OT:Shooting Ourselves in the Foot

Being thin doesn't mean a kid is starving to death. It just means they're skinny. Both my wife and I were very skinny as kids; luckily, she still is.

The US has an ethnic mix very different from Europe's. Native Americans and Pacific islanders tend to get fat on Western diets. Southeast asians and filipinos tend to be small and thin. The distribution will still be close to normal (you can't avoid the central limit theorem) but will be wider than in an ethnically uniform population.

But if the below-2-sigma part of a population is defined as malnourished, then all populations have equal proportion of malnourished.

The children who die of malnutrition in the USA are overwhelmingly victims of profound illness, generally birth defects. One rarely reads, say, of a lunatic parent who allows a child to die from lack of care. We have AFDC, food stamps, free meal centers, charities, and child protective agencies that look out for kids. Far more dangerous is being killed by trauma, overwhelmingly likely to be inflicted by a step-parent or other non-blood-relative.

But what is this obsession with US juvenile nutrition? It's a weird, recurrent theme.

John

Reply to
John Larkin
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I have come to the conclusion that I'll just have to live with it as long as I can still take care of myself without outside help. The one thing I really miss is reading real books. I have to put a book on my flatbed scanner, then blow it up on my computer screen to read it without getting a headache. I have read as many as 10 paperback books in a single day when I was younger. I was an avid Sci-Fi fan when I was in my teens and early 20s and read just about anything I could get my hands on.

Like Art Linkletter once said, "Old age isn't for sissies!" :)

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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Slow-man is running out of things to harp about and is now grasping at straws.

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

You first have to learn and remember what all the silly things mean :-(

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is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more
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Reply to
Fred Abse

There are devices that have a camera mounted vertically with a monitor overtop, used for people who have poor vision, but they cost several thousands of dollars (small market) if you can't get a subsidy on them. I wonder if you could do the same thing with a decent camera and an inexpensive monitor. It's got to be better to just move the book around under the camera than waiting while the scanner whines and grinds its way through each frame.

There are also dedicated reading machines such as the Xerox "Reading Edge" which will read books aloud with fair success (you have to get used to the text-to-speech 'accent' they have).

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

The ironic part is that I used to service those vision enhancement systems back in the '80s, and about 10 years ago I let someone talk me into selling him my last "C" mount close-up lens. I have a pile of used monochrome NTSC video cameras and monitors, both B&W and Color, but I have not been able to locate a good lens that I can afford. The only Veterans I know that got any help from the VA with the vision enhancement systems all had macular degeneration and the VA sent someone to pick the equipment up whenever one of them died. I had a link to a small CCD close-up camera that you could slide across a page and plug into the video input of a color monitor, or a TV with video input, but the link no longer works. It was $200 to $250, US. I saw the same camera being sold a t a flea market, but they wanted $800 for it, and didn't want to well it without the "Matching" $500 color monitor. $1300 for maybe $350 worth of electronics. All they did was sick a couple cheesy labels over the OEM labels and mark it up almost a grand. Sam's Club even had the camera available, but it didn't turn up with their sorry storefront search engine.

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Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

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Yup. The H5N1 has indeed to date resulted in ~ 50% human mortality. That virus however doesn't transmit readily to humans. The problem will come whenever this virus develops the ability to infect humans by classic means not involving close proximity to birds.

Graham

Reply to
Pooh Bear

Logically: The virus killing so many birds in the far east can't be all that old. If it had been around for a very long time, it would have selected the birds for being resistant to it.

A google search found this:

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*** begin quote ***

According to the Food Consumer, ever since 2003, over 90 people in southern Asia have suffered from the bird flu caused by a virus known as influenza A/H5N1. The WHO believes that the original bird virus could have mutated over the years, and now a new variant might be spreading from person to person and it could potentially infect millions of people leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

******** end

It seems like the makers of virus DNA don't use a good CVS system and end up with several versions with the same version number. H5N1 seems to describe a whole class of flu virus.

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Reply to
Ken Smith

In article , Ian wrote: [...]

There may be a problem with stats. Of those who died of the new flu 100% died from it. Of those who caught it but didn't die, less than 100% got reported. This could bias the numbers towards a higher kill rate than is really the case.

This new flu could already be more wide spread than we think if it is also less dangerous than we think.

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Reply to
Ken Smith

Hello Michael,

Yes, I've got one of those. Just have to find it :-) I use the Aristo for that stuff as well.

Regards, Joerg

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Reply to
Joerg

Hello Chris,

So who would that be on the California board?

Sorry, but I seriously doubt that. Medical ultrasound is such a small field. If you try to find an analog engineer in that field the number of really useful resumes coming back is typically zero. Tried it. People who have never designed an ultrasound scanner know next to nothing about that technology. It's not taught in enough detail anywhere.

Just look at the question on those exams.

Well, not in the US.

I disagree 100%.

Regards, Joerg

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Reply to
Joerg

In article , Joerg writes

No idea why would I. I was explaining how the UK system works. You apear to be just splitting hairs for the sake of it.

So you are a genius in your field and no one else can judge you. I bet I can find a few people who know about that filed though :-)

which exams?

No yet anyway but it will happen in the US as there tends to be more litigation. I have said for years that this will be driven more by the Insurance companies than the engineers.

That is would work in this industry or that it works well in all the others.

It is proven to work in all the other professions so what is your evidence that it won't work in embedded engineering?

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\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
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Reply to
Chris Hills

Hello Chris,

Maybe in the UK but not in the US. This is not about splitting hair. It's about the fact that such a regulatory system is wrong. Just my humble opinion. I know we may differ in opinion here.

I am not a genius. All I said is that there isn't likely anyone on a license board that could assess a candidate in my field of work. The chance of finding a license holder that could do that instead is pretty much zero as well. I would know them because this world is very small. Non-licensed peers (which is pretty much all of them in my case) are typically not allowed to vouch for an applicant. Maybe that's different in the UK, but it is that way here.

The ones that you have to take to obtain a license, of course. If they have the inclination to let you sit for the test, that is.

That's another dead end and here is why: When you have a license in the US you usually are forced to take out liability insurance. When you work in medical you will, in most states, not find a single carrier who will underwrite you. Which means you might have just shot yourself out of business by getting a license.

Engineering licensure exists since many decades. There is no proof that it has improved public safety or anything else. I had a nwespaper article where even a state license board admitted that. And no, I can't tell you where it was. I threw it out because it was irrelevant for someone working in industry because we are exempt.

We are talking about engineering here, not medical. But even in medical there have been lots of cases where incompetence was proven yet these guys had a long-standing license to practice. Of course, in nearly all the local cases that been reported in our daily paper the license was then revoked. But what good does that do the patient who had been harmed or died?

Regards, Joerg

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Reply to
Joerg

Hello Ray,

Which leave out anyone with a degree from a foreign school. 20+ years ago government bodies told students it would be good to gain overseas experience and even study there. So, what do we tell them now? That they shot themselves in the foot and shouldn't have listened?

Never met a single one. In 20 years.

If remembering correctly NSPE requires at least EIT status to join. Neither I nor any of my peers have that.

California doesn't if you only provide services to industry. We have an industry exemption.

Other states don't, and I sure won't ever live there.

They can only do that if you have knowingly pretended to be a PE but don't have a license. Anything else would get them inundated in litigation.

I have never encountered that. We live by standards such as UL2601, FDA regulations and so on.

None of them I was involved in had one. And I did ask. The only person I found in that direction (and that was one lone case in 20 years) had passed the FE test a long time ago and was thus an EIT. She never took the final test for PE because there really wasn't a need for it.

As I replied to Chris before a PE license can oblige you to mandatory PL coverage. Just for the fun go out and try to find an underwriter. I did, until I had blisters from dialing. Zilch. Nada.

That's why I do not offer services to the public ;-)

Heck, I have met a whole lot of power engineers working for utilities. They certainly provide direct services to the public. None of them was a PE.

Regards, Joerg

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Reply to
Joerg

The disitinction between skinny and active - which is fine - and being skinny to the point of being listless - which is not - is the one you should be making. Kids who don't get enough food to be able to afford to run around fall short in their intellectual development. A few years ago Scientific American published the results of a South American study comparing the effects of various sorts of food supplements (protein-enriched did better).

Evidence? Caucasians can be fat as kids - as I was, and my brothers and couple of my cousins (not obese, just well-coverd). Japanese kids tended to be skinny because they used to be starved - the current generation is is pretty much up to Western height, which deals with the hereditary component there ...

My betting is that your weight distribution will have a long tail on the fat/obese side, and a shorp cut-off around skinny - very non-Gaussian.

Statistics? You've got a fair population suffering from "food insecurity" for whom your welfare system - such as it is -doesn't work.

What's really weird is that the richest country in the world has a significant proportion of its population suffering from food insecurity.

Your welfare system seems to be crippled for ideological reasons - you want to starve people back to work, even when there isn't any work to starve them back into. Your ideologues seems to be too stupid to realise that starving families damages them - and is particularly damaging to the kids, who are your next generation of workers.

In this context an effective welfare system fulfils the same function as the oil-soaked paper I wrap around my tools after I've used them. so that they will still be in good nick when I want to use them again.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Reply to
bill.sloman

The web site doesn't bother posting figures less than 0.1% and - as far as I can work out - most of the EU hasn't got enough juvenile malnutrition to register.

views.

I'm sorry, but by the time I'd copied what seemed like every country in former Yugoslavia from the list into my posting, I'd gotten horribly bored, and I figured that the readers would too, so I collapsed them into "former Yugoslavia".

I apologise for unintentionally traducing Slovenia. I hadn't realised that your war had been so short and non-destructive.

about EU.

a war.

which took

is comparable

Portugal.

style chains

example Dairy Queen

Good for Slovenia! The Netherlands is acquiring a culture of eating well - we now have three restaurants with three Michelin stars - but there is a long way to go. It a Dutch person recommends a restaurant to you, you can be fairly sure that the decor, ambience and service will all be okay, but the food can be total rubbish.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Reply to
bill.sloman

about

an

infectious

over

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is the

And have you brought shares in the company making Tamiflu? Could you ask for a better marketing campaign? The drug has only a certain shelf life, and there's no guarantee that it will even work once their is an epidemic. This way if it doesn't work, they don't have to refund anything, and in a year if there's no outbreak, all the stock gets binned anyway as its expired and governments have to restock :-) This is the best sort of publicity any company could ask for and better still, its governments spending hard cash, and even people :-)

Simon

Reply to
Simon Peacock

They can balance a ball on their nose

Reply to
Simon Peacock

One of the advantages, of course, is that all the computer languages are English.. or at least American English. Also if you want to get the big bucks.. you still have to move to the USA. There also seems to be a trend of IT personal switching countries, and English, for better or worse, is a fairly generic language.

Simon

Reply to
Simon Peacock

That's changing. Wages for technology workers in India are rising at a very high rate. Soon, they will close in on us, both in terms of wages as well as living standards. Then, they will become just as good customers for our producers as we are for theirs.

China is a different story. Being a controlled economy, they are holding their exchange rate artificially low. We aren't complaining, because it allows US investors to pick up Chinese assets at bargain basement prices. Take a look at the financing behind Lenovo 'buying' IBM's PC division for an example. Once they have moved sufficient capital out of the USA, they will give the go-ahead to the Chinese gov't to cut the yuan loose. The exchange rate jump alone will make them billions.

Not really. Most of this is going overseas, if it hasn't already. Our local aircraft company is scheduled to begin building their next model and the local paper just ran a story about how they haven't figured out the manufacturing plan yet. After all those junkets to Japan, to learn 'The Toyota Way' and they still don't have a clue.

Yes. With a Glock (Austrian made).

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Paul Hovnanian     mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
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Paul Hovnanian P.E.

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