Ethical implication of advancing medical know-how

In the past, there was a limit to the expenses, which could be incurred by medical treatment of people needing medical attention. Usually the requisite know-how ran out before money. In other words, people died when their physicians no longer knew what to do.

Nowadays, there are more and more cases, in which the constraint is monetary rather than know-how. In other words, there are more and more cases, in which patients die not because physicians do not know how to treat them, but because money is not available to pay for known treatments.

Another factor, which did not exist in the past, is the ability of technology to keep the bodies of brain-dead people alive, by means of intravenous feeding and heart-lung machines. Such a treatment, of course, costs a lot of money, and could last for several years.

This change leads to an ethical dilemma, which did not exist in the past.

In the past, families could commit to treating a sick family member at any expense, and have reasonable expectation that he’ll either get well or die before the entire family is driven into abject poverty.

Nowadays, families are more and more confronted with the dilemma when to stop financing treatment of a sick family member. The sick family member could be elderly, needing care due to an age-related malaise. Or he could be a young child with congenital deformity or childhood cancer.

Another aspect of the dilemma is how to allocate financial means among family members, usually elderly, who need to be taken care of – and other family members, usually young, who need money for tuition, downpayment on dwelling place, and other expenses which will help get them ahead in their lives.

Blog Day 2007

Today it’s the 3rd Blog Day.

More information about the yearly Blog Day.

Five of the blogs, which I read and recommend are:

  • Freedom to Tinker (http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/) – … is your freedom to understand, discuss, repair, and modify the technological devices you own.
  • Lauren Weinstein’s Blog (http://lauren.vortex.com/) – about Internet topics, privacy and other issues relating to technology and society. The author has been active in the Internet privacy scene ever since its inception.
  • I’m just a simple DBA on a complex production system (http://prodlife.wordpress.com/) – Writing about all things production. Especially Oracle databases. The author writes about her work life as a DBA – tips, difficulties, conferences, etc.
  • Web2Spot (http://web2spot.blogspot.com/) – Covering Web 2.0 news, trends & companies made in Israel.
  • Hope is the thing with feathers (http://israblog.nana10.co.il/blogread.asp?blog=150892) – Shira Horesh’s Hebrew language blog about her life and struggles as a young woman, who got deafened at late age.

The above are only five of the 88 blogs which I routinely scan and read via their RSS feeds, using the Akregator. The first two blogs are relatively famous, and are important to follow because the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The other three are less known.

Mad Scientists!

Did you think that mad scientists exist only in pulp Sci-Fi stories and in James Bond 007 movies?

If so, The Top 20 Most Bizarre Experiments of all time will set you right!

This Web page is not for the squeamish, and it features delightful experiments such as two-headed dogs, human-ape hybrids, and getting people to kill puppies by electrical shocks.  Reading that several of the experiments were performed by Soviet scientists made me feel as if I am reading a real life enactment of the secret labs of Luthor Corp.

Three practical philosophies

Summary

In addition to major life philosophies and religions, there are also various philosophies and methods which aim at doing better various things in life. In this post I write about three such “minor” philosophies.

Feldenkrais Method

The Feldenkrais Method belongs to the realm of complementary and alternative medicine. It stresses user physical movements. It is applied by people like dancers or musicians, who want to improve their movement repertoire, and by people, who want to reduce their pain or movement limitations. One famous student of the Feldenkrais Method was David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel.
Wikipedia article (also source of this summary): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldenkrais_Method
The Feldenkrais Method Center: http://www.feldenkrais-center.com/INDEX_ENG.HTM

Eliahu Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints

The Theory of Constraints (TOC) belongs to the realm of business and organizational management. Each system (business or organization) has a goal to be maximized. Each system has also a key constraint, which limits the system’s performance relative to its goal. In order to manage the system’s performance, the key constraint must be identified and dealt with.
Wikipedia article (also source of this summary): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Constraints

Steve Litt’s Universal Troubleshooting Process

The Universal Troubleshooting Process (UTP) belongs to the realms of repairing malfunctioning equipment and software debugging. It is a method for troubleshooting reproducible problems and ensuring that once they are fixed – they stay fixed.
The core of this process is a 10-step process, which covers preparations, actual diagnosis, repair, and post-repair work.
Longer description of the process: http://www.troubleshooters.com/tuni.htm

Book review: Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think!”

DON’T MAKE ME THINK! – A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Second Edition
© 2006 Steve Krug
Author: Steve Krug
Pages: 201
Publisher: New Riders
ISBN: 0-321-34475-8
The book introduces the principles of Web usability, and explains how to overcome political obstacles to actual implementation of usable Web sites. Being an introduction, the book is rather superficial. However, it has several footnote references and a section devoted to Recommended reading, which would benefit people, who want to learn more about Web usability.

In practical world, Web site design and implementation is fraught with politics, due to the large number of stakeholders in a typical organization. The book covers the political aspects as well, even though its title does not reflect this fact.

The book is very readable, and is rich with colorful illustrations. To fully benefit from the book, the reader should have browsed Web sites and to have participated in a Web site building project.

The book was designed to be readable in a single flight. I actually finished reading it in less than four hours, excluding pauses. In my opinion, it meets very well the needs of beginning Webmasters, and of busy executives in charge of Web site design projects.

The book starts with an introduction, which explains why the book is thin, and what was left out of it and why. Chapters 1-5 cover the guiding principles, which can be summarized as follows.

Krug’s Laws of Usability:

  1. Don’t make me think!
  2. It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambigous choice.
  3. Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.

Principles:

  • Create a clear visual hierarchy.
  • Design pages for scanning, not reading.
  • Conventions are your friends.
  • Users like mindless choices.

Facts of life:

  • We don’t read pages. We scan them.
  • We don’t make optimal choices. We satisfice.
  • We don’t figure out how things work. We muddle through.
  • Steve Krug’s wife: “If something is hard to use, I just don’t use it as much.”
  • People won’t use your Web site if they can’t find their way around it.

Chapter 6 treats the subject of Web site navigation, covering search, breadcrumbs and tabs. It also introduces the “trunk test”.

Home pages have their special technical and political issues, so chapter 7 discusses home pages. An home page needs to answer the following questions:

  1. What is this?
  2. What do they have here?
  3. What can I do here?
  4. Why should I be here – and not somewhere else?
  5. Where do I start?

The conscientious Web designer will find in chapter 7 also a list of the top five plausible excuses for not spelling out the big picture on the home page, along with arguments, which refute those excuses.

The next two chapters, chapters 8-9, deal with the politics of designing for usability and present usability testing as a way to reduce the impact of “religious arguments”. Chapter 9 provides also a list of the top five plausible excuses for not testing Web sites, along with their refutations.

Chapter 10 deals with the benefits to an organization from improved usability of its Web site. Chapter 11 covers accessibility. Chapter 12 deals with the politics of bad design decisions and how to overcome them.

The following points pertaining to politics are covered by the above chapters:

  1. Home page design is fraught with politics, because there are several stakeholders.
  2. Usability testing is presented as antidote to religious arguments in the Web design team.
  3. People are afraid that better accessibility degrades the experience of non-disabled users.
  4. Bosses want to ask too much personal data.
  5. Bosses want to add “sizzle” to the Web site.

The author’s Web site is at http://www.sensible.com/.
The first edition of the book had three chapters about usability testing, which were condensed into a single chapter in the second edition. The original text of those chapters can be found in http://www.sensible.com/secondedition/.

The book was reviewed also in Amazon Web site: http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/0789723107

The following are reviews of the first edition of the book:

The following is an interview with the book author: Meet the MasterMinds: Common Sense Web Design with Steve Krug.

Wicked Problems

The subject of wicked problems is discussed in Rethinking Wicked Problems.

The following wicked problems in Israel contribute a lot of heat to the political discourse:

  • Place of religion in Israel (Israel as a state of Jews vs. Israel as a Jewish state).
  • Civil rights of Israeli Arabs vs. security of Jews by their being majority. By extension, dealing with the Palestinian refugee problem.
  • How best to help the hungry and poor in Israel.
  • Traffic accidents – human factors vs. infrastructure factors.
  • Balance of the right to make money by one’s efforts with the governance-distorting political clout caused by being very rich.

On the other hand, the problem of optimal management of the health system and health insurance does not appear to be a wicked problem.

Videoclips with subtitles – Halelujah!

Ilan Shavit publicized three videoclips about Israel.

I was happy to be surprised to see that those videoclips have subtitles in Hebrew, making them accessible to the hearing impaired, who know Hebrew!

The links to the videoclips are:

  1. Israel – Part 1
  2. Israel – Part 2
  3. Israel – Part 3

The fabricated danger to Al Aqsa Mosque

The 2000 Al Aqsa Intifada erupted in Arab cities and villages in both Israel and the occupied areas. The theme was that the Jews want to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem – the third most sacred site to the Muslims.

Jews did not understand from where did this claim come. If any mosque were at risk due to conflicting religious demands, it would have been the Dome of the Rock, which stands at the location of the Temples of old times.

Bob Wallace’s How Propaganda Works is the best explanation to this phenomenon, which I read. The life of the Israeli Arabs has been relatively peaceful. Very few Israeli Arabs indulged in terrorism without first leaving Israel. Some sick leaders want to get them to fight the Jews, to make life in Israel more difficult than it is. To accomplish this goal, the Israeli Arabs need to be persuaded that the Jews are after something sacred to them.

To point out the inequality in standards of life, level of education in schools, electricity supply, disposal of sewage – is not enough – because those are problems which can be solved in few years once the will and pressure are there. Therefore, some grievance, which cannot be resolved because it was not based upon fact in the first place, had to be invented. Hence, the accusations that Jews want to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque.

See Preservation of Al Aqsa Mosque and other Muslim holy sites about sites important to the Muslim world, which are under Muslim control, and which are not preserved by the Muslims, to say the least.

Housing 100 billion humans on Earth – another take

More than a year ago, I wondered what modifications are needed on and in Earth in order for it to house 100 billion (1011) humans, without serious interference with other life forms.

X-SEED 4000: World’s tallest tower will house 1 million people falls short from being a full answer to such a question.  However, the costs and engineering complexity seem to approach those needed for construction of a space station housing this number of people.

sitecopy – basic usage, pointers to more information, tips

When you maintain a Web site, it is a good practice to hold in your PC a mirror of the Web site’s contents. When you want to modify the contents, you edit the files in your PC and then synchronize the Web site’s contents with the copy in your PC.

To actually synchronize the files, you have several possibilities:

  • Individually FTP modified files to the Web site. Manually delete from the Web site files, which you deleted in your PC.
  • Create a tar ball of the modified files, FTP it to the Web site, and then untar them remotely. Then manually delete any files which you deleted in your PC. You need also to make sure you missed no modified file in the tarball.
  • If the Web hosting services provides a rsync server, you can use rsync to synchronize.
  • If you can set up a rsync server on your PC, you can invoke rsync on the remote Web host, if you have shell access to it. In this case, you need also to poke a hole in your PC’s firewall.
  • Use the sitecopy command, the topic of this blog post.
  • There are also other commands with substantially the same functionality as sitecopy.

Homepage for the sitecopy project: http://www.lyra.org/sitecopy/
Should I use sitecopy? http://www.lyra.org/sitecopy/why.html
Freshmeat project information: http://freshmeat.net/projects/sitecopy/

To use sitecopy under Linux, you need to create the file .sitecopyrc in your home directory. The following works for me (replace words with ‘you’ by names relevant to your situation):

site yoursitename
  server yourwebdomain.com
  username yourremoteusername
  # password ________________ # sitecopy will prompt you for your password
  local /home/yourlocalusername/websites/yourwebsite  # Your Web site's mirror
  remote /        # FTP home directory for your Web site
  ftp usecwd      # FTP will upload files only to the current working directory
  permissions all # Set permissions of files after uploading
  permissions dir # Set permissions of directories after uploading
  safe   # Block uploading of files, which were updated on the Web host.
  exclude *~  # Exclude backup versions of files modified by you
  exclude /.bash* # Do not delete dot bash files in the Web host.
  exclude /.svn   # or /CVS if you use CVS rather than subversion.
  exclude /*/.svn
  exclude /*/*/.svn
  exclude /*/*/*/.svn
  exclude /*/*/*/*/.svn
  exclude /*/*/*/*/*/.svn
  exclude /*/*/*/*/*/*/.svn
  exclude /*/*/*/*/*/*/*/.svn
  exclude /*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/.svn
  exclude /*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/.svn
  exclude /*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/.svn
  exclude /*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/.svn
  exclude /*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/.svn
  exclude /*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/.svn
  exclude /*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/.svn
  exclude /*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/.svn

(The above illustrates also a problem which I had in systematically excluding directories by name.)

To actually run sitecopy, create a shell script file with the following command:

sitecopy -u --debug=ftp,files,socket --logfile=/home/yourlocalusername/sitecopy.log yoursitename

The logfile will be few MB long for a Web site with few hundreds of files, but if you encounter any problems, the logfile will help you diagnose the problems.

I found that sometimes I need to run

sitecopy --catchup yoursitename

before uploading some files, because the safe option seems to be overzealous at times.