use the UMLS, or from using it for its intended purposes. It's a really valuable (and easily accessible) vocabulary resource.
Let's start with yours. Have you ever been in a city (e.g., New York) that was experiencing a sanitation worker strike? Garbage-men are easily some of the most important people in a modern society. The guys that empty my building's dumpster change the lives of hundreds of people every day. I can think of quite a few scientists and doctors who would love to have that level of impact.
Ditto for building maintenance and cleaning. At one point, my university decided that it could save money by cutting back on cleaning staff. Going forward, they would only come by to empty the trash and vacuum our offices once per month; the bathrooms would get cleaned every week or two, but other than that we were to be entirely on our own. We thought that this would be mildly inconvenient- it was worse. Oh, your office-mate had a banana with their lunch? That peel's gonna be in the trash can for a long time...
It turns out that the cleaning people had been changing our lives in numerous significant ways, every day, and when that change stopped happening, we sure as heck noticed. After far too many months, the administration decided that there were better places to cut back, and reinstated more regular cleaning services. And there was much rejoicing.
Your life is the way it is because a very large number of people are doing very unpleasant and/or difficult jobs, often for surprisingly small amounts of money. These people are to be honored and thanked at every opportunity, IMHO, and personally I try to as mindful as I can about the numerous and concrete ways that they change my life.
For example, one student realized part-way through the class that she could write a script to automatically process the lengthy and complex output of a particular laboratory instrument instead of doing it by hand, and by the end of the class was able to not only write that script but modify and extend it to deal with a slightly different model of the same instrument. Other students figured out that Python was easier to use than SAS for some types of data reformatting and analysis. Nothing fancy, just the sort of day-to-day hacking that we all take completely for granted- but it's incredibly useful for working scientists to be able to do that sort of thing for themselves, and courses like this one give them a real leg up.
It looks like the UNH course had some really great content- seriously, check it out or send a link to your scientist buddies.
Hyperbole, perhaps. Ridiculous, no.
Working in the field has convinced me that radiologists earn every penny, and that there are good reasons for the lengthy residencies and stringent board exams.
1: It's been a few years since I last had to do this, so the situation might have improved since then.
"When a Macintosh got into trouble it presented you with a cartoon of a bomb, which was funny the first time you saw it."[1]
Any scientist will tell you that the most important person in their department- by far- is their finance person. They're the ones that know your university's financial system inside and out, and so will be able to help you keep your money from going straight up the university's nose (as it were). A good finance person will also know how, on a per-agency-basis, to structure a grant's budget so that you get to keep as much money as possible as freely-usable as possible (E.g., there are things that the NSF will let you do with certain kinds of grant money that the NIH won't, and vice versa, and a good finance person knows what they are).
Specifically, anything funded by the NIH-- which means pretty much all biomedical research-- has to end up in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central repository. It's actually the author's responsibility to submit it, but most publishers take care of it for you.
While this model is not without its problems, I think it's a pretty amazing start and has proved itself to be well worth the hassle. The NLM has put into place a great deal of infrastructure to make it easy for authors and publishers to submit their content, and the PubMed Central site itself is a great resource for researchers.