TED Talk: The global power shift
This might send lots of Americans into a panic but I’ve reached a point where I trust “the world” more than I trust the people in Washington D.C.
“I share a destiny with my enemy.”
Gulfside Cottages
The beach at Destin, Florida
Shadows
In some schools of Eastern thought, the permanent, unchanging self is an illusion. A mash-up of hopes, fears, concepts, ideas, faded memories… constantly changing, never the same from moment to moment. I don’t pretend to understand this well enough to share it. But the photo below spoke to me in this context. The shadows are the clearly defined, easily recognizable “persons” we bebelieve ourselves to be. And that others do/should see. In fact, we are Erector Sets made up of all the bits and pieces that flow past, ever changing.
Your Next Doctor Might Be Your Car
“Since 2010, the USC School of Cinematic Arts and BMW have been working on Nigel, a Mini Cooper outfitted with 230 sensors that creates a log of everything that happens in the vehicle, letting users see it all via an iPhone and iPad app. Now USC’s Center for Body Computing is getting in on the Nigel project, looking at how the car could be used to monitor driver health as well as vehicle health.”
“One day, she imagines, a car’s pollution sensors, heart-rate sensors (maybe integrated into the steering wheel), GPS, and oxygen content sensors could all work together to tell drivers if, say, a certain polluted area of the highway affects their health–or if their heart rate goes up every time they arrive home or at the office.”
Physicians no longer control information
“Physicians no longer control information. While the idea of a patient bringing new research to her doctor isn’t a new phenomenon, in the broader historical context it’s huge. For the better part of civilization our role as physician has centered around privileged access to information and knowledge. But the web has created a type of disintermediation. The face-to-face encounter with a physician is evolving as a more narrowly defined element in an individual’s quest to understand their condition and get better. Access to information is the bedrock of the health 2.0 movement.”
“There’s too much to know. There was once a time when physicians could get their hands around what they needed to know. You’d go to the mailbox and pick up that 200 page journal and you were all set.
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“Medical students continue to learn in a system that assumes we can teach a doctor what they need to know instead of empowering them to access what they need to know.”
Bryan Vartabedian is a a pediatric gastroenterologist at Texas Children’s Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine. He writes about the convergence of social media and medicine.
What does mobile explosion mean for news?
Some nuggets from new Pew Research Center report based on a survey of 9,513 U.S. adults conducted from June-August 2012 (including 4,638 mobile device owners)
- Half of all U.S. adults now have a mobile connection to the web through either a smartphone or tablet
- Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults, 22%, now own a tablet device-double the number from a year earlier
- 64% of tablet owners and 62% of smartphone owners say they use the devices for news at least weekly
- As many as 43% say the news they get on their tablets is adding to their overall news consumption. And almost a third, 31%, said they get news from new sources on their tablet
- Fully 60% of tablet news users mainly use the browser to get news on their tablet, just 23% get news mostly through apps and 16% use both equally
Bad Lip Reading: Paul Ryan’s Video Diary
Less to think about?
Depending on your source, we (adult humans) have between 40,000 and 60,000 thoughts in a day. Let’s split the difference at 50,000. How many of those, I wonder, might be thoughts related to your job and the work you do? Twenty percent? Given that most of us spend eight hours a day on the job, that seems reasonable. So, 10,000 work-related thoughts a day.
Now, lets assume your Uncle Ernie croaks, leaving you enough money you no longer have to work for a living. Can we assume that — eventually — you will no longer have those 10,000 thoughts? Your mind probably won’t go into neutral but will replace those thoughts. How, I wonder, does that work? What mental process determines what gets those CPUs?