cant_kant

Sensible doctors do not believe drug company marketing.

I get large amounts of ad-junk from drug companies that ends up unread in the bin. I refuse to meet with drug company representatives. I smile politely at them if I bump into them in the corridor and suggest that they leave their ad-junk with my secretary. My staff then file their ad-junk in the trash bin.

On Friday, I had a drug company representative attempt to tell me ( he was hanging around my coffee area ) about the joys of Targin, a fixed-dose combination of oxycodone and naloxone. I gently shook him off, and directed him to my secretary.

Drug company representatives are usually decent human beings with lives and families. However they are poorly educated, poorly informed salesmen and women with sales targets to meet and product managers to keep happy. Even worse, they and the drug company have no accountability if a patient dies because of their recommendations. If avoidable death supervenes or if there are non-lethal complications or even just therapeutic failure, I am accountable.

Instead of relying on marketing, I rely on information from good, well performed randomised controlled studies published in reputable peer reviewed journals ( I like the NEJM ) and on meta-analyses of these. I view the results of these through a filter of scepticism, cynicism, pragmatism and a modicum of hope.

Many of my colleagues do likewise. I trust that you do the same in your respective vocations. Regrettably, there is a bell curve. I am sure that the drug companies find enough gullible prescribers out in the wild for their purposes.

Two years late. HGST has been shipping helium filled HDDs since 2014.

School is only incidentally about education. For instance, never underestimate the power of networking at a elite private school.

A few random stories, all true:

A client of mine is global <role_deleted_to_protect_anonymity> director of a multi-billion dollar Scandinavian corporation largely because a school friend knew a few board members.

A friend obtained deep access to a person, considered to be among the five most powerful people in his country, due to his school network.

Another friend was contacted by a school friend and helped him to land a job in an elite investment bank despite the lack of any relevant experience.

Kyle Vogt said: "This is false."

Talk to your lawyer before posting on social media.

Interesting stories. Better copy editing would make them easier to read.

"Ed had shouted on them like this"

"No real kidnapper hauls around a struggling, scream-seeking captive"

"I see I need to show the adolescent asshole affecting to be me "

Broken sentences like these make the stories a bit of a chore to read.

What is wrong with using TeX ?

MathML is reinventing the wheel. Only, the MathML wheel is square, flat and breaks when used.

"In April and May 2015, a test to measure prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, failed quality-control checks 22% of the time. The PSA test is used to help detect prostate cancer."

Ouch.... I see a string of class action suits in the future.

I propose that facebook() be put into the public kernel

For the secret* kernel that is known only to us, facebook () should be replaced by hn().