Does it? Seems like being able to cut and stitch yourself is the hardest part.
Funny story, I dealt with a pylonidal cyst on my tailbone by myself. I did not expect that much blood tbh (along with very stinky puss... sorry for the detail), but I managed to drain and clean it.
Apparently you need surgery for those... it really wasn't that hard, cutting in was the hardest part, but at that point the pain from it was worse.
> After questioning by the college officials, one official reportedly said that he had a skin-coloured micro Bluetooth device fixed in his ear by an ENT surgeon, reported Hindustan Times.
"After questioning by the college officials, one official reportedly said that he had a skin-coloured micro Bluetooth device fixed in his ear by an ENT surgeon, reported Hindustan Times."
This happened in India. The student was caught with a mobile phone, which in turn led to further questioning.
The surgery was done by an ENT (ear, nose, throat) surgeon. I'm not sure if it was within the ear or not, as the device was "skin coloured", though that may be because of how thin the ear's skin is.
And a poison gas, when you bite down, blow it into the face of the Baron, and he will feel the revenge for killing my wife. A revenge so storng, even the Mind Conditioning for Loyalty cannot even contain my hate and revenge.
Seems like the company went out of business because medicaid didn't cover it. I would be curious if such a device exists that could pair with a phone or laptop. A broken tooth could be capped with one of these false tooth implants and so long as there's a hygienic way to remove and clean + charge it I'd be very curious to try one.
> SoundBite was developed and marketed by Sonitus Medical, Inc. The company filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, January 15, 2015,[1] as a result of the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' decision not to cover the device.[2]
They didn’t find the headset initially. They found the phone in an inner seam of his pants. I’m guessing that they used either metal or other detectors
They way they handled it was exactly the correct one. You allow the test to continue with the minimum of disruptions for everyone. The academic consequences come later, after a university investigation, and they may face criminal charges as well, but the people who didn't cheat deserve to have their test proceed with the minimum possible disruption.
The frisking could have been done one-by-one in an adjacent room. But once you find the cheating, the best way is to let the test continue as normally as possible. Otherwise it creates a huge distraction for the other students as they wonder why that student had to leave.
the person is usually accused and maybe not guilty. Normaly you let them finish the exam and start the legal stuff afterwards (proof, counter arguments etc.)
It can also serve as additional proof if on the new answer sheet given after confiscating the devices, the exam taker performs significantly worse than on the original answer sheet.
Depends on how quietly he goes. Asking someone nicely who went to such lengths to cheat might turn bad fast, and then you're looking at the potential for physical altercations, calling security, etc.
Or you just give them another sheet and worry about punishments later.
Actually doing nothing and stopping them on the way out would be ideal, in my opinion. It gives them the chance to get cocky ("woohoo haven't get caught yet let me ramp this up a bit") and be more obvious about it, as well. (Unless it's the kind of cheating that disrupts others, of course, but hopefully it isn't?)
Criminal charges for cheating on an exam? Seems a bit absurd to me. I'm all for preventing fraud (especially when were talking about peoples lives), but I also like to think I'm a reasonable human being and criminal action seems unfounded here. It sounds to me like expectations and filters for exams are too unrealistic now combined with lack of alternative realizable opportunities, otherwise you wouldn't see this level of cheating nonsense.
Every day I see more and more ridiculous levels of competitive forces pushed on the bulk of society just to survive and it makes me wonder where the tipping point for social competitive forces for survival begin to exceed natural forces for survival and faith in societies destabilize to a point people just stop participating or at the very least many just "give up." You already see this in Japan, Korea, China (tang ping, "lying flat") and it seems to be an increasing trend in the US. I'm not intimately familiar with India but from what I have seen, it's not roses there either.
We have some fundamentally skewed power and control mechansim increasingly governing people in 'democratic societies' to which citizens seem to have little real democratic say in anymore.
Cheating in a medical exam can get an unqualified person licensed as a doctor. It can have serious consequences and kill lots of people. In a regular college exam I think criminal charges are a bit much but for a public safety related exam like doctor, pilot, etc. I think it's appropriate.
Adults are adults. 18 year-olds who defraud the military face punishment (with due process). Nearly all universities take public money and should stop treating 18 year-olds like children who need to be coddled on publicly subsidized dime.
That being said, most such punishment records should generally be expunged once rehabilitation has been completed. We're all human and make mistakes, and only a pattern of misconduct should be permanently on record.
When does it become 'biological enhancement'? Maybe all doctors should have a bluetooth implanted, to connect them to an AI or online consultants at all times?
"One shouldn't do [that medical procedure], as GOD made you perfect and you shouldn't mess with God's! plan!!!"
> Thats an interesting comment, may I ask - was God's plan to manufacture those glasses such that you can see clearly and read such from that book, made by man?
A fellow was stuck on his rooftop in a flood. He was praying to God for help.
Soon a man in a rowboat came by and the fellow shouted to the man on the roof, “Jump in, I can save you.”
The stranded fellow shouted back, “No, it’s OK, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me.”
So the rowboat went on.
Then a motorboat came by. “The fellow in the motorboat shouted, “Jump in, I can save you.”
To this the stranded man said, “No thanks, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith.”
So the motorboat went on.
Then a helicopter came by and the pilot shouted down, “Grab this rope and I will lift you to safety.”
To this the stranded man again replied, “No thanks, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith.”
So the helicopter reluctantly flew away.
Soon the water rose above the rooftop and the man drowned. He went to Heaven. He finally got his chance to discuss this whole situation with God, at which point he exclaimed, “I had faith in you but you didn’t save me, you let me drown. I don’t understand why!”
To this God replied, “I sent you a rowboat and a motorboat and a helicopter, what more did you expect?”
I know a few doctors who have told me they've used this one on people who refuse care for religious reasons. Unfortunately they said it rarely works.
The first episode of Stargate I ever watched sorta touched on this... It's the season 7, episode 5 called "Revisions" with Christopher Heyerdahl. Definitely recommend. It got me hooked on the franchise forever
The whole series is amazing. I strongly recommend watching SG1 S1-S7, then stargate atlantis S1 in parallel with SG1 S8. Some of the best television ever made.
I would give so much to see doctors who simply "google" things.
As someone who works as dev improving data and efficiency in a business.....i hate people who don't just google things. I implemented something a year ago, maybe its time to refresh my knowledge and see if anything has changed? Some doctors are infuriating, using knowledge they gained 10 years ago. Medicine also changes fairly quickly and quick search could really be a great tool.
Imagine this, I have seen many physicians (40+) at top hospitals about "mysterious" symptoms due to a reaction to a medication. 3 agreed its possible. The symptoms are listed on the medication label, plus I have been tested for everything else under the sun. I have sent research to my primary physician who has said, I am the first patient to change his mind about a drug. A quick search just listing my vague symptoms would bring up a possible reaction, or just looking at the damn label.
I mean, it's not like they are going to ask wikihow.
Updated versions of their books and medical journals, or even a stackoverflow-like platform where they could discuss and read answers would be magnitudes better.
Maybe humans memorizing tons of information was the best approach for medicine a century ago, but it's not the case anymore
There are medical databases specifically for things like this (not available to the general public), but doctors often don’t reference them because of false confidence or time pressure.
Someone with an extensive education should be able to decide which information can be considered good. If not, then maybe we should stop testing memorization and focus on ability to solve problems using ALL tools available.
> "Someone with an extensive education should be able to decide which information can be considered good."
Uh, what is an education other than absorption and integration of information? If they haven't learned (i.e. memorized) a large quantity of information as part of their extensive education to guide them, they have zero chance of "being able to decide which information can be considered good" by definition.
Presumably, doctors would have access to better information than the layperson, and know how to sift through it. I know the person you replied to said "Google", but that's been a fairly overloaded term for decades now.
Personally, I would like to see a doctor searching a site made for doctors. Seeing one just do an actual generic online search would not give me much confidence.
One eye opening fact I learned when my family was dealing with a complex medical diagnosis was how specialists have seemingly the entire population of peers on speed dial. If you can help them connect dots to other specialists, they likely have the ability to get in touch with them in near real time. I mean, it may not be 100% reliable, but my new MO is to assume all physicians have a batphone, and to ask them to use it if they need additional opinions & insights.
Which is why having an expert sift through it is helpful - he can immediately rule out garbage from stuff that at least looks sane and might warrant further consideration.
As engineers we do it all the time (sometimes subconsciously) when searching for technical documentation. Having that skill in other fields would be a godsend, but the next best thing would be to have someone else do it on our behalf.
If been in a clinic where after describing my symptoms the doctor opened the computer and typed them into a search engine. I asked her if she was googling it and she said "sort of". She started telling me about a search tool doctor's use which is much more professionally focused than Google (who diagnoses everyone with cancer) and I was very impressed both with her honesty and that this existed.
It's been a few years since so I don't remember if it was a windows app or a website but it did have a very 90s looking interface.
I had exactly this happen once in a regular MD’s office, but he was reading to me from literally the Wikipedia article on carpal tunnel, on a Chromebook. Actually Wikipedia.
I've had similar experiences like that; the doctor pulling up articles from common websites. But it wasn't the doctor pulling up the article because they didn't know what was in the article, it was them showing me so I can look it up later and read more if I wanted.
Wikipedia seems like a poor choice, though. Maybe carpel tunnel is basic enough for Wikipedia to be fine. I've been shown stuff like Mayo Clinic articles.
I caught a gastrointestinal parasite in one journey to Brazil (I should have avoided the street food!) and I am 90% sure that my Spanish doctor just googled what the hell I had when she got the results of the analysis, right there in front of me. I am not 100% sure because I could not see her screen, but the (in)frequency of mouse clicks was consistent with someone going over google and reading a bunch of pages. And then suddenly she started typing a lot and didn't use the mouse at all - switched to her daily medical app, I presumed.
The antibiotics she gave me did the trick. She was young, though.
I deal with daily chronic pain which has rendered me essentially unable to work. My full-time job has been “patient” for almost three years.
What I’ve learned is that you have to do their work for them if you want to make progress.
Sometimes that means showing up with highlighted printouts of studies that they would never get around to reading if you didn’t deliver them — and follow up on them — personally.
Other times that means that means playing dumb and “presenting” (not faking, just highlighting) the right preliminary symptoms to get a key test ordered.
I’m lucky in that I have education. I can read a study. I understand probability and statistics. I can learn terminology and use it (somewhat) correctly in a sentence. I often wonder how people without a STEM background get any care at all. Perhaps they don’t?
It’s a horrible, broken system that amounts to little more than insurance-mandated gatekeeping.
My wife is a nurse who pivoted into pharma, and when our daughter was diagnosed with a heart tumor, the only thing that ultimately resulted in us finding the right case was my wife's experience and ability to 1) ask the right questions, and 2) conduct her own scientific literature search & meta analyses. I kept thinking throughout that, if we weren't able to do this, our daughter would probably die ... and how many millions of patients receive subpar care because they don't have the skills or knowledge to keep care providers (and insurers) honest.
I used to work in this industry. Medicine is the most broken, indoctrinated, risk-averse, technology-averse industry of them all. These are people who still use fax machines. Ask your doctor for some basic imaging or so much as a print out of your chart and they'll deny your problem, then give you confused dirty looks and talk down to you.
Compare that with Dentistry. I had a problem and walked in with an hour's notice, had a x-ray from a handheld scanner emailed to me with the problem highlighted within 5 minutes like something out of Star Trek.
That’s not exactly the industries fault though. For example, in the US, you have to get a mammogram BY LAW. It doesn’t even matter that there are better and more reliable methods to detect breast cancer, the law said it MUST be a mammogram. https://www.factcheck.org/2013/10/aca-doesnt-restrict-mammog....
Anyway, then you have companies like Theranos who come along and prove why it’s a good idea to be risk adverse. Snake oil has been sold for a long time, and it really isn’t until “recently” that it has been illegal to sell it (since a bit after 1906, in the US).
In Australia all imaging is stored on the cloud somewhere. For a reason unknown to me, you still get the huge envelope. But inside is just a piece of paper with some public id and a QRcode. You don’t really need these. The doctor who ordered the imaging will automatically get forwarded the results. If you are refereed to a specialist, they will get it to.
I agree, for some reason dentistry and orthodontics seem far more technologically advanced than the rest of medicine. In addition to handheld x-rays like you mentioned, I’ve seen dentists/orthodontists use 3D printers, 3D scanners (e.x. iTero Element) and modern composites. Small sample size, but all the orthodontists and dentists’ offices I’ve been in are clearly embracing new technology as much as they can, while every doctor’s office I’ve been in has seemed like it could be a hundred years old. I wonder why that is.
The cynic in me suspects it's because insurance companies and employer-provided insurance hasn't completely mucked up the market the way it has with healthcare. Sometimes I wonder if America's "best" (least resistant) path to single-payer healthcare is to start smaller scale with universal coverage for vision & dentistry and then slowly expand coverage from there.
It's bad enough when hospitals get hacked.
I can't imagine the problems that happen when the medical staff's 'biological enhancements' are hacked.
In this community we sometimes talk about how some technical interviews are deeply unrealistic because they remove the candidate from, e.g. their IDE with tab autocompletion, or googling, which you might normally depend on. Your skills are best measured when you have access to the tools and environment which you'd actually use while working. And yet ... sometimes you can pair program with someone and it's clear that they don't really understand what they're accepting from the autocomplete, and this is legitimate cause for concern.
I think I want doctors to definitely know a bunch of stuff unaided, even if they would normally always have access to supplementary references. If nothing else, they should have the habits of mind to be able to critically evaluate their references, and notice when they're wrong or suspect.
Hmm… about 10 years ago I helped a friend pass an oral exam by talking to him over the phone. He had this “headset” that came in two parts: a tiny magnet that you insert into your ear canal, and a necklace that your put under your shirt, which was basically a large coil that vibrated the magnet in your ear.
Should’ve just used Anki religiously for a year or so instead.
Speaking of cheating though, I heard they have directional speakers that have a spread of only like a foot. With something like that it seems like it’d be easy to cheat.
"Speaking of cheating though, I heard they have directional speakers that have a spread of only like a foot. With something like that it seems like it’d be easy to cheat."
Yeah, but they still spread enough to be audible, and the reflections are audible as well. In a testing environment it would be hard to completely hide.
I'm surprised so many people speak of these as something they haven't experienced. I recall at least two grocery stores I've been in using these to beam ads at people while they were in line, and that was years ago, and I'm not in SV either, it's not like people around here use cutting edge tech for the heck of it very often. Mercifully, they didn't last long. While I didn't enjoy the ads, I did enjoy the opportunity to hear exactly how they work and get a sense of their strengths and weaknesses.
(It is absolutely true that they are garbage at bass frequencies, and the lower midrange as well. The ads were all voiced by women, because I'm not sure men would even have been comprehensible. I mean that literally. Their lowest frequency response is that high. As clever as they are it's not a surprise we don't hear them more often. They are super specialist gear not suitable for most tasks.)
Cheating in college should be punishable with prison and heavy fines. It's essentially fraud. I certainly don't think doctors who earn their credentials through cheating should be allowed to practice in any sense
Its an open secret that tutors do a significant portion of work for star athletes, to say nothing about punishments being different for international students caught cheating.
I know people in faculty, this is what is reported. A google search would suggest the same. It's far more culturally accepted to cheat in University in certain parts of the world, e.g. India, Saudi Arabia.
If I've learned anything from Columbo, it's that college students who cheat on exams eventually bite off more than they can chew by rigging their Jeep to shoot their criminology professor, and get their comeuppance from a wily homicide lieutenant who pretends to be their clueless buddy. So really you just have to bide your time.
If cheating with some bluetooth headset actually worked, something is deeply broken with your academic system. All that it proves is that you give out participation awards to people who can memorize facts over actual problem solving. Memorization doesn't take a lot of intelligence.
If the implant played back an audio recording of his notes or something, then sure. But if it allowed the student to communicate with a medical expert during the exam, then even an open-book exam not requiring memorization could be exploited that way.
I think that cheating also causes a lot of programs to price cheating in, i.e. make the course harder because the cheating they don't detect gives them excessive expectations of students.
I saw this in my CS program (and heard about it from other programs.) None of the classes taught people to program, they just expected people to know how already, and as a pretense assigned everyone a programming instruction book (in the program's official language) that was never covered through lecture. The non-programmers would immediately start falling behind and cheating together to tread water. I definitely saw people graduate who had no ability to program; they were busy enough figuring out how to cheat.
an aside: CS programs are spoiled by hobbyist programmers like me who learned for fun when they were children, and they act as if everyone was a hobbyist. Plenty of people entering CS were just comfortable with math and liked playing video games. They foolishly expected to learn how to program at programming school.
> Students getting caught in mass cheating or deploying sly means to not get caught is not uncommon in India where competition is fierce as aspirants outnumber the number of vacancies for a job and seats in colleges for courses.
I'd like to read a long form piece on this subject. What's being done about it? India is a huge country, they need specialists no doubt!
Economically, this puzzles me. I'd think that if quantity supplied were so high the equilibrium wage would drop to the point where excess people would stop trying to become doctors, or at least to the point where surgically implanting things wouldn't be worth the hassle. Is there something in India propping up wages for those professions?
You'd also think the 40 hour work week would be a thing of the past with automation. People are just very good at building walked gardens and elite communities while forcing others to be "lower class"
I would bet the demand for people highly educated and trained in medicine far exceeds the number of people able or willing to become highly educated and trained in medicine.
What would make you think that? The supply of doctors is artificially restricted in every country that I know of; it's pretty much a universal mark of privilege. In the United States, residency spots basically don't grow and it's very good for over-allocating doctor's salaries. Same in Germany, where they love their well-paid doctors and big hospitals.
Based on how much discipline (or lack thereof) people have to learn. Or maybe simply lack the innate ability. Not even all the people motivated enough to pass all the hurdles to get into medical school graduate from medical school.
That is not the perfect proof, but I am also coloring it with my anecdotal data about which percentage of kids were enthusiastic to learn any advanced topics in school such as math, physics, chemistry, much less memorize a metric ton of advanced biology information.
It is true that supply is artificially restricted in the US, of course. In many ways, not least which is an unnecessarily expensive and lengthy certification process. But I cannot imagine anyone with the average discipline being able to come close to a full fledged MD.
I can understand why you might think this, but you're factually incorrect in this case.
In the United States, the supply of medical doctors is artificially limited by state laws that prohibit the practice of medicine without a license. Licensing requires successful completion of an accredited medical residency program, which on turn requires completing an MD degree from an accredited medical school. The American Medical Association and similar state-level groups effectively control the number of residency and med school slots by controlling the accreditation process.
Most of the rest of the world has similar systems in place, including India.
On the one hand, the AMA system has been described as a means of guaranteeing the quality of doctors, and preventing unsuspecting patients from being hurt, killed, or defrauded by poorly trained doctors.
On the other hand, it's also been described as cartel designed to allow doctors to charge inflated prices for medical care, by limiting the supply of doctors, and extracting unreasonable rent from the public.
Most economists would agree that both descriptions are basically correct.
In Chile it's not artificially restricted, or to anything nearly the same level. Doctors can still make a lot of money, they just have to be really good. Medicine then becomes 10-100 times cheaper, in that range.
Before specialization, yes. And private practice is a lot more, but getting the license is a pain. However, that is still very well paid in a country where you have such great benefits. The American sticker price salaries are not honest when you have to pay for so many things out of pocket (healthcare and education, just to start). I have lived and worked in the US and EU.
The ability to immigrate elsewhere with incentives skills from countries not incentivizing the growth of their own medical field for a number of reasons.
Because it's not a "free market". The supply of doctors is legally limited... It's illegal to practice medicine without being licensed. And the number of licenses granted is limited.
The license limits could be direct, like taxi medallions in New York City... Or the limits can be indirect, like how the AMA defines the number of medical residencies in the United States.
Even in supposedly "free market" countries like the United States, we often have significant restrictions on all sorts of markets. The reasons vary.
The hyper competitiveness seems to be a problem. I'm not sure what the answer is, but students need a way to be able fail honestly without shame so that when they do succeed, they do so without needing to cheat.
It's a cultural thing. It's literally a do or die situation for everyone to do well in school. Or you would have shamed your family. But, things are getting better, as cultural expectations are subsiding. I think in the next couple decades, India will be on par with the West in terms of social expectations as the average gross income and GDP of the country continues to go up. I think China is starting to see the same thing now.
The doctor shortage in the US is because current law effectively limits the number of residency slots to 100k, pushing out foreign graduates who may have earned a spot and causing medical schools to expand slower than they would like due to fear of not matching graduates.
It’s unfortunate because the exam cheater is such a prevalent stereotype, yet I have worked with many people from India who were deep thinkers with a love of their subject.
I wonder how many potential visionaries get filtered by association with these cheaters as well as more traditional racism.
My first thought wasn’t how did he do it, but how did he got caught.
Then it turned out that a squad came to interrogate and search which sounds ridiculous. And then it turned out that he admitted to it. And then another student was caught with a non-implant device.
Or if you've ever worked in tech, or interacted with any sales teams. My wife is looking to make a career change and I told her work in low level tech because it literally doesn't matter what you know. Nobody will know what you don't know.
It pays off for those people because eventually they'll run into a non-technical hirer, who'll take 2 months to realise that they've made a mistake. Rinse and repeat.
There are institutions that are absolutely filled with these kinds of people. It's pretty much a feature, not a bug, at those places. They perceive themselves as "hustlers" and that everyone else is doing it more than them.
I really want to call some of these places referenced on their resume and see if they're outright lying or these places have just departments of people who don't do anything and people filling them just to get referral bonuses or kickbacks from the people they're placing there.
I'm not sure what the dissonance is? It's much easier to cheat in that sort of interview process than it is to cheat in a more free-form discussion interview. Of course you can simply lie in the latter, but assuming the interviewer is worth their salt they'll be able to ask questions that will be hard to answer if you don't have the experience you say you have. Whereas for algorithms and coding trivia questions you can search for answers online, have someone watching your screen and sending answers, do this bluetooth embedded approach, etc.
> but assuming the interviewer is worth their salt they'll be able to ask questions that will be hard to answer if you don't have the experience you say you have
I'm not saying being a farmer and lying about being a software developer.
But a mediocre software developer with good social skills can definitely bullshit through a top level software interview, barring the strictest of interviewers.
> A university squad of the Devi Ahilya Bai University came for a surprise check and they found one student with a mobile phone and another with some Bluetooth device
It's been 15+ years since I've been in any sort of major exams. Are surprise checks like this common these days?
The article did not explain how the device was used for cheating. I'm ready to assume that was his intent, but in what matter would it have been employed? Was he receiving answers from a third party? That seems easy to spot: just look for the guy who is reading the questions out loud.
Probably they should just have people go through a metal detector before the test, to identify all these hidden devices.
>Probably they should just have people go through a metal detector before the test, to identify all these hidden devices.
How would a metal detector stop it? If you say the metal detector is picking up a piece of shrapnel from an accident while young, how can they really disprove that?
The same way metal detectors work in other places, like airports: if you set off the detector for a valid medical reason, you should be prepared to show the card your doctor gave you attesting to this fact.
Implanted bluetooth devices is an edge case; so much so that it made the news. The normal case is people hiding devices in their clothes.
Anyway, I'm not sure whether it's considered unethical to help a patient electively implant a bluetooth receiver in their bodies, but falsely signing a medical release card probably is.
Assuming the student implanted the device in their own ear, they did learn enough to be dangerous. They'll show up as a transhumanist influencer at best and a back alley surgeon at worst.
I'm curious because the last time I surveyed the literature of diy implantable devices there didn't seem to be anything on a power source strong enough for a bluetooth device to operate for hours at a time.
There are, lithium batteries. The problem is, they outgas and explode. People do not want to implant these batteries, even with a low failrate and detectors.
There were things, e.g. the NorthStar implant, which became EmbediVet. But for aforementioned safety issues, it wasn't even used for cows.
Passive tech is the only thing right now (RFID, NFC)
First, there's no reason to think the student implanted it themselves.
Second, I think most amateurs could probably cut someone open, put something in and stitch it up. Not causing further complications would be the hard part.
I guess with my fully BTE integrated hearing aids I'd be suspected of cheating. If they even knew I had them on.
If you're not familiar with modern behind the ear hearing aids, Bluetooth is pretty common on better ones. It's like ear buds in an extremely discrete for that also happen to help you hear normally.
That's so interesting. I (and I imagine many other people) wouldn't have the guts to confront you about removing your hearing aid, even if I knew that they had bluetooth capabilities.
A lot of people are missing the bigger point here.
This person was just one who got caught. The likelihood that they’re the first one to think or do this is very low.
There are probably more sophisticated ways of using tech to cheat and I would be very surprised if they haven’t been employed in high stakes exams like this before.
Yup, and their lack of moral compass combined with sufficient craftiness to hack the system could have major implications in the workforce. They'll be incompetent and unethical but hard to detect.
I don't think this is the case. Large bodies of people already operate as if they are completely amoral today (and realistically must be engaged with as if they are to get anywhere), so what major implications could a single actor with "lack of a moral compass" really have? That's completely ignoring the issue where I'm not sure what it is even supposed to be.
The community at DEF CON and other hacking cons have been playing with bio implants for some time, including low power RF. I came here to point out what you just said - that they got caught, which signals incompetence.
I do think the bio-implanted device space is going to explode at some point. Here's where I see us headed:
* VR next. If you don't have an Oculus Quest 2 or realize what a game changer it is in terms of price, power and wireless usability, you really need to get one, no matter what you think of Zuck and FB. It's the next thing. And it'll look clunky as hell 5 years from now. It's the suitcase-sized laptop of the early 90s.
* Once very portable VR becomes a thing, augmented reality wearable glasses. As in real-time, amazing visuals that are seamlessly stitched into your reality, and so advantageous you won't want to live without them.
* Then bio-implanted augmented reality with wireless charging through the skin.
That's how I see the next 30 to 50 years unfolding in terms of devices. The first step is VR as the next big platform play. Incidentally I see three spaces there:
1. VR synthetic reality. [Already here and super fun and useful]
2. 360 film [Already here but cameras getting WAY better very fast]
3. Immersive vision-based augmented reality - visuals overlaid on regular vision. [Not quite here - but we do have PoC's and will be in the next couple years]
Gibson did it in Neuromancer in 1984 and others before that. Even if the bio interface problem isn't solved, lightweight wearables that encompass all your vision and are super performant with a massive dev ecosystem and incredibly useful will be a reality in a couple decades.
I suspect VR porn will be a huge driver of this technology. The porn industry both has the money and the desire to push the envelope into new offerings.
I wouldn't be surprised if pornhub invests in VR in some way in the next 5-10 years.
Yeah, while most people will avoid this conversation - they were huge innovators in early eCommerce, and it's an obvious use case.
But there are also other super exciting applications like dating e.g. a dating app facilitates the first date in VR and is able to provide safety controls making first-dates far more approachable and happen earlier on leading to more successful relationships.
There's already a "pornhub" for VR called sexlikereal. You can watch videos and even connect toys that are synchronised with the video. The platform seems to be getting pretty big and even produces some of their own videos.
There was a dystopian poem in the 1980's that ended with someone unable to go to sleep at night because there was a constant blinking red light when he closed his eyes from the AT&T answering machine implant in his eye.
Earpieces were alleged during the last presidential debates[1] (fact checkers said this was false), and other places[2]. How would one detect an implant?
My personal preference would be to put each candidate on multiple 3 to 4 hour long-form podcast interviews so we can get some idea of what they are like.
That being the case, one has to imagine that 30 seconds taken from the final hour of a four-hour podcast (or, potentially, anywhere in the middle) have the potential to be quite different in insight than 30 seconds take from the first hour.
The longest period we have seen a presidential candidate speak extemporaneously for is ~90 minutes (Biden town hall) which is an exceedingly rare occasion that came with pre-arranged questions and was mostly prepared talking points anyway.
One of the aims of a longform podcast would be to extend the interviewee out beyond their prepared talking points to see what happens.
One of the big problems is that certain sections of the press will just be hoping for you to fail, and will go over every word with a fine comb to look for something to moan and bitch about in the most bad-faith negative interpretation possible. Furthermore you need to be a renowned expert on any issue, cannot be seen to be thinking about something for more than a nanosecond, cannot hesitate in their answers, etc.
We are asking for too much of our politicians, so they will find ways to cope out of necessity, by limiting the exposure. We all like to think that we'd do better, but after being shafted by twats who call themselves journalists a few times we'd all be doing the same.
The problem you describe is why presidents will only sit down for interviews with anchors/journalists/networks who they have some guarantee will treat them favorably.
It's ironic that to get more than this from politicians, it seems we need to be MORE forgiving of them. That is a hard pill to swallow, as a citizen.
> The problem you describe is why presidents will only sit down for interviews with anchors/journalists/networks who they have some guarantee will treat them favorably
That's not true. Only the last president outright refused to engage in unfriendly press. Obama may have called on Fox reporters less often and only got interviewed once or twice on the network, but he still engaged them.
Or, accept that listening to and trusting a capable team of advisers is perhaps a better qualification for the role than thinking on your feet, and definitely better than being able to recall which of your rehearsed sound bites to use in response to which prompts.
Were they alleged by anyone with a shred of credibility? Natural News is somewhere below the late, lamented Weekly World News in terms of being a news source you should take seriously.
Natural News is an extremely accurate source. Just take anything written on the website, take the exact opposite position, and you will be correct more often than night.
A simple solution would be to have liquid crystals on the glasses, like electronic auto-darkening sunglasses or welding helmets. Of course, this could only change the light level of the entire field of view at once (since it's way too close to your eye to focus), but that's still useful for many things.
Try passthrough on Oculus Quest 2 to get an idea of how easy this is to solve. It just uses the motion sensor cameras and it's pixelated and black and white, but you get some overlays and you can get a very good idea of how quickly this will be solved in full 8k hidef with overlays that look like they belong.
Standing in your home office, sweating, with foggy vr glasses, trying not to fall down or run into walls while looking at low-poly NPCs coming at you, trying to use bizarre, disembodied "hands" to keep them away. What's not to love?
I have played VR. Several headsets in different setups. It's fun if you are riding a VR roller coaster or sitting in a boat as a tourist, but the only games I played that were halfway decent were Beat Saber and Alyx. Those games have addressed the controls issue better than the other games I've tried, but the sweating, fogged goggles, and the aching feet definitely still showed up in those games.
If you have not tried something with a cockpit (like Elite: Dangerous), it's worth a shot. I found it very accessible and actually quite fun, even though I hate the game outside of VR.
>> VR synthetic reality. [Already here and super fun and useful]
>Is it though?
Yes. The Quest 2 is incredible. No PC required, just a headset and 2 hand controllers. Games give you a completely immersed experience in a synthetic world where you can look around, explore, play, talk to other players in real time.
It is here and I would call it super fun, but not useful (maybe that's what you were questioning). I think it may be a fad like the Nintendo Wii, or it might hang around to varying degrees. Maybe I lack imagination but I don't see people wearing AR glasses in public or to work even if they do become ultra-compact and awesome.
Some people let their excitement lead them to believe "cool fun new thing" is somehow the magical future. I played Dactyl Nightmare (VR) back in the 1990's and have been waiting for awesome home-VR since then and quest is every bit of what I had imagined maybe it could be. But at the end of the day, rec-room paintball is just Dactly or Quake Arena. A 25yr old guy at work had to show me Mario Tennis on his Switch - it's just pong with special moves and fancy graphics. What's new is old, and I don't see any revolution with VR outside of niche applications like training and some visualization. Now get off my lawn while I go play some EchoVR.
I haven't tried the Quest 2 yet, so I don't know how good it is, but to me, it's not "completely immersed" until you can interface directly with my brain to feed it false visual, auditory, smell, touch, etc. signals, as well as interpret signals I make to move around, which causes me to interact with the virtual world instead of the real world.
Anything else to me just feels kinda clunky. Certainly the stuff available now is way better than stuff from 20, 10, or even 5 years ago, but it's a far cry from complete immersion.
It sure is clunky yes. It's certainly not totally immersed.
But it's so much more immersive than what we had before that it's still really amazing. If you had skipped computers in the 80s and 90s because they were nowhere like perfect yet, you still works have missed out on an amazing time. The same is happening now.
> VR next. If you don't have an Oculus Quest 2 or realize what a game changer it is in terms of price, power and wireless usability, you really need to get one, no matter what you think of Zuck and FB. It's the next thing. And it'll look clunky as hell 5 years from now. It's the suitcase-sized laptop of the early 90s.
I just got a Quest 2, and totally agree. It's incredible for what it can do for the price. And that it's untethered. Anyone who's into tech or interested in the future of tech should get themselves a Quest 2. The immersion level of games like Superhot VR was totally mind-blowing to me.
I also think it's the future of home workouts. If Peloton's not working on a VR system then they'll be done in five years.
There's a line I can't cross; I like being physical. The Internet and its medusa of services already takes me away from meaningful choices, why should I deepen that connection that feels so overwhelmingly oppressive already?
I'm looking for more workout apps, so I will check that out. I've been pretty impressed by Les Mills Bodycombat, though I find the banter/encouragement of the presenters/coaches barely tolerable (I believe I can turn them off in the latest update; I'd like a switch for "style/form tips only")
It will come. FB is investing the big bucks but once they start seeing real success (and they are) others will see the value and start competing for real.
I suspect that after augmented reality wearable glasses we'll transition to AR contact lenses first, and maybe even stay there, before we go to full-on implants.
Implants may be coming sooner or later but the rest of society doesn't stand still, and as we extrapolate trends into the future, one thing seems very clear:
You will not own the implants in your body.
They will be owned by a separate third party. You may still pay for them, and you may get some value out of the proposition, but they will not be under your control.
That's perhaps the most important aspect of our future.
So long as we live in a free market economy I would hope consumers wouldn't be as stupid as to go that route. Sure, with music, movies, and even electronic peripherals many people go the rent vs buy route. I imagine however that many more would have issues with ownership and bodily autonomy if the items were actual physical implants.
Never understand why people imagine this progression. I love gaming, but wouldn't really see the need to implant a PS4 into my body even if it were small enough. And outside gaming and entertainment in general, VR just doesn't have any compelling use cases. Even in gaming, VR controls are still horrible, and games are actually more limited in the range of actions your character can take - since there just aren't enough buttons on any controller to simultaneously move and interact fully enough.
Not to mention that a good 10% or more of people get violently motion sick from using VR.
About 5 years ago, I had 3 students who worked as a team to cheat.
* The ringleader placed his iPhone under his leg.
* He would lean back in his chair and hold the exam sheets up in the air. It looked a little unusual, but it (initially) seemed innocuous.
* What he was really doing was pointing the sheets downward toward the camera peeking out from under his leg.
* He was broadcasting the exam to God-knows-where.
* He and the other two students then received answers via tiny earpieces.
* In addition, the two other students would call me over to "ask clarification questions." In reality, they were trying to distract me while the ringleader broadcast the exam.
* I eventually realized they were cheating (after exam 1), but I couldn't figure out how, until another student (exam 2) approached me with a note that read, "The guy to my right has his phone under his leg. Every time you circle the room, he pushes it completely under his leg so you can't see it."
* At that point, however, each student was taking a slightly different exam (unbeknownst to them).
The ringleader emailed me at the end of the semester and said something to the effect of: "I know I don't deserve to pass, but if you fail me, I will have to stay an extra semester."
A teacher failing their students involves a lot less paperwork and formal proceedings than going through the expulsion process. Given how busy they tend to be, signing up for all of that extra work isn't an inviting proposition.
Exactly, that's one of the main issues I encountered in "academia" : you're expected to play along and ignore cheating because the goal is to have more students for as long as possible, not less.
First, I was teaching at a local community college. The students were from a nearby university. They were trying to avoid the equivalent classes at their own school and I assume they felt that I might be an "easy mark." I'm not sure what my options were with respect to reporting them to their own university.
Second, I was an adjunct at the community college. I informed the Dean of what was going on, but I got zero support. I could tell that the Dean felt that all I was doing was bringing him a problem that had the potential to mushroom into a political nightmare (no upside, only downside for him). The unspoken message that I got was, "Just deal with this on your own and don't turn it into a federal case." I don't know if the lack of support was due to me being an adjunct or whether it was due to "We need to keep our enrollment numbers up. Don't get a reputation for being a ball-buster."
Tuition-paying and academic integrity are inherently at odds with one another. If every student has earned their place via scholarship, you can kick them out freely to reallocate the scholarship pool toward students who haven't gotten caught cheating. For students paying their own way, the thought they'd get expelled for cheating may dis-incentivize them from applying even if they have no concrete plans to cheat.
I proctored an exam once in an auditorium. You could kind of see over the person in front of you's shoulder even though they sat every other seat or whatever. I'm pretty sure there was a group of friends sitting in a six deep echelon formation as some kind of cheating daisy chain but I could never prove it.
I took an exam once. Guy next to me seemed to be looking at my paper but I wasn't sure, so I stayed quiet. Later in the exam, I got stuck on a problem or made a mistake, and he tapped me on the shoulder and told me the answer. Remembering that just now made me smile. This wasn't a high stakes medical school type of thing though, just a normal classroom quiz.
What fascinates me is that everyone always separate into just two camps:
1. Cool! Tell me more! I love these puzzle/strategy games. Both how to cheat and not get caught and how to catch the cheaters.
2. Wow, these cheaters are such a bad people. Isn't it unfair to those who don't cheat...?
For once, I would love for someone to step back and ask:
What the actual fuck is going on here?
Some people are apparently spending up to 11 years (on top of high school) trying to get a certificate, that would help them maintain certain socioeconomic status. Other people are actively preventing them in getting the certificate in other ways than the official ones.
This costs an incredible amount of money. The whole overhead is insane. Whole lot of people routinely spend several YEARS without actually receiving the certificate. College education is crippled, because it needs to prevent fraud first, teach people useful things second.
Can't we do the sensible thing and lift the minimum income high enough so that only those who want to study will go to college and do so without fear of missing out?
> Can't we do the sensible thing and lift the minimum income high enough so that only those who want to study will go to college and do so without fear of missing out?
In my particular case, this was not an issue.
I don't want to go into detail, but the students were from a foreign country (this is part of why it was going to be a political nightmare for the Dean).
Two of the three could barely speak English (excepting the ringleader). I mention this ONLY because it was a big tipoff when reading their first exams: they all used idiomatic English phrases that were far beyond what they were capable of in casual conversation. They also used nearly identical phrasing when explaining their answers (another big tipoff).
If anything, I blame their university for admitting students who were incapable of succeeding without cheating. The whole escapade left me feeling dirty. The university admits foreign students (because enrollment/$$$). And they have to know many of the TOEFL scores are either unreliable or fraudulent.
This is what we did in the Netherlands. Anyone could afford to study if they wanted to, and pay equalisation kept the gaps low. Social housing provided good and cheap places to live.
Until neoliberalism hit though. Then everything was about the market and the ideals of low pay gaps were budget cut into oblivion. Now there's huge inequality and students have to take out huge loans like in the US :(
> Wow, these cheaters are such a bad people. Isn't it unfair to those who don't cheat...?
This is not the sentiment I'm getting here. More like "wow, I hope I don't get a cheater for a doctor, and if they go into research they are likely to fake results in studies. This is a unfair to society, their future employers and subjects"
It's not about fairness in the socioeconomic ladder as much as the damage and cost incurred by having an incompetent fraud in a high-impact professional role.
While I agree with your sentiment, these people aren't aiming for "livable wage" but for (from their perspective) "the top".
> Can't we do the sensible thing and lift the minimum income high enough so that only those who want to study will go to college and do so without fear of missing out?
Australia has a kind of free university for all. Australian citizens get an interest free loan of about $5k/year for tuition. You just pay it back by paying a little more tax on your income over $47k/year until it's gone. If you don't earn over $47k/year, you never pay it back, which is fine and expected. It's also easy to get welfare for housing and food as a student, so university is mostly "free". (For various values of free)
Even with all of that, plenty of people still cheat on university exams. I was shocked to learn about it, but there are always people who take that route.
Medicine is a large topic. It requires many years of memorization, experience, etc., and then it requires continuing education and constant practice. This makes the costs of medicine very high.
There is an opportunity for technology to help lower costs. The opportunity was identified decades ago, when the first work was done on expert systems for medicine.
The problem is that this means that if we succeed at applying technology to lowering the cost of medicine, it will look a lot like patients self-diagnosing. In rich countries we really don't like that. In poor countries self-diagnostics is common.
We can lower the cost of care by having lower credentialed providers such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners handle the simple cases. Patients in rich countries have already been self diagnosing for years.
You really don’t need high tech to cheat in exams. I was studying a few years ago (I was a mature student) and there were a few kids who took 3-4 toilet visits in a 2 hour exam to review notes on their phones after seeing the questions. The school can’t search you before the exam (i.e they can’t stop you carrying a phone) and they can’t watch you in a toilet cubicle. All these kids did well in their degree despite being idiots in classes and lectures.
> You really don’t need high tech to cheat in exams.
Although now ubiquitous, excluding two cups and a string, phones have always been high tech, as opposed to low tech, like feigning a need to use the restroom to develop their cheating space, as obvious and overused as it is. I wonder who first pioneered the fake bathroom visit for cheating, as opposed to it being employed as an escape from the extreme pressures of the classroom, i.e. smoking.
I don't know that this is an option everywhere. It is categorically not allowed to use the toilet during an exam here, so this is a thing that you cannot do.
This was my first thought, but I'm skeptical this ends up being as bad a problem as you imply. You don't just pass an exam and then immediately get sent to an operating theater and given a scalpel. You do a medical internship and residency, and are supervised by experienced doctors. (Yes, I know, this is the US system, but I'd hope the systems in other countries would be similar, or at least provide similar protections.) I would expect a cheater like this might not perform well enough to ever make it into an operating room. And even if they did, it would only be in an assistant role, where they would likely show their incompetence pretty quickly.
Sure, the system overall isn't perfect, but detecting incompetence on the job (before being allowed to do any damage) is IMO the most likely scenario for cheating medical students who don't get caught at school.
Even if we consider other disciplines... say, civil engineering. You don't get your degree and then immediately get the job of Principal Engineer on a bridge-building project. You're supervised by engineers with more experience, and your work is checked and signed off on if it's correct. If your work consistently fails those checks, you'll get fired.
>I would expect a cheater like this might not perform well enough to ever make it into an operating room.
Implying that material they are testing is relevant in a practical setting ? I actually wonder if they ever do something like random tests for people that are 5+ years into their career - just unannounced testing to check retention and relevance.
If it's anything like CS I wouldn't be surprised if they would fail >90% people. People here complain about having to invert binary trees in an interview...
Dr Anand Rai, the whistleblower in the Vyapam scam [of 2008-2013], said: “It is very easy to get Bluetooth fitted in the ears. It is attached to the ear temporarily and can be removed. Such a technique was used by a Vyapam scam accused too to clear his medical exam eight years ago.”
An even bigger point is being missed... the underlying cause, the societal pressure to get a degree in india is so great that people will do almost anything.
Yea but how about the lower stakes examinations in more developed country with less selectivity pressure like the US? The incentive to cheat if you're a poor performer is still high.
I shudder to think how many future doctors with a poor moral compass are getting through the system. Not only is their incompetence dangerous, their lack of ethics and craftiness could mean that they'll be harder to detect.
Whether the story is true or not, I think there's an even bigger point. I believe augmentation is coming. There will be a time in the not too distant future when disabling communication for almost anything else will be near unthinkable. I can imagine kids growing up with instant access to info and communication via neural link to feel threatened/stressed/horrified to be disconnected, similar to tearing a child away from its parent.
I'm not making a judgement whether that's good or bad. I'm sure plenty will chime in with their opinion. I'm only bringing up the world of always on computing is probably coming and schools will need to find some other way to test students that don't require handicapping them by removing what they perceive as part of their brain.
If you get used to it at a young age, it probably won't be the traumatic thing you describe. E.g. have Faraday cage test booths in schools starting as early as Grade 1.
Won't help much with recordings, of course, but that's more like a cheat sheet that's always on you; if you can succeed with it in a well-designed test environment, you can probably succeed with it in real life. At some point, if you're augmented, then memory is memory and there's no point in distinguishing between hardware and wetware.
479 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 408 ms ] threadedit: paywall bypass https://archive.ph/CCXpf
Funny story, I dealt with a pylonidal cyst on my tailbone by myself. I did not expect that much blood tbh (along with very stinky puss... sorry for the detail), but I managed to drain and clean it.
Apparently you need surgery for those... it really wasn't that hard, cutting in was the hardest part, but at that point the pain from it was worse.
I do hate it when cats come out of infected spots.
just don't take their javascript
This happened in India. The student was caught with a mobile phone, which in turn led to further questioning.
[edit] omg [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundBite_Hearing_System
https://www.amazon.com/bone-conduction-glasses/s?k=bone+cond...
> SoundBite was developed and marketed by Sonitus Medical, Inc. The company filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, January 15, 2015,[1] as a result of the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' decision not to cover the device.[2]
:(
Unbelievable. They should have been banned forever.
> An internal investigation has begun in the matter by the university examination committee and devices have been sent for examination.
> After the conclusion of the investigation it would be determined whether the case merits a police case for using unfair means in an exam
It can also serve as additional proof if on the new answer sheet given after confiscating the devices, the exam taker performs significantly worse than on the original answer sheet.
Or you just give them another sheet and worry about punishments later.
Criminal charges for cheating on an exam? Seems a bit absurd to me. I'm all for preventing fraud (especially when were talking about peoples lives), but I also like to think I'm a reasonable human being and criminal action seems unfounded here. It sounds to me like expectations and filters for exams are too unrealistic now combined with lack of alternative realizable opportunities, otherwise you wouldn't see this level of cheating nonsense.
Every day I see more and more ridiculous levels of competitive forces pushed on the bulk of society just to survive and it makes me wonder where the tipping point for social competitive forces for survival begin to exceed natural forces for survival and faith in societies destabilize to a point people just stop participating or at the very least many just "give up." You already see this in Japan, Korea, China (tang ping, "lying flat") and it seems to be an increasing trend in the US. I'm not intimately familiar with India but from what I have seen, it's not roses there either.
We have some fundamentally skewed power and control mechansim increasingly governing people in 'democratic societies' to which citizens seem to have little real democratic say in anymore.
That being said, most such punishment records should generally be expunged once rehabilitation has been completed. We're all human and make mistakes, and only a pattern of misconduct should be permanently on record.
Depends on how you think about it. They're defrauding the institution out of a credential. It really depends on how the relevant laws are worded.
Would you expect criminal charges if you got caught counterfeiting a lottery ticket?
I find everything you said interesting, of course, but I think the legal thing is slightly more complicated.
Just like when you are allowed a cheatsheet for the exam
Stackoverflow is about to get much more interesting.
A favorite joke:
"One shouldn't do [that medical procedure], as GOD made you perfect and you shouldn't mess with God's! plan!!!"
> Thats an interesting comment, may I ask - was God's plan to manufacture those glasses such that you can see clearly and read such from that book, made by man?
A fellow was stuck on his rooftop in a flood. He was praying to God for help.
Soon a man in a rowboat came by and the fellow shouted to the man on the roof, “Jump in, I can save you.”
The stranded fellow shouted back, “No, it’s OK, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me.”
So the rowboat went on.
Then a motorboat came by. “The fellow in the motorboat shouted, “Jump in, I can save you.”
To this the stranded man said, “No thanks, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith.”
So the motorboat went on.
Then a helicopter came by and the pilot shouted down, “Grab this rope and I will lift you to safety.”
To this the stranded man again replied, “No thanks, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith.”
So the helicopter reluctantly flew away.
Soon the water rose above the rooftop and the man drowned. He went to Heaven. He finally got his chance to discuss this whole situation with God, at which point he exclaimed, “I had faith in you but you didn’t save me, you let me drown. I don’t understand why!”
To this God replied, “I sent you a rowboat and a motorboat and a helicopter, what more did you expect?”
I know a few doctors who have told me they've used this one on people who refuse care for religious reasons. Unfortunately they said it rarely works.
The first episode of Stargate I ever watched sorta touched on this... It's the season 7, episode 5 called "Revisions" with Christopher Heyerdahl. Definitely recommend. It got me hooked on the franchise forever
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisions_(Stargate_SG-1)
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/how-to-watch-stargate-i...
As someone who works as dev improving data and efficiency in a business.....i hate people who don't just google things. I implemented something a year ago, maybe its time to refresh my knowledge and see if anything has changed? Some doctors are infuriating, using knowledge they gained 10 years ago. Medicine also changes fairly quickly and quick search could really be a great tool.
Imagine this, I have seen many physicians (40+) at top hospitals about "mysterious" symptoms due to a reaction to a medication. 3 agreed its possible. The symptoms are listed on the medication label, plus I have been tested for everything else under the sun. I have sent research to my primary physician who has said, I am the first patient to change his mind about a drug. A quick search just listing my vague symptoms would bring up a possible reaction, or just looking at the damn label.
Updated versions of their books and medical journals, or even a stackoverflow-like platform where they could discuss and read answers would be magnitudes better.
Maybe humans memorizing tons of information was the best approach for medicine a century ago, but it's not the case anymore
Uh, what is an education other than absorption and integration of information? If they haven't learned (i.e. memorized) a large quantity of information as part of their extensive education to guide them, they have zero chance of "being able to decide which information can be considered good" by definition.
Personally, I would like to see a doctor searching a site made for doctors. Seeing one just do an actual generic online search would not give me much confidence.
As engineers we do it all the time (sometimes subconsciously) when searching for technical documentation. Having that skill in other fields would be a godsend, but the next best thing would be to have someone else do it on our behalf.
It's been a few years since so I don't remember if it was a windows app or a website but it did have a very 90s looking interface.
Wikipedia seems like a poor choice, though. Maybe carpel tunnel is basic enough for Wikipedia to be fine. I've been shown stuff like Mayo Clinic articles.
It's basically medical Google.
The antibiotics she gave me did the trick. She was young, though.
I deal with daily chronic pain which has rendered me essentially unable to work. My full-time job has been “patient” for almost three years.
What I’ve learned is that you have to do their work for them if you want to make progress.
Sometimes that means showing up with highlighted printouts of studies that they would never get around to reading if you didn’t deliver them — and follow up on them — personally.
Other times that means that means playing dumb and “presenting” (not faking, just highlighting) the right preliminary symptoms to get a key test ordered.
I’m lucky in that I have education. I can read a study. I understand probability and statistics. I can learn terminology and use it (somewhat) correctly in a sentence. I often wonder how people without a STEM background get any care at all. Perhaps they don’t?
It’s a horrible, broken system that amounts to little more than insurance-mandated gatekeeping.
Compare that with Dentistry. I had a problem and walked in with an hour's notice, had a x-ray from a handheld scanner emailed to me with the problem highlighted within 5 minutes like something out of Star Trek.
Anyway, then you have companies like Theranos who come along and prove why it’s a good idea to be risk adverse. Snake oil has been sold for a long time, and it really isn’t until “recently” that it has been illegal to sell it (since a bit after 1906, in the US).
In Australia all imaging is stored on the cloud somewhere. For a reason unknown to me, you still get the huge envelope. But inside is just a piece of paper with some public id and a QRcode. You don’t really need these. The doctor who ordered the imaging will automatically get forwarded the results. If you are refereed to a specialist, they will get it to.
In this community we sometimes talk about how some technical interviews are deeply unrealistic because they remove the candidate from, e.g. their IDE with tab autocompletion, or googling, which you might normally depend on. Your skills are best measured when you have access to the tools and environment which you'd actually use while working. And yet ... sometimes you can pair program with someone and it's clear that they don't really understand what they're accepting from the autocomplete, and this is legitimate cause for concern.
I think I want doctors to definitely know a bunch of stuff unaided, even if they would normally always have access to supplementary references. If nothing else, they should have the habits of mind to be able to critically evaluate their references, and notice when they're wrong or suspect.
>I need you to help me pass an oral exam
>>Whats the subject?
>>>Biology
>>>>uh... whats your gag relfex like?*
What's up with all the legacy accounts acting up lately?
- How did the "necklace" connect to a phone? (Since you were talking over the phone)
- Was it bidirectional communication? How did friend communicate with you?
Id rather fail an exam than put a tiny magnet into my ear in the hopes to get it back out...
Speaking of cheating though, I heard they have directional speakers that have a spread of only like a foot. With something like that it seems like it’d be easy to cheat.
Yeah, but they still spread enough to be audible, and the reflections are audible as well. In a testing environment it would be hard to completely hide.
I'm surprised so many people speak of these as something they haven't experienced. I recall at least two grocery stores I've been in using these to beam ads at people while they were in line, and that was years ago, and I'm not in SV either, it's not like people around here use cutting edge tech for the heck of it very often. Mercifully, they didn't last long. While I didn't enjoy the ads, I did enjoy the opportunity to hear exactly how they work and get a sense of their strengths and weaknesses.
(It is absolutely true that they are garbage at bass frequencies, and the lower midrange as well. The ads were all voiced by women, because I'm not sure men would even have been comprehensible. I mean that literally. Their lowest frequency response is that high. As clever as they are it's not a surprise we don't hear them more often. They are super specialist gear not suitable for most tasks.)
I know people in faculty, this is what is reported. A google search would suggest the same. It's far more culturally accepted to cheat in University in certain parts of the world, e.g. India, Saudi Arabia.
In fact let me do it for you, here's one article on it - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/29/india-exam-c...
Stop projecting and grow up.
Sure. Here's a good example. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30676394
I saw this in my CS program (and heard about it from other programs.) None of the classes taught people to program, they just expected people to know how already, and as a pretense assigned everyone a programming instruction book (in the program's official language) that was never covered through lecture. The non-programmers would immediately start falling behind and cheating together to tread water. I definitely saw people graduate who had no ability to program; they were busy enough figuring out how to cheat.
an aside: CS programs are spoiled by hobbyist programmers like me who learned for fun when they were children, and they act as if everyone was a hobbyist. Plenty of people entering CS were just comfortable with math and liked playing video games. They foolishly expected to learn how to program at programming school.
I'd like to read a long form piece on this subject. What's being done about it? India is a huge country, they need specialists no doubt!
India has both low number of doctors per capita, and low supply for educating doctors.
That is not the perfect proof, but I am also coloring it with my anecdotal data about which percentage of kids were enthusiastic to learn any advanced topics in school such as math, physics, chemistry, much less memorize a metric ton of advanced biology information.
It is true that supply is artificially restricted in the US, of course. In many ways, not least which is an unnecessarily expensive and lengthy certification process. But I cannot imagine anyone with the average discipline being able to come close to a full fledged MD.
In the United States, the supply of medical doctors is artificially limited by state laws that prohibit the practice of medicine without a license. Licensing requires successful completion of an accredited medical residency program, which on turn requires completing an MD degree from an accredited medical school. The American Medical Association and similar state-level groups effectively control the number of residency and med school slots by controlling the accreditation process.
Most of the rest of the world has similar systems in place, including India.
On the one hand, the AMA system has been described as a means of guaranteeing the quality of doctors, and preventing unsuspecting patients from being hurt, killed, or defrauded by poorly trained doctors.
On the other hand, it's also been described as cartel designed to allow doctors to charge inflated prices for medical care, by limiting the supply of doctors, and extracting unreasonable rent from the public.
Most economists would agree that both descriptions are basically correct.
German doctors I believe make under 100 grand.
The license limits could be direct, like taxi medallions in New York City... Or the limits can be indirect, like how the AMA defines the number of medical residencies in the United States.
Even in supposedly "free market" countries like the United States, we often have significant restrictions on all sorts of markets. The reasons vary.
I wonder how many potential visionaries get filtered by association with these cheaters as well as more traditional racism.
Then it turned out that a squad came to interrogate and search which sounds ridiculous. And then it turned out that he admitted to it. And then another student was caught with a non-implant device.
Sounds ridiculous
1. people generally being against cheaters (and people also generally acknowledge that there are statistically significant amounts of cheaters)
2. people also generally (and probably with a decent overlap with the 1st group) being against hazing-style complex and difficult interview processes
I'm not saying being a farmer and lying about being a software developer.
But a mediocre software developer with good social skills can definitely bullshit through a top level software interview, barring the strictest of interviewers.
It's been 15+ years since I've been in any sort of major exams. Are surprise checks like this common these days?
Probably they should just have people go through a metal detector before the test, to identify all these hidden devices.
How would a metal detector stop it? If you say the metal detector is picking up a piece of shrapnel from an accident while young, how can they really disprove that?
X-Rays? MRI? Or requesting medical documents about it? (can all be done afterwards)
Anyway, I'm not sure whether it's considered unethical to help a patient electively implant a bluetooth receiver in their bodies, but falsely signing a medical release card probably is.
There were things, e.g. the NorthStar implant, which became EmbediVet. But for aforementioned safety issues, it wasn't even used for cows.
Passive tech is the only thing right now (RFID, NFC)
Though, I suppose if this was a test of their skill in cosmetic surgery, then detection certainly would count as a failure.
Second, I think most amateurs could probably cut someone open, put something in and stitch it up. Not causing further complications would be the hard part.
If you're not familiar with modern behind the ear hearing aids, Bluetooth is pretty common on better ones. It's like ear buds in an extremely discrete for that also happen to help you hear normally.
Medical student: "one time I hacked my ear..."
This person was just one who got caught. The likelihood that they’re the first one to think or do this is very low.
There are probably more sophisticated ways of using tech to cheat and I would be very surprised if they haven’t been employed in high stakes exams like this before.
I think the manner is what makes this story interesting.
In fairness, this one person proved they can do implants :')
> could have major implications in the workforce
I don't think this is the case. Large bodies of people already operate as if they are completely amoral today (and realistically must be engaged with as if they are to get anywhere), so what major implications could a single actor with "lack of a moral compass" really have? That's completely ignoring the issue where I'm not sure what it is even supposed to be.
I do think the bio-implanted device space is going to explode at some point. Here's where I see us headed:
* VR next. If you don't have an Oculus Quest 2 or realize what a game changer it is in terms of price, power and wireless usability, you really need to get one, no matter what you think of Zuck and FB. It's the next thing. And it'll look clunky as hell 5 years from now. It's the suitcase-sized laptop of the early 90s.
* Once very portable VR becomes a thing, augmented reality wearable glasses. As in real-time, amazing visuals that are seamlessly stitched into your reality, and so advantageous you won't want to live without them.
* Then bio-implanted augmented reality with wireless charging through the skin.
That's how I see the next 30 to 50 years unfolding in terms of devices. The first step is VR as the next big platform play. Incidentally I see three spaces there:
1. VR synthetic reality. [Already here and super fun and useful]
2. 360 film [Already here but cameras getting WAY better very fast]
3. Immersive vision-based augmented reality - visuals overlaid on regular vision. [Not quite here - but we do have PoC's and will be in the next couple years]
https://youtu.be/uASUHbFEhWY
I wouldn't be surprised if pornhub invests in VR in some way in the next 5-10 years.
But there are also other super exciting applications like dating e.g. a dating app facilitates the first date in VR and is able to provide safety controls making first-dates far more approachable and happen earlier on leading to more successful relationships.
PS explaining for a friend XD
[1]https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-10-05-biden-wore-wire-with-...
[2]https://twitter.com/3ree6ixty/status/1352444645125414913?ref...
The longest period we have seen a presidential candidate speak extemporaneously for is ~90 minutes (Biden town hall) which is an exceedingly rare occasion that came with pre-arranged questions and was mostly prepared talking points anyway.
One of the aims of a longform podcast would be to extend the interviewee out beyond their prepared talking points to see what happens.
We are asking for too much of our politicians, so they will find ways to cope out of necessity, by limiting the exposure. We all like to think that we'd do better, but after being shafted by twats who call themselves journalists a few times we'd all be doing the same.
It's ironic that to get more than this from politicians, it seems we need to be MORE forgiving of them. That is a hard pill to swallow, as a citizen.
That's not true. Only the last president outright refused to engage in unfriendly press. Obama may have called on Fox reporters less often and only got interviewed once or twice on the network, but he still engaged them.
2) Those allegations have surfaced around every debate since 2004 (or at least one debate every cycle)
3) Who cares if they were fed lines? Speechwriting isn't their job, nor is memorizing numbers.
Is it though?
Yes. The Quest 2 is incredible. No PC required, just a headset and 2 hand controllers. Games give you a completely immersed experience in a synthetic world where you can look around, explore, play, talk to other players in real time.
It is here and I would call it super fun, but not useful (maybe that's what you were questioning). I think it may be a fad like the Nintendo Wii, or it might hang around to varying degrees. Maybe I lack imagination but I don't see people wearing AR glasses in public or to work even if they do become ultra-compact and awesome.
Some people let their excitement lead them to believe "cool fun new thing" is somehow the magical future. I played Dactyl Nightmare (VR) back in the 1990's and have been waiting for awesome home-VR since then and quest is every bit of what I had imagined maybe it could be. But at the end of the day, rec-room paintball is just Dactly or Quake Arena. A 25yr old guy at work had to show me Mario Tennis on his Switch - it's just pong with special moves and fancy graphics. What's new is old, and I don't see any revolution with VR outside of niche applications like training and some visualization. Now get off my lawn while I go play some EchoVR.
I haven't tried the Quest 2 yet, so I don't know how good it is, but to me, it's not "completely immersed" until you can interface directly with my brain to feed it false visual, auditory, smell, touch, etc. signals, as well as interpret signals I make to move around, which causes me to interact with the virtual world instead of the real world.
Anything else to me just feels kinda clunky. Certainly the stuff available now is way better than stuff from 20, 10, or even 5 years ago, but it's a far cry from complete immersion.
But it's so much more immersive than what we had before that it's still really amazing. If you had skipped computers in the 80s and 90s because they were nowhere like perfect yet, you still works have missed out on an amazing time. The same is happening now.
I just got a Quest 2, and totally agree. It's incredible for what it can do for the price. And that it's untethered. Anyone who's into tech or interested in the future of tech should get themselves a Quest 2. The immersion level of games like Superhot VR was totally mind-blowing to me.
I also think it's the future of home workouts. If Peloton's not working on a VR system then they'll be done in five years.
FWIW, I'm also wary of embracing full-time VR. I'd certainly like augmented reality, but immersive VR feels like too much yet.
And yeah totally agree - I think one of the biggest changes here is the price. $300 is insane for what you're getting out of the box.
You will not own the implants in your body.
They will be owned by a separate third party. You may still pay for them, and you may get some value out of the proposition, but they will not be under your control.
That's perhaps the most important aspect of our future.
Not to mention that a good 10% or more of people get violently motion sick from using VR.
* The ringleader placed his iPhone under his leg.
* He would lean back in his chair and hold the exam sheets up in the air. It looked a little unusual, but it (initially) seemed innocuous.
* What he was really doing was pointing the sheets downward toward the camera peeking out from under his leg.
* He was broadcasting the exam to God-knows-where.
* He and the other two students then received answers via tiny earpieces.
* In addition, the two other students would call me over to "ask clarification questions." In reality, they were trying to distract me while the ringleader broadcast the exam.
* I eventually realized they were cheating (after exam 1), but I couldn't figure out how, until another student (exam 2) approached me with a note that read, "The guy to my right has his phone under his leg. Every time you circle the room, he pushes it completely under his leg so you can't see it."
* At that point, however, each student was taking a slightly different exam (unbeknownst to them).
The ringleader emailed me at the end of the semester and said something to the effect of: "I know I don't deserve to pass, but if you fail me, I will have to stay an extra semester."
I ended up failing all three.
Couple of points that I omitted.
First, I was teaching at a local community college. The students were from a nearby university. They were trying to avoid the equivalent classes at their own school and I assume they felt that I might be an "easy mark." I'm not sure what my options were with respect to reporting them to their own university.
Second, I was an adjunct at the community college. I informed the Dean of what was going on, but I got zero support. I could tell that the Dean felt that all I was doing was bringing him a problem that had the potential to mushroom into a political nightmare (no upside, only downside for him). The unspoken message that I got was, "Just deal with this on your own and don't turn it into a federal case." I don't know if the lack of support was due to me being an adjunct or whether it was due to "We need to keep our enrollment numbers up. Don't get a reputation for being a ball-buster."
1. Cool! Tell me more! I love these puzzle/strategy games. Both how to cheat and not get caught and how to catch the cheaters.
2. Wow, these cheaters are such a bad people. Isn't it unfair to those who don't cheat...?
For once, I would love for someone to step back and ask:
What the actual fuck is going on here?
Some people are apparently spending up to 11 years (on top of high school) trying to get a certificate, that would help them maintain certain socioeconomic status. Other people are actively preventing them in getting the certificate in other ways than the official ones.
This costs an incredible amount of money. The whole overhead is insane. Whole lot of people routinely spend several YEARS without actually receiving the certificate. College education is crippled, because it needs to prevent fraud first, teach people useful things second.
Can't we do the sensible thing and lift the minimum income high enough so that only those who want to study will go to college and do so without fear of missing out?
These people want to achieve status. Minimum income wouldn't help.
In my particular case, this was not an issue.
I don't want to go into detail, but the students were from a foreign country (this is part of why it was going to be a political nightmare for the Dean).
Two of the three could barely speak English (excepting the ringleader). I mention this ONLY because it was a big tipoff when reading their first exams: they all used idiomatic English phrases that were far beyond what they were capable of in casual conversation. They also used nearly identical phrasing when explaining their answers (another big tipoff).
If anything, I blame their university for admitting students who were incapable of succeeding without cheating. The whole escapade left me feeling dirty. The university admits foreign students (because enrollment/$$$). And they have to know many of the TOEFL scores are either unreliable or fraudulent.
Until neoliberalism hit though. Then everything was about the market and the ideals of low pay gaps were budget cut into oblivion. Now there's huge inequality and students have to take out huge loans like in the US :(
This is not the sentiment I'm getting here. More like "wow, I hope I don't get a cheater for a doctor, and if they go into research they are likely to fake results in studies. This is a unfair to society, their future employers and subjects"
It's not about fairness in the socioeconomic ladder as much as the damage and cost incurred by having an incompetent fraud in a high-impact professional role.
While I agree with your sentiment, these people aren't aiming for "livable wage" but for (from their perspective) "the top".
Australia has a kind of free university for all. Australian citizens get an interest free loan of about $5k/year for tuition. You just pay it back by paying a little more tax on your income over $47k/year until it's gone. If you don't earn over $47k/year, you never pay it back, which is fine and expected. It's also easy to get welfare for housing and food as a student, so university is mostly "free". (For various values of free)
Even with all of that, plenty of people still cheat on university exams. I was shocked to learn about it, but there are always people who take that route.
Medicine is a large topic. It requires many years of memorization, experience, etc., and then it requires continuing education and constant practice. This makes the costs of medicine very high.
There is an opportunity for technology to help lower costs. The opportunity was identified decades ago, when the first work was done on expert systems for medicine.
The problem is that this means that if we succeed at applying technology to lowering the cost of medicine, it will look a lot like patients self-diagnosing. In rich countries we really don't like that. In poor countries self-diagnostics is common.
Although now ubiquitous, excluding two cups and a string, phones have always been high tech, as opposed to low tech, like feigning a need to use the restroom to develop their cheating space, as obvious and overused as it is. I wonder who first pioneered the fake bathroom visit for cheating, as opposed to it being employed as an escape from the extreme pressures of the classroom, i.e. smoking.
Sure, the system overall isn't perfect, but detecting incompetence on the job (before being allowed to do any damage) is IMO the most likely scenario for cheating medical students who don't get caught at school.
Even if we consider other disciplines... say, civil engineering. You don't get your degree and then immediately get the job of Principal Engineer on a bridge-building project. You're supervised by engineers with more experience, and your work is checked and signed off on if it's correct. If your work consistently fails those checks, you'll get fired.
Implying that material they are testing is relevant in a practical setting ? I actually wonder if they ever do something like random tests for people that are 5+ years into their career - just unannounced testing to check retention and relevance.
If it's anything like CS I wouldn't be surprised if they would fail >90% people. People here complain about having to invert binary trees in an interview...
Dr Anand Rai, the whistleblower in the Vyapam scam [of 2008-2013], said: “It is very easy to get Bluetooth fitted in the ears. It is attached to the ear temporarily and can be removed. Such a technique was used by a Vyapam scam accused too to clear his medical exam eight years ago.”
I shudder to think how many future doctors with a poor moral compass are getting through the system. Not only is their incompetence dangerous, their lack of ethics and craftiness could mean that they'll be harder to detect.
I'm not making a judgement whether that's good or bad. I'm sure plenty will chime in with their opinion. I'm only bringing up the world of always on computing is probably coming and schools will need to find some other way to test students that don't require handicapping them by removing what they perceive as part of their brain.
Won't help much with recordings, of course, but that's more like a cheat sheet that's always on you; if you can succeed with it in a well-designed test environment, you can probably succeed with it in real life. At some point, if you're augmented, then memory is memory and there's no point in distinguishing between hardware and wetware.