j7uy5 | July 23, 2008Harvard
Medical School recently completed a review of their required
premedical curriculum, culminating with the development of recommended
changes. The outcome of this process is reported in an
article in the recent issue of the New England Journal of
Medicine. It's one of their open-access articles:
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/359/3/221">Relevance
and Rigor in Premedical Education
Jules L. Dienstag, M.D.
In recent decades, scientific knowledge has changed dramatically,
once-settled scientific principles have been replaced by more
sophisticated concepts and entirely…
j7uy5 | July 21, 2008Many years ago, I was browsing thought the Borders bookstore, one of
the earliers ones, on State Street in Ann Arbor, and encountered a book
about psychotherapy. It claimed to be a sort of encyclopedia
of named styles of psychotherapy. I can't recall the number
of them, but I think it was between 300 and 400. That was 20
years ago. I'm sure it is in the thousenads by now.
Of course most of these are merely variations of just a few themes.
And most have not been validated systematically.
One of these is called
href="http://www.corebeliefs.com/index.html">Core
Belief Engineering…
j7uy5 | July 20, 2008The Pew Research Center informs us that
href="http://pewresearch.org/databank/dailynumber/?NumberID=585">
today's number is 46%. That is the percentage of
independent voters who are undecided about their choice for President
in the November election in the USA. This is "much higher"
than the same statistic four years ago. It is likely that
this group will swing the election.
Of course, you could say the same about almost any group, if the
election is close.
I noticed this because I was on their site for something else, and
noticed the number in the sidebar, in a little box that said…
j7uy5 | July 18, 2008The House is considering
legislation that would do two things: force oil companies to
give up unused leases, and ban the export of oil from Alaska.
It's brilliant because it highlights the absurd
fallacy: that opening up more land for drilling would lower gas prices.
The fact is, oil companies already have leases that they are
sitting on, not drilling on.
Opening up more land for oil leases will not cause them to drill more
oil. It'd be like putting more gas in the tank of a
driverless car. Putting more gas in the tank will not enable
the car to go farther. The car will go nowhere,…
j7uy5 | July 16, 2008
This is a photo from a collection of images that were modified using
href="http://www.gimp.org/">GIMP - The GNUImage Manipulation Program.
There is a small collection of such photos at
href="http://www.junauza.com/2008/07/25-best-gimped-images.html">Tech
Source From Bohol. This
href="http://209.234.77.62/gallery/kerry_rifle_large.html">particular
image is at a
href="http://209.234.77.62/stovepipe.html">less refined site,
that Tech Source linked to.
I made up the name. The original caption on the photo is "Innocence."
j7uy5 | July 15, 2008
href="http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/restless_legs/restless_legs.htm">Restless
Legs Syndrome has been more in the public eye lately.
I understand this is because of aggressive direct-to-consumer
advertising. I'm not much of a consumer, so I haven't seen
the ads, but people tell me about them.
Whatever you think of DTC advertising, RLS is real, and it is a
significant problem for some people.
Years ago, it was discovered that RLS can be alleviated for some people
with carbidopa/levodopa. But that was an off-patent medicine.
When patented medicines [Requip (ropinirole) and…
j7uy5 | July 14, 2008I got twenty dollars out of the bank today. What should I get: two shares of Fannie Mae stock, or four Happy Meals?
j7uy5 | July 10, 2008This post is not about mental health parity. Although it is a
very important topic, there is no reason for me to write about it.
If you are interesting in the topic, just go read the (open
access) Perspectives column in the current NEJM:
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/359/2/113">Shuffling
toward Parity -- Bringing Mental Health Care under the Umbrella.
The column is short enough that there would not be any point in trying
to distill it any further. But I do want to make a couple of points, including a
mild-to-moderate quibble with one of the points mentioned:
Insurers…
j7uy5 | July 9, 2008Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital
reported, in the
href="http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7Edb=all%7Econtent=t768481832%7Etab=issueslist">Australian
and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, on a case of a person
with delusional beliefs regarding climate change.
There is no openly-accessible abstract, (the link to the paywall page
is
href="http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content%7Econtent=a791365692%7Edb=all%7Eorder=page">here)
so we have to make do with
href="http://www.anorak.co.uk/global-warming/185486.html">a
news report:
We describe a…
j7uy5 | July 7, 2008There is an interesting and thought-provoking essay at The Oil Drum.
It was written by
href="http://www.uvm.edu/giee/?Page=about/students/Nathan_Hagens.html&SM=about/about_menu.html">Nathan
Hagens, a student at the Gund Institute, University of
Vermont.
He makes some errors in the science, and engages in some armchair
hypothesizing (see graph above), but the overall conclusions are not
affected.
He romps through evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, and behavioral
neuroscience on his way to explaining why we have an addiction to oil.
It clearly is not intended to be a…
j7uy5 | July 6, 2008Responding
to the innate human desire to have the faster browser possible, I am
almost happy with Firefox 3. But not quite. Thus,
the
experiment: compile from source. This is accomplished as
follows:
0.
Kubuntu does not come with the packages necessary to build from source,
by default. You must install a bunch of stuff first.
Fortunately, this is easy. To install the
prerequisites
necessary to build Firefox from source, open a terminal and type:apt-get build-dep firefox
1. Download the Firefox source code
href="ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/linux-i686/en-…
j7uy5 | July 6, 2008
We decided to let one artichoke blossom, just to see what it looks
like. It turns out that it looks sort of like a thistle.
That's because it is a kind of thistle.
I hadn't known that. The thistle is the national
flower of Scotland.
j7uy5 | July 5, 2008Seems like everything is being made so you can attach an iPod.
Shown below is the
href="http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=204553512&adid=17070&dcaid=17070">George
Foreman iPod Grill. With
10-watt speaker.
How patriotic is that?
And what are we to make of one of the reviews posted at Buy.com?
I love George Foreman's products! I own all of the
grills, and I use them when I have small get togethers. They are great,
indoors and out. I usually only use one at a time, since my friends
don't really come to my parties. I don't know what that is about. I
used the George…
j7uy5 | July 5, 2008The League
of Conservation Voters is half-way through the process of
selecting the dozen worst environmental offenders in elected office.
Each election year, they select approximately 12
politicians to target for their campaign, in an effort to unseat, or
deny seats to, the politicians with the worst voting records on
environmental issues.
Last time (2006), the "dozen" (actually 15)
href="http://lcv.org/newsroom/press-releases/2006-dirty-dozen.html">included:Senators
George Allen (R-VA)
Rick Santorum (R-PA)
Jim Talent (R-MO)Representatives
Bob Beauprez (R-CO)
Katherine Harris (R-FL)…
j7uy5 | July 3, 2008At last, they are being honest with us: you
have no rights.
Attorney General said so. He admitted it.
So, at least he's honest. See his picture to the
right? Doesn't he look like an honest gentleman? He
is.
In a recent
href="http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hngKSYm06_-CQxF9Afx1X9j1urdQD91LS2V00">interview
with reporters, Mukasey stated that it is "necessary to put
in place regulations that will allow the FBI to transform itself as it
is transforming itself into an intelligence gathering organization."
Now, the AP is reporting some details of that transformation.
href="…
j7uy5 | July 1, 200840% of Internet users do not upgrade their browsers to the most secure
version. Internet Explorer users have the worst record, with
more than half having failed to update.
OK, people, do your patriotic duty and get with the upgrades!
Then we can see the National Threat Advisory go down to blue,
for the first time in history.
(source:
href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080701-40-of-surfers-dont-bother-with-browser-security-updates.html">Ars
Technica)
j7uy5 | July 1, 2008Leave it to the scientifically-minded among us to solve the world's
economic crisis. All it takes is an understanding of the
elements.
At this point, there is little doubt that a serious economic crisis
awaits the people of planet Earth.
The Bank
for International Settlements (BIS) released their
href="http://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2008e.htm">Annual
Report on 30 June 2008. The BIS, based in
Switzerland, is an organization of 55 central banks. It
href="http://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2008e8.htm">concludes:
In the aftermath of a long credit-driven boom, it
would not be…
j7uy5 | June 29, 2008
This is a photo of two White Storks, Ciconia ciconia, nesting atop a primary school chimney near the south coast of Portugal. The photo is by Valter Jacinto, and has a Creative Commons license. Link.
The White Stork is the national bird of Poland.
In the USA, we would never allow storks to nest at a primary school. It would offend the fundamentalists.
j7uy5 | June 29, 2008On 6 June 2008, the Federal Register in the USA
href="http://www.thefederalregister.com/d.p/2008-06-06-E8-12671">contained
a notice, that the Department of Homeland Security is
conducting a review. They are reviewing the National
Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP).
The Federation of American Scientists
href="http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2008/06/dhs_invites_public.html">points
out that DHS is soliciting public comment.
The NIPP is explained and documented at a DHS
href="http://www.dhs.gov/xprevprot/programs/editorial_0827.shtm">site.
one of the documents (1.3MB PDF) is…
j7uy5 | June 28, 2008Meteorology is outside of my usual topics for posting, but this
particular news item seems to have received little attention elsewhere: there is evidence that the jet streams are moving, systematically,
toward the poles.
The jet streams are high-altitude streams of air, about 7 to 16
kilometers over sea level. They blow air from west to east.
Jet streams are important factors in the causation of weather patterns.
Therefore, systematic changes in the jet streams are expected
to cause
changes in weather patterns. Now, we have evidence that the
jet streams are changing.
href="http://…