Science, Technology & Health: July 2006 Archives
In light (heh) of the recent power outages I'm thinking of buying a generator for backup power at our new house. Does anyone have experience with these who can make a recommendation? Some questions:
- Do I want diesel or gasoline? I don't want to have to mix oil, so a two-stroke is out. How do I store the fuel? In the basement? There are some generators that run on natural gas, but then I'd have to connect to the gas somehow.
- What brands are good?
- How large of a model do I need? This will obviously depend on what I want to run. Computers and the fridge should be less than 2KW, but I'm sure we'll want some lights also. How much power do air conditioners use? I bet quite a lot.
- Should I wire the generator directly into the house electricity, or just use an extension cord when needed?
- I bet generators are loud, but I'd be afraid to put one very far from the house because it might get stolen. Our neighbors wouldn't want the thing near them either, but I don't think it would be safe to run the generator in the basement without a lot of ventilation.
- Anything else I'm forgetting?
Here's an interesting website about Affect Control Theory, a field of study that attempts to understand how peoples' emotions shape their interactions, and how people shape their emotions to fit into their perceived roles.
Affect Control Theory proposes that:- Individuals conduct themselves so as to generate feelings appropriate to the situation.
- Individuals who can't maintain appropriate feelings through actions change their views of the situation.
- Individuals' emotions signal the relationship between their experiences and their definitions of situations.
Here's a subpage with some interactive tools you can use to test ACT scenarios with various actors. This is new to me, but interesting enough to explore. Make sure you read some of the introduction information or you'll have a hard time figuring out what is going on.
Here's a great resource for anyone interested in multiagent systems. There are links to software packages and a lot of theoretical work as well.
Also check out Agent Land, a site devoted to commercial and freeware software agents that perform a wide variety of tasks.
Which two American institutions are the among most expensive and least effective? Public education below the university level is clearly the first, strangled by a governmental near-monopoly, and William Tucker explains how American health care is similarly impeded by regulation.
A complicated system of mutual dependency distorts the incentives. "The FDA is like the FCC and Big Pharma is like the regional Bells" is what Mr. Kessler hears from Don Listwin, a former Cisco executive who now heads the Canary Foundation, a Silicon Valley-based effort to promote preventive medicine. In other words, in medicine as in telecom, the big players end up exploiting regulations more than opposing them, if only to preserve their monopolies. The Food and Drug Administration--understandably but narrow-mindedly--wants "cures" for cancer and other diseases. Thus tens of thousands of chemicals are screened, only a handful make it even to Phase I trials, and by the time a new drug is approved a billion dollars has been spent. Even then the new drug may help only 10% of patients.Yet if someone were to invent a device with a wide, preventive usefulness--say, a nanotech implant that would spot the proteins that indicate the first minute presence of cancer--it would have to go through the same process of billion-dollar testing. Since the government and insurance companies are reluctant to add anything to their repertoire of coverage--and since such a device would be targeted at the much broader pool of people who are not sick--research might well stall in its earliest phases for lack of reimbursement-funding. ...
In one hilarious sequence, Mr. Kessler recounts trying to draw his own blood sample, in the hope of checking his cholesterol. But clinics won't draw blood without a doctor's orders. Drugstores think you want the syringe to shoot heroin. Unless you want to just gouge your own finger, you're in the clutches of organized medicine. Imagine how tightly it grips something a bit more sophisticated.
As I wrote earlier about America's health care problem:
Rather than require all practicing physicians to be certified by a government-approved authority, the government should simply require that physicians disclose their credentials and leave the certifications to private organizations (as is done in most professional fields). This would open the door for thousands of lower-cost, lower-skill physicians who would be more than able to treat common maladies like colds and broken bones. You don't need an MD to set a broken arm, so why should you have to pay for one? Because currently the government says so. Medication is similar. Consumers need the government to ensure that drug companies disclose all the potential side-effects of their products, but we don't need the FDA to tell us what we can and can't put in our bodies if we're willing to take known risks.
In the attempt to protect us from ourselves, the government stifles medical innovation and restricts the market, driving costs up and severely limiting the options available for treatments of every sort of illness.
