Quote from: pentium on November 04, 2008, 02:39:54 PM This has come to be known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The physicist Werner Heisenberg suggested that just by observing quantum matter, we affect the behavior of that matter. Thus, we can never be fully certain of the nature of a quantum object or its attributes, like velocity and location. This idea is supported by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Posed by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, this interpretation says that all quantum particles don't exist in one state or the other, but in all of its possible states at once. The sum total of possible states of a quantum object is called its wave function. The state of an object existing in all of its possible states at once is called its superposition. According to Bohr, when we observe a quantum object, we affect its behaviour. Observation breaks an object's superposition and essentially forces the object to choose one state from its wave function. This theory accounts for why physicists have taken opposite measurements from the same quantum object: The object "chose" different states during different measurements.Speaking of Heisenberg, the inventor of the 'uncertainty principle': he thought Heraclitus (you know who Heraclitus is, don'tcha) views only needed a bit of tweaking to bring them totally up-to-date:QuoteModern physics is in some ways extremely near to the doctrines of Heraclitus. If we replace the word 'fire' by the word 'energy' we can repeat this statement word for word from our modern point of view. Energy is in fact the substance from which all elementary particles, all atoms and therefore all things are made, and energy is that which moves... Energy may be called the fundamental cause for all change in the world.By the way, Heraclitus was an aristocrat who lived on the Ionian cost of Greece. His preference for composing short, almost paradoxical philosophical epigrams later earned him the sobriquet 'the Dark'. But it is an innocuous-looking dictum about rivers that has made his reputation. You cannot step into the same river twice. Heracliteanism became a doctrine encapsulated by Plato as the view that "all is flux." But Plato himself was echoing Cratylus, who had only earlier decided for himself what it was that Heraclitus must have meant. Cratylus' idea that everything was changing all the time was then taken up by Empedocles, who embellished the other Heraclitean notion of a world continually torn between the two evocatively named forces, 'love' and 'strife', in order to reveal its essential character. The world becomes a sphere of perfect love in which strife, like a swirling vortex, has infiltrated. Whose idea was it, then? Heraclitus', or Cratylus', or...? It keeps changing. But in any case, the point about the river seems to have been a more prosaic one to do with the nature of human experience. We encounter things all the time as being different, but behind the appearance of diversity is a more important and more fundamental unity: "cold things grow hot, the hot cools, the wet dries, the parched moistens." Not that Heraclitus is saying that the senses are deceived, for "whatever comes from sight, hearing, experience, this I privilege," he adds. Even life and death are as one, Heraclitus continues. "The same living and dead, what is awake and what sleeps, young and old... for those changed are those, and those changed around are these." The opposites are united by change: they change into each other. And change is the fundamental reality of the universe. The highest, 'divine' perspective sees all the opposites: "day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, plenty and famine," all are the same. With the divine perspective, even good and evil are the same. Two thousand years later, Professor Hegel found in Heraclitus' swirling vortex of the unity of opposites the kernel of a new 'world philosophy', the origins of 'speculative logic', and the historical notion of perpetual change. For your information, it was not the first time Hegel was borrowing or echoing, whatever you wanna call it. In 1766, Johan Titius translated into German "Contemplation de la Nature" by the French natural philosopher Bonnet, where the latter remarks that maybe there are more planets in our solar system than were known at his time. Titus added to this remark that one may notice that the distances of the planets from one another can be approximated by a sequence of numbers that can be generated by an algorithm that is known as the 'Titius Bode Law.' Hegel's dissertation (1801) "De orbitis planetarum" revolves around the discussion of the Titius-Bode law and likely influenced his concept of history as a series of successive epochs from the Prehistoric and Asian, through Ancient, Feudal, Industrial and post-Industrial Stages. The predictive power of the Titus-Bode Law was improved by Stephen Phillips' formulation of the Titius-Bode-Phillips Spiral Algorithm, after he interposed Hegelian dialectic spiral of historical development on the photograph of the Whirlpool Galaxy, captured by the Hubble telescope.At any rate, Hegel's battle between thesis and antithesis, searching for synthesis, led directly both to Marx's dialectical materialism and to the fascist idealogy of the purifying powers of conflict and war. But then, Heraclitus himself had declared: "You must know that war is common to all things, and strife is justice." It is only the heat of battle that can "prove some to be gods and others to be mere men, by turning the latter into slaves and the former into masters." Actually, there is another way of looking at Heraclitus. At the same time as he was outlining his theory of perpetual, cyclical change, the Chinese sage Lao Tzu was explaining the cyclical nature of the Tao, manifested in the famous interplay of yin and yang. But that is another story altogether.
This has come to be known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The physicist Werner Heisenberg suggested that just by observing quantum matter, we affect the behavior of that matter. Thus, we can never be fully certain of the nature of a quantum object or its attributes, like velocity and location. This idea is supported by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Posed by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, this interpretation says that all quantum particles don't exist in one state or the other, but in all of its possible states at once. The sum total of possible states of a quantum object is called its wave function. The state of an object existing in all of its possible states at once is called its superposition. According to Bohr, when we observe a quantum object, we affect its behaviour. Observation breaks an object's superposition and essentially forces the object to choose one state from its wave function. This theory accounts for why physicists have taken opposite measurements from the same quantum object: The object "chose" different states during different measurements.
Modern physics is in some ways extremely near to the doctrines of Heraclitus. If we replace the word 'fire' by the word 'energy' we can repeat this statement word for word from our modern point of view. Energy is in fact the substance from which all elementary particles, all atoms and therefore all things are made, and energy is that which moves... Energy may be called the fundamental cause for all change in the world.
2. No one really agrees on his theory of fire, some co-opted it for their own use
Quote from: coin up in the air on June 28, 2008, 12:31:50 PMNo doubt about it, besame. Even moreso if we'd be talking about foreign doctors looking to practice in the US. A government program to address a national health care crisis by placing foreign doctors in America's rural towns and inner cities is being undermined by employers - mostly U.S. doctors who profit by exploiting the physicians and diverting them from the patients who need them. Stories of abuses within the program, which receives little government oversight, are whispered among foreign doctors in hospital corridors, reported online and heard by colleagues in foreign medical schools. And the abuse appears to be a primary reason that fewer of them are participating in the program. Some of the foreign doctors are cheated financially and worked to dangerous levels of exhaustion, and they can't easily escape the jobs because the employers sponsor their visas. The doctors are sharing their experiences with colleagues back home - in places such as Ghana, Haiti, India and Pakistan - who are now finding other paths to U.S. residency to avoid being bullied and treated as indentured servants.The dire consequences of the program's problems may be no clearer than in the Nevada town of Beatty, population 1,154, "the gateway to Death Valley." The community is about to lose its only doctor, who is from the Philippines. She has fulfilled her commitment under the government program, and the non-profit organization that runs the clinic, Nevada Health Centers, has had no luck finding a replacement. Nevada Health Centers by all accounts treats the doctors fairly and as intended under the law. Several years ago, it was receiving about 100 applications a month from foreign physicians for openings at its 27 clinics. But now it gets no applications and recruiting efforts have been fruitless. The government program, adopted by Congress, is known both as the J-1 visa waiver program and the Conrad 30 program, for its author, Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D. It makes immigration concessions for foreign medical school graduates who are nearing the end of their medical residency training in the United States. The foreign doctors hold J-1 visas, which require them to return home when they finish their residency. If they return home, they must stay there for at least 2 years, and if they want to return to the United States, they must start the immigration process all over again.Rather than go home after their medical training, foreign physicians can qualify for J-1 waivers to stay in the United States as long as they commit to at least 3 years of service in a federally designated physician shortage area - usually a rural or blighted urban area. And at the end of the term, these J-1 doctors can begin the U.S. residency process. About 3,100 foreign doctors participate in the program, a number that is declining year by year. Nationally, doctors who come from foreign medical schools say they are forgoing the J-1 visa for what they consider a more attractive option, called the H-1 visa. The H-1 visa takes more steps to acquire and limits where a doctor can do residency training, but it leads more quickly to a "green card." The downside for rural and inner city America is that the H-1 visa, unlike the J-1 visa, does not require foreign doctors to return home for 2 years after they finish their training. That eliminates any motive for foreign doctors to commit to 3 years of service in a medically underserved area. Nationwide, the numbers of J-1 visas and requests for waivers to work in underserved areas are plummeting, according to the statistics available.J-1 doctors say that because of the buzz around the program in the international physician community, some medical residents are waiting longer for H-1 visas or, if they can get only a J-1 visa, are returning home for 2 years instead of taking a waiver to work in an underserved area. Dr. Wahab Brobbey, a J-1 doctor in Iowa who told the Sun he was exploited by his previous employer in Tennessee, said he advised his cousin and other medical school classmates to avoid the J-1 visa. The cousin is now doing his residency on an H-1 visa. "And they tell their brothers, and they tell their friends - there are lots of us," said Brobbey, who is from Ghana. Brobbey said the exploitation has gone on for so long, with no accountability for employers, that the J-1 visa waiver program is "basically dead." "The boat has sailed already," Brobbey said. "I don't know anyone who will do J-1 now." Given the Internet chatter, the problems with the J-1 waiver are widely known in the medical community, and the jobs carry a stigma. Some of the participating doctors refer to themselves as "J-1 positive" as if they're afflicted with a disease. It is unknown whether J-1 doctors have been sexually abused, though one doctor reported she had been sexually harassed. Many factors could explain why more foreign residents are pushing for H-1 visas over J-1 visas said Greg Siskind, a superstar immigration lawyer, but it's possible some foreign doctors who know about the "real and perceived problems" are deciding to "vote with their visa" by choosing the H-1.In 2005, the American Medical Association adopted a resolution saying the foreign doctors often find themselves "in abusive and intolerable" employment situations and should be able to transfer to other employers without being forced to restart their three-year commitment in an underserved community. An AMA official said anecdotal accounts are heard frequently of J-1 doctors working unfair call schedules, suffering pay and salary disparities and having the terms of their contracts switched against their will. The J-1 doctors are in a "vulnerable position," said the AMA official, who because of association policy was not allowed to be quoted by name. "They know it's a privilege to be in our country. They don't want to make any waves, but they're totally being abused and taken advantage of." Employers who adhere to the J-1 waiver guidelines say they've heard the reports of other bosses flouting the J-1 laws. Saul Blair, executive director of the Phoenix region of IPC, a company that provides doctors to hospitals, employs 17 J-1 doctors, including several who came to him after being exploited by employers in other states. No one monitors where the doctors work or whether "I'm paying them 10 cents or $100,000," Blair said. It would be easy to audit a company's medical records to confirm that J-1 doctors are treating federally designated underserved patients, Blair said, but the government has not. J-1 doctors feel conflicted about staying in the United States. "If I had known about this I would have never done it here," one foreign doctor said. "I advise everyone I know not to come here on J-1. Go to Australia."I am a foreign doctor (originally from Iraq) who was laid off several years back by my employer who sponsored my J-1 visa (I won the lottery fortunately that is how I got the residency) I remember it very well how hard it was to find employment - any type of employment - I guess it was because of my language skills that I got a job to survive during those hard years (I was employed by a contractor in need of translation services from Dari to English - Dari is the name given to classical Persian poetry and court language, as well as to Persian dialects spoken in Afghanistan. Various dialects of Dari are also spoken by a few people in Iran and by many in Pakistan.
No doubt about it, besame. Even moreso if we'd be talking about foreign doctors looking to practice in the US. A government program to address a national health care crisis by placing foreign doctors in America's rural towns and inner cities is being undermined by employers - mostly U.S. doctors who profit by exploiting the physicians and diverting them from the patients who need them. Stories of abuses within the program, which receives little government oversight, are whispered among foreign doctors in hospital corridors, reported online and heard by colleagues in foreign medical schools. And the abuse appears to be a primary reason that fewer of them are participating in the program. Some of the foreign doctors are cheated financially and worked to dangerous levels of exhaustion, and they can't easily escape the jobs because the employers sponsor their visas. The doctors are sharing their experiences with colleagues back home - in places such as Ghana, Haiti, India and Pakistan - who are now finding other paths to U.S. residency to avoid being bullied and treated as indentured servants.The dire consequences of the program's problems may be no clearer than in the Nevada town of Beatty, population 1,154, "the gateway to Death Valley." The community is about to lose its only doctor, who is from the Philippines. She has fulfilled her commitment under the government program, and the non-profit organization that runs the clinic, Nevada Health Centers, has had no luck finding a replacement. Nevada Health Centers by all accounts treats the doctors fairly and as intended under the law. Several years ago, it was receiving about 100 applications a month from foreign physicians for openings at its 27 clinics. But now it gets no applications and recruiting efforts have been fruitless. The government program, adopted by Congress, is known both as the J-1 visa waiver program and the Conrad 30 program, for its author, Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D. It makes immigration concessions for foreign medical school graduates who are nearing the end of their medical residency training in the United States. The foreign doctors hold J-1 visas, which require them to return home when they finish their residency. If they return home, they must stay there for at least 2 years, and if they want to return to the United States, they must start the immigration process all over again.Rather than go home after their medical training, foreign physicians can qualify for J-1 waivers to stay in the United States as long as they commit to at least 3 years of service in a federally designated physician shortage area - usually a rural or blighted urban area. And at the end of the term, these J-1 doctors can begin the U.S. residency process. About 3,100 foreign doctors participate in the program, a number that is declining year by year. Nationally, doctors who come from foreign medical schools say they are forgoing the J-1 visa for what they consider a more attractive option, called the H-1 visa. The H-1 visa takes more steps to acquire and limits where a doctor can do residency training, but it leads more quickly to a "green card." The downside for rural and inner city America is that the H-1 visa, unlike the J-1 visa, does not require foreign doctors to return home for 2 years after they finish their training. That eliminates any motive for foreign doctors to commit to 3 years of service in a medically underserved area. Nationwide, the numbers of J-1 visas and requests for waivers to work in underserved areas are plummeting, according to the statistics available.J-1 doctors say that because of the buzz around the program in the international physician community, some medical residents are waiting longer for H-1 visas or, if they can get only a J-1 visa, are returning home for 2 years instead of taking a waiver to work in an underserved area. Dr. Wahab Brobbey, a J-1 doctor in Iowa who told the Sun he was exploited by his previous employer in Tennessee, said he advised his cousin and other medical school classmates to avoid the J-1 visa. The cousin is now doing his residency on an H-1 visa. "And they tell their brothers, and they tell their friends - there are lots of us," said Brobbey, who is from Ghana. Brobbey said the exploitation has gone on for so long, with no accountability for employers, that the J-1 visa waiver program is "basically dead." "The boat has sailed already," Brobbey said. "I don't know anyone who will do J-1 now." Given the Internet chatter, the problems with the J-1 waiver are widely known in the medical community, and the jobs carry a stigma. Some of the participating doctors refer to themselves as "J-1 positive" as if they're afflicted with a disease. It is unknown whether J-1 doctors have been sexually abused, though one doctor reported she had been sexually harassed. Many factors could explain why more foreign residents are pushing for H-1 visas over J-1 visas said Greg Siskind, a superstar immigration lawyer, but it's possible some foreign doctors who know about the "real and perceived problems" are deciding to "vote with their visa" by choosing the H-1.In 2005, the American Medical Association adopted a resolution saying the foreign doctors often find themselves "in abusive and intolerable" employment situations and should be able to transfer to other employers without being forced to restart their three-year commitment in an underserved community. An AMA official said anecdotal accounts are heard frequently of J-1 doctors working unfair call schedules, suffering pay and salary disparities and having the terms of their contracts switched against their will. The J-1 doctors are in a "vulnerable position," said the AMA official, who because of association policy was not allowed to be quoted by name. "They know it's a privilege to be in our country. They don't want to make any waves, but they're totally being abused and taken advantage of." Employers who adhere to the J-1 waiver guidelines say they've heard the reports of other bosses flouting the J-1 laws. Saul Blair, executive director of the Phoenix region of IPC, a company that provides doctors to hospitals, employs 17 J-1 doctors, including several who came to him after being exploited by employers in other states. No one monitors where the doctors work or whether "I'm paying them 10 cents or $100,000," Blair said. It would be easy to audit a company's medical records to confirm that J-1 doctors are treating federally designated underserved patients, Blair said, but the government has not. J-1 doctors feel conflicted about staying in the United States. "If I had known about this I would have never done it here," one foreign doctor said. "I advise everyone I know not to come here on J-1. Go to Australia."
[...][...] and the stuff we have from Heraclitus are a few fragments [...][...]
You've got to be kidding me, just sex - you are dissapointed with doctors because they may have used as pawns homeless people! Doctors and medical professionals are absolutely not champions in this field - how about intelligence agencies having conducted non-consensual human experiments (e.g., trauma-based mind control, etc).
Quote from: Luzhi on December 17, 2008, 10:05:22 PMHmm, the motive of the famous Greek sirtaki - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMW1Z1FiTo&feature=relatedNot really - Sirtaki appears as the first on the left - the actual video URL posted is just some Ourania and Spiro * & ^ %! I really hate it when people try to be smart asses!
Hmm, the motive of the famous Greek sirtaki - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMW1Z1FiTo&feature=related
Wow - great post AmyL! Good for ya! Love, and only love, will save the world!
2. Years After Graduation: Score 1 to 5 (MD Diploma)5 points for recent graduateEvery year after - deduct a point, if 5+ years after your MD 1 pointMax = 5 points, Min= 1 point
Quote from: Luzhi on December 17, 2008, 10:10:33 PMWow - great post AmyL! Good for ya! Love, and only love, will save the world! so, Luzhi, still thinking Love, and only love, will save the world?
Quote from: apropos on December 03, 2008, 06:42:07 PMTwo thousand years later, Professor Hegel found in Heraclitus' swirling vortex of the unity of opposites the kernel of a new 'world philosophy', the origins of 'speculative logic', and the historical notion of perpetual change. [...]At any rate, Hegel's battle between thesis and antithesis, searching for synthesis, led directly both to Marx's dialectical materialism and to the fascist idealogy of the purifying powers of conflict and war. [...] Hegel's dialectic
Two thousand years later, Professor Hegel found in Heraclitus' swirling vortex of the unity of opposites the kernel of a new 'world philosophy', the origins of 'speculative logic', and the historical notion of perpetual change. [...]At any rate, Hegel's battle between thesis and antithesis, searching for synthesis, led directly both to Marx's dialectical materialism and to the fascist idealogy of the purifying powers of conflict and war. [...]
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