Monday [12.20.2010]: a long hiatus

four years, and i'm still transitioning.
if anything, i've got less time and have forgotten how to code and tweak scripts to get this running again.
aiyaiyai..

i'll eventually get there, even if this turns out to be a retirement project =\

Saturday [05.06.2006]: churning out dr deaths

the australian medical schools are apparently churning out dumb doctors.

“TEACHING of basic anatomy in Australia's medical schools is so inadequate that students are increasingly unable to locate important body parts - and in some cases even confuse one vital organ with another.” - news.com.au

I find that very interesting... I'd like to know which senior doctors have been interviewed for I just saw the report on the evening news and they've been people from admin or from the college of surgeons. Well duh. No wonder there's such a fuss about anatomy. They're SURGEONS.

Is this whole issue about the fact that medical students are graduating with an inadequate knowledge of anatomy (something else that's been usurped from UN'CLE.. we used to be the ones that every intern, registrar, consultant and their granny knew to churn out graduates who were great doctors and awful anatomists) or is this about the power struggles between the physicians and the surgeons?

Personally, I agree that all the recent restructuring of various med schools around the country has done more harm than good. Sure, we're getting more touchy feelie subjects. Sure, we're now getting more psychology and ethics integrated in our learning. I'm not belittling the importance of these aspects of education, for they prepare one to deal with future patients and prepare scared, inexperienced interns to deal with awkward and sensitive situations. Instead of shortening the medical degree from six to five years, instead of shortening an already short five year degree into a lets-cram-everything-in-four-years-and-make-you-work-the-fifth-without-pay... as a med student. I'm imploring those powers-to-be to GIVE US SOME PROPER TRAINING dammit. As horrible as the news article makes our education out to be, I'm sorry to say that they're mostly right.

We DON'T get the training we need. We DON'T get the learning we're supposed to. We DON'T get enough clinical exposure. We have too many useless things to sign off that don't matter in the end. We have to sit through too many useless lectures given by very smart doctors who have no communication skills. We hardly get any support, save from those handful of supervisors who genuinely care and make the effort to help us better our education. The admin merely nod their heads and make empty promises. Give us someone who understands the shit we go through on a daily basis. Give us someone who has the common sense to look ahead and realize what sort of impact their restructuring will make on current medical students.

Like everything else in this place, you make us pay more in terms of time and money in return for less service and education. It's about time you listen to the students and ask them what THEY want and what THEY need before making more decisions now, only to defend them later.

I totally agree with what a fellow med student, or colleague as they like us calling our friends.. “perhaps the head of the medical schools should stop strongly denying the claims in the newspaper and instead go ask the students what they think and want. asses!”

Wednesday [04.19.2006]: robot reproduction

thanks to booyahman for coming across this link... and for the intro to medgadget. that's one more site heading towards my bookmarks folder!

not many have the honor of having superscript letters in one's name, but this spunky dame whol likes greeting the world in her birthday suit was one of them. presenting noelle™, the pregnant robot.



the folks at medgadget are gems in dredging up the new and wonderful...like realizing the potential of google calendar

Wednesday [04.12.2006]: gummy worms anyone?

originally posted on 5.o6.o5

There seems to be not enough karma being meted out.. or I'm just too blur to notice. It's probably the latter. Plenty of wacky stories out there tho ~ thought I'd get the ball rolling and share this one.

Maggots chew toward woman's brain From correspondents in Bangkok
05-05-2005
From: NEWS.com.au

DOCTORS in northern Thailand have removed almost three dozen fly maggots from a woman's nose, where they were eating their way towards her brain, a report said. The 38-year-old pig farmer from the northwestern city of Chiang Mai is believed to be the first reported case in Thailand of maggots nesting in a human's nose, Tawee Thanuparprangsan of Nakhon Ping hospital told The Nation newspaper. The 38-year-old woman visited the doctor in late March, complaining of excruciating pain in her left cheek. “I checked her nasal cavity and found a lot of fly maggots there,” Tawee told the paper. The maggots had eaten so much of her nasal tissue that some of her cartilage was exposed, Tawee added. He anesthetized the woman and during an operation removed 34 maggots from inside her nose. “She then needed antibiotics to treat the bacterial infection for five straight days before being allowed to return home,” Tawee told the paper. As a pig farmer, the woman was exposed to many flies every day. “Probably while she was sleeping, a fly went up her nose and laid its eggs, which then hatched into larvae,” Tawee said. If the infected area had spread to her brain, she could have died, Tawee added. Last week, the paper reported that an 84-year-old man on the southern resort isle of Phuket had 50 maggots removed from his ear, after he went to a hospital complaining of an itch. He had scratched his ears so hard that they started bleeding, and doctors said that flies apparently had gotten inside and laid eggs. Last week, the same hospital removed an eight-centimetre-long leech from throat of a 19-year-old man who had complained of a constant sore throat.
In the words of Cher from Clueless... “eeeww!?”

Wednesday [04.12.2006]: some things don't get better with age...

originally posted on 4.2o.o5

i was yakking to L and was trying to make her feel better when i was reminded of what happened in taiwan this summer..

first week back and i was out shopping with my mom. she was having a blast chatting to the sales lady and when i came back from browsing, the lady was like.. “oh so is this your sister?”

!!!!!!
excuse me??

you should've seen my mom's face. that grin on her face was so wide, it could've been picked up by the hubble. ans twinkling thd then she turned around, saw my face and tried to suppress that smile. you could still see her eyeo. *grumble*

i had my payback a few weeks later when we were all at a friends' house. i was sittin' on the couch, sandwiched between my parents and the doorbell rang. owner of the house yelled for someone to get the door so being the nearest to the door, my mom went to open it. in saunters a mutual friend, greets my mom and proceeds to greet everyone else. she gets to me.. looks at me, then back at my mom and asks “ohh, so that's your daughter!”

this acquaintance then flits her gaze over to my dad and then goes to my mom.. “and how charming, that must be your son-in-law!”

(o.O)

everyone did the asian flush (you know, when you go red with alcohol as most asians famously and predictably do) and you could see the lady literally thinking of ways to get out of the situation. lol ~ right back at you ma! hehe

Karma SERVED!
The next time you delight in someone else's misfortunes and grin like the Cheshire Cat, think twice *wink*

Wednesday [04.12.2006]: randomness accepted

originally posted on 4.16.o5

from CNN.com, pointed out by V:

Jeremy Stribling said Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with “context-free grammar,” charts and diagrams.

The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.
Stribling said the trio targeted WMSCI because it is notorious within the field of computer science for sending copious e-mails that solicit admissions to the conference. The idea of a fake submission was to counter “fake conferences...which exist only to make money,” explained Stribling and his cohorts' website, “SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator.” To their surprise, one of the papers — “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy” — was accepted for presentation. Excerpts include:
“the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning” “We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions.” Nagib Callaos, a conference organizer, said the paper was one of a small number accepted on a “non-reviewed” basis — meaning that reviewers had not yet given their feedback by the acceptance deadline.

However, Callaos said conference organizers were reviewing their acceptance procedures in light of the hoax.

The students were soliciting cash donations so they could attend the conference and give what Stribling billed as a “completely randomly-generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face.” They exceeded their goal, with $2,311.09 cents from 165 donors.

WMSCI SERVED!
The boys got their paper published, are still invited by the organization they embarrased to attend the conference and made some moolah on the side.