George Saunders's Advice to Graduates It’s long past graduation season, but we recently learned that George Saunders delivered the convocation speech at Syracuse University for the class of 2013, and George was kind enough to send it our way and allow us to reprint it here. The speech touches on some of the moments in his life and larger themes (in his life and work) that George spoke about in the profile we ran back in January — the need for kindness and all the things working against our actually achieving it, the risk in focusing too much on “success,” the trouble with swimming in a river full of monkey feces. The entire speech, graduation season or not, is well worth reading, and is included below.
Lucid Dream Featured Article Categories: Featured Articles | Dreams In other languages: Español: tener sueños lúcidos, Deutsch: Einen Klartraum träumen, Français: faire des rêves lucides, Português: Ter Sonhos Lúcidos, Русский: видеть осознанные сны, 中文: 做清醒梦, Nederlands: Zo kun je lucide dromen, Čeština: Jak na lucidní snění, Bahasa Indonesia: Bermimpi Sadar, 日本語: 明晰夢を見る, العربية: رؤية حلم جلي, ไทย: ฝันรู้ตัว, 한국어: 루시드 드림 꾸는 법, Tiếng Việt: Mơ có Ý thức
How a secretive panel uses data that distorts doctors’ pay “I have experience,” the Yale-trained, Orlando-based doctor said. “I’m not that slow; I’m not fast. I’m thorough.” This seemingly miraculous proficiency, which yields good pay for doctors who perform colonoscopies, reveals one of the fundamental flaws in the pricing of U.S. health care, a Washington Post investigation has found. Unknown to most, a single committee of the AMA, the chief lobbying group for physicians, meets confidentially every year to come up with values for most of the services a doctor performs. Those values are required under federal law to be based on the time and intensity of the procedures. But the AMA’s estimates of the time involved in many procedures are exaggerated, sometimes by as much as 100 percent, according to an analysis of doctors’ time, as well as interviews and reviews of medical journals. If the time estimates are to be believed, some doctors would have to be averaging more than 24 hours a day to perform all of the procedures that they are reporting.
Lateral thinking Lateral thinking is solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic. The term was coined in 1967 by Edward de Bono. [1] According to de Bono, lateral thinking deliberately distances itself from standard perceptions of creativity as either "vertical" logic (the classic method for problem solving: working out the solution step-by-step from the given data) or "horizontal" imagination (having many ideas but being unconcerned with the detailed implementation of them). Methods[edit] Critical thinking is primarily concerned with judging the true value of statements and seeking errors. Random Entry Idea Generating Tool: The thinker chooses an object at random, or a noun from a dictionary, and associates it with the area they are thinking about. Challenge Idea Generating Tool: A tool which is designed to ask the question "Why?" See also[edit]
Atul Gawande: How Do Good Ideas Spread? Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly? Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century. The first public demonstration of anesthesia was in 1846. The Boston surgeon Henry Jacob Bigelow was approached by a local dentist named William Morton, who insisted that he had found a gas that could render patients insensible to the pain of surgery. That was a dramatic claim. In those days, even a minor tooth extraction was excruciating. On October 16, 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital, Morton administered his gas through an inhaler in the mouth of a young man undergoing the excision of a tumor in his jaw. Four weeks later, on November 18th, Bigelow published his report on the discovery of “insensibility produced by inhalation” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. There were forces of resistance, to be sure. Sepsis—infection—was the other great scourge of surgery.
Some Think Completely Different: Complex Adaptive Systems | Profesorbaker's Blog Complex Adaptive System (Credit: Google images) Dr. Igor Nikolic graduated in 2009 on his dissertation: co-evolutionary process for modelling large scale socio-technical systems evolution. He received his MSc as a chemical– and bioprocess engineer at the Delft University of Technology. He spent several years as an environmental researcher and consultant at University of Leiden where he worked on life cycle analysis and industrial ecology. Igor Nikolic: “Tonight, when you go home, you will perform a very small, seemingly insignificant, action, which will have a dramatic global consequence. How can we understand complex adaptive systems? Igor Nikolic: “Things that consist of many different entities, acting, reacting, to each other, without any centralised control, having emergent behaviour, creating a pattern of behaviour, that looks like something we can recognise, like a city in an industrial region.” What properties do complex adaptive systems have? 1. 2. Can you explain this further?
“Good” Patients and “Difficult” Patients — Rethinking Our Definitions Four weeks after his quadruple bypass and valve repair, 3 weeks after the bladder infection, pharyngeal trauma, heart failure, nightly agitated confusion, and pacemaker and feeding-tube insertions, and 2 weeks after his return home, I was helping my 75-year-old father off the toilet when his blood pressure dropped out from under him. As did his legs. I held him up. I shouted for my mother. My mother was 71 years old and, fortunately, quite fit. Together, we lowered my father to the bathroom floor. In the emergency department, after some fluids, my father felt better. My mother waited with my father. After weeks of illness and caregiving, it can be a relief to be a daughter and leave the doctoring to others. I rested my hand on my father's arm to get his attention and said, “Dad, how much would you mind if I did a rectal?” We doctors do many things that are otherwise unacceptable. “Kid,” he replied, “do what you have to do.” I found gloves and lube.
Why You Never Truly Leave High School Throughout high school, my friend Kenji had never once spoken to the Glassmans. They were a popular, football-playing, preposterously handsome set of identical twins (every high school must have its Winklevii). Kenji was a closeted, half-Japanese orchestra nerd who kept mainly to himself and graduated first in our class. Psychologically speaking, Kenji carries a passport to pretty much anywhere now. The party was fine. You’d think Kenji’s underwhelmed reaction would have been reassuring. “Well, right,” said Kenji. “And maybe the way life is, still, sometimes,” said Larry. Not everyone feels the sustained, melancholic presence of a high-school shadow self. To most human beings, the significance of the adolescent years is pretty intuitive.
Going Under In December 2003, Brent Cambron gave himself his first injection of morphine. Save for the fact that he was sticking the needle into his own skin, the motion was familiar--almost rote. Over the course of the previous 17 months, as an anesthesia resident at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Cambron had given hundreds of injections. He would stick a syringe into a glass ampule of fentanyl or morphine or Dilaudid, pulling up the plunger to draw his dose. Then he'd inject the dose into his patient. If the patient had been in a panic before her surgery, Cambron would watch her drift into a pleasant, happy daze; if the patient had been moaning in pain after surgery, he'd watch the relief spread across her face as the pain went away. The way in which Cambron handled his own injection reflected that intense curiosity--but also a degree of caution. That first injection of morphine, however, would quite possibly be the last time Cambron actually chose to do drugs.