The Pros And Cons Of A YouTube Democracy
This is pretty silly.
Burnout is usually identified by three major symptoms: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and decreased sense of self-efficacy. But burnout, we believe, is also a euphemism for what many physicians experience as a crisis of meaning and identity. A deeper understanding of burnout, we suggest, begins by acknowledging its context: physicians in many developed countries live and work in a technocentric, dehumanised, and financially driven environment, often within a broken and unjust system of health care. Those who work in academic health centres face institutional strains caused by the marketplace restructuring of health care, a shrinking safety net, more indigent patients to care for, and increasing competition for research funding. Their counterparts in developing countries often work under conditions that are shaped by inadequate resources, a shortage of health workers, and weak health-care systems. In different settings worldwide, therefore, physicians may work under conditions that increasingly prevent them from living up to their highest ideals. This is the background for grasping the valuable definition of Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter: “Burnout is the index of dislocation between what people are and what they have to do. It represents an erosion in values, dignity, spirit, and will—and erosion of the human soul.”
“This is the time when people hate you as a doctor. You have failed, flunked, dropped the ball. You should be sued—you will be sued. You are a quack…And a part of you believes all this because no matter how sure thing the death was, some part of you believes you really can perform miracles.”
Consider the Twitter phenomenon, which went from nearly invisible to nearly ubiquitous (at least among the online crowd) in early 2007. During busy periods, the user can easily be overwhelmed by the volume of incoming messages, most of which are of only passing interest. But there is a tiny minority of truly valuable posts. (Sometimes they have extreme value, as they did during the October 2007 wildfires in California and the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.) At present, however, finding the most-useful bits requires wading through messages like “My kitty sneezed!” and “I hate this taco!”
But imagine if social tools like Twitter had a way to learn what kinds of messages you pay attention to, and which ones you discard. Over time, the messages that you don’t really care about might start to fade in the display, while the ones that you do want to see could get brighter. Such attention filters—or focus assistants—are likely to become important parts of how we handle our daily lives. We’ll move from a world of “continuous partial attention” to one we might call “continuous augmented awareness.”
As processor power increases, tools like Twitter may be able to draw on the complex simulations and massive data sets that have unleashed a revolution in science. They could become individualized systems that augment our capacity for planning and foresight, letting us play “what-if” with our life choices: where to live, what to study, maybe even where to go for dinner. Initially crude and clumsy, such a system would get better with more data and more experience; just as important, we’d get better at asking questions. These systems, perhaps linked to the cameras and microphones in our mobile devices, would eventually be able to pay attention to what we’re doing, and to our habits and language quirks, and learn to interpret our sometimes ambiguous desires. With enough time and complexity, they would be able to make useful suggestions without explicit prompting.
And such systems won’t be working for us alone. Intelligence has a strong social component; for example, we already provide crude cooperative information-filtering for each other. In time, our interactions through the use of such intimate technologies could dovetail with our use of collaborative knowledge systems (such as Wikipedia), to help us not just to build better data sets, but to filter them with greater precision. As our capacity to provide that filter gets faster and richer, it increasingly becomes something akin to collaborative intuition—in which everyone is effectively augmenting everyone else.
Little by little, people who don’t know about drugs like modafinil or don’t want to use them will face stiffer competition from the people who do. From the perspective of a culture immersed in athletic doping wars, the use of such drugs may seem like cheating. From the perspective of those who find that they’re much more productive using this form of enhancement, it’s no more cheating than getting a faster computer or a better education.
Many proponents of developing an artificial mind are sure that such a breakthrough will be the biggest change in human history. They believe that a machine mind would soon modify itself to get smarter—and with its new intelligence, then figure out how to make itself smarter still. They refer to this intelligence explosion as “the Singularity,” a term applied by the computer scientist and science-fiction author Vernor Vinge. “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence,” Vinge wrote in 1993. “Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” The Singularity concept is a secular echo of Teilhard de Chardin’s “Omega Point,” the culmination of the Nöosphere at the end of history. Many believers in Singularity—which one wag has dubbed “the Rapture for nerds”—think that building the first real AI will be the last thing humans do. Some imagine this moment with terror, others with a bit of glee.
The amount of data we’ll have at our fingertips will be staggering, but we’ll finally have gotten over the notion that accumulated information alone is a hallmark of intelligence.
Hm… iiuno about that…
Teen Pregnancy: Reaching Epidemic Levels in Foster Care
One study at the University of Chicago found that nearly half of girls who had spent time in the foster-care system had been pregnant at least once by the time they were 19 years old.
:|
Why Does the Vaccine/Autism Controversy Live On?
Paradoxically, the great success of vaccines is a crucial reason why antivaccination sentiment has thrived, some scientists say. Most of the diseases that vaccines protect against have largely been licked. As a consequence, few people personally remember the devastation they can cause. So with less apparently on the line, it is easier to indulge in the seeming luxury of vaccine skepticism and avoidance.
Nice brief summary of the origins.
Guest Photographer/Photojournalist: G.M.B. Akash – Child Labor
Beautiful photos of terrible situations.