October 2009 - Posts

Plan, Don't Panic
October 28, 2009 6:27 AM by Scott Warner

The other week I watched a show on the Discovery channel in disbelief. Called Pig Bomb , it described hoards of feral pigs roaming the Southeast. Locals may have cross-bred the American boar with its ill-tempered cousin, the Eurasian wild boar, for hunting Read More...

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Abort Retry Ignore
October 23, 2009 6:07 AM by Scott Warner

MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) debuted 28 years ago, quickly finding its way into labs on PCs in offices or attached to instruments. Programs such as BASIC promised much. We just knew , deep down, that computers meant less paper, effortless Read More...

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Back to BASIC
October 19, 2009 6:17 AM by Scott Warner

I once read an article about a BASIC program used to temperature-correct arterial blood gas results. This was in the day when a program could be "keyed in" from a magazine. BASIC, which stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, was Read More...

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Teachable Moments
October 14, 2009 6:25 AM by Scott Warner

Much was made of the President's "beer summit" last July, a meeting between a black professor and the white policeman who arrested him, something the Wall Street Journal labeled a "teachable moment." Aside from wondering what kind of beer goes best with Read More...

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Write Thyself
October 9, 2009 6:55 AM by Scott Warner

It wouldn't surprise me if most laboratories have more written procedures than all other departments of the hospital combined -- shelves of them in worn, bursting binders. Printed or scanned, that's a lot of writing. And I'll bet the procedures are all Read More...

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Valuable Work
October 5, 2009 7:16 AM by Scott Warner

When a round robin of "What's New" got to me at a recent department head meeting I said, "We're working on a new C. diff algorithm that screens for toxin-producing antigen and not just the toxin." Amid blank stares one manager laughed, " English please!" Read More...

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