I have been looking forward to the first day of bringing my kid to the kindergarten.
Well, really - how could you not?
I decided to take a half day off. The sun was bright, the traffic heavy. My daughter, still every inch of her a toddler, was excited and brought with her the picture book "Let's Go to School." We heard the sparrows chirping as we ran up the hill to the bungalow campus. It was the natural and lively outdoor environment I like most about the school.
Surrounded by uneven paths on the slope, riddled with holes (and some mosquitoes, too), the school looks as if it has been designed to teach and prepare for Tarzan. A good news for Tarzan, after the recent typhoon storm, is the school and most trees were not blown down. A bad news is that the tyre swing at the campus was damaged beyond repair.
No surprise we miss the tyre swing badly.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Monday, August 13, 2012
Luck
Go ask a doctor how it goes after the on-call day, and odds are that the doctor will tell you how lucky or unlucky he has been.
Some of us take solace, after a stormy night, by calling ourselves unlucky. To us, a peaceful night means luck.
But be not beguiled.
Now that I've got senior enough to be on call once in a while, what I look forward to is the luck (sort of) to see more difficult cases and learn. I remember reading once that medicine is knowledge, judgment, experience, and luck. With that in mind, I called myself lucky (I still do) when my pager was bleeping all night during my recent call days.
Lest I be misunderstood: I do not want to suggest that a good doctor is one who prays for a busy on-call day. Nor do I think it always proper to work nonstop. Yet, when I think about my two recent on-call days, I see that I was really lucky to come across patients that I can learn from them: first, I learned to stick a long needle into the pericardial sac around a patient's heart, and next, I learned to place a balloon pump into the aorta of a failing heart.
And I owe it all to a bit of luck.
Some of us take solace, after a stormy night, by calling ourselves unlucky. To us, a peaceful night means luck.
But be not beguiled.
Now that I've got senior enough to be on call once in a while, what I look forward to is the luck (sort of) to see more difficult cases and learn. I remember reading once that medicine is knowledge, judgment, experience, and luck. With that in mind, I called myself lucky (I still do) when my pager was bleeping all night during my recent call days.
Lest I be misunderstood: I do not want to suggest that a good doctor is one who prays for a busy on-call day. Nor do I think it always proper to work nonstop. Yet, when I think about my two recent on-call days, I see that I was really lucky to come across patients that I can learn from them: first, I learned to stick a long needle into the pericardial sac around a patient's heart, and next, I learned to place a balloon pump into the aorta of a failing heart.
And I owe it all to a bit of luck.
Friday, August 3, 2012
Peer review
Few words are more likely to make one think of impartial judgement and idealism than that big term peer review. A beacon of justice for scientific knowledge. Almost all manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals are now sent out to reviewers, selected by virtue of their knowledge about the manuscript's topic, before any decision on publication.
Reviewers are obliged to return the review within two weeks. The deadline is not difficult to meet, unless I forget the request. When I returned from Berlin, I thought I'd finished all the reviews and didn't pay attention until a reminder appeared in my e-mail box yesterday.
"Oh man, I thought I had submitted my evaluation. Did I?" I asked myself as I quickly searched my files. I didn't keep track of the evaluation scores and decision of each manuscript reviewed, but I saved the written paragraphs that summarize for the editors (the reasons for my recommendations for disposition of the manuscript) and for authors (as requested by most, if not all, journals). Imagine that you had submitted the review over one week ago and yet the reminder was sent to you because of computer system error. Would you be able to submit an evaluation identical to the first one?
I shrugged; probably I blushed. It's odd. When we write the paragraphs, we make use of slow, deliberative, and more logical mode of thinking (the System 2, as what the psychologist and Nobel-winning economist Daniel Kahneman calls it). By the time we enter the manuscript's rating with respect to the originality, scientific accuracy, interest to the readers of a specific journal, recommendation like rejection or acceptance with major revision, we're switching to System 1, a fast, automatic, intuitive, and emotional mode with little sense of voluntary control.
I tried my best to recollect how I entered the score. But my answer came out in stammers and meanders. The situation is that I typed the paragraph in the hotel and then brought my computer to a bus station (a free wifi hotspot) for final electronic submission. I could have missed the last step when the weather turned bad, with a sudden flurry of heavy rain. And if I'm candid, I do believe that I could have entered a lower score at that time, simply because of the rainy weather.
Reviewers are obliged to return the review within two weeks. The deadline is not difficult to meet, unless I forget the request. When I returned from Berlin, I thought I'd finished all the reviews and didn't pay attention until a reminder appeared in my e-mail box yesterday.
"Oh man, I thought I had submitted my evaluation. Did I?" I asked myself as I quickly searched my files. I didn't keep track of the evaluation scores and decision of each manuscript reviewed, but I saved the written paragraphs that summarize for the editors (the reasons for my recommendations for disposition of the manuscript) and for authors (as requested by most, if not all, journals). Imagine that you had submitted the review over one week ago and yet the reminder was sent to you because of computer system error. Would you be able to submit an evaluation identical to the first one?
I shrugged; probably I blushed. It's odd. When we write the paragraphs, we make use of slow, deliberative, and more logical mode of thinking (the System 2, as what the psychologist and Nobel-winning economist Daniel Kahneman calls it). By the time we enter the manuscript's rating with respect to the originality, scientific accuracy, interest to the readers of a specific journal, recommendation like rejection or acceptance with major revision, we're switching to System 1, a fast, automatic, intuitive, and emotional mode with little sense of voluntary control.
I tried my best to recollect how I entered the score. But my answer came out in stammers and meanders. The situation is that I typed the paragraph in the hotel and then brought my computer to a bus station (a free wifi hotspot) for final electronic submission. I could have missed the last step when the weather turned bad, with a sudden flurry of heavy rain. And if I'm candid, I do believe that I could have entered a lower score at that time, simply because of the rainy weather.
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