uarch - Slashdot User

Harvard Says Computers Don't Save Hospitals Money 398

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @03:28AM from the always-jam-tomorrow dept.

Lucas123 writes "Researchers at Harvard Medical School pored over survey data from more than 4,000 'wired' hospitals and determined that computerization of those facilities not only didn't save them a dime, but the technology didn't improve administrative efficiency either. The study also showed most of the IT systems were aimed at improving efficiency for hospital management — not doctors, nurses, and medical technicians. 'For 45 years or so, people have been claiming computers are going to save vast amounts of money and that the payoff was just around the corner. So the first thing we need to do is stop claiming things there's no evidence for. It's based on vaporware and [hasn't been] shown to exist or shown to be true,' said Dr. David Himmelstein, the study's lead author."

Plasma Device Kills Bacteria On Skin In Seconds 237

Posted by kdawson on Friday November 27, 2009 @02:39PM from the it's-a-dry-cold dept.

Ponca City, We love you writes "In medicine, plasma, the fourth state of matter, is already used for sterilizing surgical instruments; plasma works at the atomic level and is able to reach all surfaces, even the interior of hollow needle ends. Now the BBC reports that researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have demonstrated a plasma device that can rid hands, feet, or even underarms of bacteria, including the hospital superbug MRSA, by creating cold atmospheric plasma that produces a cocktail of chemicals that kills bacteria but is harmless to skin. 'The plasma produces a series of over 200 chemical reactions that involve the oxygen and nitrogen in air plus water vapor — there is a whole concoction of chemical species that can be lethal to bacteria,' says Gregor Morfill. 'It's actually similar to what our own immune system does.' The team says that an exposure to the plasma of only about 12 seconds reduces the incidence of bacteria, viruses, and fungi on hands by a factor of a million — a number that stands in sharp contrast to the several minutes hospital staff can take to wash using traditional soap and water. Morfill says that the approach can be used to kill the bacteria that lead to everything from gum disease to body odor and that the prototype is scalable to any size and can be produced in any shape."

Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @07:07PM from the snack-is-going-to-be-on-the-floor-today dept.

Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."

Climatic Research Unit Hacked, Files Leaked 882

Posted by kdawson on Friday November 20, 2009 @03:51PM from the playing-dirty dept.

huckamania was one of many readers to write with the news that the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Unit was hacked, and internal documents released. Some discussion and analysis of the leaked items can be found at Watts Up With That. The CRU has confirmed that a breach occurred, but not that all 61 MB of released material is genuine. Some of the emails would seem to raise concerns about the science as practiced — or at least beg an explanation. From the Watts Up link: "[The CRU] is widely recognized as one of the world's leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change. Consisting of a staff of around thirty research scientists and students, the Unit has developed a number of the data sets widely used in climate research, including the global temperature record used to monitor the state of the climate system, as well as statistical software packages and climate models. An unknown person put postings on some climate skeptic websites that advertised an FTP file on a Russian FTP server. Here is the message that was placed on the Air Vent today: 'We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.' The file was large, about 61 megabytes, containing hundreds of files. It contained data, code, and emails apparently from the CRU. If proved legitimate, these bombshells could spell trouble for the AGW crowd." Reader brandaman supplied the link to the archive of pilfered data. Reader aretae characterized the emails as revealing "...lots of intrigue, data manipulation, attempting to shut out opposing points of view out of scientific journals. Almost makes you think it's a religion. Anyone surprised?" And reader bugnuts adds, for context: "These emails are certainly taken out of context, whether they are legitimate or fraudulent, which adds to the confusion."

100 Million-Core Supercomputers Coming By 2018 286

Posted by timothy on Monday November 16, 2009 @02:56PM from the super-commuters-the-year-after dept.

CWmike writes "As amazing as today's supercomputing systems are, they remain primitive and current designs soak up too much power, space and money. And as big as they are today, supercomputers aren't big enough — a key topic for some of the estimated 11,000 people now gathering in Portland, Ore. for the 22nd annual supercomputing conference, SC09, will be the next performance goal: an exascale system. Today, supercomputers are well short of an exascale. The world's fastest system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to the just released Top500 list, is a Cray XT5 system, which has 224,256 processing cores from six-core Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). The Jaguar is capable of a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops. But Jaguar's record is just a blip, a fleeting benchmark. The US Department of Energy has already begun holding workshops on building a system that's 1,000 times more powerful — an exascale system, said Buddy Bland, project director at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility that includes Jaguar. The exascale systems will be needed for high-resolution climate models, bio energy products and smart grid development as well as fusion energy design. The latter project is now under way in France: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which the US is co-developing. They're expected to arrive in 2018 — in line with Moore's Law — which helps to explain the roughly 10-year development period. But the problems involved in reaching exaflop scale go well beyond Moore's Law."

Comment Know-it-alls & Bone-heads (Score 2, Insightful) 383

by uarch on Thursday November 12, 2009 @12:50PM (#30074270) Attached to: Your Opinion Counts At CNN — But Should It?

What makes the know-it-alls and bone-heads that work in the news any better than know-it-alls and bone-heads who don't?

Most media people you see day-to-day have the mistaken impression that they actually know WTF they're talking about. Unfortunately, they don't.

Comment Re:Carmakers lie (Score 2, Informative) 1146

by uarch on Wednesday November 04, 2009 @02:37AM (#29974498) Attached to: Toyotas Suddenly Accelerate; Owners Up In Arms

That's a ridiculously uninformed comment.

BMW speedometers read high but it's not due to a problem with the electronics. It is intentional and other replies have already stated why it's intentional.

If you go into the car's service menu (you can reach it with a goofy pedal combination, similar to the old Nintendo up-down-up-down-a-b-start) you can find a menu that presents the ACTUAL speed which is clearly separated from the REPORTED speed.

Comment Save the Planet, Eat Your Children (Score 0, Redundant) 942

by uarch on Monday October 26, 2009 @02:23AM (#29869537) Attached to: Save the Planet, Eat Your Dog

Why not? They certainly must have a much bigger carbon footprint than the family dog.

On-Body Circuits Create New Sense Organ 289

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday September 16, 2009 @12:35PM from the don't-tag-this-porn dept.

destinyland writes "In 'My New Sense Organ,' a science writer tests 'a new sense' — the ability to always know true north — by strapping a circuit board to her ankle. It's connected to an electronic compass and an ankle band with eight skin buzzers. The result? 'I had wrong assumptions I didn't know about ... I returned home to Washington DC to find that, far worse than my old haunt San Francisco, my mental map of DC swapped north for west. I started getting more lost than ever as the two spatial concepts of DC did battle in my head.' The device also detects 'the specific places where infrastructure interferes with the earth's magnetic fields.'

Comment Re:WordPro? (Score 1) 331

by uarch on Sunday September 13, 2009 @07:17PM (#29408505) Attached to: IBM Policy Switches From MS Office To OO.o

It goes to show that a company like IBM can function using a "minority" office suite.

That depends on how you define "function."

Comment Not at all... (Score 1) 712

by uarch on Wednesday September 02, 2009 @01:36PM (#29288179) Attached to: Has the Rate of Technical Progress Slowed?

No, it hasn't. The problem is that much of the advances are in areas that aren't immediately obvious to most people. The various biological sciences and materials sciences are prime examples.

People notice the things that fundamentally change their life; the car, the airplane, the TV, etc. They don't notice someone rewriting a virus to perform something useful, nor the work with brain implants that when fed through a computer have controlled robotic limbs, nor someone "growing" nanowires in the lab, nor the fabrics that can stop a bullet while still being light and flexible enough to make comfortable clothing, etc.

IMO, anyone that doesn't see amazing tech popping up nearly every day is either stuck in the past or simply lacks any vision of the future.

Augmented Reality In a Contact Lens 196

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @12:49PM from the lookit-them-wires-in-there dept.

Toe, The writes "Bionanotechnology researcher Babak A Parviz writes about his research toward producing a computer interface in a contact lens. At the moment, they have only embedded a single LED, but they foresee a much more complex interface such as detailed in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. Such lenses potentially could also read human bio-information from the eye, providing medical information on the order of what is now taken from blood tests, but on a continuous basis. An example would be monitoring glucose levels for diabetics. The author states that, 'All the basic technologies needed to build functional contact lenses are in place,' and details what refinements and advances will be necessary to bring this technology to reality."

Comment Re:My business plan includes world domination (Score 1) 259

by uarch on Monday August 24, 2009 @03:34PM (#29176795) Attached to: Intel's Roadmap Includes 4nm Fab in 2022

True to a degree, though there is definitely money going towards working out the broad details of such a plan.

While many industries don't create plans that span more than a year or two, the business Intel is in all but requires it. It's absolutely a work in progress and is expected to change over the years but you'd be surprised how accurate these things can be. The broader vision of the Nehalem we see today is not that far removed from the vision of Nehalem they were discussing ~6 years ago.

Average Gamer Is 35, Fat and Bummed 439

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday August 19, 2009 @11:42AM from the fun-also-causes-cancer dept.

kamapuaa writes "According to a study published in the upcoming October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the average US video game player is 35 years old, overweight, and tends toward depression. Specifically, female video game players tended towards depression, while males tended towards large BMIs. While the study itself points to several conclusions, one researcher noted: '... habitual use of video games as a coping response may provide a genesis for obsessive-compulsive video-game playing, if not video-game addiction.'" On the flip side, the Washington Post is running a story about the mental health benefits of playing video games.

Comment Re:Isn't it still a step in the right direction? (Score 1) 517

by uarch on Friday August 14, 2009 @11:26AM (#29066207) Attached to: World's First Formally-Proven OS Kernel

Where did you see a suggestion there should be no software verification? Surely not in the parent. The question of the degree to which software verification is needed is entirely different than the question of whether "formal verification" is as effective as people who haven't worked with it believe.

I'm simply stating that formal verification isn't perfect. Having worked with it personally I have seen the majority of people simply take what it says on faith because they don't understand the process. Simple rules of thumb that people use to attenuate their "normal" verification expectations are often thrown out the window the first time they work with "formal" verification. A frequent reason is because they hear that it uses math - despite the fact that many forms of it use no more math than any other form of verification - and of course "math can't be wrong" when you're an engineer.

Formal is simply another tool in the toolbox. As with the rest of the tools there are certain instances in which it makes a lot of sense and others where there is something better. Having worked with it in the past I see a story claiming that an entire kernel was "formally verified" and the first thing that comes to mind is a question of how many bugs they missed by not using all their tools.

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