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September 23, 2009
little tech, a little business
I don't know how Baidu functions in China or why the company gets such a response in the US. Baidu is like Google + Napster. The company gets praise about its entrepreneurship yet its search engine can be used to find any published Asian audio file without a peep from either governments. If piracy is a headache in the US, in Asia, it's a neurocarcinoma.
Amen on supervision of banks and maybe a few other industries.
Interesting article on sharing in the light of where some biological intellectual property is going.
Posted by azileretsis at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)
studies
Synthetic biology in popular press.
I would be alot happier in my studies if I could study this only.
For those artsy science nerds, look what they did with glass (Virology Blog)!
Posted by azileretsis at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)
September 11, 2009
change
Marijuana coming soon near you.
The economy through Google's eyes.
Posted by azileretsis at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)
September 10, 2009
read
Is certain systems worth modeling?
And, the winner is.....swine flu! (ViroBlog)
I'm not minimizing the seriousness of the swine flu but for those who have been tracking influenza for years, this is an amazing chart. I'm wondering if the second spike that isn't part of the swine flu is due to increased flu surveillance.
For your information:
Posted by azileretsis at 07:36 PM | Comments (0)
September 09, 2009
contact
The perils of Facebook. Oh yeah, this is going on FB.
Posted by azileretsis at 12:48 PM | Comments (0)
September 03, 2009
just a show
I just watched The Daily Show with Betsy McCaughey as a guest. I have a few comments. First, I am an avid proponent of more patient advocates in the healthcare debate. However, Ms. McCaughey's mistake was not keeping the debate simple and factual. Government jargon is never going to work well on a TV show targeted to the twenty-somethings. The debate over the living wills and advance directives should have been directed over to when is it alright for a physician to provide counsel about these items. Should everyone over the age of 60 have one? Should everyone diagnosed with cancer have one? How about when you become an adult or even younger? When should the government dictate when you should start thinking about dying? Or, as Jon Stewart was trying to frame it, how much longer you should live?
Another topic during their debate concerned the medical protocols. Physicians are financially incentivized to follow standard protocols. I love protocols. Protocols protect people from stupid and lazy physicians. But, they also restrict the wise physicians to whom we hope our broken bodies will end up some day. We are just beginning the debate about standard care. For example, do we want our medical care to be a decision tree? What factors should come into consideration when making a standard protocol? If we trained physicians better and allowed more well-trained judgement calls, would we get better care? It has parallels with sentence minimums for judges. Nevertheless, we want to rush to make standard care a law or even to incentivize it even more?
Overarching issue in the healthcare debate is how much should the government be involved in an individual's medical care? What are the goals of the universal healthcare? To provide access, to provide cost control, to provide care?
I also want to draw attention on another example of government mandate, public education, and how well that has been working. I am proud to say I came out of public education but I also see not all are equal. BTW, what is the opportunity cost to other government programs if healthcare legislation gets implemented? All I'm asking is for more debate. Just my ramblings.
Posted by azileretsis at 02:00 AM | Comments (0)
September 02, 2009
love and hate
I love xkcd. By the way, on the site, the creator uses the title attribute nicely.
Do you sometimes feel like your mechanic is laughing behind your back? My 1999 car needed to be fixed three times in the last month.
Frog or toad in the pepsi. Or rat droppings or fly wings...Now, don't you wish everybody went six sigma?
Economics is just numbers merged with social issues. If I were to get another PhD, it would probably be in economics.
Can I predict that Grace will be a doozie? It's always the innocent sounding names like Katrina, Camille and Rita.
Posted by azileretsis at 07:51 PM | Comments (0)