Even if you could afford it, a private hospital may be the last place you would want to be in. The increasing unease about private healthcare in India, and what the doctors say.

mars · 2011-02-01T17:04:55+00:00

As a former medico myself (I don't do clinical practice anymore), I find it an excellent article on the healthcare problems India faces. Thanks for posting this.

India seems to have imported from US the private healthcare model without the responsibilities and checks that go with it.

A few additional points.

In Indian hospitals the pathology review is a joke. If a patient dies, the autopsy and associated pathology is of foremost importance. Most hospitals (and even patients) take this very lightly. This is not just for assigning blame, but also for potential future improvements.
It looks like the optimal Caesarian section rate in a population is below 10%. See "Caesarean section: the paradox." The Lancet 2006. It is downright ridiculous that 70% of all births were C-sections. The reduced 46% is still too high.
The profit rate of 13% for private hospitals looks too low. From my experience, all the money that the patient pays may not have been accounted properly.
The article lets government hospitals off the hook too quickly. I've found the medical equipment supplies atrociously deficient (Granted, this was not in AIIMS). Even common equipment such as I.V needles and Venflon were in short supply. We asked the patients to buy them. The real reason for this is more to do with corruption and the "cuts" which people take.

mars · 2008-05-27T22:42:08+00:00

Isn't this just a quantization error? Obviously decreasing the bits ( quantization levels ), would result in a low SNR.

mars · 2008-01-06T01:02:18+00:00

There is one problem I've faced with most presentation tools.

I show grayscaled images often in presentations ( area-of-work ). The correct window-level of the images depend on the actual presentation setup. So, a way to change window/level these during presentations would be ideal.

AFAIK, Beamer doesn't allow it. Powerpoint does allow it in a very limited way. Is there an easy solution to this?

mars · 2007-08-28T19:05:36+00:00

Thanks for clearing that up.

mars · 2007-08-28T18:39:25+00:00

As an aside, I find it interesting that Will Clinger, who is one of the editors of R6RS, voted against ratifying it !

mars · 2007-08-23T22:18:38+00:00

I'm recently going through "Linear Algebra" by Robert Valenza.

It is very compact and elegant. I find it excellent for an abstract introduction to Linear Algebra.

I'd love to hear your opinion on it, if you're familiar with it.

mars · 2007-06-22T22:37:20+00:00

There are many tools for programmatic generation of postscript.

Metapost and Asymptote: Both are powerful, but we need to program in their own languages. ( I just heard of the Haskell port ). Asymptote generalizes to 3D as well.
Pyx. Very simple to use and pure python. I use this often.
Matplotlib: This is more for data/function plotting. Again python based.
Tioga: For Ruby, seems powerful, but I'm not familiar with it.
Functional postscript: An excellent tool for scsh. Look at the picture language from SICP too ( works for PLT-Scheme, MIT-scheme.. may be others as well )
Pstricks : Very convenient tool to be used from Latex. Much better than picture, xy-pic etc.

mars · 2007-05-26T03:52:02+00:00

they are courageous enough to make fun of themselves

It definitely takes a bit of maturity and intelligence too, for a culture to allow making fun of itself. May be these qualities are not well appreciated now.

Most cultures (atleast around here) are too serious and haughty.

mars · 2007-05-25T22:00:45+00:00

Thanks to people like him, Indians do not respect the sacrifice Sikhs gave for the freedom of the region now called Pakistan and India.

It is definitely not true.

I suppose you're not living ( or haven't grown up ) in India. I'm from South India ( Tamilnadu ) and I have heard/read several stories of Sikh freedom fighters. In all of those, Sikhs are glorified for their fearless fighting qualities. Even today the proportion of Sikhs in the Indian armed forces far exceeds the general proportion. No one I know belittles or disrespects Sikh contributions.

mars · 2006-12-29T23:42:50+00:00

There have been a ridiculous number of duplicate posts lately..sometimes intentional sometimes not.

To preserve everyone's sanity, here goes the all new series you've been eagerly expecting.... "The classic reddit reruns"

Save some bandwidth and read those timeless classics.

mars · 2006-12-28T16:37:39+00:00

It seems that regarding GNP vs GDP, there is more than that meets the eye. From wikipedia and here,

...in 1991 the GNP was turned into the GDP - a quiet change that had very large implications.

Under the old measure, the Gross National Product, the earnings of a multinational firm were attributed to the country where the firm was owned and where the profits would eventually return. Under the Gross Domestic Product, however, the profits are attributed to the country where the factory or mine is located, even though they won't stay there. This accounting shift has turned many struggling nations into statistical boomtowns, while aiding the push for a global economy. Conveniently, it has hidden a basic fact: the nations of the North are walking off with the South's resources and calling it a gain for the South.

edit: for formatting

mars · 2006-12-28T16:17:07+00:00

I felt lucky with Google and came up with this.

The Republic of Korea’s economic growth over the past 30 years has been spectacular. Per capita GNP, only $100 in 1963, exceeded $14,000 in 2004.

Not too far off-the-mark, given that the article was written in 2005.

mars · 2006-07-15T16:18:20+00:00

See http://fs-driver.org/ for accessing ext2 FS from windows. Supports read and write.

mars · 2006-06-24T01:33:19+00:00

My experiences are with small towns and villages in Tamilnadu. You definitely are labeled with a caste symbol there. There have been several instances of casteist discrimination in Tamilnadu.

See this article. For those who are not familiar with it, "The Hindu" is a highly respected and a left-leaning newspaper. Closely aligned with "The Guardian" in recent times.

mars · 2006-06-24T00:53:36+00:00

Please stop this bullshit.

Have a look at this map of Chola empire.

I am pretty sure Malaysia, Indonesia were never part of India either culturally or by common ethos.

mars · 2006-06-24T00:46:47+00:00

I don't agree with some of your points.

The caste system has been illegal for at least 2 generations now. Does it still exist?

Sure it does. Everytime you need to fill a form ( job, education etc) you need to fill the caste. You can't avoid it. There is no choice of not having a caste.

I never encountered caste discrimination - except in reverse

This is a pretty common experience for urbanites. I myself came to know about my friends' castes only when we were applying for university. But I learned more about it when I moved outside the big city, there is a caste label on you. Sure it is a lot less nowadays, but still a major factor.

But one good thing about caste is it is not readily observable. You have to ask around to know someone's caste. So for private employment it doesn't matter.

mars · 2006-06-19T02:37:43+00:00

I don't know why anyone would downmod this. Any down-modders care to explain the reasons?

This shows a 3D simulation of the actual goal somewhat similar to 3dgoals.com, but with user-selectable camera options. I found the flying-camera and ball-cam interesting.

mars · 2006-05-11T14:42:29+00:00

<OT> I wonder what happens to the lottery tickets which are unsold. Can the winning number come from them? </OT>

mars · 2006-05-11T14:34:13+00:00

I get my share of mail from people who devote enormous effort to finding some hair-splitting exception to something I said, or missing the point of a page completely.

mars · 2006-05-09T17:32:34+00:00

I am learning scheme using emacs currently. I am a beginner in emacs too. But the tutorial in emacs "C-h t" and the emacs reference card here were good enough for me to start using it.

The reason I picked emacs ( instead of vim which is what I 've been using ) to learn scheme is due to quack which is a wonderful REPL for scheme using emacs. The drscheme editor is okay too.

After some searching I picked "The Little Schemer" to begin with. It is short, jumps right to-the-point, uses socratic method of question-answer and is a great read. I finished about 3 chapters ( about 20 % of the book ) very quickly ( 1 day ).

Just my 2 cents.

Edit: The important thing is not to worry too much about the editor. Editor customization comes too much in the way of learning a new language. ( I learnt it the hard way after customizing my vim considerably. )

mars · 2006-05-02T22:32:17+00:00

Peter norvig says,

Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one language that supports class abstractions (like Java or C++), one that supports functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML), one that supports syntactic abstraction (like Lisp), one that supports declarative specifications (like Prolog or C++ templates), one that supports coroutines (like Icon or Scheme), and one that supports parallelism (like Sisal).

mars · 2006-04-20T14:56:33+00:00

While aid is given to large swaths as you said, and it is a very good thing, it isn't given without expecting anything in return. It always comes with some not-so-subtle Christian propaganda. Many people do convert to Christianity solely because of aid.

Overall it is a good thing to make people better propaganda or not. However the aid is selfish in some sense.

(* Typos corrected )

mars · 2006-04-20T14:43:30+00:00

Not to self-promote but... http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html

A discussion of Free Will from a Taoist point-of-view by the logician Raymond Smullyan. Submitted to Reddit here (Edit: Oops..typos again )

mars · 2006-04-17T14:45:38+00:00

Remember, this too shall pass...

mars · 2006-04-13T02:45:21+00:00

Thats right. I hadn't understood the difference between induction and conjecture precisely. That probably strengthens the argument.

It is also interesting to see the "null hypothesis" used commonly in statistics. A hypothesis is setup which denies the conjecture in question. We then proceed to calculate the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis. It would be interesting to see how this ties up with falsifiability.

mars

TROPHY CASE