The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.— Henry Rollins 1 year ago
I haven’t posted in forever…
because I’ve been teaching grad students about system administration. We had projects in East St. Louis and Champaign, IL. We also have a team of people working in Sao Tome, Africa. We’ve had a pretty successful semester, with new community technology centers built and about one hundred XO laptops deployed in Sao Tome.
2 years ago
This is too small to really read, but the dominant line is genetic phenomena. This graph shows the evolution of a particular dimension of a burst of publications about lentiviruses. Lentiviruses are a type of virus with long incubation periods. They are one of the major delivery mechanisms for genetic engineering/therapy.
Still trucking away on this…
2 years agoMedicine is the reigning example of a field defined by difficult information problems. Evidence-based medicine is defined, as a methodology, by reliance on exact reasoning. However, exactitude can be elusive, particularly given the realities described in the quote below. This is not to slight close reasoning — I fully believe in the power of rigorous, quantitatively driven medicine to deal with well-known pathologies.
Nagging but basic questions remain: how do medical professionals make decisions in the real world, when data is imperfect? When the pathologies are less understood? How do communication and information problems factor in decision making?
My conjecture (a pre-hypothesis, in other words) is that social and intuitive factors are crucial, even in computationally rich environments. Social networks of knowledge and skill should be a central locus of study for medical communications technology. Beyond the interactions of professionals, networks of patients and care-providers are a second critical arena.
One of my overarching interests is expanding definitions of medical care beyond an incident-based, reactionary model. There is a clear need to redefine the technology of medicine to support conversation as well as computation. In similar terms, I find it important to consider building technologies and networks that allow for long-term, stable interactions with care providers. These sorts of interactions are helpful in responding to invidual instances of disease, but they also sustain an overall framework for health and well-being.
Anyway, early rants on medical informatics.
2 years agoUncertainty is the central, critical fact about medical reasoning. Patients cannot describe exact-— Peter Szolovits, “Uncertainty and Decision in Medical Informatics,” Methods of Information in Medicine, 34: 111-21, 1995 2 years ago
ly what has happened to them or how they feel, doctors and nurses cannot tell exactly what they
observe, laboratories report results only with some degree of error, physiologists do not under-
stand precisely how the human body works, medical researchers cannot precisely characterize
how diseases alter the normal functioning of the body, pharmacologists do not fully understand
the mechanisms accounting for the effectiveness of drugs, and no one can precisely determine
one’s prognosis.
via
You can tell that the monk on the left has just realized the emptiness of all phenomena. The monk in the back still appears to be ensnared by samsara.
2 years ago…I find it amusing they provide the LD 50 for caffeine; 192 mg/ kg
2 years ago