Comment Re:Popular Java Myths (Score 2, Insightful) 171
In other words, Java is not one-size-fits-all, and all languages have tradeoffs.
Garbage collection is an amazingly boring field of computer science.
And so is , unless it isn't. Any time some one says, "X is boring," or, "X is interesting," that really means, "X is boring TO ME," or, "X is interesting TO ME." "Boring" or "interesting" is opinion. Personally, I find GC rather interesting, in particular the latest advances in real-time GC. I did compiler/programming languages work for my M.S., and I believe that most people would think that it is boring as well, but it is not to me.
It's all about tracking references
There is a lot more than that.
Diverting patients isn't all that surprising. Hospitals do it all the time whenever they reach capacity. It's called overflow and it's quite common. In this instance their capacity was diminished because their system was in the gutter.
Fixed that for you. No one was turned away that actually arrived.
"Turning away ambulances" (used both in TFA and its source article) tells me they were diverting even truly emergent cases.
The source article did not use this phrase. The summary and a blog about the event used the phrase. The source article said "on diversion", which means that ambulances, when given a choice, will go to a different hospital.
So I think turning non-critical patients away from a hospital that is backed up with paperwork could be a positively useful step toward protecting patient safety, if done for that reast. Obviously you would want to still admit someone who's in cardiac arrest. Something less serious like a broken leg could be safely rerouted to another hospital that's not overloaded. The patient might grumble but in fact he may very well get treatment sooner by taking a road trip to the next town.
You won't get turned away, you will simply be put at the bottom of the triage list, after being given the opportunity to leave of your own accord.
"But even leaving that aside - why do problems with paperwork make it necessary to turn away patients?"
Lawyers.
Actually, it sounds like they were not turning away people (not patients, they are not patients until they have entered care), but simply diverting them if they were in an ambulance. A walk-in can not be sent to another hospital in any reasonable time, which is why they were NOT turned away, but an ambulance can easily choose between hospitals. Ambulance diversions happen frequently, say to even patient loads or wait times, and it sounds like this was simple another diversion, albeit for an unusual reason. So, the lawyers had nothing to do with it.
They will not type in your company name in the URL bar and add
You would be surprised. Many people assume that will work, if they only go to sites where that works. Think eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, Target, Bank of America, Nike, and a million other national brands. It took me a year or so to stop my wife from doing that, and I only was able to convince her after she had tried that with a few companies where the rule didn't work. At first she simply treated those companies as individual exceptions. Why do you think that companies try to get company-name dot com? It's because a large fraction of people expect it.
If not, try a better antenna. If that doesn't work, then get upset. But at least wait until June 12 to write it off.
A loss of stations is a loss of stations. Many people do not want to spend money in order to keep something they already have.
Oh, and that is a mighty nice home you have. It would be a shame if something happened to it.
The original paper (at http://www.app.pan.pl/article/item/app54-213.html) basically says that the "osteological neutral pose" (ONP) (basically the pose where the bones make maximal contact with each other) is not necessarily the pose most commonly held. Apparently, the first and only good study of neck and tail position concluded that the then currently accepted pose was unlikely and that ONP was probable, and then every one else simply accepted that without further study.
The authors went looking at current animal poses and concluded two things. First, in modern animals, ONP is not always the pose held by default, and in fact assuming ONP as default in sauropods has some difficult-to-explain ramifications (though a vertical default does as well). Second, even if ONP is the default pose, there is generally much movement away from that pose for various activities in modern, like drinking and running, and so it is likely that sauropods had that too.
The authors also, of course, hedge their bets and say that their ideas may be totally off if there is something they aren't aware of, like specialized tendon structure for the neck or other such things.
In short: the authors say that the conclusion that sauropods have horizontal necks was based on assumptions that are unsound.
Oh, and TFA:
BRISBANE: The current depiction of the way giant sauropod dinosaurs held their necks is probably wrong, says a new study.
"For the last decade the reigning paradigm in palaeontology has been that the big sauropod dinosaurs held their necks out straight and their heads down low," said co-author Matt Wedel, who researches biomechanics at the Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California.
But "our research [now] suggests that this view of sauropods is simply incorrect, based on everything we know about living animals," he said.
Unrealistic posture
According to the report in the report in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, sauropods held their necks up in the same way as many living vertebrates, in a swan-like 's' curve, rather than in the horizontal pose commonly shown in everything from museum reconstructions to plastic toys.
For many decades, scientists supposed that sauropods had long necks so they could browse high in the treetops and depicted them, like giraffes, with their heads held high. But a 1999 Science paper led to a shift in the way sauropods were shown.
The authors of that paper argued that the habitual pose of an animal's neck could be easily found by lining up the vertebrae in maximum contact, which gave a horizontal pose for most sauropods. Estimates of blood pressure also suggested that it would have been very difficult for sauropods to pump their blood up to such a height.
Blood pressure problem
"The problem is, living animals don't hold their necks in that posture," Wedel said. After stumbling across a paper from the 1980s that showed that most land animals held their necks vertically, Wedel's team looked for clues to sauropod posture in X-rays of living animals.
They found that reptiles and amphibians held their necks mostly horizontally, while mammals and birds (which are more closely related to dinosaurs and share their upright leg structures) all held their necks vertically.
Studying the neck movements of living creatures also suggested that sauropods had a greater range of movement than previously thought.
While scientists had assumed that the dinosaur neck vertebrae overlapped each other by around 50%, that's not true for living creatures like ostriches and giraffes, which can extend their necks till the vertebrae hardly overlap at all.
Their method was so simple that the team was worried someone else would publish the findings before they could. "We did get a bit paranoid... it just seemed so obvious that if you want to know what extinct animals did, you should look at what living animals actually do," Wedel told Cosmos Online.
John Hutchinson, a biomechanics researcher at the University of London's Royal Veterinary College, in Britain, said that the study's methods had the advantage of being firmly grounded in actual observations of animal anatomy and behaviour, but there is still work to be done to confirm the findings.
"A conundrum that remains unresolved is how sauropods would have pumped blood to their heads if held so high," he said. "The blood pressures, and hence heart sizes, required are quite large."
According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless.
