Friday, August 13, 2004

Stan's dead Randy Dotinga of Wired Magazine discusses the amazing power of "human simulators" -- human mannequins used to train medical students. Human simulators can not only breathe and have a heart rate, pulse, and temperature, but can also blink, speak, cry out, and convulse. Scientists look forward to the development of clammy skin, sweat, and spurting blood. The simulators have become so lifelike and compelling that they are also used to train students for coping with the death of patients: In addition to getting sick, Stan does something else very human -- he can flat-line and "die." But Murray, the Penn State professor, said he doesn't like to let Stan kick the bucket while he's training medical students. "If Stan dies, the medical students and residents start blaming themselves, and all the learning stops," he said. "We totally lose the objective of what we want to do in the beginning." Murray said he sometimes will let Stan die in order to teach his students how to handle the emotional aftermath of death. Indeed, trainees sometimes develop an attachment to Stan, who is equipped with a speaker in his head. "We're trying to get the learners to bond with the simulator," said Taekman of Duke University. "They can ask the simulator questions, and we have the simulator ask them questions: 'Can you please tell my wife how I'm doing in the middle of the operation?'" Perhaps they should also be marketed for empathy training. [Via Coast to Coast AM] 1:58:51 AM    comment [] WWDT -- Tina Brown style Writing in the Washington Post, Tina Brown notices how reasonable peple are starting to seem paranoid: Among New York Democrats there's a weird fatalism about John Kerry's chances in November. The city's mania to see the president routed does nothing to lift the mood of bullish defeatism. What you hear is that Bush will still win by a hair -- not because Kerry fails to rev the electorate's engine, but because "they" will "pull something." What "they" will "pull" ranges from the notion that "they" -- sometimes known as "Karl Rove" -- will produce Osama bin Laden from some luxury cave on Halloween, to a super-scary election-eve terror attack warning that would have all the authenticity of Orson Welles's 1938 radio hoax about the Martians, but better production values. On these premises, it is a given that the timing of the recent terror reports was sheer manipulation. Exhibit A, the riff goes, is a photo in the takeout on terrorism in this week's Newsweek. See that big picture of Fran Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser? In the background is Karl Rove. C'mon what's he doing at a terrorism meeting? (Actually it was a staffers' meeting, but nevermind.) "I've heard people saying that the Bush team might blow up something around election day, just like the Nazis burned the Reichstag and then blamed it on the Jews to get elected," a writer friend e-mailed me this week. "The surprise is that it all comes from your above-average Times-reading academics." Are smart people going nuts? Nuts? Paranoid? I don't know. Reasonable people seem to be coming up with good reasons to be afraid. I, for one, believe anything is possible with these characters in power. [Thanks to PM] 1:30:50 AM    comment []

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