Category: rePosts

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Praise::Barefoot doctors – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos

Got this from jayson through facebook. In some ways I can no longer be impartial about this issue primarily because whenever emotions are involved the mind almost always takes a backseat. I was bale to see the interview of one of the children, of one of the doctors who were jailed.  The words were something like “Para na nga sa amin , kukunin pa para itulong sa ibang tao..” said in a tone equal parts admiration and hurt.  Ewan , hope more people are as selfless as those doctors , rebels or not.

Barefoot doctors
By Michael Tan
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:20:00 02/16/2010
Filed Under: Health, Human Rights, Prison
MANILA, Philippines—The rain on a health workers’ training workshop in Morong, Rizal, and the arrest of 43 health professionals and workers continue to be front-page news.
The other night on the TV program “Crossroads,” Lt. Col. Noel Detoyato, spokesperson of the Armed Forces’ 2nd Infantry Division, noted that the workshop participants generally had low educational attainment, and cited this as one reason why they were suspected as subversives. Detoyato even enumerated the participants’ educational profile: 5 had elementary education, 4 were elementary graduates, 7 had high school education, 12 were high school graduates, 5 had college education and 4 were college graduates. He then mentioned that one of the participants had only finished first grade, and that this person was wanted for murder.
The colonel’s revelations reflect society’s prejudice against people who have had little formal education. “Uneducated” means ignorant, with connotations of the criminal and the subversive. Moreover, in this case of the health workers, there is the insinuation that the “uneducated’ (read the poor) couldn’t become health workers.
Yet for nearly half a century now, there has been a quiet global revolution going on, where people with minimal education have become excellent community health workers. In the Philippines, such training dates back to the early 1970s, when Filipino health professionals put up community-based health programs (CBHPs) with community health worker (CW) training as its centerpiece.
The Filipino CBHPs drew inspiration from China’s health care system, one which built upwards from the communes and villages. A hallmark of the Chinese system was the training of barefoot doctors, so-called because many had minimal formal education. Yet, with training of six months to a year the barefoot doctors could handle many of the most important health needs in their villages. Some eventually went on to medical school. One of them, Chen Zhu, rose through the ranks to become minister of health.
via Barefoot doctors – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.

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rePost::4 Simple Principles of Getting to Completion | Zen Habits

I was interviewing for a job in a startup last year. The interview was going well then I was asked what have you launched. I wasn’t able to say anything and that was the end of what could have been a partnership.  I have to remind myself that good enough is good enough and that making complicated things are hard and thus strive for simplicity. For a lot of programmers simplicity is harder than complexity. Here are a few advice on getting to completion, advice I extremely need to become a success.

4 Simple Principles of Getting to Completion


Simplify to get it done.

“If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, then this is the best season of your life.” ~Wu-Men

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

When I hear about a great idea that a friend has, I get excited. I can’t wait to see that idea become reality.
Then I ask about the idea a few months later, and it often is not one bit closer to completion.
Ideas stop short of becoming reality, and projects seem to drag on endlessly, because of one thing: complexity.
via 4 Simple Principles of Getting to Completion | Zen Habits.

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rePost::Crash Pilot Appears To Have Written Anti-IRS, Anti-Corporate Screed | TPMMuckraker

Universal Healthcare NOW!!!!

He also appears to denounce the Wall Street firms that helped caused the financial crisis — and even the lack of progress on health-care reform, criticizing Washington politicians for failing to fix “the joke we call the American medical system,” and for doing the bidding of the drug and insurance companies:
Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it's time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country's leaders don't see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It's clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don't get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.
Referring to the bailouts of airlines after 9/11, Stack writes: “the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY!”
via Crash Pilot Appears To Have Written Anti-IRS, Anti-Corporate Screed | TPMMuckraker.

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rePost:: Drive safely and don't abuse alcohol, drugs or candy :: Letters of Note

This illustrates how small nudges can have large effects on who we are.  This was very inspiring.

Drive safely and don’t abuse alcohol, drugs or candy

When asked by his teacher to write to a contemporary artist as part of a school project in 1997, 13-year-old Green Day fan Austin Kleon immediately opted to contact collage artist Winston Smith – the man responsible for creating the artwork for the band’s 1995 album, Insomniac – and after finding his address via a gallery curator, Austin sent his letter to the artist and hoped for the best. A few months later when nearly all hope was lost, the stunning 14-page reply seen below, along with pages and pages of artwork, arrived at the teenager’s home. He was ecstatic:
I couldn’t believe it. An artist—a real artist!—had written me back!
To me, it was the equivalent of Rilke writing back to the young poet. He told me about his life and his methods. He urged me to always question authority, stay away from drugs, and keep getting straight As so one day I could pay the bills. (An artist—a real artist!—was telling me it was okay to get straight As!) I’d never heard anybody talk about the kind of things he wrote about—art, America, growing up in a small-town—it was like a time-bomb that went off in my brain.
The letter, and I’m not exaggerating, changed my life.via Letters of Note: Drive safely and don’t abuse alcohol, drugs or candy.

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rePost:: Sentences to ponder :: Marginal Revolution

Hmm. I’m in the don’t plan vacations camp. This troubles me. I may not be maximizing happiness.

Sentences to ponder

The study, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life, showed that the largest boost in happiness comes from the simple act of planning a vacation. In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks.
There is more information here.
via Marginal Revolution: Sentences to ponder.

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Learned Today::Your eyes betray the timing of your decisions : Neurophilosophy

can you train yourself to see this change? I think I’m too slow or absent minded to notice this.

The researchers used an infrared eye-tracking device to measure the diameter of the participants’ left pupils up to 2,000 times per second while they performed the tasks. They found that pupil dilation was tightly coupled with the time at which the decisions were made, and betrayed the participants’ decisions before they were openly revealed. In the first experiment, maximum pupil dilation was observed during the 2-second interval in which the button was pressed. In the second, where there was a delay between the choice and the participants’ report of which number they had chosen, their pupils were maximally dilated during the interval at which they chose the digit. During task three, maximum dilation was again observed during the time at which the participants “chose” the underlined number.

via Your eyes betray the timing of your decisions : Neurophilosophy.

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rePost::The One Who Got Away – Pictory

Click through, the romantic in me is moved.

Think about the people missing from your life, and how you feel about them. What we remember — and what we forget — may reveal more about ourselves than about them. We have photos, letters, souvenirs, and fragments of memory, but our powerful imagination takes over from there: We color in the blanks. And that’s OK. Retouching old loves is a way of understanding what we want. It helps us find our way to new ones.
It’s impossible to know whether the experiences below are about infatuation, true love, lust, or something else entirely. But we can be sure that each of these contributors learned about life and themselves in the process.
via The One Who Got Away – Pictory.

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rePost:: » Tips for Stress-Free Travel » The Art of Non-Conformity »

Nice set of advice. I learned the quoted advice implicitly from tonio and chuck. It came from observing that what’s important is the experience everything else should be in the background. What does this mean? Well bring lot’s of money and have a who cares attitude about money. Some caveats would be, at least for me.
Learn to haggle without being stressed (I needed to learn this)
some more travel advice:

  • Learn to ask for directions.
  • Learn if the area has a map (especially useful for introverts like me)/cultural/tourist office.
  • It’s not how many places you visit it’s about how happy you were when you visited those places. (Let the bad things slide)
  • You travel to travel not to tell other people about it, which basically means photos are there to remind you of the happy moments.
  • Basically BE IN THE MOMENT(I can still recall vividly the first panoramic view of the Mt Pinatubo crater lake or each second of the Dahilayan zipline, It was because I was so into the moment it was as if nothing else existed.)
  • Travel Light.  (This was taught to me by walking with 2 bags with a combine weight of around 25kg walking for more than 15km from davao’s eco bus station to the davao museum and to a few more places. When you are thinking of bringing anything just say to yourself YOU AREN’T GOING TO NEED IT)
  • Always carry change.
  • Dress down, dress comfortably. (I find that dressing down automatically signals to people you are asking for directions/advice to point you to the least expensive options.)

Spend more money. I often get stressed out spending small amounts of money. Overall, this isn’t always bad—it’s led to a healthy paranoia about debt and a lifelong adherence to frugality. However, it has its downsides too, in that I can spend hours walking around trying to decide what to eat, or hours trying to figure out the public transit system somewhere instead of just flagging down a taxi.
It only took me about 100 countries—I’m a slow learner—but I finally created a $10 rule for myself that has been rocking my world. The $10 rule is that when I’m traveling, I deliberately avoid worrying about most things that cost $10 or less. As I said, this makes a big difference. I actually eat three meals a day now. If I can’t find free WiFi, I’ll walk into a hotel and pay for the connection. SO MUCH LESS STRESS.
via The Art of Non-Conformity » Tips for Stress-Free Travel.

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Quote::The Case Against Credentialism – James Fallows

Wow we are being penalized for our reliability.  I have a strange feeling that data analyst / programmer / consultant would be closer to doctors/lawyers than engineers.

The newly organizing groups could call themselves professions, and not simply resurrected medieval guilds, because their members’ mastery of a new body of knowledge gave them claims to a competence beyond the amateur’s reach. Doctors could take advantage of the new breakthroughs in germ theory and anesthesia, engineers of refinements in industrial technology. “A strong profession requires a real technical skill that produces demonstrable results and can be taught,” a sociologist named Randall Collins wrote in a history of educational credentials. “the skill must be difficult enough to require training and reliable enough to produce results. But it cannot be too reliable enough to produce results. But it cannot be too reliable, for then outsiders can judge work by its results.” Indeed, when historians try to explain why engineers have never become as pretigious and independent as doctors or lawyers, one of their answers is that the engineer’s competence is too clearly on display. (When a patient dies, the doctor might not to be blame, but if a bridge, falls down, the engineer is.)
via The Case Against Credentialism – James Fallows.

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rePost:: The Gifts of Doubt :: Experimental Theology

1. Epistemological
This isn't news, but truth claims are more difficult in modernity. Particularly those outside of the range of science. Collectively, we've lost the meta-narrative (the big overarching story that shaped everyone's worldview) and have traded it in for more particular and local stories and perspectives. Big T Truth has been lost to little t truths. And this move isn't all bad. The stories of the weak and marginalized (their small t truths that were being written out of the history books by the Big T Truth of Empire) are slowly being recovered.
Doubters tend to flourish in the modern context. The fractured epistemological situation of modernity (often called “postmodernity”) demands a degree of epistemic humility. Doubters are very comfortable with this. Doubters tend to shy away from shouting meta-narratives at people who don't believe in meta-narratives. That is, rather than lamenting the modern situation, as the fundamentalists do (“No one believes in Truth anymore!”), the doubters will “get” the modern person and, due to certain shared sympathies, be more likely to articulate the faith in a way that makes sense to outsiders. Doubters trade in paranoid shouting for intelligible conversation.
via Experimental Theology: The Gifts of Doubt.