LaForge: Captain, if we re-route ancillary credits toward this endeavor, the resulting economic incentive might provide a sufficient engineering catalyst to spur technological innovation.
Riker: So, basically, we offer them prize money to make the damn thing?
The objective of the project, currently being explored by the X Prize Foundation and Qualcomm, is not just to create one more cool gadget for “Trek” fans … although the idea of a hand-held, automated medical diagnostic device is pretty cool. The objective is to extend the reach of health information and services to billions more people in the world.
“We believe this is a fundamental step in helping people become true ‘health consumers’ who can have as much say in assessing and accessing health care as they would any other service or product,” Don Jones, vice president of wireless health strategy and market development at Qualcomm Labs, said in this week’s announcement about the project. “Qualcomm believes the value of this X Prize is also in changing the cost structure and focus of health care. By having consumers take the initial actions to obtain health assessment data, the use and the quality of physicians’ time is improved.”
The competition is modeled on earlier incentive programs such as the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private-sector spaceflight, or the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize for super-efficient road vehicles. The basic idea is to encourage the development of mobile devices that can diagnose patients at least as well as a panel of board-certified physicians.
“The goal obviously is to drive a lot of innovation toward this narrow goal of easy-to-use, low-cost, minimally invasive, rapid, portable and scalable diagnosis,” Jones told me during a follow-up interview.
I think this story accurately reflects a bizarre reality: most fat people don’t realize that they’re fat.
I currently live in one of the fittest cities in America, where jogging, biking, hiking, and going to the gym are considered routine, almost necessary behavior. I come from a small, poor, rural southern town where the ability to avoid physical labor is considered a virtue.* The people in my hometown are almost uniformly obese; when I go back home, I sometimes think that the only people who aren’t fat are a few rich people and the meth addicts. Comparing the people in Austin with people in my hometown is striking and distressing.
I was fat for a while, too. Got my BMI up around 33 or so before I did something about it, and I’ve spent the last five years between 24 and 26. My wife’s around 20. These are normal body sizes, even if I occasionally weigh in five or six pounds on the heavier side of normal.
Yet when we go to my hometown, we’re treated like visiting Somalians, who need to be given food and lots of it. Our eating and exercise habits (i.e. sometimes we walk around the block after dinner) are considered exotic and foolish. My obese family lectures me on which starchy convenience foods are healthy. The quote at the end of the linked story – “There is this tendency that if everyone around you looks a certain way, you either want to look that way or you’re comfortable looking the way you are” – is 100% accurate. When healthy people visit the land of the obese, it’s the healthy people who are gawked at and talked about.
During the welfare wars of the 80s and 90s, Republicans kept arguing that welfare created a culture of dependency. There were large swaths of the country where being dependent on the government dole simply did not carry any stigma with it among the locals. In the absence of being told that it was wrong, many welfare recipients regarded it as a normal way of life. The Clinton/Gingrich welfare reforms did a lot to combat that mindset by making work the norm again and reaffirming that there is, in fact, a stigma attached to welfare.
It’s not obvious to me that there’s any sort of government reforms that can combat obesity; reducing food stamp benefits would probably only encourage the purchase of more ramen noodles and less healthy food. Moreover, most fat people aren’t on the dole. They stuff their faces with the proceeds of their own labor.
But it is obvious, in a country where most obese – not merely overweight, but obese – people don’t even recognize their condition, that there is insufficient stigma attached to being fat. They look at themselves and aren’t bothered by what they see, often because so many of those around them look just as fat (or fatter – I know a number of obese people who don’t think they’re fat because they’re not as fat as someone else they know).
Obesity isn’t just aesthetically displeasing. It drains the physical and spiritual well-being from the fat person. There needs to be more emphasis on this. It’s currently considered rude or mean to draw attention to the obese, just as Republicans were once labeled as a bunch of meanies for trying to force welfare recipients to find jobs. If anything, we’re currently being too nice to the obese. A caring society does not let its members destroy their bodies and souls through ignorance and self-delusion.
*Is it any wonder that the south has higher obesity rates than the rest of the country? Avoiding physical labor, let us say, is a very, very old activity there.
WASHINGTON – Tractor beams, energy rays that can move objects, are a science fiction mainstay. But now they are becoming a reality — at least for moving very tiny objects.
Researchers from the Australian National University have announced that they have built a device that can move small particles a meter and a half using only the power of light.
Physicists have been able to manipulate tiny particles over miniscule distances by using lasersfor years. Optical tweezers that can move particles a few millimeters are common.
Andrei Rhode, a researcher involved with the project, said that existing optical tweezers are able to move particles the size of a bacterium a few millimeters in a liquid. Their new technique can move objects one hundred times that size over a distance of a meter or more.
The device works by shining a hollow laser beam around tiny glass particles. The air surrounding the particle heats up, while the dark center of the beam stays cool. When the particle starts to drift out of the middle and into the bright laser beam, the force of heated air molecules bouncing around and hitting the particle’s surface is enough to nudge it back to the center.
I haven’t decided what is cooler: That we now have fricken tractor beams, or that they were invented by Aussies.
Jamie posted this at 12:18 PM HKT on Wednesday, September 8th, 2010 as Nerdom, Science!
Ann Althouse reviews an author’s review of Megan McArdle’s review of the author’s book:
By the way, “their theory” — if I can trust McArdle — is that “people are naturally polyamorous.” The dispute continues with McArdle and the author (Christopher Ryan) throwing shit at each other in a fight about whether people are like bonobos. I’m just saying “throwing shit at each other” because that’s how bonobos fight, and people are like bonobos, right? Not right? Advantage McArdle!!!!!
Apollo posted this at 6:26 PM HKT on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 as Science!, The Right Words
The inestimable Jim Manzi has read Mark Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny. He doesn’t like it:
I wasn’t expecting a PhD thesis (and in fact had hoped to write a post supporting the book as a well-reasoned case for certain principles that upset academics just because it didn’t employ a bunch of pseudo-intellectual tropes). But when I waded into the first couple of chapters, I found that – while I had a lot of sympathy for many of its basic points – it seemed to all but ignore the most obvious counter-arguments that could be raised to any of its assertions. This sounds to me like a pretty good plain English meaning of epistemic closure. The problem with this, of course, is that unwillingness to confront the strongest evidence or arguments contrary to our own beliefs normally means we fail to learn quickly, and therefore persist in correctable error.
I’m not expert on many topics the book addresses, so I flipped to its treatment of a subject that I’ve spent some time studying – global warming – in order to see how it treated a controversy for which I’m at least familiar with the various viewpoints and some of the technical detail.
It was awful. It was so bad that it was like the proverbial clock that chimes 13 times – not only is it obviously wrong, but it is so wrong that it leads you to question every other piece of information it has ever provided.
…
There are many reasons to write a book. One view is that a book is just another consumer product, and if people want to buy Jalapeno-and-oyster flavored ice cream, then companies will sell it to them. If the point of Liberty and Tyranny was to sell a lot of copies, it was obviously an excellent book. Further, despite what intellectuals will often claim, most people (including me) don’t really want their assumptions challenged most of the time (e.g., the most intense readers of automobile ads are people who have just bought the advertised car, because they want to validate their already-made decision). I get that people often want comfort food when they read. Fair enough. But if you’re someone who read this book in order to help form an honest opinion about global warming, then you were suckered. Liberty and Tyranny does not present a reasoned overview of the global warming debate; it doesn’t even present a reasoned argument for a specific point of view, other than that of willful ignorance. This section of the book is an almost perfect example of epistemic closure.
I’ve had a half-mind to read Liberty & Tyranny for much of the same reason I read Twilight and saw Avatar: not only because they’re all wildly popular, but also because people I know and trust found profoundly disliked them, and I’m curious to see who’s right. Next time I’m a the library, I’ll borrow a copy.
But I will purchase — at full price, if necessary — Manzi’s next book.
Update: Predictable reactions form Manzi’s fellow Cornerites, K-Lo and Andy McCarthy.
The classic definition of science is that it creates theories that are falsifiable. Compare that definition to this story.
Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo, climate scientists at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, say that only about half of the heat believed to have built up in the Earth in recent years can be accounted for. . . .
“The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later,” Trenberth said. “The reprieve we’ve had from warming temperatures in the last few years will not continue. It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate.”
This sounds like something I would have written on the write-up for a high school chemistry project when asked, “Why didn’t you get the result you expected?” Of course, in high school chemistry I was running experiments based upon centuries-old fundamentals, and deviance from the expected answer was always my fault. Also, I wasn’t expecting governments around the globe to rearrange their economies based on my results.
Three cheers for the residents of Texas’s State Board of Education, District 9 for tossing Creationist and Christian Revisionist Don McLeroy out of office in Tuesday’s primary (the man who beat him, a moderate on these issues, faces no opposition in the general election).
Due to its size — and the way California’s persnickety standards and budget woes have removed it from the process — Texas’s standards are extremely influential nationwide. Getting a confirmed crazy loon like McLeroy off the board is an important victory.
To have a marvel of the modern world named you is indeed a tremendous honor. Behold, Pluto, in all its glory [read the story, and note that global warming is not strictly a terrestrial phenomenon]:
