Monthly Archives: March 2010

Doctors CANNOT Use 23andMe Due To 23andMe’s Bad Faith Contract

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If I had my way, every primary care patient in my office would have a genomic test. But, I can’t: the 23andMe contract explicitly forbids its medical use.

Again: I run a medical office. I can’t even legally use my own 23andMe report in my own medical office for my own health —let alone endorse its use for patients.

Imagine this scenario: a patient comes into the medical office with a 23andMe report. The doctor uses the report to, for example, prescribe an alternative to Plavix because the patient is at risk for thrombosis but —like 17% of people and as warned by the FDA— the patient does not metabolize Plavix to its active form according to 23andMe.

BOOM! That patient coerced that doctor into malpractice liability. Section 3 of 23andMe Terms of Service: “The Services Content is not to be used, and is not intended to be used, by you or any other person to diagnose, cure, treat, mitigate, or prevent a disease or other impairment or condition, or to ascertain your health.”

The worst of this is that 23andMe ACTIVELY INSTRUCTS its users to violate this clause —not only personally, but to also implicate their medical doctors in crime.

And the doctor is trapped: he can respect the law and alienate the patient, or ignore the law and appease the patient.

That’s your “health empowerment revolution”: more kafkaesque legal games, more parasitic licensing contests, more marketing, more wasteful testing, and more money to a few celebrities while the people who actually learn the science and do the work get the blame and the bill.

You know, I’m all for the hacker ethic. But if you hack the system, it has to be for the greater good —the greater system. Otherwise, that hack is just called “evil” —and that’s what this entire 23andMe adventure looks like to me: garden-variety, ordinary, boring, stupid evil.

23andMe: We trusted you with beautiful work, and you mashed it into useless noise. That’s the real crime here.

In fact, that’s why I’m in this horrible business of medical practice management at all. Years ago, I trusted you to do the right thing. I thought that genomics would be obvious common practice for sure, and I wanted to be there when it was. But no. You had to play popular and fuck it up for everybody.

Car collides with school bus in mid-NJ, killing Camry driver, hurting … – Los Angeles Times

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The Star-Ledger - NJ.com
Car collides with school bus in mid-NJ, killing Camry driver, hurting ...
Los Angeles Times
... High School students on the bus suffered minor injuries. Investigators believe Draiss may have suffered some type of medical problem before the collision.
Somerset man killed in crash with Hillsborough school busThe Star-Ledger - NJ.com
Report: Student injured in school bus accidentphillyBurbs.com
3 injured in central NJ school bus accidentDailyrecord.com
NJ.com -myCentralJersy.com
all 153 news articles »

Earth Hour 2010

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This is one of the official Earth Hour videos for this year.  Here is the Earth Hour website.

Earth Hour is next week, March 27th.  Last year I didn’t think much of this event and I still don’t, but this year I’m going to turn my lights off and take my dog for a walk, (which I do every night anyway) during Earth Hour  — and see how many lights are on.  I might even take a few photos of a dark street, which shouldn’t be too hard to find.  My city is in debt, like a lot of U.S. cities, and they are turning off street lights to save money.   I can actually see the stars at night in some neighborhoods.   Light pollution is down because of the bad economy.  That’s good, but the reason for it isn’t.   I also see, from the official site, that Wells Fargo Bank is a “featured corporate partner” in Earth Hour.  There is a Wells Fargo Bank on my walking route and they leave most of their lights on all night, lighting up the entire block.   I will report right here whether they turned off all of their lights or not.*   (Want to make any bets?)

Turning off lights for one hour is great, but it’s not going to stop global warming.  The purpose of the event is to raise awareness.  The official website writes:

The movement symbolizes that by working together, each of us can make a positive impact in this fight, protecting our future and that of future generations.

Overall, there can be some unintentional messages with events like this.   Turning lights off for one hour while coal plants are belching out toxic pollution and smog settles over our cities for another evening  seems pretty lightweight to me.   I hope no ones gets the idea that turning off their  lights for one hour is where it stops.  Earth Hour should involve some sort of climate action like shutting down a coal plant for an hour.  Civil disobedience (as advocated by James Hansen and Al Gore) should probably be a part of any real future Earth Hours, because we are running out of time to stop global warming.   Or,  Earth Hour should spur people to action in whatever way they can contribute, but it should be a way of life, something that people do all the time, even if it’s just talking to people about climate change.  There is a big lack of knowledge in the U.S. about what climate change is.  Everyone, no matter who you are, can help to change that.

In addition, driving around to get photos to upload, and then turning on computers all over the world to upload these photos uses energy.  Probably more than what would be used if this event wasn’t going on. In other words, what is the carbon footprint of this event?  (We will never know, because no one is measuring it.)

After Earth Hour is over, [...]

NCBI ROFL: Double feature: foot in the door and door in the face techniques. | Discoblog

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175202206_67e00d2792Foot-in-the-door technique using a courtship request: a field experiment.

“‘Foot-in-the-door’ is a well-known compliance technique which increases compliance to a request. Many investigations with this paradigm have generally used prosocial requests to test its effect. Evaluation of the effect of foot-in-the-door was carried out with a courtship request. 360 young women were solicited in the street to accept having a drink with a young male confederate. In the foot-in-the-door condition, before being solicited to have a drink, the young woman was asked to give directions to the confederate or to give him a light for his cigarette. Analysis showed foot-in-the-door was associated with greater compliance to the second request.”

foot_in_door

Door-in-the-face technique and monetary solicitation: an evaluation in a field setting.

“To test the door-in-the-face technique for a private solicitation, 53 men and 37 women in several bars were engaged. In one condition, a female confederate asked the subject to buy her drink because her boyfriend had left without paying the bill. After the subject refused, the confederate requested only 2 or 3 coins. In the control condition, the latter request was the only one. Analysis showed a dramatic increase in compliance for the door-in-the-face condition. A positive effect of the door-in-the-face technique was also observed for the average amount of the donation. The accentuation of the solicitor’s dependency in the door-in-the-face condition seemed relevant for explanation.”

door_in_face

Thanks to John for today’s ROFL!

Photo: flickr/AndrewEick

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Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Women’s bust size and men’s courtship solicitation.


Episode 10 – Focus on the Chocolate

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Next day, she stepped off the plane to a wall of flashing bulbs. The press were out in force, the photographers desperate to get the best picture of one of the most glamorous women to visit the city in – oh- days. The cult of celebrity really was getting out of hand, she mused behind the

Hubble 3D in IMAX: View of the Heavens in a Theater That’s Almost That Big | 80beats

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Launch up from your couch and voyage to the final frontier this weekend with Hubble 3D, a hi-tech piece of visual wizardry from Warner Bros, IMAX, and NASA. The movie tracks the efforts of the astronauts on board mission STS-125, who blasted off aboard space shuttle Atlantis last May to fix the Hubble Space Telescope. For this mission, as DISCOVER explained in a review of the movie, Atlantis carried not only its regular payload of new gear for the telescope, but also a 600-pound IMAX camera to record the orbital repair job in breathtaking detail.

Apart from replacing worn out equipment and upgrading the world’s largest telescope so that it could continue to send home breathtaking images of the universe, the astronauts also functioned as cinematographers, using only eight minutes of film to shoot the repair work. The film also takes viewers on a tour of the telescope’s most famous observations, and explains what the ’scope has revealed about such wonders as the stellar nurseries of the Orion nebula and our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda. Director Toni Meyers, whose credits include a 3-D documentary about the international space station, says: “I think there is a kind of innate curiosity in all of us and a thirst to travel to places that either we can’t go to or it’s extremely difficult to do so” [CNN].

Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, this interstellar ride allows viewers to watch crew members working on the open body of Hubble in space even as politicians on Earth debated the telescope’s future. The brisk 40-minute film is also interspersed with vignettes of the astronauts’ pre-launch training in a gigantic underwater repair station.

While the astronauts were confident about their roles aboard the space shuttle, they were nervous of their filmmaking duties. “We’re basically a bunch of knuckleheads,” said [astronaut Michael] Massimino, a graduate of Columbia University with a doctorate from MIT. “Just because you can walk in space and fly a space shuttle doesn’t mean you’ll remember to turn a camera on and off” [CNN]. But director Meyers was more confident about the crews’ directorial and acting talents. “The crew is very engaging, with wonderful personalities…. They really show the audience how difficult it is to do what they were faced with up there”[DISCOVER], she says.

The film opens today, March 19th, in some theaters, but more shows are expected to be added in April when Hubble celebrates its 20th anniversary. For crew members, Hubble 3D was an especially exciting opportunity as they could finally share what they see and do in space with the rest of the world. Astronaut Micheal Massimino, a veteran of two space-walks aboard Atlantis exclaimed: “I tell folks … if you’re in heaven, this is what you would see…. This is what heaven must look like. It’s beautiful” [CNN].

Here’s a look at the making of Hubble 3D.

Related Content:
80beats:Hubble Spies Baby Galaxies That Formed Just After the Big Bang
80beats: Prepare to Be Amazed: First Pics From the Repaired Hubble Are Stunning
80beats: Space Shuttle Grabs Hubble, and Astronauts Begin Repairs
80beats: Researchers Find First Picture of An Exoplanet! (In 11-Year-Old Hubble Data)
Cosmic Variance: Well, That Was Fast, on the upgraded Hubble’s initial data
Bad Astronomy: Hubble’s Back, and Spying on Wailing Baby Stars