Yeah, I guess bagging college works for the rare 1-in-a-billion future billionaire. But for everyone else, college is a place of great growth of knowledge, breadth of mind and experience, social maturation, and preparation for anything and everything. Yeah, college does not guarantee success. But not going to college virtually assures lack of success. Don't listen to this drivel. --JSt

I'll help all you folks out who are insecure. I am an amateur software cobbler, able to make Hello World work only during full moons. I tip my hat to all of you, whether you are developers or engineers. Cheers, --JSt (fortunately, software tinkering is not my day job)

One reason I've heard cited that makes sense to me is that education, whether 2nd grade or second year of med school, is one of those human endeavors that requires person-to-person interactions that resists the general industrialization that occurs in so many other fields of work. You can't outsource classroom teaching. You can't replace a teacher the way you can replace secretaries with word processors and calendar apps and automated phone answering systems. I don't know whether this idea stands up to scrutiny, tho'... --JSt

"Why should college necessarily be a "fond personal experience"? You're there to learn, are you not?" You're there to do a lot of things. Learn is one of them. But get real for a moment, nearly everything one learns in a college classroom one forgets within weeks, months, and certainly years. This is not cynicism, this is fact. If you take an Econ course or a Psychology course, months or years later former students can't recite lots of facts learned. College is about learning facts, learning discipline, learning teamwork, learning about other people, broadening your mind, transitioning to being an adult. All the goals are important. For some certain goals will be more important than for others. For some, the stuff one learns will be highly aligned with the work they do in the workplace in 2, 5, and 20 years, for others the stuff they learn will have little to do with future work, and that's ok. Anyway, with a broader view of what one could and should get from college, I think college can and should be a fond personal experience. --JSt

Um, I'm a doctor. It amazes me that people do not care about how these marvelous machines work, namely the human body, but they don't. They just keep using them without paying attention to them or keeping them in good shape and then wonder why they break down. Creepy when you think about it, but it pays the bills : ) -- JSt

No, never ethical, never appropriate. Leave drugs, their costs, their risks, their side effects, to those who have diseases. --JSt

I drive a cheap car every day so I can drive an expensive coffee maker every morning! It is my one expensive extravagance. But, OHHHHHHH, it's worth it. http://www.krupsusa.com/All+Products/Espresso+Machines/Automatic+Espresso+Machines/Products/XP7260/XP7260.htm -- Josh

Impressive to read that folks are developing a digital listening device for the chest of children to aid in the diagnosis of pneumonia. But what isn't shared here is that listening (or "auscultation") is quite inaccurate for the diagnosis of pneumonia when done by expert humans called doctors. Maybe a machine could do better, I don't know. But just aspiring to be as good as a human doctor's ears is not good enough. --JSt

I'm confused. DAvid Pogue says all the time that Siri IS the speech recognition of Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Can someone explain? I know the travails of the poor owners and developers of the original Dragon. I am a faithful and happy Dragon Naturally Speaking medical since 1999. I just want to understand whether Siri is or isn't Nuance's Dragon. And if so, why would Nuance put out a "rival", to quote the title of the OP here. -- Josh

don't get your hopes up. A pint of Ben & Jerry's in front of your screen is the same number of calories and the same impact on obesity whether you eat it at 2 in the morning or 2 in the afternoon. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if biological clock research paid off elsewhere in human health (insomnia, jet lag, sleep messed up by depression, etc.) -- Josh

webOS. Pretty soon you'll have to Google that in order to remember what it meant. Too little too late. --Josh (former Palm developer)

Um, sorry, but there is no current test. There is no screening test for pancreatic cancer. --Joshua Steinberg MD

Careful. Though you may have the permission from the authors to redistribute their works, they may not legally be able to give you such permission. See the rules for journal Cell, one of these Elsevier publications, under "Copyright" section:

Yes, you are correct. Intellectual property rights are often transferred from authors/investigators to the publisher with submission. And that's what I'm choosing to ignore. The medical literature is written purposely to share and spread information so that physicians everywhere can improve the care of patients. --JSt

Fan-freakin-tastic! I detest Elsevier and Wolters-Kluwer and other publishers/purveyors of medical literature. They put everything behind extremely expensive paywalls. I get around them by using my university's institutional subscription access, but still it's a PIA. Whenever anyone on my online listservs without access asks for an article, I play librarian and get it for them for free. I once asked Wolters-Kluwer for permission to cite research findings from a medical article in a free medical app I wrote. They wanted $795. I reiterated that the work I am doing is free and educational. They relented "just this once". I now never ask again for permission from large publishers who unfortunately hold the intellectual property rights to much medical literature (instead of the study authors themselves, oddly). I always ask permission from authors and researchers, but no longer from publishers, as they just want to monetize and gouge. Don't need that. -- JSt