Fish, farms or people

Future of dams could pit farms against fish:
[Via mcclatchydc.com: Homepage]

The Merced River begins its journey high in the Sierra before rushing down the foothills and crossing the Valley to finally empty into the San Joaquin River. Most of this scenic river’s 122-mile-route runs below two of Merced Irrigation District’s dams — the McSwain and New Exchequer. The very life of the river depends on how much water these dams release and when.

[More]

These sorts of stories will continue to appear more and more as water usage becomes an even bigger part of the picture. Between the fish, farming and people, there may not be nearly enough water. In fact, there may not be enough water for even two of the three.

With the terrible droughts, not only in California but in Texas, even food may have to be gownsized to provide water. Perhaps with a weakening La Nina, more water will be brought by the next El Nino.

Technorati Tags: Environment

Sharing medical knowledge

When knowledge cannot be shared:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

I just came back from an executive event where I heard a very interesting talk from the CIO of one of the more successful healthcare systems in the US. I am not sure I can talk about specifics, but that’s not the important part. He said a lot of interesting things in his talk, but one in particular made me both laugh and cringe. Laugh cause it’s something so familiar, and cringe, because it is a problem that should not exist.

Based on recommendations from JAMA they developed an IT framework which monitored a particular condition in their ICU’s, which they had not done in the past (a particular indicator needed to be maintained within a fairly narrow window). By developing some pretty neat protocols, they were able to both decrease costs improve outcomes. Now they wanted to share their processes and protocol, their knowledge as it were, with other healthcare systems. Unfortunately there is no way for them to do that. All systems are different, and there are no good interchange standards. An innovative deployment, which would reduce costs and improve patient outcomes is once again locked up.

Some day we might actually figure this out.

Image via Knilram under a Creative Commons license

There are things like this that make you want to scream. A simple checklist saves 1500 lives and $200 million. But its use was curtailed for a time because of supposed ethic issues. This prohibition was rescinded although the letter is not a model of clarity.

Research involving humans can be a real tough path to follow. Even defining it is problematic.

But the doctor who came up with the idea got a MacArthur Fellowship due to his work. And the use of checklists is becoming even more a part of acceptable medical procedures. Major complications dropped over 33% and deaths dropped by 40%. Maybe this is why pilots of airplanes or astronauts all use checklists.

Perhaps things are changing in medicine. Maybe it will not be quite so hard to implement changes such as these throughout a hospital system. One can hope.

Technorati Tags: Health

Social and cultural reasons

by Silenceofnight
Lack of ability does not explain women’s decisions to opt out of math-intensive science careers:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

Women don’t choose careers in math-intensive fields, such as computer science, physics, technology, engineering, chemistry, and higher mathematics, because they want the flexibility to raise children, or because they prefer other fields of science that are less math-intensive–not because they lack mathematical ability, according to a new study.

[More]

This study indicates that math abilities are a very small part of the dearth of women in these scientific areas. An academic researcher is often expected to devote such large amounts of time to their endeavors that raising children is out of the question, unless they are male and have a wife to do it. Females trying to raise children are not given enough support to do both, so they often opt for more flexible arrangements.

Great for the children but often not the best for a leadership role in some of these sciences. What is interesting is that if women were represented purely on their math abilities, then 33% of the leadership roles should be female. This is over twice what the actual rate is.

Cultural reasons are the main drivers for the lack of women in these fields. Overt sexism is not as major a problem as it was but the cultural expectations in certain fields does put different pressures on the different sexes.

Technorati Tags: Science