I mean, it's a neurodevelopmental disorder that makes it hard for people to accomplish tasks. And what you're describing just seem like all the symptoms people with ADHD would have.
This isn't a perfect analogy, but it's kind of like saying a guy isn't a great runner because he tore his ACL and surgeons fixed it but it's still messed up, and saying he should've just never gotten the surgery.
You're blaming the medication when people with ADHD are already predisposed to not being able to complete things, have normal careers, and are at high risk for anxiety, depression and other things. You're just seeing what ADHD looks like.
Very anecdotal here, but I wouldn't be the successful person I am had I not been given medication when I was young, starting in third grade. Night and day difference when I was on it. The medication made me a functioning person who could pay attention and do what I was supposed to do.
However, my doctors treated me with medication _and_ had me go to a therapist for cognitive behavioral therapy. The medication helped me learn to slow down my mind, be able to focus when I normally couldn't, and develop the coping skills that allowed me to function that I was learning in therapy.
My doctors also had never planned for the medication to be long term for me. It was a tool to help the therapy take hold. I was on it for about five or six years, slowly weaning me off in 7th grade once I'd developed the proper skills. I haven't taken any of that medication since then.
I don't think many paired it with therapy back then. Maybe they still don't. But I use those tools I developed in Therapist Bob's office all those years ago on a daily basis. I never could've paid attention to what that man was saying had I not been on medication. Saved my life.
Some folks on certain medications (or just because) can have an increase in red blood cell production, sometimes called "blood thickening," I believe, and they can sometimes just get a prescription from a doctor to go to a donation facility. Or some facilities will still just allow you to do this if you tell them you need to get rid of excess blood for the reasons above, and then they dispose of it. (Not everyone requires a doctor's prescription for it.)
That's just one use case, obviously, so there is a system for some to get rid of excess blood, at least, in a similar manner as you would donate.
There was some discussion[0] on HN a few weeks ago organizations (like the Red Cross[1]) not accepting donations from patients who require therapeutic phlebotomy (hemochromatosis patients, for example) because their donation provides the donor a benefit (and therefore isn't strictly altruistic). That sent me down an interesting rabbit hole of reading (link in discussion).
I didn't realize that. I was briefly thought to have hemochromatosis, and had been "self-treating" via the Red Cross for years.
It turns out I didn't have hemochromatosis. It was merely a bit high, but knowing that I donated so often (both whole blood and platelets, which you can do more often), there was concern that the "self-treatment" was covering up a real problem.
I had not heard at the time that they wouldn't have wanted my blood. It was over a decade ago, and it's possible that the policy didn't exist then.
I have hemochromatosis and here in Germany it's impossible for me to donate blood. It's not actually forbidden, afaik, but no company want's to give 'contaminated' blood to patients, even though it would be perfectly fine.
That sucks that people treated you like that, and I'm sorry you had to deal with that.
At my last employer, which was my first time as a manager, I helped to get HR to remove the requirement to have a degree from all job applications, as it was a major barrier to entry and preventing a lot of great candidates from applying. At my current job, I also don't care if you attended college, and removed it from requirements for my team.
I just care if you can do the job and you're not a jerk about it. I know many other folks in hiring positions who feel the same way, and some large companies are starting to rethink their degree requirements. Hopefully it becomes more widespread so folks don't have to experience what you have.
> At my current job, I also don't care if you attended college, and removed it from requirements for my team.
I am so glad to see others adopting this path. Even with dropping this constraint we are having a little bit of trouble finding good people. I can't imagine how hard it is to hire someone now if you are demanding 4 year degrees and other forms of experience/credential.
I feel the world is changing so fast now, especially in technology, that it has become counterproductive to screen for historical credentials and experience. "Can you deal with rapid change and communicate effectively" are the new major criteria for us.
Just wanted to say, I used filepicker.io years and years ago on a project and it was wonderful. Thanks for developing something that was easy to use and intuitive, especially when I was still learning the ropes.
What's wrong with seeming like you are a recovering alcoholic? Many people are, and if someone judges you for that, they're not a good person. Many people also don't want the excess calories, and if someone judges you for NOT joining them in drinking alcohol, again, they're not a good person.
Same goes if they think you're a food/diet nazi. Who cares? It's your body. They shouldn't be so judgmental of your life choices, especially something as personal as how you decide to fuel your body and stay alive. And if they are judging you, in my experience, it's usually because they're working through their own issues and would rather it not be pointed out how unhealthy their choices are, and they want you to join them in their maybe-not-so-great decisions.
Well, I'm not sure what the point of this was. My team at the Chicago Tribune has been working on visualizing and explaining Chicago crime data for quite some time. Here's one of our biggest projects, which pulls in (I think) the same data Socrata used, as well as our own tracking of shootings, homicides and suburban crime data: http://crime.chicagotribune.com
Hopefully one of my coworkers will join in here who's more knowledgeable than me, but remember crime data, such as what Socrata is displaying, is just a snapshot of crimes that have been reported. It could mean those crimes were just more enforced at that time, or more people decided to report crimes, etc. It is not a crime victimization survey.
The point I was trying to make is when editors have to make choices between areas to cover. As you may be aware, most traditional media outlets are becoming smaller in terms of news gathering employees. So now they sometimes need to make decisions about what areas they should be covering.
If less folks search and clicks on ads for "Cleveland education news" rather than "Cleveland crime news," one could attempt to use that data in making their decision if you had to choose between those two topics to cover. You're serving your readers and getting them information they want, rather than spending time covering a topic that won't be read by your readers. I think this would be a bad financial decision and a bad allocation of resources.
I guess I didn't make this point clearly in my quick blog post, but I'm not advocating for doing a Demand Media-style operation. What I'm advocating for is using more analytics to make your decisions in allocating diminishing resources. I think you should do that rather than just going by your gut.
As a person who's worked in the news industry for all of my short career, its tendency has been to make decisions not necessarily based on data. I'd like to change that.
I guess I'm confused as to what you're disappointed about. My audience is mostly for newspaper/media folk, and I tend to try and bring ideas from the web development world to them. So that's what I did with this quick post.
I'm not sure how I don't care about the topic, as I did write about it and offered ideas for how newsrooms could use this.
I hadn't heard of adCenter until today, either. But I thought it worthwhile to mention a tool that isn't Google for once.
The point is that article that newspaper folk produce using this method will essentially be along the lines of the Google-chasing Demand Media content farm stuff. Give people exactly what they're looking for at the top of their mind and a lot of important reporting goes away.
It's not your article he's complaining about, it's the articles that your article encourages people to write.
You're on the front page of HN today, so whatever your regular audience, your audience today includes a number of tech bloggers.
For newspapers: you will not be catering to your audience, you will be catering to the people who clicked on those ads.
I was not suggesting you did not care about your topic.
I was not suggesting it was in any way improper for you to mention adcenter. But it's funny, you just parroted what was in the news and instead of useful trend data about the popularity of adcenter among bloggers we just have more noise.
I'd like to know how Dave Winer expects a new biographer to get the same amount of access to Steve Jobs as Walter Isaacson did. It's hard to interview someone 40 times if, you know, you can't.
Just because a biographer had access to the subject doesn't mean the biography is necessarily better. "Authorized" biographies are notorious for slanting favorably towards their subjects, papering over their flaws and building up their good points.
Sometimes that's just a byproduct of spending a lot of time with someone; you can't spend all those hours with a person without starting to see things at least a little the same way they do. Other times it's a condition they had to agree to in order to get that access in the first place.
Which is why so much of this stuff turns on the reputation of the biographer. An authorized biography by a hack is unlikely to have much merit. The presumption is that Walter Isaacson (a) cares very much about his reputation and (b) stakes it on this biography.
You can't call this biography "slanted" without suggesting that Isaacson sold himself out. He may have, but that's a serious accusation.
I'm not calling this biography slanted -- how would I know, I haven't even read it yet -- I'm challenging the assertion that a biography written with access to the subject is automatically better than one written without it.
Yes, that's what I meant. I bet there are recordings too. It would be enormously selfish to keep those for himself, but I agree with you that it's unlikely. However, by asking for it, it seems to increase the likelihood that it will happen, however slightly. The question should be raised. Maybe after Isaacson dies he'll will them to a museum, library or university.
I would expect he is under no legal obligation. But he ought feel a professional obligation to history that others may be able to use the recordings/transcripts to draw their own conclusions. He is a biographer, after all; he never got to interview Einstein, he had to rely on the records of others that were preserved. That doesn't mean the transcripts must be released immediately, but I would expect that others will eventually have access.
How often does this actually happen? I'm not altogether that knowledgeable in this area, as I am neither a biographer nor a historian. But I don't know where the "professional obligation to history" comes from. He's making a commercial product, not doing a research paper for a public university.
And sure, it'd be nice to see his source material eventually. But I'd rather see the coherent package of his research in a narrative book form rather than his notes. I'll trust Isaacson to tell the story of Steve Jobs through his own interpretation, as that is all that a biography can be.
I'm not an expert, either, and I don't know of much precedent for interviews like this with an individual author being publicly released (say, on the web, rather than in a university archive), but private archival materials are used by historians and biographers all the time. I don't know whether Isaacson or his publisher own the rights, but I'm sure others will ask for access in the future.
I'm not sure about characterizing a biography as a "commercial product"; although although it is the source of the author's livelihood, and the publisher is a for-profit entity, it is a complex entity as a product. The author depends in this livelihood in having access to materials from others, it is not unreasonable to think he may reciprocate in some circumstances. In any case, in future years (after the initial sales peak of the bio), releasing the source documents may even cause a revival of interest that helps residual sales.
I would assume they're actually under obligation to not release them. Most people that sit down for these things would rather every word they've spoken does not see the light of day.
This isn't a perfect analogy, but it's kind of like saying a guy isn't a great runner because he tore his ACL and surgeons fixed it but it's still messed up, and saying he should've just never gotten the surgery.
You're blaming the medication when people with ADHD are already predisposed to not being able to complete things, have normal careers, and are at high risk for anxiety, depression and other things. You're just seeing what ADHD looks like.