Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Random pictures - nature

 
 
 

Go to the link for the full, uncropped pictures and many more...

Random chart - hospital ratings


"... The ingredients of the star ratings depend heavily on inputs that fail to account for the upstream social determinants of health that largely determine downstream health outcomes for patients from indigent communities, who rely on the nation’s safety-net hospitals for access to the entire continuum of care — primary to quaternary.
Using the star rating data provided by CMS, we evaluated the socioeconomic characteristics of hospitals’ home ZIP codes by the number of stars they’re awarded on the Hospital Compare website. This slide shows a portion of our findings. Evaluated by an area-level socioeconomic deprivation index that measures multiple factors such as education, poverty, unemployment, environment, and income, we found that one-star hospitals reside in ZIP codes that are nearly three rungs lower on the SES ladder than five-star hospitals. In fact, we found that the socioeconomic health of the hospital’s community grows exclusively with the number of stars awarded, and many of the one- and two-star hospitals are among the country’s elite academic medical centers that treat the most complex patients, who face both clinical and social comorbidities..."

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Random chart - EVs


"More than 2 million electric vehicles may be on the world’s roads by the end of 2016, writes the Guardian, citing data from the electric vehicle world database EV Volumes. That should be good news for electric carmaker Tesla. It is not. A closer look at the data shows that most of the growth comes from Tesla competitors, and from regions where Tesla is weak. It is a stereotype “that the U.S. market is further ahead in deploying the zero-emission technology thanks to cars such as the Tesla Model S,”  writes Automotive News. As far as Tesla is concerned, electric vehicle sales are exploding in all the wrong places...." Read the rest here.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

Amazon Echo and Sonos

So, integration between Amazon's Echo and Sonos is on the way, and soon (sometime in 2017) you will be able to control your Sonos system using Echo. Amazon Echo Now Lets You Control Your Sonos Speakers informs us that:

"... That'll change soon, though. Today, Sonos announced two new ways to control its system via third-party wares. First, you’ll soon be able to fire up Spotify, select your Sonos in the devices menu, and control the speakers directly from the app. It’s not the same thing as selecting a Bluetooth source; cueing up your songs will allow the speakers to stream them directly via Wi-Fi. The Spotify Connect features also let you hand off tunes from your headphones and car stereo to your home system when you get there. Those features will be launched as a public beta update to the Spotify app in October, with the official launch coming in 2017

And then there’s Echo. Although there won’t be any Alexa ears built right into Sonos’s speaker—which would be an integration worth some genuine excitement—you can now control them via the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, and Amazon Tap. You can use voice commands to have Alexa tell you what’s playing, navigate tracks, and pause and play. That trick is not quite available yet, but it’s coming as a free Echo device update in 2017..."

That will be nice, although the "2017" doesn't quite jibe with the "Now" in the article's title! I've seen much online discussion about this topic, but no mention that there already is some ability to control your Sonos using Echo, albeit very rudimentary control

If you have SmartThings  in conjunction with your Echo, it will allow you to start/stop your Sonos. The SmartThings hub discovers your Sonos players, and if SmartThings is enabled in Echo then you can start and stop your Sonos by Echo voice command - "Echo, Office Sonos On" will start and "Echo, Office Sonos Off" will stop the Office Sonos.

Granted you can only start and stop the Sonos playing (I did say very rudimentary) and it will only play whatever you had queued up last; you can not control volume, change playlists, skip a song, set alarms, etc. All that will have to wait for the promised integration...


Random chart - healthcare

Saturday, October 8, 2016

Thursday, October 6, 2016

Random charts - doc politics

 

"... New data show that, in certain medical fields, large majorities of physicians tend to share the political leanings of their colleagues, and a study suggests ideology could affect some treatment recommendations. In surgery, anesthesiology and urology, for example, around two-thirds of doctors who have registered a political affiliation are Republicans. In infectious disease medicine, psychiatry and pediatrics, more than two-thirds are Democrats..."

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Random chart - liberal academe

Source: Evidence of 'Liberal Academe'


"The study, published online by Econ Journal Watch, considered voter registration data for faculty members at 40 leading U.S. institutions in economics, history, communications, law and psychology. Of 7,243 professors total, about half are registered. Some 3,623 are Democrats while just 314 are Republicans.
Economists are the most mixed group, with a ratio of 4.5 Democrats for every Republican. Historians as a group are the most lopsided, at 33.5 to one; the paper attributes this to the rise of specializations such as gender, culture, race and the environment. (Some classify history as one of the humanities disciplines.) Lawyers are 8.6 to one and psychologists are 17.4 to one, while communications scholars, including journalism professors, are 20 to one..."