Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Oh, Hi There

As you've probably noticed, I've been neglecting Verbatio for quite some time now.  After finishing boards, I had barely a week before starting up with my clinical rotations.  My time is more limited now than it ever was during 1st and 2nd year, so my posts will likely be shorter and few and far between.

Rather than get into a long EBM post right now, I thought I'd say a little something about the HP TouchPad and how HP abandoned all WebOS hardware (though they say they haven't given up on supporting WebOS... we'll see about that).  As you might have read, HP has stopped production of all WebOS hardware (as in the Palm Pre line and the HP TouchPad).  Because of this, there was a firesale of HP TouchPads going for $99 over the weekend.  I was lucky enough to snag 2 of the 32GB versions at $149 a piece, as I'm hopeful Android will be ported over to the device soon to make it more useful.  At least I think I was able to snag them.  HP says they have my order and that they're slowly working their way through them, but I won't be entirely convinced until it shows up at my door!

It's been my opinion for a while that Palm's WebOS had the strongest UI of any mobile OS out there -- it's just a shame that their hardware sucked and there was so little developer support behind it.  WebOS just never got enough users to get people interested in developing apps for it, which is really too bad.  I preferred WebOS over Android (even CM7, though I do love the widgets and customization options), but WebOS just didn't have the apps I needed for school (Epocrates stopped supporting it shortly after I switched to Android).  I could talk at length about all the mistakes HP made when they purchased Palm, and how I wish Google had purchased Palm so as to integrate some of WebOS's features into Android, but Ars Technica had a pretty good article last week about what HP should have done with WebOS that is probably more worth your time.

I'll try to post more often, though for better or for worse, I wouldn't expect any really long posts any time soon.  So far I'm enjoying 3rd year, but I'm a little busier most days than I expected.  I'm almost 3 months into it, and I'm still not used to waking up early and working a normal/long work week!

Monday, May 23, 2011

Boards

I've been absent lately because at the end of April I had finals, and since then I've been hating my life studying for Boards.  I haven't forgotten about Verbatio, but I won't be posting anything until after June 2 when I take my test.  I have a lot of things I want to write about, but I figure doing well on Boards is a little more important right now.

In the meantime, you should check out Agraphia, a blog I discovered last month.  It's by an EM resident, but if you go through his archives you'll find a lot of posts from when he was in med school too.

See you all in 2 weeks!

Friday, April 01, 2011

Self-Published eBooks Are a Realistic (and Profitable) Option

A friend of mine told me about some crazy author, Barry Eisler, who turned down $500,000 from a big name publisher so he could self-publish his work as an eBook for sale on Kindle, B&N, etc.  Let me repeat that: he turned down half a million dollars so he could sell his own book on his own online!  That's some serious freaking coin to turn down!

Another self-published author, J.A. Konrath, has a blog on which he posted an interview he had with Barry Eisler about his decision, the current state of the publishing industry, and the future of self-publishing.  It's a great read, albeit a VERY long read, but you should definitely read it.  I've been checking out J.A. Konrath's blog regularly since I read that interview, and he has some good stuff on there.  I even picked up one of his books for $0.99, which I hope to read after I take USMLE Step 1 in June.

I've been wondering why some of my favorite authors, like Orson Scott Card, don't just drop their corporate publishers and do their own thing online.  Seeing as most authors only get 14.9% of online book sales, they can make MORE money per sale (70%) if they self-publish and lower the price to $2.99 instead of the publisher's standard $9.99-$14.99 price.  And if they're a big name author, they could still get away with $9.99 and pocket a LOT more money than they would if their publisher offered the ebook instead.  I've always despised the fact that when I purchase a book, so little of my money goes to the actual content creator, but I had no idea it was only a paltry 14.9%.

It's an interesting development, and I hope more authors go that route in the future.  It bothers me to no end when publishers gouge customers on ebook prices, sometimes even making them MORE EXPENSIVE than the hardcover or paperback version!  I don't mind paying $10 for a book -- the author deserves it! -- but I'd feel much better about it if I knew the author was actually getting more of that money.  The corporate publishing model is outdated and unnecessary, and the sooner authors, publishers, and readers realize this, the better off everyone will be.

Let's try not to have a repeat of the music industry resisting digital sales and trying to force customers to purchase their music the way the music industry wanted them to.  That's what the publishers are trying to do by delaying ebook releases and/or raising the price, and it's very off-putting to customers like me who just want to enjoy the latest from their favorite authors while making sure those authors receive proper compensation for all their hard work!

Friday, March 25, 2011

Google Being Less Open with Honeycomb (Android 3.0)

I heard about this a few days ago, and I'm trying not to jump to conclusions too hastily.  Google recently announced that they will delay the release of the source code for Honeycomb, the latest version of Android made specifically for tablets.  How long will they delay it?  No one knows for sure, and Google hasn't been very clear about it.  Open source developers are understandably pissed off -- the author of that Ars article, Ryan Paul (Segphault), started an awesome open source microblogging application for Ubuntu called Gwibber that I use all the time.  The reason for the delay has some merit, however, because in an attempt to get Honeycomb finished, Google stopped worrying about making sure that it would work on phones.

Google's worried that if they release the source right now, Honeycomb will be slapped onto phones or crappy tablets it wasn't meant to run on, and the user experience will suffer for it.  They have an argument here, in that some of the cheap ass Android tablets out there really give Android and Google a bad reputation.  If I buy a $100 Android tablet and find that it's complete junk, I might think that all Android tablets will be like that, which is not the case.  Motorola may also have wanted Google to delay the release of the source code in order to boost Xoom sales rather than having people just update their current Android 2.2 or 2.3 tablets to run Honeycomb.

On the other hand, some tablets such as the dual-core Tegra 2 G-Tablet come with garbage software pre-installed, but because of Android's open source nature, enthusiasts have made custom ROMs that make the G-Tablet an excellent, cheap Android tablet.  I was VERY tempted to pick one up off of Woot the other day for $285 shipped, but Google's delay in releasing the Honeycomb source convinced me otherwise.  The G-Tablet's specs are pretty close to that of the Xoom, but at less than half the cost!  The screen isn't quite as nice, and it has half the RAM, but it would have made an excellent, cheaper alternative to the Xoom once some XDA developers got Honeycomb running on it.  Unfortunately, there's no telling when that will happen now.  In the meantime, I've decided to give Apple's iPad 2 a shot.

I'm very disappointed with Google right now.  I run CyanogenMod 7 (an open source, community-based ROM) on my HTC Evo, and it runs WAY better than the much slower, clunkier HTC Sense interface that came with my phone.  Custom ROMs like CM7 aren't possible without the Android source being openly available.  I understand Google wanting to have more control over the Android source so that the market isn't flooded with crappy products that claim to be the newest Android devices.  To be honest, you can't be as confident that every Android-based device is going to be as solid or consistent an experience as it is on nicer devices like the Evo.  Unfortunately, delaying or withholding the release of the source code like this also cripples the possibilities that an open platform like Android is supposed to be able to offer.  The custom kernels and ROMs that are possible with Android are among the main reasons I switched to Android in the first place!

I hope this really is just a delay in releasing the source code and that it gets released sooner rather than later.  If not, Honeycomb development is going to be severely hindered, and the Android tablet software scene needs as much help as possible to catch up to Apple's 1 year head-start.  Until then, we have no choice but to just wait and see what the hell Google decides to do.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Initial Thoughts: iPad 2 vs. Android 3.0 (Honeycomb)

I'm a big proponent of open source software.  I absolutely love my HTC Evo 4G (running CyanogenMod 7), and I've been using Ubuntu on my home computers pretty much exclusively for ~5 years now.  I use MythTV on my media server so I can record OTA HDTV broadcasts via my antenna for free; it even automatically detects commercial breaks so I can skip them with a simple press of a button when I'm watching recorded TV shows.  It's pretty sweet.

So, simply put, Apple products aren't really designed with me in mind.  I like to have full control over my software and hardware so I can tinker with it to get it to run just the way I want.  That's the beauty of open source software, but it's not for everyone.  Apple makes excellent hardware, and their software works beautifully together.  My issue with Apple isn't their products, but rather with how their software is managed.  Apple's iPhone, iPod, and iPad products are also meant to be managed with iTunes, which I can't use because I run Ubuntu.  I prefer my mobile device to act like a USB flash drive so I can transfer music and other documents to it myself and have it detected by the device's software without issue.  This lets me use my Evo as a USB storage device to transfer files between pretty much any computer I want without them needing to have iTunes installed.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Apple's New Policies Prove Difficult for Some Developers

Ars Technica recently posted an update regarding Apple's changes to their app store policies.  Basically, "Anyone who sells subscription-based content outside the App Store must also use Apple's system, giving Apple a 30 percent cut."  This might not seem like a very big deal at first, but if you read that newest update from Ars, you can understand why some developers are pissed off.

There's a logistical problem with an app having to offer a subscription 2 ways -- through the app store and through their own transaction/subscription service.  How do you tell the user "hey, you need to choose how you want to pay for the exact same service either way, although one way gives Apple a 30% cut simply for our app being available on iOS."  For some developers, having Apple manage transactions is much easier, but other developers already have a revenue plan in place and Apple scraping 30% off the top can remove their incentive for having the app available on iOS.  Ars mentions two apps in particular, Readability and TinyGrab, two apps that could be very useful to iOS users but that won't be made available due to Apple's new policies.  I wouldn't be surprised to see things getting messy all over again when it comes to apps that allow access to Hulu, Netflix, Kindle, and other large services that many iOS users enjoy every day!

If you're still not sure why this is a big deal, let me offer an analogy to this situation to understand why some people are angry.  Say that a particular real estate company, Orange, owns 25% of the real estate market in a big city.  25% of all houses sold and all apartments/houses rented come from them.  Orange executives are sitting around trying to investigate "alternative revenue opportunities," and they realize that they're really losing out because every unit they sell spends all of this money on electricity, Internet access, and cable/satellite service, but that they never see a dime of that money.  But hey, they deserve some of that money because if they hadn't sold/rented that unit, those utility companies would never have gotten that customer!  Orange is in no way involved with these services aside from selling the house/apartment to the occupants who later purchase those services.  To increase revenues, they tell all of these utility companies that for every customer they got from an Orange real estate property (even houses sold several years ago), the utility company needs to give Orange 30% of all customer feesAnd if they don't comply, then they won't be allowed to offer services to all current and future Orange real estate customers.  Even if Orange couldn't do this with houses, it would be relatively manageable with a lot of their rental properties, which would be devastating to these utility companies.

Monday, February 07, 2011

Bill Maher on NFL Socialism vs. MLB Capitalism

A week ago on Real Time, Bill Maher had an interesting take on the Super Bowl in his segment, "New Rules."  It's only about 5 minutes long, so rather than paraphrase it, I'll just have you watch the video:





Bill Maher is an interesting person -- he usually supports what "the scientists" say, but at other times he just goes his own way regardless of what the scientific evidence says, as he does with vaccines.  Nevertheless, he still has some interesting moments on his show when he's not being too much of an ass.  He is a comedian though, and thus when he says things, you need to consider the legitimacy of those claims.


In this case, I decided to look at the list of winners for both the Super Bowl and the World Series.  I then calculated the percent of the total number of championship games that each team had appeared in and/or won (as a percent of the total, not of their appearances).  This information is summarized in the tables below, after the break.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Do Americans spend their money more wisely than the government?

I was watching this Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher, and one of the Republican guests said something along the line of I believe Americans know how to spend their money more wisely than their government does.  This is something you hear a lot from Republicans.  In general, I agree to the degree that I'd rather spend the majority of my money myself rather than give it to the government to spend on whatever.  However, that doesn't mean that Americans necessarily spend their money more wisely.  For one, some things the government spends money on would be impractical and economically unsound for a person to do on an individual basis (e.g. roads and national defense).

Still, considering all the talk about the national debt, I wondered how much debt the average American household was in compared to the government when you compensated for the difference in wages.  In other word's, what's the average American household's debt as a percentage of its income compared to the US government's debt as a percentage of government spending?

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Cochrane Review: Statins in Low-Risk Patient Populations

Dr. Steven Novella recently posted about a Cochrane review of statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs) on SBM.  As Dr. Novella says, the question is not about whether or not statins work (they do), but whether or not their use is warranted in low-risk populations.  The Cochrane review found that 1000 low-risk patients would need to be treated in order to prevent one death per year from a cardiovascular event.  10+ million people in the US are on a statin, but I'm not sure how many of them are at a low risk of having a cardiovascular event.

At the end of his post, Dr. Novella wonders what the cost breakdown would be for something like this.  How much money is spent on the statins versus how much would have been spent on the cardiovascular events the drug helped patients avoid?  I decided to make a few quick calculations just to see what kind of ballpark figures we're looking at.  With all the talk about rising healthcare costs, I thought this would be worth looking into.  This is by no means conclusive, and like I said, I don't know how many low-risk patients are taking statins.  This is more of an intellectual exercise, as I'd expect someone with greater access to statistics concerning statin use to be able to come up with a much more accurate figure.  But I'll give it a shot anyway because I'm bored and I don't feel like studying for my exams on Monday (which, coincidentally, are over cardiology!).

Aspartame and Cancer in Rats vs. Humans

A friend of mine (who I swear sometimes suffers from hyperactive agency detection device) referred me here when he was telling me that aspartame (sometimes abbreviated as APM) is hazardous to human health.  Specifically, he was talking about this:

An animal study that fed 0, 4, 20, 100, 500, 2500, and 5000 mg per kilogram of body weight of aspartame to rats saw lymphoma/leukemia increase in female rats, starting from about twice the risk with 20 mg per kilogram of body weight (a person weighing 75 kilograms or 165 lbs, consuming 1500 mg aspartame, or about 8 cans of diet soda) compared with a control group that was not fed aspartame.

It's strange that he pointed me there when the rest of the article talks about how the most recent HUMAN study shows no association between aspartame consumption and cancer rates, but nevertheless, I'd like to deal with this issue.

Before I get into that, let me give a brief overview of the idea behind non-nutritive or "0 Calorie" sweeteners.  Sugar (such as sucrose or fructose -- there are many types of sugars) is perceived as sweet because it interacts with taste buds on our tongue.  These taste buds have receptors that temporarily interact with sucrose and other sugars, and when that happens our brain gets a signal that says "oooh, this tastes sweet."  Each of these sugars has a varying level of "sweetness" as perceived by the brain depending on how it interacts with these receptors.  Evolutionarily, this is an advantage in that sugars are used by our bodies for energy, so being able to detect sugar and have a pleasurable response to it makes sense.  But when we consume more Calories than we require and we become obese, this reward response can become counterproductive.  One weapon against this is to use compounds that activate our taste buds for "sweet" but without that compound being used for energy.  Instead, the compound passes through your digestive tract without being absorbed.  That way the food tastes good without making us fatter!

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Site Updates

I've been receiving a small amount of regular traffic lately (for me, at least).  As such, I thought I should mention that you shouldn't be surprised if you notice a few changes to Verbatio. 

I've added 2 new pages: About Me and Bookshelf.  The About Me page is pretty self explanatory, and the Bookshelf is where you can go to see a list of what I'm reading, planning to read, and have already read.  I'll also be experimenting with the design of the site in general, so don't be surprised if you come here and see some crazy new theme or layout.  I'll try to keep it from ever looking too awful, and I apologize for some of the silly Google ads you see on here.  I blog about how worthless homeopathy and other forms of pseudoscience are, and yet my brother told me that he often sees Google ads for those very same products!

So please, enjoy the site and hopefully I can find the time and energy to post often enough that you have a reason to keep coming back!

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Dr. Paul Offit on NPR's Talk of the Nation

Dr. Paul Offit was a guest on Talk of the Nation last week to talk about vaccines.  He talked about his new book, Deadly Choices, which discusses the anti-vaccine movement.  I've already ordered it on my Kindle, but I haven't read it yet.  I'm hoping I can use it as a break from GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire series soon (I'm ~65% through the 3rd book, A Storm of Swords). 

I had a chance to listen to the podcast while I was at the gym today, and it was enjoyable but immensely frustrating.  I think what people forget is that sometimes medicine doesn't make logical sense until you spend years studying the subject.  One of the callers refused to accept Offit's argument that having 5 vaccines in a single doctor's visit still isn't even a blip in the radar compared to what your immune system (or a child's) encounters every day.  When you see a child scream while getting stuck with a needle a few times, I can understand how it would seem that it's a bigger deal to your immune system, but factually it simply is not.

I could spend hours talking about vaccines and the anti-vaccine movement, but instead I'll have you check out the podcast yourself.  It's ~18 minutes long so you can listen to it while you're driving to class/work or while you're at the gym.  If you have a podcast application on your phone, you can subscribe to Talk of the Nation as well, which makes finding and listening to stuff like this much easier.  Hopefully I'll find some time to read Deadly Choices soon.  Based on what I heard on the podcast, I'm sure it'll be worth the time!

Monday, January 10, 2011

The [boring] truth about rBGH and milk safety

A while back, I posted about some concerns brought to my attention by my sister-in-law, several of which dealt with cows and dairy products.  In particular, she had asked about:
  1. rBGH/bST (recombinant bovine growth hormone, or bovine somatotropin):  They give this to cows to increase their growth and milk production.  What if it's still in the products we consume?
  2. IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor 1):  There are questions about IGF-1 being responsible for some cancers, and rBGH is supposed to elevate IGF-1.  Can it cause cancer in humans who drink milk from these cows?
  3. Can antibiotics given to cows show up in our food supply, and are they increased or more harmful due to the hormones we give the cows?
I did a lot of searches on PubMed trying to find information about rBGH, and most of what I found dealt with animal trials or the public's perceptions of rBGH.  After all, if you've read some of the pro-organic websites out there, you might have seen something about the dangers of these chemicals, or even that the FDA has never studied the effects of these chemicals in milk consumed by humans.  Well, it turns out there's a very good reason why you don't find these studies anywhere -- it's because they're not necessary.  Medically.  Scientifically.  At all.

Why? Because well... Science.  It works, bitches!

Friday, January 07, 2011

College upperclassman fail at scientific reasoning

Ars Technica has a nice article on how many college upperclassman in science majors still suck when it comes to scientific and/or formal reasoning.  When we're children, we come up with simplified explanations for observed events that fit our experiences and/or expectations, but those explanations are often incorrect.  But hey, nothing against our 5-year-old selves, what else can you expect without a more formal science education!  The hope is that we'd shrug off these inaccurate, inadequate explanations as we progress through our science education.  Unfortunately, that's not happening nearly as often as we'd like.

I'll let you read the article on Ars for some of the details, but one thing in particular caught my eye (emphasis mine):

What's the root of this problem? The authors ascribe a lot of it to language. It's quite common to hear people describe fat as just melting away or vanishing, which doesn't encourage anyone to try to balance the books on where all those atoms actually go to, much less get them thinking in terms of their release as carbon dioxide and water vapor. The same problem persists in the language commonly used by biologists. We frequently refer to energy as "lost" when it's no longer available to an organism, but that doesn't mean it's not still there, typically in the form of heat.

Very similar to what I discussed about Cryolipolysis, right?  I've heard cryolipolysis's effects described as "melting away" the fat, but melting it away in one area doesn't do anything if it only comes back to the same area or somewhere else to take up residence again!  Some scientific reasoning is all that is needed to know that cryolipolysis can't deliver on all of the promises described by some of its proponents.  Better scientific reasoning skills could save people a lot of money and disappointment on procedures like that!

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Kindle now available for Windows Phone 7, but still no WebOS love

It appears that Amazon was able to release Kindle for Windows Phone 7 less than 2 months after WP7's release in the US.  That's great for WP7 users and all, but what about WebOS users?  What the hell, Amazon?

I've moved onto Android 2.2 (soon to be 2.3, or "Gingerbread") with my HTC Evo 4G, but 1.5 years ago I absolutely loved my Palm Pre when I got it!  It was a great phone.  WebOS development hasn't quite progressed like I'd hoped (hence my move to Android), but I still find it hard to believe that a Kindle app for WebOS would take very long to make.  I don't mean this in a conspiracy theory kind of way, but I wouldn't be too surprised if Microsoft had some part in getting the app out quickly.  After all, WP7 supposedly has at least a $500 million marketing budget, so I don't think it's out of the question.

I love Amazon and I love my Kindle, but this is still pretty ridiculous, and borderline insulting for the many WebOS users out there who would love to read Kindle books on their phones (my brother included, who isn't eligible for an upgrade until this summer).

Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Cryolipolysis: What is it and does it work?

In the last couple weeks, I've realized that if I still lived back home, I'd probably be blogging a lot more often.  Talking to my family always gives me great ideas for new topics to cover on here!

This time, we have cryolipolysis (I think I've heard it called "cold lipo" as well).  This procedure involves exposing fat "problem areas" (like love handles) to intense cold.  It's non-invasive, and may seem like a nice alternative to people who are put off by the somewhat disturbing, violent procedure that is liposuction.  For people who are in good shape but still have some remaining problem areas they'd like to get rid of, it can be tempting.

The low temperature forces your adipocytes (fat cells) to undergo apoptosis (programmed cell death).  The idea is that killing these adipocytes will get rid of the fat they contain and thus reduce the amount of fat in the area.  A study from July 2009, entitled Clinical efficacy of noninvasive cryolipolysis and its effects on peripheral nerves looked at the procedure.  A search in PubMed for cryolipolysis didn't bring up any more recent studies for its efficacy in humans, which leads me to believe that this may have been something of a dead end (1.5 years and no larger trials to test the procedure?), but it's worth looking into. 

Before getting into the results of the study itself, let's consider what happens after an adipocyte undergoes apoptosis.  When an adipocyte dies, it releases its contents (fat) into the surrounding tissue.  From there, the fat can be taken up by the surrounding surviving adipocytes or picked up by the lymphatics and returned to the blood. From here, the fat has a few options:
  1. Stay in the blood.  This would be bad.  What use is reducing your love handles if you give yourself high cholesterol instead?
  2. Be "burned" for energy/calories.
  3. Be transported throughout the body for storage, including back to the original site.
  4. Excreted from the body.
Now it can get a little more complicated than that considering what else needs to happen to the released fat (lipids) before they can be stored or used for energy, etc., but that's enough for a general idea of what's going on.