Just as we have to back the agent with presence or money to her own primary advantage, so we have always needed to get second opinions on doctor and lawyer, baker and goldsmith.
All in range of course, so long as we can double guess wikipedia.
This is fine until we are stressed by illness, tort, wheat intolerance or fake jewels. At which point we traditionally go national or private. Today the support group is there, usually trustable. Strong if personal, weaker if remote. The online pecking order is still there: lords get better service at Nick’s fish bar than MPs and so on. The retired get less medicine than the waged. Unless one has read enough to know which buttons to press, which fibs to call.
A knowledge of the professional training helps: which philosophy did their school quote as basis (Piaget, Vygotsky, or both), which texts, which authorities, which training methods, which journals. What issues raged while they were housemen, what union politics, what perks govern decisions, what fashions rule today, what professional blindnesses. If a little knowledge is dangerous, a little bias or blind spot is more so to the surgeon’s patient. A risk in this is making your professional jumpy, but at least then you know to move away fast. And there is no illness that cannot be made worse by surgery.
So the quick training course is a valuable aid, a without which not to the multi-skilled.
An invaluable part of this independence is its effect on both immune systems. Physically, the flows are stronger, the glands that release the chemical messengers better lubricated, the mental pathways readier to react. The bigger influence is on the neural pathways, doubts are fewer, neuroses unwakened or less so, the flee or fight response stilled while trust and calm reign. Confidence is king.
Bedside manner is the hallmark of the true professional, it's what we pay for and it's what cures in the %0% of cases therapy doesn't. In every field, one suspects. Carrying it within you is the greatest gift of the internet – an open door to the mobile professional within.
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There may be massive gaps in this - please confound the argument.
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( 3 / 105 )Ebay and friends united, googledocs and google earth succeed because we each drive them from our unique perch in the framework. Not so the court system. Yes we may trust a Judge Sirica, Nixon’s nemesis over Watergate, or the hypothetical Justice Deed, avatar-judge both human and superhuman, but we are being conditioned by capitalism to demand rights here and now. We also know that our judges are part of the comfortable meritocracy, few living in semis, fewer in thin-walled estate apartments. Watching the shere cost of fallible justice to us the taxpayer, it is conceivable that conviction about natural justice will let not a few of us seek promotion to witness, judge, jury and punisher. Without benefit of defence or statement in mitigation. We see daily the horrendous offender unpunished, even rewarded in home circles. We see the American three strike policy effective, but at immense psychological costs to all players. We each have anonymous tools online, in mail, and in street contact. It is a tribute to enlightenment that they are so little used. But the failure of big government to have a working home office or even weed out its own corrupted is pushing the aggrieved into anger, the victims toward destabilising vengeance.
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( 3.1 / 99 )The able operator can tell from body language those coming out of the station about to commit a crime, and afterwards that they have done it. The clues are almost subliminal, and there is no public training for picking up the skills. It will not be long before the combination of visual evidence with forensic DNA and brain scans are coupled with therapy. Current best guess on therapy is coordinating the BOLD (blood oxygen level dependency) detection with ultrasound stimulants in areas that decriminalise like pleasure centres and the conscience activators. So Mr Criminal what do you want: a whack with a truncheon, a year inside, or a dab of warming ultrasound in the prefrontal cortex? Small wonder the police want cams on every crim. Until we find a way of going for oysters that cling closer than barnacles.
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( 2.9 / 95 )We get the problems we need, says gaia theory. Derided by many, James Lovelock’s Gaia theory is that the earth is close to flip over into almost or worst case totally uninhabitable. Not global warming, global heating. But he says with equal confidence we could do something about it. He also says if we can’t fix population expansion, Gaia will, brutally. Local events (like tsunami and hurricane), then wider ones (where say sea level rise 70 metres if the Antarctic melts as well as the northern ice, desert from Capes to Siberia with a few wandering bands of us to repopulate from. But 100 000 years for Gaia to recover if she can. Suspect we need to get on with the technical fixes faster than we think, in controlling solar input and generating enough energy. See Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia for methods.
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( 2.9 / 100 )Coupled with the media interest in X-ray scanning on the street for security alerts, and the problems of data integrity and identity theft, an impending challenge is the growing use of fMRI brain scans for purposes other than medical diagnosis. With the advertised public price of a scan dropping to $167, and the near silence of the research labs on what thought patterns can now be detected , it seems that the older lie detectors are going to be out of business. The good news for us the public is that many metals react violently in the strong magnetic field of today’s scanners, so random use is out. Let's hope the good uses outweigh the underhand. If I was the bus top Martian, I might just use this ratio as the benchmark of a civilised species.
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