“At the current rate…” and other assumptions

In order to make any predictions in any area of study, one must make assumptions about the data, and what is likely to affect it going forward.  That is why statistical studies often make use of such statements as:

“At the current rate…”

“If things continue as in the past…”

“Based on what we know now…”

“It is reasonable to assume…”

“If history is a guide…”

“If things don’t change…”

But things do change, and that is what makes predicting the future so difficult, and so vulnerable to known and unknown biases.  While these caveats are unavoidable, and need to be stated, they require the consumer of the statistics to have a reasonable amount of skepticism and a large amount knowledge.

A quote in a The Great Race by Levi Tillemann states that “The available supply of gasoline, as is well know, is quite limited and it behooves the farseeing men of the motor car industry to look for likely substitutes.”  This quote is attributed to Thomas J. Fay, in 1905, in a magazine call Horseless Age.

Home Monitoring of Patients by Doctors

As electronics applications get more sophisticated, and the pressure keeps increasing to keep medical costs down, doctors will more and more rely on home monitoring of patients. Electronic devices at home, such as blood-pressure monitors, digital scales, pulse and oxygen monitors, and EKG recorders to name a few, can easily be monitored remotely by doctors using a home “telestation.” Home telestations can also be programmed to ask relevant questions which can be answered with push button responses.

Monitoring of diabetics’ sugar levels is one of the early applications of this technology, where the data is not always relayed to the doctor, but sometime to a parent via cell phone or to the patient herself. Alarms can wake up a patient, or a parent to advise of an otherwise unnoticed medical situation.

This is just the beginning of what we can be looking forward to in the future.

For a comprehensive treatment of this subject see the Wall Street Journal article, “Stay Home. The Doctor is Watching You.” published February 17, 2015.

Recycling pace makers from cadavers…

Pace makers are being removed from cadavers, with family consent of course, and being sent to third world countries for reuse.  Read the details:

http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/12/cardiac-pacemaker-recycled/