Ah, yes, health care- the "other white meat" of stable job fields. :-)
And I'm glad you decided to check the place out in spite of negative posts!
1,186 karma · joined May 27, 2009
And I'm glad you decided to check the place out in spite of negative posts!
Portland does indeed have an extremely high homeless population, and there are real structural issue with how the city deals with that problem. Depending on where and how you live, it's possible to ignore that problem, or to not fully appreciate how bad it is, but believe me: it's real. It's also gotten a lot worse in recent years due to the economy as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our local VAs have brought on extra social workers to try and deal specifically with homeless vets, and the various homeless services agencies have been expanding, as well.
We also have inflated unemployment, mostly because the city's such a nice place to live that lots of people move here without a job, or, when they lose their job, don't leave. If you've got technical skills, it's a great time and place to find a job- but if you don't, there are way fewer options than it might seem, and it is can be an extremely competitive job scene. It's like that everywhere, I know, but for whatever reason it's especially bad in Portland. I am (honestly, no sarcasm) thrilled for your wife that she had such an easy time finding a job; not knowing anything about her, I can say that if she's not a techie than hers is the first such story I've heard from a new arrival in Portland over the last few years. Far, far, far more common is the "well, I picked up a few hours here, and a few hours there, but I can't find anything full-time, and I've been looking for six months, etc. etc."
Regarding the weather- winters in Portland affect everybody differently. SAD is indeed endemic; my GP blames it on wide-spread vitamin D deficiency, but who knows. At least in the 1990s, Portland did have an above-normal level of teen suicide. I don't think the rain here is any worse than Seattle, and from what I've heard the SAD issue is about the same up there as it is down here. But it's a real thing... you'll know what I'm talking about when we get a freak-occurrence sunny day in Feburary (typically, it will have been raining or at least completely overcast for three or four months by that point) and suddenly everybody around you seems ten times happier.
Anyway, welcome to Portland, and like I said, I'm glad you're enjoying it. I love it, myself, and feel like the positives vastly outweigh the negatives. But it's important to have a complete and balanced view of one's city, and Portland definitely has room for improvement.
For what it's worth, most people actually doing the "cleaning up after the elderly" job are certified nursing assistants, who often earn basically a notch or two above minimum wage.
You are 100% correct that current AAC solutions are often suboptimal, but one of the big challenges facing the field is that individual capabilities (both in terms of cognitive function and motor control) vary extremely widely from user to user, and so there's no such thing as a "one-size fits all" solution. Oh, and head buttons like the one you saw typically use "over-sized arcade buttons" because the user doesn't have the fine motor control needed to operate anything smaller. The idea is to give them as big and easy a target to hit as possible. There are users who, literally, are limited to twitching one of their eyebrows as their sole voluntary muscle motion, and sometimes even that is unreliable (i.e., it only twitches some of the time, or for a short period of time). In such a case, you want the button to be as easy as possible to trigger- think Fitt's law. :-)
Accelerometer-based solutions such as the one described in the article have the potential to be extremely useful; however, in the case of a user who's limited to a head button (or an elbow button, a nose switch, etc. etc.), the physical movements involved could well be too variable and irregular to be usefully decoded. That said, one of the active areas of research within the AAC world is how to build machine learning algorithms into AAC software such that an individual's system adapts over time to their patterns of use, so depending on what's going on with a particular user it might be possible to train something up... but, of course, doing this in any kind of repeatable way often ends up to be a crapshoot, as, again, users vary incredibly widely in terms of which muscles they can control and the extent to which they can do so.
In most cities, this sort of thing (major police operation, shots exchanged between police and armed member of public, street closures, etc.) would have been big news; that night, none of the local news broadcasts even mentioned it (one traffic report that afternoon did mention the closure of Jefferson, but didn't go into details). No headlines in the paper the next day, either.[2] My point here is that this sort of thing was apparently commonplace enough that it wasn't considered to be a newsworthy event, and none of my Detroit relatives seemed particularly surprised or concerned.
1. Notably, the particular chunk of neighborhood in question was at least half-abandoned (judging from the amount of ivy covering every second house).
2. Technically, by "the paper the next day," I mean the Detroit Free Press's website. At that point in time the DFP wasn't printing week-day paper editions.
Someday, somebody'll figure out how to do it, and when they do, it'll be amazing... but I'm not placing any bets on when it might happen.
Furthermore, at least at my institution, being the "programmer who knows some science" means that your position is entirely funded with "soft money", which means that your level of job security can be pretty low.
I will say, however, that the MagSafe design, even lacking strain reducers as discussed by the OP, has proven its value on more than one occasion. Besides the obvious advantages (i.e., tripping over the cord no longer sends one's laptop flying, nor does it cause catastrophic damage to the power port), I'm personally fond of the fact that you can step on the adapter all day long without damaging it. We had to replace an adapter once back in the day after accidentally stepping on the little round connector part, and bending it irreparably out of shape.
I fail to see what the problem is here, as long as he's spreading the wealth along to the rest of the organization and its investors.
The problem is that I know just enough about both weather and machine learning to know that such a simplistic approach probably wouldn't work very well. And, of course, the relative costs of false positives and false negatives are very different (false negative: I miss a good riding day; false positive: I get soaked and have to deal with slippery pavement).
Right now, it's just NIH, but it's only a matter of time before AHRQ and the other biomedical funding agencies get in on the action, and there's no reason (in principle, anyway) why NSF or DOE couldn't also join in or do something similar on their own.
Antarctica? Check. Mysterious underground lake? Check. Driven scientists? Check. Extremely isolated location? Check.
Here's how I see it going down:
Drill pierces lake; eldritch horror escapes or is otherwise unleashed as consequence of scientific hubris; Vostok station's radio transmissions cease suddenly; a team is sent to investigate... maybe they find the sole survivor of the original drill crew (he's gone horribly insane, of course), eking out an existence in what remains of the research station... he warns the investigators not to go down to the drill site...
It's a little bit dated at this point, but Shelley Powers' "Practical RDF" was also helpful- but, again, I got a lot more out of it once I'd read Antoniou and had internalized the whole RDF thing at a "30,000 foot" level.
BTW, I just Googled for the Antoniou book to make sure I had remembered its authors correctly, and it turns out that one of the first results is a PDF version of the entire text. I don't know what it's doing up online, but grab it while it's hot. If it's helpful, Powell's has a couple of used copies:
That said, RDF has historically had three main problems, IMHO. The first is that its proponents have, historically speaking, done a crappy job of explaining what it actually is, and a worse job of demonstrating what it can do.
The second problem is that it's not really the most human-readable format around, especially in its XML serialization format. This is largely because it wasn't designed for human-readability, but in the age of the Web (where human-readable formats have shown to have major advantages over non-human-readable ones), this is a liability. They've added some more readable serialization formats over the years, but a lot of the documentation and tutorials assume that you'll be working in XML.
When I first tried to learn about RDF, years ago, all I found were tutorials full of really gnarly-looking XML with minimal explanation of what was going on. I spent so much time getting bogged down by the syntax that I missed the point entirely.
The third, and bigger, problem with RDF, is that it's a little hard to "grok" if you don't have a good grounding in predicate logic, description logics, and some of its other theoretical underpinnings. Actually, wait, maybe I said that wrong- I should say instead that most of the old-school RDF people do have solid theoretical backgrounds in description and predicate logic, and have a hard time talking about RDF and other semweb technologies with people who people who don't have that background. So they use lots of jargon that, while useful, isn't very helpful to somebody just trying to get their feet wet.
So, what should IAC/Match.com/whoever have done in this situation? Leave it the heck alone! First of all, by owning two of the biggest players in online dating, customer acquisition is basically a zero-sum game as far as IAC is concerned- presumably, any customers lost to Match.com from OKCupid's blog post would end up going with OKCupid instead, and therefore either way IAC wins, so what does it matter? Of course, this assumes that an OKCupid customer is of equal value as a Match.com customer, which may or may not be true.
Secondly, it's important for IAC/Match.com to keep in mind larger question of why they felt like it was worthwhile to own OKCupid in the first place. Presumably, they wanted to own it because it targeted a different customer population than their other properties; part of the reason that it does so is because of its quirky, "edgy", and open image. It's 2011; people notice when companies take down influential and well-known blog posts, and their opinions of these companies change accordingly. Ergo, by pulling these sorts of shenanigans, IAC or Match.com is potentially undermining the very thing that made OKCupid attractive to them.
I suppose one could try and do some sort of calculation:
X = # customers lost to Match.com as a result of OKCupid's "don't pay for online dating" post; Y = # customers alienated, amount of bad publicity, internal drama at OKCupid, bad karma, etc. resulting from taking down a well-known (and accurate) blog post
Is X > Y? Mazel tov, take down the post. Is Y > X? Leave it alone; monkeying with it will do more harm than good.
Note that this sort of calculation is essentially impossible to do in a principled way; as such, it seems to me that the sensible course would have been to just leave it alone and focus on making better products.
But what do I know? I'm just a informatics nerd, not a business expert, so maybe there's more to the situation than I'm seeing.
I agree with you 100%. I also think that it's an area that people (and countries) can and do have reasonable disagreements regarding where that balance point should be.
> I also enjoy the freedom. It's something you seem to have trouble understanding.
No, believe me, I understand; I think that you and I place different value on that level of freedom. For me, the freedom isn't necessarily an end in and of itself- it's one of many different means to an end. In other words, the freedom isn't valuable; it's what that freedom allows us to do, and how it allows us to live our lives, that's important.
Furthermore, I think of freedom as a vector, not a scalar- there are multiple dimensions to it. Simply talking about "more" or "less" freedom isn't very meaningful. Sometimes, trading one kind of freedom for another makes sense. For example, I generally try and follow traffic laws when driving. This is a constraint on my freedom to drive as fast as I want, wherever I want. However, by accepting this constraint, I experience a net gain in total freedom (i.e., the magnitude of my freedom vector increases overall), since by buying into the system of traffic laws, I get to enjoy a traffic and road system that lets us all have cars and use them to go wherever we want to go without having to worry (too much) about somebody driving the wrong way down our lane of traffic, and so on. I value that quite a bit- enough to follow rules that are sometimes suboptimal, or downright annoying.
Personally, I would feel a lot more free and happy if I knew that my friends all had health insurance, and there have been times in my life when it would have been very nice to be able to find a different job without worrying about what the effects would be on my partner's access to health care. I also feel like the overall societal benefits to everybody's friends having health insurance and what-not would result in a net increase in the magnitude of my personal freedom vector, to the extent that I'm willing to accept a hit to one or another of my vector's dimensions in terms of paying higher taxes, etc.. Obviously, you disagree with me on this count, and that's fine- but let's make sure we understand precisely what it is that we're disagreeing about.
It seems to me that one way to think about our difference of opinion is that, when you and I calculate the magnitude our freedom vector, we're placing different weights on the various dimensions--- in other words, some dimensions are more important to you than others. Heck, we might even be calculating our freedom vectors in entirely different spaces- our dimensions themselves might be different, which would make it very hard to compare how you think about and value these things to how I think about and value them. Can you tell I'm in the final throes of dissertation writing? :-)
> Why does it matter to you? It's my money. 5 or 6 million per year really isn't that much anymore.
Well, it actually doesn't matter to me personally; I just have a hard time getting my head around the concept that, past that point, another million would have any net effect on my personal happiness level. However, as I said before, this could totally be an artifact of the fact that I'm not in that position. Maybe if I were, I'd feel differently. Note that the exact amount isn't really so important- just the idea that there's a point past which it doesn't matter. Maybe the real point is 10 million, maybe it's only 1 or 2. Obviously, it'll be different for everybody, but I don't think it'll differ by all that much, once all is said and done.
BTW, I disagree that 5 or 6 million/year "isn't that much anymore." First of all, in most of the world, that's such a fantastical amount that you might as well as be talking about being paid in unicorn horns; however, we're not talking about living in Botswana- we're talking about living somewhere like the US. So, here in the US, 5/6 m/year is way more than enough to live in incredibly decadent luxury in any city in the country. I suppose it might not enough to actually own and operate a private jet, but it's certainly enough for NetJets; it's probably not enough to buy one's own island, but short of that sort of thing, I'm having a hard time imagining something I'd like to do that I couldn't do easily on that kind of income.[1] Again, maybe my imagination is too limited, here, but I kind of don't think so- I've certainly got a taste for creature comforts, and enjoy luxuries as much as anybody else. Remember, I'm not saying that people shouldn't earn tons of money- just that, after a point, what does it matter? And, if it doesn't matter, why not use it supporting a system that efficiently makes life comfortable for people that don't have as much as you do?
> The US already has Medicade and Medicare. Over 70% of people are covered in some way or another by their employer.
First of all, that still leaves 30% of the country that isn't covered, which is way too damn many. Second of all, what most people call "Medicaid" is actually a patchwork of different programs that vary widely in terms of coverage requirements and services from state to state, and is far from an ideal system, although it is better than nothing. As to the fact that most people who are covered are covered through their employers, doesn't that strike you as a major dent in their freedom? How many potential entrepreneurs do you think don't bother simply because they can't risk losing their (or their family's) health insurance? In my mind, this represents a major hit to personal liberty, and as such seems like exactly the sort of thing that a system intent on maximizing individual freedom would be attempting to fix.
> You haven't talked about the negative effects of a socialized healthcare system and you are trying to use sympathy to get me to agree with you.
Well, I haven't talked about it, because I didn't see it as relevant to the discussion- most of the rest of the world's countries employ some form of government-funded universal healthcare, and even though there certainly are negatives, I gotta say- I've traveled a fair bit, and due to my work, wherever I go I end up talking to people about healthcare. I've never- not once- heard somebody tell me that they'd rather have the US's system than their own country's, even if they've spent the last half-hour enumerating their system's problems. That says something, in my mind. Furthermore, there are a lot of different kinds of "socialized healthcare systems." Some of them have usage limits, etc.; some are surprisingly market-driven (e.g., Switzerland). That's not really what we're talking about, though. No system is going to be perfect; the question is whether a government-run system that guarantees a certain level of coverage to all citizens would be better or worse than our current system (or lack of system).
> Healthcare is a finite resource. We need some way to limit usage. There needs to be a hybrid system in place that limits total visits per year (and charges fees after that) or it will eventually collapse. Unlimited anything is a bad idea.
All 100% true points. "Rationing" is a really dirty word when it comes to health care, but it's an absolute necessity, if for no other reason than resources are ultimately finite. Right now, one of the ways we limit usage is by limiting access, which I personally view as unjust. If everybody had equal access, maybe we could figure out a better way (not bloody likely, IMHO, but it can't be worse than what we've got now). Note that I'm personally extremely pessimistic about health care in the US, even if we somehow were able to get a better system into place, but I don't think that means that we shouldn't try.
At any rate, this is all kind of off-topic from our original discussion.
[1]: Exception: massive-scale philanthropy, along the lines of the Gates Foundation.
I also use it as a secondary backup for particularly important files (in addition to my physical backups)- it's replaced the "email myself a copy of the important presentation" process.