Statesman vs. politician

"What is the difference between a politician and a statesman? Here are some answers: (1) A politician thinks of the next election, a statesman thinks of the next generation. (2) A politician thinks of himself first, a statesman thinks of the country first. (3) Anyone elected to office is a politician; a statesman promotes the public good with integrity. Statesmanship conveys a quality of leadership that organically brings people together; and of eldership, a spirit of caring for others and for the whole. (4) A statesman is ever governed by the following principle: I must do what is best for the people as a whole. His job is political probity, even though he may face horrible conditions for carrying it out. (5) A politician makes the possible necessary, while a statesman makes the necessary possible. (6) And my favorite of all: A politician talks the talk; a statesman walks the walk."

From

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20090905-223616/The-statesman-and-the-retreatant

Nurse Anesthetists want to "fly solo."

Flawed data - nurse anesthetists are given the least risky cases, and even more so when they are practicing solo. Less sick patients will always do better.TE See the editorial in the NYT. No Harm to Patients From Unsupervised Nurse Anesthetists, Study Finds Medscape Medical News , 2010-08-06

August 6, 2010 — Allowing certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) to provide anesthesia without physician supervision resulted in no evidence of increased inpatient deaths or complications, a new study published in the August issue of Health Affairs found.

The analysis of Medicare data for 1999 to 2005, encompassing more than 481,000 hospitalizations, found that allowing CRNAs to work independently without oversight by an anesthesiologist or surgeon had little or no effect on mortality and morbidity rates.

Authors Brian Dulisse and Jerry Cromwell, health economists at the Research Triangle Institute in Waltham, Massachusetts, recommended that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) permit the nation's 37,000 nurse anesthetists to work independently without first requiring state governments to formally petition for an exemption, as 14 states have already done. "This would free surgeons from the legal responsibility for anesthesia services provided by other professionals. It would also lead to more cost-effective care as the solo practice of CRNAs increases," the authors said.

The research was funded by the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists (AANA), which applauded the study. "Since the late 1990s, we've been on record calling for the elimination of supervision for nurse anesthetist services," AANA President-Elect Paul Santoro, CRNA, MS, told Medscape Medical News. "This antiquated regulation places undue costs on the healthcare system. Local institutions should be free to decide for themselves. This study confirms our position and is supported by several previous studies."

In a blistering response posted on its Web site yesterday, the American Society of Anesthesiologists said theHealth Affairs study "is an advocacy manifesto masquerading as science and does a disservice to the public. It makes dangerous public policy recommendations on the basis of inadequate data, flawed analysis and distorted facts."

CMS reimbursement rules prohibited payments to CRNAs unless they are supervised by either an anesthesiologist or the surgeon. In 2001, CMS issued a rule that states could seek an exemption from the oversight rule.

By 2005, 14 governors in mostly rural states were granted permission to opt out of the supervision requirement. "Solo practice by CRNAs is especially important in rural areas, where anesthesiologists are in short supply," Dulisse and Cromwell write.

The authors used Medicare inpatient (part A) and carrier (part B) data to study inpatient mortality and complications. It included 481,440 hospitalizations, of which 68,744 were in states that opted out of the supervision requirement.

They found that the proportion of surgeries performed in which anesthesia was administered by CRNAs without supervision increased by 5 percentage points in both opt-out and non-opt-out states.

"Despite the shift to more anesthetics performed by nurse anesthetists, no increase in adverse outcomes was found.... In fact, declining mortality was the norm," they said. "The mortality rate for the nurse anesthetist solo group was lower than for the anesthesiologist solo group.

"These results do not support the hypothesis that allowing states to opt out of the supervision requirement resulted in increased surgical risks to patients. Nor do the results support the claim that patients will be exposed to increased risk as a consequence of more nurse anesthetists' practicing without physician supervision," they concluded.

The American Society of Anesthesiologists said the study "reflects the weaknesses of billing data when used to make an assessment of safety and quality." The data do not distinguish between complications resulting from surgery or anesthesia, nor do they discriminate between conditions existing before surgery and those resulting from surgical or anesthetic care.

"The existing Medicare policy requiring physician supervision of nurse anesthesia is rooted in the overwhelming preference of patients, particularly Medicare beneficiaries, for a physician to be responsible for their anesthesia care. Suggesting that this patient preference be pushed aside on the basis of flimsy analytics is irresponsible," said the statement from the American Society of Anesthesiologists.

NYTimes: Your Own Hot Spot, and Cheap

Mifi - the wave of the future. "If Virgin can make money from this, it boggles the mind how overpriced the competition is". A credit-card-sized, $40-a-month portable wifi. Pretty cool. Read how incredulous David Pogue is as he describes it. TE

STATE OF THE ART: Your Own Hot Spot, and Cheap

Virgin Mobile's MiFi is nearly like the ones offered by Sprint and Verizon but with three exceptions: an unlimited data plan, no contract and a $40-a-month service fee.

http://nyti.ms/cx3wIj

Sarcopenia: Doctors Seek Way to Treat Muscle Loss

"At this point, what we can say is that older people are at risk for eating too little protein for adequate muscle preservation"

Doctors Seek Way to Treat Muscle Loss

Why muscles wither is captivating more scientists and drug and food companies, let alone aging baby boomers.

http://nyti.ms/cFu2ew

NYTimes: Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

I have always recalled events and topography in terms of cardinal directions. In fact, I've convinced myself on occasion that I can recall a vague memory better if I am facing in the same direction as when the event took place. I always just thought it was an oddity, but this essay describes a few scattered cultures where cardinal directions are a huge part of language, memory, and hence the speakers' experience of the world.
The essay also talks about how the gender assigned in some European languages influences native speakers' mental picture of those items - 'bridge' is masculine in Spanish, where bridges are associated with strength, but feminine in German where they are considered slender and elegant.
Mother tongue doesn't prevent our understand of concepts, but gives us a predisposition to think about concepts in a particular way: "if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about." TE

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

The idea that your mother tongue shapes your experience of the world may be true after all.

http://nyti.ms/9wCGNR

Cool hand

The Leidenfrost effect - a thin veil of protective gas forms at an interface between liquid and an object that is well above its melting point.

Here's an image (and a video, next, below) of a hand being dipped directly into liquid nitrogen for an instant.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid89176697001?bctid=595188459001

And here's a video of a hand being dipped into molten lead.

Safeway's massive warehouse

Dropped Pin (click on satellite view)

Here's the location of the Safeway warehouse for the Seattle area. I passed it on the train this morning. It's massive, and hundreds of trucks were busily loading and unloading at 0630. This warehouse probably services a few million people.

Facebook...pros and cons

I had occasion today to re-examine the benefits and dangers of facebook. I recognize, and am constantly told that it is beneficial and everyone is using it, and it allows connection on an unprecedented level, that people can share ideas that spread like wildfire and connect over the things they like. Here are some recent New York Times articles pointing out the pros and cons of facebook. It seems that having a large number of people whom you may not know access your information can lead to problems down the line, with recruiters, employers, etc. And having murky obligations to people because they are a ‘friend’ or are ‘unfriended’ can make relationships unnecessarily complicated.

-Friends, Until I Delete You

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/fashion/29facebook.html?scp=3&sq=facebook%20unfriend&st=cse

deleting friends does not generate a notification of any sort, leaving members to discover they’ve been unfriended only when they find they no longer have access to someone’s profile. It can be a jarring experience, especially considering that the person who dumped you at some point either requested you as a friend or accepted your request …

While many trivial actions do prompt Facebook to post an alert to all your friends… striking someone off your list simply is not one of them.

…Of course, not all unfriendings are equal. There seem to be several varieties, ranging from the completely impersonal to the utterly vindictive.

…On Facebook, as in life, no unfriending is as fraught with pitfalls as the one you really mean.

…The two had a falling out …During an emotional late-night moment, she clicked the “remove”…“Now I really, really regret it”

+In India, Using Facebook to Catch Scofflaw Drivers

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/technology/02traffic.html?ref=facebook_inc

… two months ago, and almost immediately residents became digital informants, posting photos of their fellow drivers violating traffic laws

… acknowledged that it was possible photos could be manipulated to incriminate someone who was not actually breaking the law. But, he said, drivers can contest the tickets if they think they were wrongly issued. The police advise residents not to let personal animosity influence their photo-taking, and not to do anything to compromise their own security, like antagonizing law-breakers while snapping photos.

-Price of Facebook Privacy? Start Clicking

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/technology/personaltech/13basics.html?_r=1

Which is longer, the United States Constitution or Facebook’s Privacy Policy? -the latter

The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons.

-Germany Plans Limits on Facebook Use in Hiring

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/business/global/26fbook.html?scp=3&sq=facebook&st=cse

the German government on Wednesday proposed placing restrictions on employers who want to use Facebook profiles when recruiting…

There are currently no rules governing how companies use Facebook data…

-How to Use Facebook’s New Location Feature

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/how-to-use-facebooks-new-location-feature/?scp=15&sq=facebook&st=cse

Apple has built impressive location detection into its newer iPhones. They have GPS, plus they sniff the air for local Wi-Fi network names and compare them to a map of known network locations…

Facebook will query your iPhone for its location, and prompt you with a list of nearby places that it knows… Tap the screen to set your location, and all your Facebook friends will be able to see…

Second, Facebook Places lets you see where your friends are. …iPhone app will pop up a list of who else is nearby…The end goal is obvious: You can contact and meet up with friends who are near you.

Here are the two issues that will surely bother the most people: First, if you are at a location but have not checked in, Facebook friends at the same location can check you in themselves

-How to Hide From Friends You Don’t Like

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/how-to-hide-from-friends-you-dont-like/?scp=33&sq=facebook&st=cse

…it’s inevitable that you’ll be friended by someone you know, but with whom you don’t want to share your online life… how do you avoid them without the awkwardness of unfriending them?

Facebook has made it easy to hide other members’ status updates…

When you write a status update of your own, look for the lock-shaped icon below and to the right of the text input box…There are two ways to exclude people.

+The Language of Fakebook

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/fashion/15Culture.html?ref=facebook_inc

Lauren Mechling and Laura Moser have been writing a clever serialized novel on Slate called “My Darklyng.”Their innovation: the plot unfolds not just in text but on Facebook and Twitter.

…[it] offers a brilliant commentary on how fictional teenagers are on Facebook…A 14-year-old I talked to about this sent me a message that pretty much sums it up: “I write more enthusiastically on Facebook than I actually am in real life. Like if I see something remotely funny I might say ‘HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA,’ when really there is no expression on my face.”

…Facebook gives the exhibitionism, the pure theater of those years, a whole other level of stage.

…You can find polite little girls cursing like sailors on Facebook. Everything is louder, more ardent, capitalized. This is a way of dramatizing or raising the stakes on even the most inane or banal exchange

…Being “friends” on Facebook is more of a fantasy or imitation or shadow of friendship than the traditional real thing. Friendship on Facebook bears about the same relation to friendship in life, as being run over by a car in a cartoon resembles being run over by a car in life. Facebook is friendship minus the one on one conversation, minus the moment alone at a party in a corner with someone

…Somewhere in the gap between status posting and the person [they are] in their room at night is life itself. So fiction is the right response, the right commentary, the right point to be making about who we are in these dangerously consuming media, in these easy addictive nano-connections.

-The Web Means the End of Forgetting

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html?ref=facebook_inc

we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities… In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten…the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past…far from giving us a new sense of control over the face we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.

a photo …showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor …said she was promoting drinking… As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree.

Sued that…violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech…A challenge of…how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever.

Other examples: 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”

Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away …[for] an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D.

U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research …— including search engines, social-networking sites…Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online

the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.

A Manhattan woman…she was afraid of being tagged in online photos because it might reveal that she wears only two outfits when out on the town…“You have movie-star issues,” she said, “and you’re just a person.”

Last December, the company announced that parts of user profiles that had previously been private — including every user’s friends, relationship status and family relations — would become public

In February, the European Union helped finance a campaign called “Think B4 U post!” that urges young people to consider the “potential consequences” of publishing photos of themselves or their friends without “thinking carefully” and asking permission.

Those who think that their online reputations have been unfairly tarnished by an isolated incident or two now have a practical option: consulting a firm like ReputationDefender, which promises to clean up your online image.

Web. 3.0 — a world in which user-generated content is combined with a new layer of data aggregation… For example, the Facebook application Photo Finder, by Face.com, uses facial-recognition … to allow you to locate any photo of yourself or a friend on Facebook, regardless of whether the photo was “tagged” — that is, the individual in the photo was identified by name. At the moment, Photo Finder allows you to identify only people on your contact list, but [will soon] almost certainly challenge our expectation of anonymity in public.

an exclusive bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, requires potential members to sign an agreement promising not to blog about the bar’s goings on or to post photos on social-networking sites

[future legal options:] laws forbidding people to breach confidences could be expanded to allow you to sue your Facebook friends if they share your embarrassing photos or posts in violation of your privacy settings.

experiments about the “decay time” … of good and bad information — in other words, whether people discount positive information about you more quickly and heavily than they discount negative information about you. His research group’s preliminary results suggest that if rumors spread about something good you did 10 years ago, like winning a prize, they will be discounted; but if rumors spread about something bad that you did 10 years ago, like driving drunk, that information has staying power.

What people seem to want is not simply control over their privacy settings; they want control over their online reputations… of course, an unrealistic fantasy.

but a humane society values privacy, because it allows people to cultivate different aspects of their personalities in different contexts

Truck vs Bridge Fail

Always check the rear of your vehicle in the mirror when driving a truck...

Whoops! The 10 Greatest (Accidental) Inventions of All Time

Microwave, superglue, saccharin, Teflon ...

http://m.gizmodo.com/5620910/whoops-the-10-greatest-accidental-inventions-of-all-time

http://www.newsweek.com/photo/2010/08/31/famous-accidental-discoveries.html?gt1=43002

Racine house

NYTimes: A Box of Fresh Air

"...required that the house be evaluated for air tightness. An inspector trained a blower on the facade and gauged how much air passed through it..."If it were any tighter, when you open the doors, the toilets would flush." "

ON LOCATION: A Box of Fresh Air

In Racine, Wis., a climate-controlled structure of glass, steel and concrete offers a sweeping view of Lake Michigan — and the future.

http://nyti.ms/cCs05O

NYTimes: What Do Girls Want?

Where 20-somethings shop.

FALL FASHION: What Do Girls Want?

A few fashion Web sites seem to have figured out what the young shopper is looking for today.

http://nyti.ms/9Z3oAO

NYTimes: The New Coffee Bars: Unplug, Drink, Go

This article makes a point about a trend at cafes: getting rid of the expectation that the expensive price of a cup of coffee entitles you to free wifi for your laptop. Instead, in the Italian tradition, how about a quick gulp of latté at a barstool, sans table or laptop makes for cheaper coffee. A key social observation in the article: "Tables create a feeling of territorialism" TE

The New Coffee Bars: Unplug, Drink, Go

The latest spots want customers to leave their laptops at home.

http://nyti.ms/9w881A

New Biofuel Cell Demonstrated; Could Be Filled With Sugary Soft Drinks to Power Devices | Popular Science

Finally, someone's found a safe way to provide mobile energy i.e. non-nuclear, non-fossil fuel : New Biofuel Cell Demonstrated; Could Be Filled With Sugary Soft Drinks to Power Devices

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-08/new-biofuel-cell-could-power-devices-sugary-soft-drinks