by AJ Lumsdaine | Sep 2, 2014 | Off Topic Posts
Salman Khan – Khan Academy: Education Reimagined
I haven’t forgotten loose ends I haven’t had time to tie: inserting the citations into Letter to a Medical Student [part 1][part 2][part 3][part4], and posting the last installment of How to Get Rid of Ants for Good [part 1][part 2]. The information in the first two parts is no longer enough for people to solve the problem without the 3rd installment. I’ve drafted it, I just haven’t been able to finish!
I posted that ant series with an agenda: I have been following the work of microbiologist Bonnie Bassler on bacterial communications, and wonder if there may be an equivalent biological means of thwarting bacteria by manipulating their communications. (Manipulating rather than trying to kill them, which may not even be in our best interests as collateral damage to good bacteria causes other problems.)
I didn’t want to post anything new until I got around to finishing at least those two things, but I couldn’t help posting this amazing talk by Salman Khan of Khan Academy.
Wow. Anyone who homeschools should see this. Anyone who schools should see this. I love his analogy of education being like building a house. What’s the purpose of having some kids finish 60% of the foundation and 50% of the framing, and then moving on to something else just because everyone else does? I went to a public school in a small town in South Dakota when I was a girl and it was a work-at-your-own-pace place, with so much enrichment. I have since met SO many creative and accomplished people who came out of that one small program.
For SolveEczema.org users in particular: After the talk, my son and I lined up with everyone else to shake Khan’s hand, say Thank You, and to take photos. In the first part of his lecture, he was so candid about his journey in a way I wish I could be. What he said rang so, so many bells. When we got through the line, I said, “If you ever want to mentor someone, I think I’m you, only with medicine, and 7 years ago — at least I hope so.” (10 years ago?) I gave him my card, and he said, “That’s interesting, because I have eczema.”
I keep hoping he’ll try the site strategies, because I’m beginning to think this has to be experienced, even by those who don’t have eczema (especially by those who don’t have eczema) for anyone else to understand the broader medical and environmental implications. To get researchers to understand why there’s almost no way the underlying environmental issues involved as described on SolveEczema aren’t a factor in bat white nose syndrome/bat fungal susceptibility — they almost have to experience the process and transformation themselves, again, even if they don’t have eczema.
Great talk for anyone who cares about education.
Salman Khan – Khan Academy: Education Reimagined
by AJ Lumsdaine | Sep 17, 2013 | Off Topic Posts
I am really not a Luddite.
I tried using Facebook, but somehow it wouldn’t let me separate SolveEczema.org from my personal page, so forget that. After making some monumental blunders — such as replying “yes” when it asked if I wanted to import my contacts from Yahoo, only to discover it had automatically spammed everyone who had ever written to me about the website with a Facebook request — I closed and deleted the account.
I know it’s possible to separate the personal and professional on Facebook — or maybe not, I’ve heard differing opinions — I just haven’t had time to figure it out for myself. As someone who truly grew up hand-in-hand with the age of technology, I no longer suffer arcana well.
My undergraduate advisor at MIT was a brilliant semiconductor device physicist, David Adler, who was very proud of the fact that he’d never used a computer. “That’s what graduate students are for,” he would say. His work enabled the building blocks of computers, but he had no time for them himself. I have always envied him those graduate students!
I am finally making progress on my book, so I purchased a copy of APE: How to Publish a Book by Guy Kawasaki and attended a lecture by him at my local bookstore. It’s brand spanking new advice about a rapidly changing field, and every bit as readable as his other books. Since I have always intended to self-publish, Kawasaki’s APE was exactly the right book at the right time.
While I think he’s absolutely spot on with his advice — his advice is sound, his advice is great! — much depends on building a social media platform. But how am I going to do this without a graduate student or two?
His suggestion to me at his lecture was to hire someone to help. Yes!! That would absolutely solve the problem, it just can’t happen on my side of reality for now. We live in different worlds, Guy.
My website stats tell me this year SolveEczema.org has already had over 40,000 unique users — as many as all of last year — and the vast majority arrived from bookmarks and links, not search engines, with multiple page views per user, meaning, people are sharing. The blog gets between roughly 1,200 and 1,700 views per month (how many unique users that means, I don’t know.)
So how do I turn that into followers on twitter or Google+ (whatever that is!)? (I am not a Luddite! I am not a Luddite!)
That was a poor and backhanded way of apologizing for taking so long to finish this book. I spent much of last year as the crazy parent trying to improve indoor air quality at our local school, where my son began experiencing some pretty significant allergy problems, and so did I and my husband, truth be told. The school ended up doing a great deal, and the experience was not wasted and will become another chapter in the book, as allergy and eczema are so related. I learned much in the process, as always.
This is also a backhanded way of explaining why Guy Kawasaki’s book is my first twitter post! You can now follow SolveEczema.org on twitter! (I think…)
by solveeczema | Aug 5, 2010 | Off Topic Posts
I keep a file of “funny and amazing insurance excuses,” but I had to share this exclusion for an urgent care physician’s charge from our local medical center’s After Hours Urgent Care Clinic:
“YOUR BLUE CROSS AND BLUE SHIELD SERVICE BENEFIT PLAN COVERAGE DOES NOT PROVIDE BENEFITS FOR ADDITIONAL CHARGES BY ANY PROFESSIONAL PROVIDER FOR EXTRA CHARGES FOR SERVICES RENDERED AFTER OFFICE HOURS OR ON DAYS WHEN THE PROVIDER’S OFFICE IS NORMALLY CLOSED. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THESE CHARGES.”
I don’t usually laugh, but … if the doctor’s office was open, why would I have to go to After Hours Urgent Care? (Actually, one of these visits I went because the doctor sent me to the ER and I was hoping to avoid the emergency room, so I went to urgent care; I don’t know if the doctor’s office was open then or not.)
I have a ten-inch stack of medical billing paperwork to slog through again. This is just wrong. Anyway, if I didn’t laugh, I’d cry.
by solveeczema | Dec 17, 2009 | Off Topic Posts
The story of violin virtuoso Joshua Bell playing incognito in a Washington DC subway — where virtually no one stops to listen — is circulating again by email.
The story is true. I couldn’t help writing about it on this blog’s first “Off Topic” post.
But as with most experiments, whether informal ad hoc or formal medical ones, people must take care to separate the experiment from the conclusions that can (or can’t) be drawn from them.
People love an incredible story — in this case, especially the observation that every child who went through the station tried to stop and listen.
But here’s the problem with it: it was a set up. Whether by deliberate design or not, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. In Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book The Tipping Point, he discusses research that speaks to this, that the most important factor in whether people stop is if they have a few moments to spare. It’s not about beauty or character, need or greed. It’s just about whether people are pressed for time. And these people in the DC subway were chosen because of their time vise.
In The Tipping Point, Gladwell discusses a study by Princeton psychologists on a group of seminary students. Researchers asked each aspiring theologian to prepare a short talk on a Bible-based theme, then to give the talk at another building a short walk away. On the way to their presentations, each student came across a sick man in an alley. The psychologists wanted to find out who would stop and help, and what factors (especially of character) would predict who would take the time to lend assistance.
In some cases, the researchers even gave the seminary students the topic of the Good Samaritan to talk about! To some, he’d say they were late and expected to start already, and to others he’d say they were early but might as well start heading over.
It turned out that none of the factors they studied (such as talking about the Good Samaritan story from the Bible right beforehand) had any effect. The only thing that did was whether the student was in a hurry or had time. There the difference was huge. Other research has backed this up.
I have trouble believing the Washington Post reporter who set up this “experiment” with Joshua Bell didn’t know any of this when he designed it — and it’s not really an experiment if you already know the outcome. Even if he didn’t know to start, he should have done his homework. (And if he didn’t do his homework, was it really such a severe indictment of people’s poor sense of beauty, or just a stunt with a predetermined outcome?)
He proposed it as a test of whether people would recognize beauty out of context, but if he had been genuine about it, he would have gone to, say, a park near where poor day laborers gather, or asked Bell to play anonymously and out of the way at a picnic for underprivileged kids or at a garish amusement park or in disguise at a farmer’s market. He didn’t do any of these things, because he likely knew or suspected he wouldn’t get the outcome he wanted for this story, i.e., Bell would have drawn crowds.
In the Bell subway “experiment”, the only people who stopped were the ones who perceived themselves as having a few moments, just as research would predict. Young children, one must note, live in the time warp of childhood and always think they have time for something interesting. To make it a test of whether people recognize beauty out of context, the reporter should have put Joshua Bell in a jarringly different context, where people had maybe other (less “beautiful”) diversions, but had at least some time to stop if they wished to.
Just to put this in context: There is an orphanage in Cambodia that educates and supports Cambodia’s garbage dump children. The rescued kids were so grateful, they organized a program to bring books and a day of happiness to children at the dump from which they had come. I was not surprised to hear that the children at the dump treated these books like wondrous, precious treasures. They don’t need an education to recognize or be hungry for beauty in the midst of squalor and despair. I’m willing to bet Mr. Bell’s violin playing would be received with equal gratitude and wonder by these most destitute of the poor. (But you’d have to design such a visit with the same circumstantial sensitivity as by these children who returned.)
The subway story filled me with cynicism about the reporter rather than people’s capacity to recognize beauty. Shame on him.
It’s still a good story, though. But poor Joshua Bell!
by solveeczema | Nov 19, 2008 | Off Topic Posts
I feel I must apologize once again for my inability to really answer any correspondence for the site or spend any serious time on new posts or revisions. I appreciate the wonderful letters and feedback I have received lately, it has really buoyed me through this trying time. There is nothing like knowing another child can have a normal life!
I may as well just tell you why I am so preoccupied. As usual, it’s medical insurance paperwork. (The amount in dispute is more than a whole year’s disposable income for us, it’s a big deal.)
On October 7, 2008, I received a letter from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the government agency in charge of federal worker healthcare contracts, which said that Blue Cross Blue Shield had promised to “provide benefits for the disputed claims.”
I thought my family’s long, three-and-a-half year nightmare was over. Unfortunately, in spite of my follow ups with the government, Blue Shield has neither sent the promised revised explanations of benefits nor the promised reimbursement. They did, however, promise the government rep that they would take care of it by November 7, 2008. They didn’t.
This is the same healthcare plan that Barack Obama would like to offer everyone for US healthcare reform. Look, I am still high from election night. I voted for him even in the primaries. But I don’t think this is the right way to reform our system. Not at least if we want better results for less money. Insurance companies have put federal workers in an even worse place than everyone else with insurance in this country. We don’t have the right to sue the insurers. We don’t have the right to seek independent medical review the way people do in states. And so on.
I don’t think granting those things is enough to solve our healthcare crisis, but you can imagine the field day insurers are having with those of us who have even less recourse than everyone else.
President-elect Obama would like to extend the coverage he and the Congress have to everyone else. Well, I have the same PLAN he has — I’d like to know how I can get the same COVERAGE. You see, the insurance companies are well aware of who is in Congress and who is not.
I’d like my life back. If government (as opposed to PRIVATE insurance companies) were doing this to people, there would be rioting in the streets and tea thrown into harbors. Or at least a lot more gun buying. I have a half room in my small house devoted just to insurance paperwork, and that doesn’t include the boxes, filing cabinets, and shelves full of the stuff elsewhere in my house.
The President-elect’s Mother had to spend the last months of her life arguing with insurance companies from her hospital room. By contrast, my Aunt from a wealthy country in Europe that spends considerably less per capita on healthcare than the US but gets better results and covers everyone — my Aunt the career secretary fought cancer for fifteen years, in which time she flew airplanes, climbed mountains (even part-way up Everest), took regular vacations in other countries, drove a nice car and lived in a nice apartment (her ability to enjoy life probably partly responsible for why she lived so long with a cancer that usually kills in under five years). When she died, she left an INHERITANCE from her savings to all of her grand nieces and nephews for their college education. Can you imagine anyone in this country suffering from cancer for fifteen years and leaving anything but medical bills and paperwork?
How bad does the economic crisis have to get before we decide we can’t afford the luxury of an industry that spends $450 billion a year on administrative costs in order to delay and deny care for their own profits? The cost to the lives of ordinary Americans is incalculable. I know it has been to mine.
(I wonder how Oprah’s Peter Walsh would make that odious medical paperwork clutter disappear and give me back my peace! Or at least give me back the ability to do something useful with my time, such as help people the way I’m hearing the site is helping. I tried to sign on to the declutter plan, but that ten minutes a day thing only goes so far with this stuff dominating the house… And my life…)
by solveeczema | Nov 3, 2008 | Off Topic Posts
With no working washing machine for a month now, Halloween costume plans had to change in our household. Fortunately for us, Canon sponsors one of the best web sites on the Internet, from which we were able to print plans to build a really cool red panda mask out of paper card stock. No washing required.
Link to the site: Canon Papercraft
I don’t have words to do this site justice. You can download detailed kits for building animals, dinosaurs, pop-up cards, whole towns, trains, airplanes, gift boxes, wedding cake teddy bears, the Parthenon, the Taj Majal, the Sydney Opera House, the Statue of Liberty, and on and on — all out of paper! And all with the highest level of design values: clear instructions, amazingly intelligent design, simple to build. The hardest thing is just cutting out the pieces. If you use this site, PLEASE do not forget to thank Canon, as they are sponsoring this site. It’s absolutely amazing.
