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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 9 of 9. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by alexandra_k on November 5, 2018, at 23:32:16
Hey
Sorry about that.
If you don't like sports...
Then how come your username is 'Baseball'
?
Posted by baseball55 on November 9, 2018, at 17:27:56
In reply to baseball?, posted by alexandra_k on November 5, 2018, at 23:32:16
Totally unoriginal. My daughter was using it as a user name and I just copied it because it was easy to remember.
Posted by alexandra_k on November 9, 2018, at 22:57:29
In reply to Re: baseball?, posted by baseball55 on November 9, 2018, at 17:27:56
oh. haha. i thought you must be really into baseball. the boston sox, or whatever. i don't really know anything about it.
Posted by baseball55 on November 11, 2018, at 17:30:24
In reply to Re: baseball?, posted by alexandra_k on November 9, 2018, at 22:57:29
> oh. haha. i thought you must be really into baseball. the boston sox, or whatever. i don't really know anything about it.
I'm not much into sports, but I've always been a fair-weather Red Sox fan - if they make the playoffs and world series, I 'll watch and cheer them on. Otherwise, I have no idea.
Boston is huge sports town. All our teams -baseball, hockey, basketball, football - are among the best. Our football team (US football, not soccer) is crazy successful and wins championship after championship. I have many friends and colleagues who never miss a game. The quarterback (don't ask me, just the most important player) is a guy named Tom Brady who is a hero in Boston. A couple of years ago I was talking to a friend whose nephew has Aspergers. I asked how his nephew ( then around 28) was and he said they wished he could meet some young woman who would want to take care of him. That his nephew was very sweet and quite handsome - he looks like Tom Brady. I asked, who is Tom Brady?
He looked at me like I was some freak of nature. But that's how little attention I pay to sports teams. I don't even know the names of the greatest players of the greatest teams.
Maybe I should change my user name. Maybe Mozart55 or Vangogh55. I like classical music and I like art and independent film and I don't like sports or rock music much at all. It's not that I'm a snob. I just would personally rather go to a museum than a baseball game.
Posted by alexandra_k on November 11, 2018, at 22:46:18
In reply to Re: baseball?, posted by baseball55 on November 11, 2018, at 17:30:24
Great place to go if you can get a sports / athletics scholarship, for sure :)
I've been amusing myself with a journals list and trawling through that looking for likely suspects... Also with looking in to the medical school / work force trajectory of English Speaking countries. It is a shame I didn't get to learn French and German from earlier on... Oh wells...
Anyway, that takes me to residency programs. I have just started looking... But... Wow. It's motivating, yeah. And I'm sure it's a far better use of my time than computer games... I have a million questions... I wonder most whether every program has an IMG quota (or similar) or whether certain schools will only consider people from (for example) Ivy League schools in the US. When I was applying for PhD programs in the US I only applied to MIT and Cornell primarily because they were the only 2 in the top 100 who didn't require GRE scores (from memory I actually looked through every program in the top 100 to establish that). I got the fastest rejection letter I've ever had from MIT. That made me sad because I wanted to work on a theory of mind for Kitmet the Robot :( Cornell... Actually didn't even bother to send a rejection letter, and when I inquired (months and months later) they were all, like, 'oh, we did process it, but somehow you didn't get sent a letter' and then someone from the deparment said nice / condescending things to make it sound like they really cared about my writing sample... I don't know whether the fact I didn't apply for more programs? The fact that I didn't have a GRE score (even though the school said they didn't require one) meant they wouldn't consider me...
I wonder if there might be a similar thing with IMG match? Anyway...
It can be fun to watch sport when people are into it and the team does quite well. I enjoyed the spectacle of the Superbowl when I was in St Louis and I am sad in hindsight that I didn't do more to see the basketball when I was in North Carolina because the finals were UNC Chapel Hill and Duke so the whole town went off... And seats were lottery so I actually could have been there...
Keep your name. People can ask. I have been curious about it, for a while.
Posted by alexandra_k on November 11, 2018, at 22:52:19
In reply to Re: baseball? » baseball55, posted by alexandra_k on November 11, 2018, at 22:46:18
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw-gOmJwzuc
hahahhaha.
Yeah. I would have got a kick out of writing a PhD thesis on Emotion / Development / learning about that.
Years and years ago, now. Was never meant to be. Oh wells.
Posted by alexandra_k on November 11, 2018, at 23:58:54
In reply to Re: baseball?, posted by alexandra_k on November 11, 2018, at 22:52:19
of course i understand it's a bit gimmicky. i was interested in the idea of embodied cognition vs disembodied cognition and neural nets and learning algorighms vs 'rules in the head'. of course i understand it's a robotics / learning algorithm network based program, really. the theory of mind is sort of incidental. actually... i'm not entirely sure what it's about or why there is stuff about it online now, more than 10 years later... anyway... it captured my imagination at the time because i was interested in theories of emotion and emotional development. because it captures something that people often still don't at all understand... a message to back off. yeah.
i wonder if you can teach people to interact with kismet so they treat their own infants better? or if people simply never do understand why the hell they should back off for, if they don't want to.anyway...
i'm sure i heard from somewhere that someone applied to more than 80 residency programs and i don't know how many interviews came out of that. so... i won't take it personally.
i'm frightened, baseball, about how i've been feeling, lately. over the years, here, things have been grinding me down. how i haven't been able to accomplish anything much since returning. how i haven't succeeded, at all, in meeting people like me. people who are as intelligent and motivated as me to work on / for the stuff i've been working on. no shortage of people *saying* they want to work, but doing the work is different entirely. and increasingly it seems to me that doing the work isn't rewarded, and so at the end of the day more fool me for doing the work. i'm feeling lonely and isolated and i feel like most of the people in the vicinity are... psychopaths. really. have been selected for their ability to keep other psychopaths entertained. they are supposed to entertain each other to keep the heat away from other people who... are so distant they start to feel like mythical beings. i start to doubt i have actual memories of interacting with people who are different...
it feels like an awful kind of oppression abuse. just so many psychopathic, awful people attracted to wherever there is a medical school. that seems to be what it is. it brings out the worst in people and it brings out the worst of the people. and then plenty of people want to do it because of all this... it's really really awful. these awful awful bully people who see there's money to be made and people to be abused. all the awful.
anyway... i suppose i feel that i'm close now. if i am, at all. interview in a couple weeks... or that's that for this year. in which case i apply again next year. in which case if that doesn't work out... well... i won't be continuing on in this country one way or the other. i'll be pretty f*ck*ng mad if i don't get to get started on things next year. i'm pretty f*ck*ng mad the last 10 years of my life have been wasted by nasty psychopaths who can't see anything beyond their own selfish interests.
i think maybe the dean of fass... the one who was behind my application being processed later than usual... the one who ensured i didn't even get a fass scholarship this year... i think she's gone, now. i just inquired about my reimbursement for costs application and someone emailed me straight back and said it should have been done... i think maybe things are shifting... it does take time... i need to get started with med next year. i'll keep my head down as best i can... but the psychopaths are starting to wear me out, here. just wear me out.
i got a text message reminder i'm due for a cervical smear today. i never gave them permission to text message me. i explicitly requested they NOT EVER text message me. there is a little note on my file that says i requested to 'opt off' which they just keep on ignoring...
the default is taken to be that they just do whatever they want with you whenever they want. if you object you can state your objection but they will continue.
we have no notion at all of informed consent.
things are precisely backwards here.
Posted by alexandra_k on November 12, 2018, at 0:13:06
In reply to Re: baseball?, posted by alexandra_k on November 11, 2018, at 23:58:54
and i said to them 'give me the swab and i'll take it myself'. i understand you need to collect a sample of cells from the cervix.
but really what the smears are about is about it being something that med students need to sign off that they've done.
and they worry that nobody in their right mind will give informed consent to have a cervical smear done by someone who doesn't know what they are doing / isn't likely to collect cells from the right place so... uh... they sort of don't tell the person that they are only a med student. they pretend that they've done it, like, a million times before. you know how it is, just get in there and have a go. beggars can't be choosers and all that.
and even if they did find abnormalities in my cervical smear they likely wouldn't tell me that they've found them. they'd be more interested in observing my natural history to see whether the abnormalities get better or worse or remain the same. maybe to see whether our medical students get better or worse or remain the same in tehir ability to detect cervical abnormalities.
and even if they did decide to tell me that they found abnormalities then they would put me on a waiting list for surgery... and then the district health board would take me off the waiting list for surgery because they'll have found some academic willing to write a report that says that there is no proof these surgeries are cost effective and it would be cheaper to do nothing.
and even if i did get called up for surgery that would likely be an exercise in 'get in there and have a go!' for our medical students, too. under anasthesia how many medical students can all practice giving me smears?
so you see our health system is a joke. it's an awful f*ck*ng joke. there's nothing here. there's nobody home. just a bunch of awful bullies getting in there and taking what they want beause they want it... nobody teaches them anything... nobody that knows anything would want to teach them anything...
i have no confidence in our health system.
none whatsoever.
we don't have a health system. we don't have competent doctors. we don't have anything...
we have a bunch of managers and administrators.... a bunch of boards of directors... a bunch of psychopaths who sold out the people for embarrasingly little...
i hope they are held accountable.
the problem is what do you do with all these people? when 3/4 of teh ppulation behave like that if circumstances are conducive. circumstances have been mighty conducive for them, here. this whole nation is just a dumping ground for the developed world's trash. the inferior goods. teh inferior people. that sounds awful. morally inferior.
apparently the problem is wicked problem which is a techical term. i see... a bunch of short sighted psychopaths blaming the world for their own shortsightedness and narrow pursuit of their interests.
thanks for posting what you did on psychology, baseball. it was... so true. i thought. yeah. you are right, i think. about the inequality in the relationship. there is an inherant inequality. but that's kind of like the inherant inequality there is in a healthy parent - child relationship, too. the child's is inherintly selfish, i mean. growing up / letting go / being in the genuine position to pay it forwards. yeah.
Posted by alexandra_k on November 12, 2018, at 0:24:09
In reply to Re: baseball?, posted by alexandra_k on November 12, 2018, at 0:13:06
there was a guy who came out here from the US last year. to give a few talks, and one, in particular, to the old awful people who don't even have very much money... anyway, it was about the future of cancer care for our country. he said it would basically be surgery. his focus was thoracic. the people were disappointed. i guess that's the reality, though. we aren't going to trade for latest cancer drugs any time soon and let's face it we aren't in the position to properly look after and administer medications that need, oh, refridgeration, or fancy things like that... he said something about how registration is something else... but they could take someone and teach them how to do cancer surgeries of the lungs... i wonder where he was from / where he was thinking... anyway... glitterworld surgery is probably pretty pointless, yes. the trouble with orthopedics is that there is a new zealand specialist training program for it. which is just to say that there is a bunch of people who think they are orthopedic surgeons which is just to say that the government already thinks it has orthopedic surgeons. i think it is a weird blend of 'i stuck a needle into your knee with some local and now you say you feel better' and 'medical device representative scrubbed in and assembled implant devise according to manufacturer instructions'... but people feel mighty special thinking that they are orthopedic surgeons... i mean to say... i don't know that there's any way to actually get to do it when you have a bunch of people thinking that is what they get to do (while doing something else entirely)...
people from here get to go to harvard...
i think it's a way of making them think they have equity. distracting them from the fact they aren't getting clinical training. orthopedics is... doing statistics / public health stuffs on the knee operations i mentioned earlier... getting to go to america is getting to study public health and other non clinical things at harvard for half a year or a year...
anyway...
so many microbes. so many differnet kinds of agar...
This is the end of the thread.
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