The House Financial Services Committee has approved Rep. Ron Paul’s measure to drastically expand the government’s power to audit the Federal Reserve.
Demonstrating the efficacy (or lack thereof) of vaccine and antivirals during flu season would not be hard to do, given the proper resources. Take a group of people who are at risk of getting the flu, and randomly assign half to get vaccine and the other half a dummy shot. Then count the people in each group who come down with flu, suffer serious illness, or die. (A similarly designed trial would suffice for the antivirals.) It might sound coldhearted, but it is the only way to know for certain whether, and for whom, current remedies actually work.
In the absence of such evidence, we are left with two possibilities. One is that flu vaccine is in fact highly beneficial, or at least helpful. Solid evidence to that effect would encourage more citizens—and particularly more health professionals—to get their shots and prevent the flu’s spread. As it stands, more than 50 percent of health-care workers say they do not intend to get vaccinated for swine flu and don’t routinely get their shots for seasonal flu, in part because many of them doubt the vaccines’ efficacy. The other possibility, of course, is that we’re relying heavily on vaccines and antivirals that simply don’t work, or don’t work as well as we believe. And as a result, we may be neglecting other, proven measures that could minimize the death rate during pandemics.
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Announced today. I definitely support Obama's direction (see his remarkable Cairo speech from last June). I'd like to see faster resolution in Iraq and Afghanistan but I know it's a difficult situation. He didn't start the wars, so I give him credibility there.
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I've been less verbose than usual over the past two weeks: in fact, I didn't even email anyone except while at work. I've been on a two-week "computer fast" while at home after business hours, and it's been a neat experience.
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This is a fascinating new way to help groups make an honest valuation of something they will share: check if their brains say "that's fair" when they assign a price for their portion.
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I think this may be the first in a series of exciting milestones over the next 5 years: Nanosolar has opened its robotic manufacturing facility in Germany for mass-production of thin-film solar panels.
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Tomorrow is the AJAX conference in Boston where I and my colleagues from Getco will be learning about ways to improve our javascript and web interface style. If you're in the area, give me a tweet or an email!
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I rolled the experimental javascript "speed reading" code (that I wrote a couple of days ago) into a more polished Ubiquity command this evening. It's called "Eyes Like Lightning".
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I recently learned that the primary inhibitor for speeding up our reading is the mechanical movement of our eyes (saccades), so I had this idea to make the text move past your eyes rather than your eyes move past the text. The result is this little speed reading app I made in html/javascript. It's probably not original (I was influenced by other things I've seen, but can't recall where). Nevertheless, I thought you might like it too.
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