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Sunday, March 7, 2010
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Tuesday, February 23, 2010
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Friday, February 19, 2010
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Wednesday, February 17, 2010
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Thursday, February 11, 2010
May 2008
Generations
First: AT’s Grandmother
Second: AT’s Mother
Third: AT
Fourth: sg
Fifth: AT (looking like her daughter) with her Brother, MT





Monkeys Control a Mechanical Arm With Their Thoughts - NYTimes.com
Shared by aquariumdrinker
Can the revolution be far behind?
Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.
EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect
Shared by aquariumdrinker
Whew. $10 saved.
INDIANA JONES REVIEW.
That was the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen.
THE REAL MEDICAL MALPRACTICE PROBLEM: MEDICAL MAPRACTICE.
Maggie Mahar has a great post on movements in medical malpractice, and the beginnings of a change from the traditional “deny and defend” strategy towards disclosure and, yes, apologies. The problem is, a more open approach to medical malpractice suits might mean more of them get filed. The medical malpractice problem is not, as some would have you believe, solely in the courts. It’s on the operating tables. Take this study from the Harvard School of Public Health (as Maggie notes, “this is not a cabal representing lawyers who should be sitting on the bottom of the ocean. These researchers are interested in our health as a nation.”), which found:
• “The great majority of patients who sustain a medical injury as a result of negligence do not sue.” Indeed, the New York Times reports, although “recent studies have found that one of every 100 hospital patients suffers negligent treatment, and that as many as 98,000 die each year as a result … only a small fraction of injured patients — perhaps 2 percent—press legal claims.)
• “Just 1.1 percent of all doctors accounted for 30 percent of all malpractice payments made between 1990 and 2002, while only 5.2 percent of doctors were responsible for 55 percent of all payouts.” A very small group of doctors are losing or settling malpractice lawsuits, but they are losing big.
• “Eighty percent of claims involved injuries that caused significant or major disability (39 percent and 15 percent, respectively) or death (26 percent).”
The problem isn’t malpractice lawsuits, but the mistakes that lead to them. I’m sympathetic to doctors who don’t want to be punished for human error, but I’m also sympathetic to patients who’ve been grievously injured because they trusted doctors to avoid major errors. In our system, such trust is all too frequently grievously misplaced. But trying to deal with this on the legal end, either by toughening the circumstances under which patients can sue or simply increasing disclosure and easing the path to restitution, is getting it exactly backwards. The suits aren’t the problem, the mistakes are the problem.
Surgical checklists, health information technology systems, better nurse staffing ratios, better sanitation, and a hose of other initiatives could be deployed to cut down on medical errors. As I’ve written in the past, various systems have pursued quality control programs and seen errors and suits drop precipitously. A national strategy to fund such programs more widely would be a wise response. But thinking about these lawsuits is perverse. In 99 percent of the cases, there’s a medical tragedy at the center of the suit, and that, not the legal process it engenders, is what we need to attack.
Related: My Slate article on The Medical Malpractice Myth.
YouTube - Sturgess Fillmore Presents... ATLANTA!
This film was created in 50 hours as a part of the 2008 Rapid i Movement Film Competition. It won 1st Place and will be seen at the 2008 Atlanta Film Festival.
Hope you had a good weekend
We did! Here’s a couple of photos of sg toddling.


Crazy
Apparently this post was a little more opaque than I’d thought, and requires a bit of explanation. See, the quoted blurb is something I ran across while researching an abandoned and unclaimed property statute, and describes the holding in a case. And I think it’s safe to say that this case is what you will want to cite when a crazy person leaves a bucket of cash on your doorstep and then wants it back six months and one day later.
I was trying to explain this to AT last night (“See, this lady was nuts, right? And she had a basket of cash - I don’t know why. I don’t know why the crazy lady had a basket of cash, but that’s not important. Well, it isn’t important for the point of the story. That she left it on these people’s porch. Because they were aiming a satellite at her family. I don’t know. It doesn’t say. It doesn’t matter whether it was a good satellite or a bad satellite.”) and I realized that I needed to know more.
If you, like me, thirst for education on this very, very niche question of law, read on. Below is the judge’s opinion in the matter.
continue reading… »Obama and Appallachia
Very interesting report from Al-Jazeera. It’s hard to imagine an American news outlet’s report cutting so deep:
This is obviously an awkward subject. Hillary Clinton and her supporters haven’t wanted to acknowledge that their ranks have, to some extent, been swelled by racism. At the same time, insofar as Obama looks likely to lose a substantial number of voters purely because of race that is a real, if unseemly, tactical objection to giving him the nomination.












