Check our code.org. It feels backwards but I am very impressed. Move onto sphero , then micro-bit and then arduino. There are also decent systems called scratch jr and scratch. Finally, I can’t recommend LEGO mindstorms and boost enough.
The key insight that made me want to post this is we should actively try to move to an older ventilator design (does bulk of the work, not optimized but easier and simpler). I have encountered this in my life as a software engineer. MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) in the mid 90s was hard to grok .. you had this huge book by Jeff Prosise to absorb. I cracked it when I chanced upon a manual for MFC 1.0. It was super simple and down to the essentials. All the fancy stuff they added from 1.0 to 5.0 was icing and made things complex.
I think people who are actually working on ventilators should seriously consider going for a simpler design .. it might be this or might be something else. The person in this article also said he is happy to give the design away.
I think if the Malaria Med+Antibiotics treatment from the French study don't work (we'll know in about a week I think), we need to move to a war footing and start producing ventilators. My back of the envelope math has scared the crap out of me (best case 500K Canadians dead, worse case 3 million).
I really hope someone who can make a difference sees this.
There are people in the world who live with very serious lung issues who do home management daily in order to survive. Non-mechanical lung clearance methods are a part of their daily routine.
I've left some comments here on the possibility of doing lung clearance in the absence of sufficient numbers of ventilators:
I don't really care to argue it with anyone. Please go find somewhere else to vent your spleen about how stressful this is. My recommendation is and has always been: If you have no other option and you are going to die because of it, you can try this.
That's it. That's my entire point. All the accusations that I'm up to something nefarious and dangerous are completely unfounded.
Take care. Try to not stress too much. Thank you for trying to be part of the solution.
And here I thought I was an idiot for wondering if just having people sleep in a position to help fluid drain from their lungs would help. I guess I wasn't so far off.
More prosaically, I think I've reduced durations of basic colds by deliberately coughing early on. Needs more experiments, but as you said side effects are minimal, so you may as well try. I'm starting to think this is a family of life hacks that should be much more widely known.
I just saw an interview with an Italian physician where he briefly mentioned therapies for the lung before things got to the stage where ventilators were needed: https://youtu.be/3dmIzW3icRs
It was a brief reference without enough details to be sure that he was referring to clearance methods similar to our the same as what you reference, but it sounds as if this may be part of therapy already. So well in line with what you have described.
Thank you for that. I've watched it. It's nice to hear that the Italian doctors are concerned about the issue and trying to stave off use of ventilators.
The interviewer suggested this is a different policy from what is happening in the UK/English-speaking world where they/we are basically begging for more ventilator capacity.
Thank you for bringing these techniques, verified by actual use, to our attention. I can well believe that, in a world where good first options are the norm, fallbacks may not be widely known. Even if they are insufficient in the worst cases, thay are still worth consideration.
Best wishes to you and your family in these trying times.
You persist in attacking a straw man in direct reply to a post that explicitly disclaims it. Quit pattern matching on "non-doctor comments on medical issue" and look at what she's actually saying.
> I think if the Malaria Med+Antibiotics treatment from the French study don't work (we'll know in about a week I think), we need to move to a war footing and start producing ventilators. My back of the envelope math has scared the crap out of me (best case 500K Canadians dead, worse case 3 million).
We should assume they won't work. War footing time is now.
It is going to be bad. People are still out and about touching everything then touching their face. I saw one lady today leave Walmart then upon getting to her car put all the groceries in the back then grabs a bag of chips and pops them open and starts eating them just moments after handling her shopping cart. Are people not seeing the videos of the people dying or on ventilators struggling for oxygen? Mean while the number of people around here being infected is slowly getting larger and larger each day. I have been telling people wash your hands before you do anything. They say social distancing, but that is the dumbest thing if you ask me because people seem to think that means if I am out and about and I stay 3 feet away from other people I will not get sick. What it really means is when you are out and about you need to not be in contact with other people or objects that other people may come in contact with. If you do come in contact with an object another person may have come in contact with, you may be exposed to the virus. Any time you touch an object others may have touched wash your hands. Social Distancing= Distancing from People and Any Objects they may have Touched. The other huge thing is do not touch your face, if you must it should only be after you thoroughly washed your hands. I am a home care aide and look after hundreds of elderly. This is getting crazy and feels as if we are just about to blow up in numbers. I wish people would take this more seriously. Vancouver Island is starting to take off. Good luck every body
Thank you for the links. I work in this space professionally. I had heard about Brillo and Android Things a while back (there was very little info back then). Looks like there is a lot more good info now. Will delve into it. By the way, if you are in Mountain View and want to grab coffee, please reach out (email in HN profile).
I have fond memories of Chuck at MSR-SVC. I was a lowly post-doc who sat close to him for a time. He was very generous with his time and I can only recall his door being open. I was struck by the breadth of his expertise (e.g. he knew about HCI matters even though I considered him a low-level systems guy). I've heard him being called the engineer's engineer and that is an apt title. He inspired me and will be missed. RIP.
he was so humble for someone so intelligent. even though it was 15yrs ago at this point, I still am struck by how happy he was to come to redmond for 3 days to sit through design discussions for work that became the basis of roles / minimal windows. was a great role model that you didn't need to show you were the smartest person in the room. RIP
We're a group of scientists and engineers who are building fault tolerant, distributed systems. Members of the group have published at top conferences such as OSDI, NSDI, FAST, MobiSys, Middleware, etc. We are currently hiring hands-on systems researchers as well as people with strong software development skills in Python, Java, C, or C++. If you are very comfy with coding for Android or Linux, do mention that. Also, if you have coded against a DB like MySQL, Riak, Cassandra, or a pub/sub system, bonus points! The right candidate must be comfy with concurrency primitives (have used locks, critical sections in practice and understand the implications thereof) and network programming. We don't carry pagers or have on-call - the work is more about coming up with compelling ideas and creating proof of concept demos/prototypes to illustrate them. This is a very unique opportunity for a serious developer who is interested in getting exposure to a research lab setting. The company offers lots of perks. Please mention you saw the post on HN.
P.S. My first "Who Is Hiring" post. Please be gentle :)
The position lists a Ph.D. as a requirement - that's just for the researcher position, right? I'm interested in the development roles; does a Master's degree focused on systems meet your qualification requirements?
Hi! Yes .. the PhD requirement is only for the researcher position. A Masters or equivalent hands-on systems experience is sufficient for the dev position.
P.S. Pls see my email address from my HN profile. Thanks!!
Heh .. me too! I did it as a hobby project over the holidays. Loads of fun. A few people suggested I write up my experience. Ended up giving a paper at Sci Py 2012:
Over the past several months, I've had the honor of working with an amazing set of people to build this service. Would love it for people to try it out, and give feedback.
I know there are videos and press releases coming out. Also, since we are just releasing the service, there might be a queue for access. You can take a look at the CLI docs until you get access. Thought the dev community would like to see more detail :)
The capacitive electrodes form an electric field around the surface of the pcb. When your hand or finger (conductive surface) is in range, the chip senses the distortion of the e-field (change in capacitance) to track your hand movement and calculate the position.
If you're looking for an Ubuntu-based Vagrant box, you can try out my Vagrant box (http://ferry.opencore.io/en/latest/install.html#os-x). It's based off of 14.04. Be warned though, my box is very large (~4GB) as it contains many pre-baked images (Hadoop, Cassandra, etc.).
Thanks. Where do I issue vagrant halt (i.e. which folder)? The workaround I found was to go virtualbox directly and issue a poweroff. Not clean at all :(
