A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
A Facebook during our family sojourn in Ft. Lauderdale:
I have officially had it with Hertz. The minivan that I reserved was “not available” and this yellow car that they gave us as a substitute is definitely not “stroller-friendly” like the agent said.
At least a few engineers later asked me about Hertz, driving the “yellow car” (a Lamborghini, I think), etc.
Full post, including commentsFrom our anonymous insider…
Exam week covered cardiopulmonary physiology, anatomy and clinical skills. Pharmacology remains the most dreaded topic. Despite this universal struggle, two-thirds of the class appear comfortable with the pace. We know what to expect. We realize that the exams are meant as a stop-safe. If one of us fails the exam, typically a score less than 60%, it is a wake-up call that we are not on-track for the final judgement: Step 1.
The other third of my classmates are nervous wrecks. They are so concerned about what they need to know that they forget about learning. Four percent of the class failed and will have to retake the exam next week. Most of these individuals had adhered to Anita’s strategy of focusing on “High Yield” material, defined as material frequently included on the Step 1 exam and therefore in McGraw Hill’s First Aid for the USMLE Step 1. The First Aid summary figures are worth reviewing the day before the exam, but it seems that “High Yield”-minded individuals quickly forget a substantial amount of the information. These individuals go blank during discussion of some aspect of the patient case that was in the previous block, for example, an enzyme involved in a urea cycle disorder.
As soon as the exams were done, classmates were able to reflect on their experience. We agree that the tested block was much more enjoyable than our first block, which was devoted to clinical applications of molecular pathways, many of which students were exposed to in pre-med required courses and MCAT studying. The tested block was our first foray into predominantly “clinical” material: physiology and pathophysiology. We also got to use our stethoscopes!
After my second exams, a few things I wished I knew on day one:
Most of the class reads the suggested Costanzo’s Physiology (“I have a date with Costanzo tonight,” is a common inside joke), but I preferred the more in-depth Medical Physiology (Boron and Boulpaep).
Twenty percent of the class no longer goes to lectures because they find it less efficient than independent study. I continue to go to hear the clinical vignettes. Some lecturers are down to an attendance rate of less than 30 percent. Maybe medical school costs could be cut considerably; Jane and and I agree that we could learn everything besides anatomy and clinical exam skills using Web-based and library resources.
The job of a medical student is to study. Many of us got through undergraduate exams by cramming the night before. This purge-in, purge-out mentality does not work in medical school. Curiosity becomes the most valuable asset in medical school. The depth and breadth of information requires constant dedication to translate understanding into retention. My search for immediate answers to questions is challenging for classmates because I don’t have a smartphone right now. Jane suffers the most with my endless questions: “My ankle evertor muscles are sore. What muscles are those?” (Fibularis brevis and fibularis longus)
Statistics for the week… Study: 35 hours. The library was still packed when I left at 10:00 pm most nights this week. Sleep: 8 hours/night; Fun: Learning on Saturday that I’d passed!
More: http://fifthchance.com/MedicalSchool2020
Full post, including commentsBoston Magazine has an article on GE CEO Jeff Immelt. They note that the stock price has gone down from $40 per share to $29 during the 16 years that he has run the company. Adjusted for inflation, that’s nearly a 50-percent decline ($40 in 2001 is equivalent to about $55 today).
A Google Finance chart of GE versus the S&P 500 confirms the dismal performance of this stock.
What do readers think? Was GE just so crazily overvalued, even after the Crash of 2000, that the stock had nowhere to go but sideways? Revenue in 2001 was $126 billion and earnings per share were $1.41 (annual report). The 2016 annual report shows $113 billion in “industrial segment revenues” and $1 in “continuing EPS” (GAAP measures) and $103 billion in revenue and $1.49 using non-GAAP techniques. So the company’s performance has become incomprehensible to laypeople in the intervening years, but revenue and profits do seem to have stagnated. How can this be in a world that is ever-more-friendly to the biggest companies?
[Not everyone is suffering. Boston Magazine notes that shareholders paid Immelt $21 million last year. He spent a full four months of salary on a modest dwelling: a $7.5 million Back Bay townhouse.]
Related:
Thomas Piketty presented 704 pages about how rich the world’s rich bastards are and therefore it was time for the pitchforks (see Book review: Piketty’s Capital). We have a household member who, despite being 13 years shy of being able to drive, is fond of Car and Driver magazine in hardcopy. From the June 2017 issue, in a review of the $3 million Bugatti Chiron:
Bugatti by the numbers:
…
42: number of cars owned by the average Bugatti driver
…
870: number of miles the average Veyron [previous version of the car] accumulates in a year
(This is in an inset box that is missing from the online version.)
Full post, including commentsOn an evening stroll with a 7-year-old, following a discussion of why dogs’ night vision is better than ours, she pointed out that “We’re descended from monkeys. What do we share with monkeys? Two legs. Two arms. The love for bananas.”
Full post, including comments“How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality” (nytimes) advocates for a seemingly sensible economic policy (getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction), but I can’t see how the cited stories support the author’s argument. Here’s my published comment on the piece:
Affecting stories. And of course subsidizing unproductive investments in housing is a sure way to kill per-capita GDP growth (a worker who lives in a larger and nicer house does not get more work done), so it is hard to imagine a more counterproductive policy for an indebted government (which needs economic growth to pay off $20 trillion in debt) than the mortgage interest deduction.
That said, the author picked people who live in one of the world’s most expensive housing markets (Boston area) and they have kids and they want to have each child in a dedicated bedroom. Absent fellow taxpayers (many of them childless working drones) giving them subsidized housing, how was that ever going to work unless one parent had a high income?
There are some Americans who can afford to have kids with a moderate-income co-parent and a comfortable-sized house/apartment. There are some Americans who can turn a moderate income into a comfortable-sized house/apartment in a high-cost area. What this article shows is that the intersection of these two groups is non-existent without an ample helping of tax dollars contributed either by (a) those who have a higher income, or (b) those who don’t have kids.
Readers: Can you see a way in which eliminating the mortgage interest deduction would make housing in prime urban areas more affordable for low-income people who want multi-bedroom units? If killing the deduction slowed construction of new housing, wouldn’t the price of existing housing actually go up? And how does the mortgage interest deduction have a significant effect when we have (1) a growing population (due to immigration), (2) a demonstrated inability to construct new urban environments that are attractive?
[Separately, if you bought a house in Detroit or Cleveland 15 years ago you’ll be pleased to learn from the NY Times that “homeownership … is a proven wealth builder”]
Full post, including commentsFrom the local school…
Dear Parents & Guardians,
Supporting the mental health and well-being of our students is a priority for all of us as a community. It has come to our attention that some of our middle school students have been talking about and/or watching a popular new Netflix series that presents an inaccurate and graphic portrayal of suicidality. The series, based on a book by Jay Asher, entitled 13 Reasons Why, portrays a high school student who commits suicide after leaving audio recordings for her peers to listen to after her death. The purpose of this letter is to make you aware of this series and the concerns of the suicide prevention experts. We encourage you to have conversations with your child if they have watched this series or have heard about it from friends. Having accurate information and talking points will support your conversation with your child. While all students require support with these discussions, students who may already be vulnerable are at greater emotional risk.
In addition, please be advised, mental health professionals are concerned with the graphic depiction of suicide and sexual assault contained within this series.
——- from the attachments…
On the surface, 13 Reasons Why might come across as a show that discusses mental health, however the issues of mental health or illness are never explored in the show. While a varied number of issues were presented in the show (e.g., sexual assault, sexual orientation, sexting, etc.), for Hannah they seemed to generally manifest themselves as shaming and harassment. The overwhelming message seems to be centered on the oft-cited but misleading narrative that bullying ultimately leads to suicide. The storyline espouses that the simple solution to Hannah’s struggle – indeed the cause of most of her strife – was the unkindness, and in some scenarios, the downright cruelty of her friends. While this is an important theme to explore, causal links between bullying and suicide are simplistic and as such, problematic.
Suicide is not a common response to life’s challenges or adversity.
When you die you do not get to make a movie or talk to people any more. Leaving messages from beyond the grave is a dramatization produced in Hollywood and is not possible in real life.
Hannah’s tapes blame others for her suicide. Suicide is never the fault of survivors of suicide loss. There are resources and support groups for suicide loss survivors.
I think is a good illustration of our culture of victimhood that one can now be a “survivor” as a consequence of someone else’s suicide.
Full post, including commentsRussian-oriented folks:
I’m giving two talks tomorrow (Friday, May 12) at the New Economic School here in Moscow. The first is from 11-12 and covers the American start-up world, open-source software, and some lessons on management and working with big customers (speaker notes/handout). If you’d like to attend, here is an official sign-up page. The second talk is from 17-18 (5 pm in American parlance!) and is titled “U.S. Family Law: What happens to an economy when having a baby is more lucrative than going to college and working?” (notes; best guess: the economy shrinks by about 3 percent). It is geared more to graduate students in economics planning their research projects, but if you’d like to attend please add a comment to this posting and perhaps it will be worth setting up an official sign-up page for that as well.
Full post, including commentsI’ll be in London starting Sunday evening and through Wednesday afternoon (May 14-17), mostly working but I could probably get away for coffee. I’m staying near the Embankment Tube station (Whitehall Gardens).
Please email me, philg@mit.edu, if interested, and we can find a time/place.
Full post, including commentsOne of my money expert friends refuses to believe that we are being bilked by the health care industry. Sure we spend 18 percent of GDP and Singapore spends 4.5 percent and we spend more than twice as much per person in dollars as do the richer European countries. However, American pharma and healthcare are way better than in those other parts of the world where they spend less.
Life expectancy statistics suggest that American health care is not better, but we can argue about lifestyle, accidental death rates, etc.
How about a new measure: exports of our purportedly superior products and services.
There are plenty of upper-middle-class and richer people all around the world. We can assume that their desire to be healthy and alive is as strong as ours. If our pharma is so great and the new patented drugs so much more effective than older generics, are foreigners happy to import these new drugs and pay U.S.-style prices for them? If our hospitals and procedures are more advanced, do we see planeloads of upper-middle-class French and Germans, for example, coming to hospitals in the U.S. for treatment? There is no debate that we charge 5-10X more and that they’ve already paid for insurance over there, but if we really do a better job wouldn’t at least a sizable number be willing to invest $800 in a plane ticket and whatever we are charging for procedures? What’s more valuable to a wealthy French or German citizen than health?
What do readers think? Is this a good metric?
Related: