Ploofle

This is how good it is: it makes me wish I was a doctor.
…
Now that you’ve been shocked, check out the film: Salud.
It’s about the work being done abroad by Cuban doctors and the medical establishment, particularly in a sustainable and locally appropriate manner. It’s so good, it’s hard for me to believe this is the real deal - so I’ll be reading up on it to see if what’s portrayed is the average/typical experience.

Rongrong, Alexis, and others: check it out. I may ask you how close the US system is to this later…

Tags: praxis

…but I am a tad out of sorts - no reason, just am.

I am up to 3-ish jobs, 13 credits, and down to one nerve. I think that people should be paid according to effort - it seems it’d be a nicer way to live, except that you’d be ragged and who knows what the metrics would entail.

On the other hand, I learned the basics of multivariate analysis, how the US overthrew the Guatemalan government in the 50s for bananas, and that most people here don’t know the practice of pinning money to yourself on your b-day for people to add to.

Anyone want to work on some artistic-y projects?

Tags: praxis

from Wikipedia:

In American politics and advertising, the expression astroturfing is used pejoratively to describe formal public relations projects which deliberately seek to engineer the impression of spontaneous and populist reactions to a politician, product, service, event, etc. by many diverse and distributed individuals acting of their own volition, when such reaction does not in fact actually exist.

Astroturfing is carefully designed to ”appear” as though it is the result of popular feeling, rather than manipulation. The astroturfing campaign attempts to gain legitimacy by affecting the appearance of having sprung forth spontaneously from “the people”, whereas it is actually centrally coordinated and engineered by a small group. The planners hope that the public at large will believe that so many seemingly independent viewpoints could not have been faked.

The term is wordplay based on “grassroots” efforts, which are truly spontaneous undertakings. AstroTurf refers to the bright green artificial grass used in some indoor sports stadiums. A “grassroots” action or campaign is one that is started spontaneously and is largely sustained by private persons, not politicians, corporations, or public relations firms. A “grassroots” campaign is perceived to come from the popular feelings of some mass of people and to not be a creation of the powerful.

Examples of these kinds of practices can be found throughout history, though there is a perception that use of astroturfing is increasing in reaction to the declining credibility of politicians and corporations.

See example: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007846.html

Tags: praxis

…Add to that list health professionals who totally get bent out of shape when the sanctity of their profession is questioned. In short, we had to read for class a publication concerning uninsurance and the health consequences of it, based on a literature review of that subject. One of the results thrown out included that ER patients without insurance get worse medical care in the ER than others. People began taking this very personally, as they were professionals who worked in the ER, saying things like “no doctor would ever give bad care based on things like insurance!” Or “stop pissing on the poor oft-maligned healthcare providers”, since we totally don’t normally go around appreciating them or anything.

As generalizations irritate me, as well as snow-white clean reputations of professions (say, clergymen are always celibate when they’re supposed to be, judges never have penis pumps under their robes, nurses never deliberately euthanize patients without consent), I responded. And a flurry of posts commenced. Maybe the data is way off - but shouldn’t you check their facts to see if they are valid points? All I’m saying is never questioning your fundamentals - be that of yourself, your career, your profession, your faith - is to entrap yourself in a situation of oblivious comfort and disconnect with your people.

In my little niche of personal professional-land, if you lose touch of that essence - that people in your shoes can and will do what is wrong - you can’t honestly say you’re working as a partner with people in need. Rather, you’re parachuting in to provide them with all the help they’ll need to be better people.

Tags: praxis

Highly recommended - it really frames the issue of international health, data/IT, and spiffy people from Denmark: Hans Rosling video at TED

Tags: praxis