[ExI] Attention Spans Decreasing?

[John Grigg]

I want to give everyone here a big virtual hug.  : )  I have deeply enjoyed
the learning and insights I have gotten from this list over the years.  And
as for bogosity filters, I still need to work on mine.


I have sensed my own ability to focus for long periods and not get antsy,
to really have gone down over the past decade or so.  Oh, and speaking of
videogames, watch out for side-scrolling Starbound! lol  It superficially
looks like an old SuperNintendo game, but on steroids, due to it's modern
pc depth and variety.  You explore & colonize a galaxy of planets with coal
burning starships..., yep.  My girlfriend is thoroughly addicted to it! lol
 And yet I am not.  I do love the animation sequences after my characters
die, showing a mind/body clone generation.


But of course it's not *really* my original character, but a copy.  Hee...



John  : )


On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 12:21 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki <
rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 1:37 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> I had an idea, which Rafal or Bill might comment on.  Doctors can go thru
>> their whole careers using data that was pre-filtered.  They have their
>> medical textbooks, the JAMA, mostly credible and careful medical journals,
>> etc, all high quality reliable information.  They knew to disregard or
>> heavily discount material supplied by advertisers and vendors, but pay
>> close attention to some select sources and studies.  They knew how to get
>> everything pre-filtered at least up to the plausible level before they even
>> invest valuable time to read it.
>>
>
> ### The key is finding the right venue. For me it's UpToDate (paywalled),
> Medscape/eMedicine, RxList, and Pubmed searches. I hardly ever go outside
> of these sources, which should not be surprising since Pubmed encompasses
> essentially all of peer-reviewed medical literature. You have to always
> think about the "standard of care" part ... I have never been sued, I
> sincerely hope this lucky streak continues and I try to help my luck by
> being nice to patients and periodically checking the guidelines even on
> basics, like stroke or Parkinson's.
>
> Today I did a marathon session on Pubmed at my science job - it's so much
> different from my MD-PhD days 20 years ago. Frantically searching through
> hundreds of articles I know nothing about trying to assess the plausibility
> of a biological mechanism for a drug we invented, in order to choose a
> reagent to buy from among thousands of possible avenues of research. Made
> me dizzy, literally.
>
> There is a new, lazy way of doing science coming to town - shotgun
> sequencing DNA, RNA, proteins, completely characterizing all molecular
> entities in a sample, generating upwards of 10 GB data per sample, and
> letting a bioinformatics package make guesses at mechanisms.
>
> Soon those who own the relevant hardware will be retired (earning a rent),
> those who don't will be fired.
>
> Rafal
>
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>
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