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I gave Psychiatry Grand Rounds yesterday at the University of Arkansas Medical School in Little Rock. During the tour of the beautiful, modern and environmentally-state of the art Psychiatric Research Institute, I was impressed by something called a “suicide resistant door”. One of the challenges of inpatient psychiatric services is that while you want to [...]
Archive for the ‘Technology and Society’ Category
January 25th, 2012
Category: Personal moment, Technology and Society
I returned from a short trip abroad to find hundreds upon hundreds of emails waiting for me. A small portion of them were filter-eluding spam, but almost all were from real human beings. Of those, perhaps one in five had an attachment which I was asked to read/review/critique. The length of said attachments varied from [...]
January 22nd, 2012
The political implications of maps of US renewable energy resources.
December 20th, 2011
Keith says he not only doesn’t use his cell phone when driving (CWD), but doesn’t talk to people when they are driving. Good for Keith, and the NTSB, which has recommended a flat ban on using cell phones while driving, hands-free or not. Our designated ‘conservative’ columnist, Debra Saunders, weighs in with one of her [...]
December 18th, 2011
Category: Health and Medicine, Technology and Society
As has been discussed here before, driving while using electronic communication devices is dangerous whether you go hands free or not. Matt Richtel, who won a Pulitzer Prize for covering distracted driving (and is a very nice fellow to boot), has a piece in NYT today examining whether the reason people keep doing something so [...]
December 4th, 2011
Category: Technology and Society, Uncategorized
…is a wonderful short story by E.M. Forster, set in a dystopia where everyone lives underground in little cells and only communicates with others via technology. On the Friday after Thanksgiving, UC Berkeley’s email, calmail, crashed and has been available in fits and starts at best ever since (for several days only via a web [...]
November 29th, 2011
ARM´s 25 billion general-purpose computer cores are like mitochondria in cells.
November 20th, 2011
Category: Humor, Technology and Society
This is the best joke I have heard about faster-than-light neutrinos: The bartender says “Sorry, we don’t serve faster than light neutrinos”. A faster than light neutrino walks into a bar.
November 16th, 2011
A colleague was just typing something on her iPad. When she typed “law review,” it auto-corrected to “laser Jew.” Discuss. UPDATE: Other excellent examples can be found here.
November 13th, 2011
Category: Technology and Society
Family members have an increasing capacity to spy on each other using hidden cameras, GPS trackers and the like. Common applications of these ever-developing technologies include sussing out an unfaithful spouse and detecting when a teenager has driven the family car over the speed limit. Robert Mendick’s article largely follows the usual line of media [...]
