When I taught a class where I assigned essays I confirmed my own suspicions from when I was assigned essays: the majority of the sentences committed to paper are awful drudgery. I then flipped the requirements on their head and removed minimum page requirements and instead had extremely strict maximum page requirements (with of course the objective material requirements of the essay itself). So much improvement for everyone involved. I had to read through so much less pointless material and the students were forced to focus their ideas in a succinct way to be able to get to all of the objectives of the essay in the limited space. Everyone saved time and did better.
When I taught a class, I had a strict 3 page maximum on lab reports for this reason. So many people are used to turning in 10's of pages of drudgery. I just want a few that get to the heart of the issue.
A tale as old as time itself. I feel like this sort of headline might garner actual shock maybe ten years ago. It's funny how nowadays my reaction is more akin to a car alarm going off down the street.
Android offers the same thing. The point here is about the google pay services which is a highly priviledged service inside any android and so will be apple inside any iphone.
I don't think that's the point. Apple Maps app has the same location settings as any other map app on iPhone. I have it set to "While Using the App".
If you are suggesting that Apple tracks user location at all times regardless of this setting, then that's a different topic that has no substance in this therad.
There's quite a bit of confusion in this thread regarding "chronic homelessness" vs "temporary/short-term homelessness". The solution for short-term homelessness is generally the use of "emergency shelters", of which San Francisco has many. However, emergency shelters do little to nothing to address chronic homelessness, which requires long-term supportive housing, something San Francisco has very little of.
This difference, which gets lost in discussions such as the one here, leads to bad-faith statements by politicians and others regarding the true amount of housing available for homeless people. For example, the number of "available beds" touted by Newsom and others are almost entirely within short-term emergency shelters, which do not address the real problem (chronic homelessness) much at all. Instead, this "number-of-beds" statistic is used to gloss over the fact that a real solution has not been found, and then justify (probably illegal) police action against homeless people. The true intent of such actions is probably to cause regular disruption in the lives of homeless people to increase the difficulty of simply being homeless in San Francisco. Whether or not you agree with such police action is up to you, but it's important to acknowledge that the argument that "there is available housing" is a bad faith argument, and that this argument is simply used to redirect attention from both police action against homeless people as well as the fact that a real solution has not been found.
Here's a citation that describes the differences between short term emergency housing and long term housing, which illuminates why the current approach being taken by San Francisco is not genuine as well as approaches that might actually work:
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). Permanent supportive housing: Evaluating the evidence for improving health outcomes among people experiencing chronic homelessness.
Thanks! Digital health can be incredibly fun and rewarding, but there are plenty of opportunities to run head first into walls you may not have realized even existed.
Aside from the ethics considerations, privacy regulations (and the desire to tread conservatively) can lead to some odd implementation decisions...especially if you're coming into the industry from a general or consumer oriented tech background.
I once worked on a medication adherence project for patients in Italy where patients needed to complete bi-weekly assessments and generally track their medication adherence. We set up a secure portal/website for patients, but were prohibited from emailing them reminders when their next assessment was due.
The sponsor (aka pharma co) was extremely conservative re: patient privacy laws and more or less left it at, "well, the patient will just have to remember to return to the website, log in, and complete their survey at the appointed time." After a couple of months of sub-optimal survey completion rates, they re-evaluated their position and let us send out survey reminder emails.....which is a baseline thing to do when you need to retain participants over the life of a study.
Oddly enough, this was for a commercial project (medication was available on the market, physicians were referring their patients to this website as a value added sort of service) and the commercial side is a bit more wild west than phase 2/3 research. Well, as wild west as the pharma/clinical research industry gets :)
There are parallels between customer acquisition/retention in SaaS and patient recruitment/retention in clinical trials that are pretty interesting...but I think most folks on the Saas side would think the healthcare folks are trying to solve problems with one (if not two) hands tied behind their backs - and in some cases, wouldn't be wrong in thinking so.
Thank you for your informative and critical feedback - skepticism is at the heart of science! Very true, the system could potentially be used to promote a specific agenda. However, we very much want to avoid a system that allows something such as this as much as possible. Ideally through implementing open-source / 3rd party / community-input based protocols. If you have suggestions in this regard we'd love to hear them!
And yes, we plan on including food at a later date!
