Re: The Final Sanction
Fiat iustitia ruat caelum.
799 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2022
Faecebook tried to make an example of Australia when it introduced laws making them pay news sites to link to content. That attempt lasted about a day and a half, because it didn't make the laws unpopular, it made Faecebook unpopular.
The likes of Zuckerberg have influence, but legislatures have power. Courage to use power in the face of influence, though...
My workplace has a medical document creation / management system whose web interface crashes with loss of (often lengthy and information-dense) entered data a little too often for comfort.
Wordpad is the tool of choice for people who want to keep their notes until they've finished and Ctrl+A Ctrl-C Ctrl-V it over into the web browser. Enough formatting to make it useful, simple enough that it works in less than a second from the asking.
You can tell the people who do it by the little trails of artefact left by dodgy UTF-16 to UTF-8 (or vice versa) conversion whenever it meets an accented character or em dash.
It should be noted that Darwinian evolution is not regarded as "settled science" by biologists.
In that biologists by and large, to satisfy the definition of a scientist, subscribe to the Popperian notion that science is never settled, only yet to be disproved. Sometimes the disproof of a theory would have to be outrageously bizarre, so that's something like settled.
Asexual reproduction relies on mutation alone as selection pressure, rather than the whole recombination thing. So oddities where species have a mixed sexual/asexual mode are almost to be expected. Not contradictions to evolution, though.
The Darwinian/Mendelian synthesis is falsifiable, makes predictions borne out by observation, and has not been contradicted by observation. Lamarckism, Lysenkoism, and Invisible Pink Unicornism aren't.
Digitising paper records works.
It is easier to make words on paper look like the thoughts in my head than it is to make words on a screen do the same thing. If you can't find a way to do that more efficiently than pen and paper, give me pen and paper and pay someone to scan it.
Information handling in a medical context is so important that increasingly hospitals are hiring scribes to work with doctors as functionaries, to make the orders for tests, writing of notes, liaising with allied health and other practitioners just happen, to free up actual medicine. It's not just painful to reduce the quality and clarity of medical recording and communication, it's inefficient and dangerous.
Doctors don't generally need text search. We need event search. If it's a familiar patient, we use our memory. If not, we use other doctors' and nurses' notes.
OCR is only useful as much as things like free text search are useful - not as much as you would think. Anyone who contemplates OCRing a medical record hasn't seen one.
Collating results from different providers and integrating them in a record is the back end - and that's IT's job. If it doesn't work, we'll call you.
The human interface problem of medical record keeping is essentially solved, decades ago by the hundreds of people that hospitals used to employ in their medical records department. The basic idea has been converged upon out of painful experience.
I switch back and forth between workplaces between a full paper system and a digital system. (Yes, full paper systems do still exist, sometimes across entire networks or, in my case an whole state public health system.) The digital systems that actually work are either paper forms that are scanned, or skeuomorphic digital versions of what the paper forms used to look like. Say what you like about an interface having to look like Word, but there's nothing so intuitive as a flat piece of paper and a pen.
There's a form and a MR form ID for everything. The important things (patient alerts, allergies, demographic identifiers) have low numbers. The forms for outpatient contacts come next, then inpatient events. The sequence of each follows the patient through admission, progress, procedures and discharge, with form numbers increasing as you go along. Sort by form type number, then chronologically. When advance care directives were introduced, they became an MR0, because they had priority over MR1, the alerts page.
A useful medical note is a mind-map, narrative where something's being narrated, bullet point or enumerated lists or sketch drawings otherwise (past medical history, family history, medications, allergies; history, examination, investigations; assessment and plan). Because it comes out of a human conversation, it's not dictated but constructed in a nonlinear way that's really hard to replicate without the freedom of pen and paper. I haven't seen a capable digital system that isn't awkward, and therefore less efficient that the paper one.
There's a fundamental inefficiency in shifting work away from the medical information department and on to the heads of the medical and nursing staff, who have enough to do already,
Abso-bloody-lutely.
I daily use a digital medical record which mimics the layout of the old paper record, segregated into alerts / outpatient episodes / inpatient episodes / diagnostics / correspondence sections then partitioned according to patient contact episode, and internal sorting of those according to admission / progress / specialist inpatient (ICU/theatre/diagnostic procedure) / discharge by the hospital paper form MR type. Precisely what the paper record had evolved into after centuries of human experience showed us how to minimise the use of any sentence beginning with the words ”Where in this thing am I supposed to find...".
This is a perfect exemplar of you don't know what you've got till it's gone. No-one gives this problem a second thought until some bright spark comes along and, presented with a problem that is already solved, says "no, we should do it this way..." and tries to implement some system that was abandoned the last time it was tried because it didn't work as well.
As a student on placement overnight in a teaching hospital I was given an overnight room on the fifth floor of a building described as "nurses' quarters". One morning after night shift I thought there had to be a quicker way to street level than through the twisty maze of corridors that connected the building to the main hospital, so I legged it down the emergency exit... and into the convent where the nuns who still were associated with the place had their quarters / retirement home. Turned around in time to hear the click as the one-way lock on the door I'd just come through closed.
Those nuns had jammed open the fire door and filled that fire escape stairwell with potted plants, photographs, souvenirs, basically the accumulated detritus of years, in a place where they obviously expected no-one from the outside world to ever visit.
I just asked the first person I saw what the quickest way out was, and followed their direction, taking care not to make eye contact with anyone until I was out of there. Coincidentally it was right across the road from the headquarters of a fire brigade that serves a city of 4.5 million people - but who can't find anyone willing to inspect a nunnery.
I'm curious as to whether at that distance Sol is still the brightest star in the neighbourhood (my guess would be yes) - and if Earth is close enough that the angular distance between Earth and Sun matters (also yes). That would ease the task of working out where to point the dish, I suppose.
Armstrong knew Eagle was going to be long well before he could even see the boulders. The boulder field was west of West Crater (the boundary of their planned landing ellipse) and it was the last in a series of events that added up to put them west of their planned landing site, which included mascons and failing to fully depressurise the link between LM and CSM before separation.
They sorted it out for Apollo 12, though. They landed so close to Surveyor 3 that the blast from the DPS sandblasted the surface of the old lunar lander, inadvertently destroying some of the evidence they came to collect.
We have a surprisingly good idea what the climate was like in 536 AD, through dendrochronology and surrogates like nitrates in ice cores. Weather not so much, except maybe as area under the curve.
So if this is weather and not climate, can you give me a valid weather forecast for the northern hemisphere for tomorrow?
Remember that if you're ok accepting dumbing down of subtleties of language, you're on the path that leads to communicating with points and grunts. Maybe further than you realise.
Or maybe spend your next holiday in Australia's Northern Territory and pick up one of their tourism-promotional bumper stickers: CU in the NT.
Also available as a novelty spare tyre cover for the back of the 4WD.
Downvotes without explanation? Really?
The US exploits its workforce, disproportionately to similar economies. And it does it counter to is own national interest.
Minimum wage has gone backwards in real terms since the Reagan era. Their Gini coefficient is the worst in the OECD and worse than most third world nations.
The US was never more prosperous than when it had a large and prosperous middle class who could live comfortably while driving productivity and employment. The 80s corporate decision to abolish the middle class has taken all of the profit and put it in the pockets of the C-suite and the billionaires that own them. Meanwhile, tax on the super-rich is abolished and organised labor is vilified, so the process becomes self-perpetuating.
Money is not for ordinary people. No wonder ordinary people are angry.
Mcdonald's and the others will sooner or later have to come up with things like health insurance that really is health insurance, not some warmed-over cr** That is not health insurance but a sticker put on a package of garbage.
Oh, you were talking about health insurance. For a moment I thought you wrote health insurance but meant food.