LeBron James, and the Tale of the Never Seen Dunk – Ball Don’t Lie – NBA – Yahoo! Sports
This is almost old news already, but I think it deserves some attention, as well as a permanent (relatively) spot on the web. When did Lebron turn into a big baby? Between his playoff run-and-hide and now this, where he can’t handle someone dunking on him.
This is absolutely no fun, and it falls right in line with a batch of childish behavior from LeBron James recently. And I’m not in line with those who are letting James slide for this or James’ refusal to meet the media or congratulate the Orlando Magic last month because “he hasn’t done anything wrong yet.”
They’re confusing “not doing anything wrong” with “meeting and far exceeding the hype that preceded his NBA career.” We should applaud his game, but to applaud him for merely not being a dingle berry doorknob is ridiculous. Nearly as ridiculous as substituting “dingle berry doorknob” for a curse word.
via LeBron James, and the Tale of the Never Seen Dunk – Ball Don’t Lie – NBA – Yahoo! Sports.
Everyone was willing to make an excuse of the playoff thing, but this is just dumb. I know Nike has made some statement amount “no videos” or something like that, but many witnesses say that they had no problem with the filming until Lebron got dunked on.
I really don’t get it. Lebron certainly appears to be more relaxed and fun-loving this. Is he getting uptight? Maybe this just shows that maybe NBA players should go to college and mature a little.
Essay – A Doctor by Choice, a Businessman by Necessity – NYTimes.com
An essay column in the New York Times discusses a personal reflection on money aspect of practicing medicine by Dr Sandeep Jalhar:
To meet the expenses of my growing family, I recently started moonlighting at a private medical practice in Queens. On Saturday mornings, I drive past Chinese takeout places and storefronts advertising cheap divorces to a white-shingled office building in a middle-class neighborhood.
I often reflect on how different this job is from my regular one, at an academic medical center on Long Island. For it forces me, again and again, to think about how much money my practice is generating.
via Essay – A Doctor by Choice, a Businessman by Necessity – NYTimes.com.
I sympathize with the feeling that one may have entered medicine hoping to not worry about money. Unfortunately, those days are gone… the age where doctor’s are paid enough so that they can just practice and not worry about money have been gone for a couple decades now.
I do think that the current fee-for-service system is sick, and really needs to be fixed. I know HMO’s got a bad name in the late 80s, early 90s, but I do feel that they are a much better financial structure than the system we have now. Obviously, I’m a little biased.
I’m pretty sure doctors in general will be happier that way. I know that there was a survey of Canadian doctors which showed surprisingly high satisfaction scores when compared to their salary. I’ll need to dig up to reference, I’ll update this post when I find it.
Testing Evolution’s Role in Finding a Mate – NYTimes.com
An article trying to interpret behavior while speed dating and making evolutionary interpretations. The epidemiologist part of me just cringes at the statement below. The method (randomization) is meaningless unless you have some grasp of the inclusion criteria and the potential biases introduced there. Specifically, are the type of men and women who speed-date different from the general population?
I think it is fair to say that most people have never speed-dated in their lives. If I could hazard a guess, I would also say that men who go speed-dating tend to be more shy, and women who speed-date tend to me more extroverted than average. (I know someone is going to hate me for making generalizations). I don’t know if these assumptions are true, but any report on science should at least acknowledge that the study has very little to do with “evolution” and is more something that is limited to speed-dating behavioral dynamics.
In recent years, the emergence of speed dating has given psychologists, economists and political scientists new ways to test this and other hypotheses about mating. Because participants can be randomly assigned to groups and have no prior information about other participants, three-minute speed-dating sessions are about as close to a controlled experiment as researchers are likely to get.
via Testing Evolution’s Role in Finding a Mate – NYTimes.com.
Well – Reasons Not to Panic Over a Painkiller – NYTimes.com
Some well reasoned advise regarding the recent federal advisory committee report on acetaminophen published in the New York Times health blog. I think the key points include the very low level of incidence, and the comparitively high level of side effects (although still low compared to how much it is used) of NSAIDs and Aspirin.
Few drugs are more ubiquitous than acetaminophen, the pain reliever found in numerous over-the-counter cold remedies and the headache drug Tylenol.
But last week, a federal advisory committee raised concerns about liver damage that can occur with overuse of acetaminophen, and the panel even recommended that the Food and Drug Administration ban two popular prescription drugs, Vicodin and Percocet, because they contain it.
The news left many consumers confused and alarmed. Could regular use of acetaminophen for pain relief put them at risk for long-term liver damage?
via Well – Reasons Not to Panic Over a Painkiller – NYTimes.com.
Science moves from the stacks to the Web; print too pricey – Ars Technica
Article from Ars Technica, discussing the move to digital archiving. Personally, I would love it if people would stop sending me dead trees and just give me an option for online subscriptions for my journals…
Last week, the head of the US branch of Oxford University Press noted an event that was striking, if unsurprising. When grading an assigned paper, a Columbia University professor found that the majority of his students had cited an obscure work of literary criticism that was roughly a century old. The reason? Because the work was in Google Book Search, while much other (more recent) work was not.
The relative invisibility of offline information has an impact on almost all areas of life, but it’s felt especially acutely in the academic world, where work builds on the existing body of knowledge. Getting all of that dead-tree information onto the Internet (or into archives like J-Stor) would be of tremendous utility to scholars and students, but convenience isn’t the only reason for digital distribution of academic work. A recent decision by a prominent academic publisher to switch to digital-only distribution was apparently motivated by simple economics: print no longer made financial sense.
via Science moves from the stacks to the Web; print too pricey – Ars Technica.
A Day in the Life of 3G – PC World
A Day in the Life of 3G – PC World.
Finally, a good article that tests 3G networks across multiple cities in an objective manner. Of course, you can still have some local street-by-street variation and indoor-outdoor variation, but I am impresed by their methodology.
And the results?
chart - 3g speed and reliability results by city
Testing Results in a Nutshell
In Novarum’s tests for us, Verizon Wireless demonstrated a good mix of speed and reliability. Across more than 20 testing locations in each of the 13 cities we tested, Verizon had an average download speed of 951 kbps. Verizon demonstrated good reliability, too; the network was available at a reasonable and uninterrupted speed in 89.8 percent of our tests.
Sprint’s 3G network delivered a solid connection in 90.5 percent of our 13-city tests. Sprint’s average download speed of 808 kbps across 13 cities wasn’t flashy (at that speed, a 1MB file downloads in 10 seconds), but dependability is an important asset. The Sprint network performed especially well, both in speed and in reliability, in our test cities in the western part of the United States.
The AT&T network’s 13-city average download speed in our tests was 812 kbps. Its average upload speed was 660 kbps. Reliability was an issue in our experience of the AT&T system: Our testers were able to make a connection at a reasonable, uninterrupted speed in only 68 percent of their tests.
Somewhat surprisingly, our testers also found that the “bars of service” readings on their phones were rarely an accurate predictor of the quality of the ensuing connection. In most places and with most wireless providers, the “bars” did little more than indicate whether the phone had access to some service or to no service. (See “What Do Bars Say About Your Connection?“)
Doctors and the potential pitfalls of an online presence : White Coat Underground
Everyone who uses the internet leaves some sort of footprint, even if it’s just a string of visited addresses. This presence is magnified if you’ve ever been in the news, been listed on a website (e.g., as faculty), or if you write a blog. Social networking sites such as facebook and Twitter add a whole new dimension of online presence. Everyone should be concerned about what their online presence says about them (if your public Amazon wish list is full of sex toys, for example…) but physicians should have special concerns which fall into some broad categories. First, we’ll briefly discuss types of online presence.
via Doctors and the potential pitfalls of an online presence : White Coat Underground.
I well written article reviewing some of the concerns of medical blogging. I know that I write this blog fully aware that a patient or potential or current employer may see it. I don’t mind them seeing that I can be silly, but you have to be careful want you rant about…
It helps to have a pretty common name….
The Top 10 Michael Jackson Acapellas: Pics, Videos, Links, News
These are really cool. They’re acapella versions of Michael Jackson’s songs. It’s like listening to MJ in a totally new way. My personal favorite is definitely “I’ll Be There.” His older stuff sounds amazing.
link to Buzzfeed. With a hat-tip to Bing Shen through his Google Reader Shared feed.
HealthDay – Even After Death, Heart Attack Treatment May Not End
Too often, EMS crews feel obliged to bring unresponsive patient to hospital, study finds
Quote and Link below
In the United States, paramedics treat almost 300,000 people with cardiac arrest each year. But despite what’s portrayed on TV, fewer than 8 percent survive, according to the American Heart Association.
The association’s guidelines include the recommendation that people who have not responded to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and advanced cardiac life support in the field not be taken to a hospital. After paramedics have tried and failed to resuscitate a patient, they should stop, researchers say.
“Paramedics provide all the same lifesaving procedures that we can provide in the emergency department,” said the study’s lead researcher, Dr. Comilla Sasson, Robert Wood Johnson clinical scholar and clinical lecturer in emergency medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School.
“Once you have done 20 to 30 minutes of cardiac resuscitation, the best practice guidelines are to cease if a patient does not have a pulse,” she said. But the study, published online June 30 in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, found that several factors inhibit this from happening, including:
via HealthDay.
Most of the time when I get a patient like this, I find that the patient is ready to be declared dead within a couple minutes of arrival, but one is afraid the family will feel that no attempt was made if one stops that quickly. The paperwork and burden of telling the family then falls on the ER doctor, who honestly knows very little about the case other than what the paramedics just told him. I’m not sure what is the best option for this, but these cases can lead to significant crowding and disrupt the flow of the Emergency Department, and it would certainly be nice if they weren’t brought to the Department if it is not necessary.
The Rock « WhiteCoat’s Call Room
This is a nice story, even though I doubt the story since I have yet to meet a philosophy professor who gives life-advice like this…
A philosophy professor stood before his class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks about 2″ in diameter.
He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.
So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the rocks.
He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.
The professor picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else.
He then asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with an unanimous — yes.
The professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and proceeded to pour their entire contents into the jar — effectively filling the empty space between the sand.
The students laughed.
“Now,” said the professor, as the laughter subsided, “I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The rocks are the important things – your family, your spouse, your health, your children – things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else. The small stuff.”
“If you put the sand into the jar first,” he continued, “there is no room for the pebbles or the rocks. The same goes for your life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your husband or wife out dancing. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, give a dinner party and fix the disposal.”
“Take care of the rocks first — the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.”
One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the beer represented.
The professor smiled. “I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of beers.”
