The Wired Ophthalmologist

I have been giving the Wired Ophthalmologist course at the AAO annual meeting since 1997.  Obviously it is important to be one of the first to port to the AAO's new online community and I will be slowly moving content that has always been available on my personal website at www.bashour.com over to the AAO community site bit by bit - pun intended.

The Best Doctor?

I just commented on a post made by Paul Levy @ http://runningahospital.blogspot.com/
Could not agree more with this post and it is equally true for Doctors as it is for hospitals. Who is "the best" cardiologist? Urologist? Dermatologist?
Patients ask friends and doctors they know for referrals. Do these people really know who is the best... Indeed not, a mythology exists here as well. Referrals are based on such things as visibility, reputation, amiability, affability, availability, sociability and longevity. Very rarely indeed are they based on ABILTY.
I recommend patients go to a specialty group practice and ask very specifically the nurses and assistants who work directly with all the doctors (in surgery if it concerns surgeons) which one they would send their sick relative to. Often it may not be the esteemed head of the practice they were originally recommended.

Friends help define views of beauty - Fourth Facial Attractiveness Article in 2 Months!

Richard Russell (Harvard) and Matthew Bronstad (Brandelis) recently published a study in Perception. They asked adults to rate the attractiveness of various faces, they found that that siblings, friends and spouses were more likely to agree with each other than with strangers."The agreement between pairs of affiliated friends, siblings and spouses was significantly greater than between pairs of strangers drawn from the same race and culture, providing evidence that facial-attractiveness preferences are socially organized," Richard Russell, of Harvard University in Massachusetts, said in the study.

They recruited 20 married couples, 20 pairs of siblings and 41 pairs of close friends and asked each person to rate 74 faces of undergraduates on a scale of one to seven, from very attractive to very unattractive. The responses were also compared with answers from another person they did not know. Close relations were more likely to agree with each other than with strangers and the strength of their agreement also tended to increase along with the number of years that they had been in daily contact.

Links:
Friends help define views of beauty

Ugly Men With Pretty Women

Just a note to myself to clarify and address some of the information and misinformation being reported regarding the findings from the team of Professor Jim McNulty at the University of Tennessee in the Journal of Family Psychology
Basically what is being repoted is that:

• Men who see themselves as better looking than their wives were more likely to be disgruntled and have negative feelings about their marriage,

• “Men who were more attractive than their partner demonstrated a tendency to offer less emotional and practical support to their wives.”

• "Attractive men have available to them more short-term mating opportunities. This may make them less satisfied and less committed to the marital relationship."

• “Men are rated as more likeable and friendly when they have a wife who is very attractive," said Strathclyde University psychologist Alastair Ross

• "Ugly men try harder. They care more about you and treat you like a princess. Good-looking guys are self-obsessed. That’s not attractive."

• It appears that handsome men carry a “health warning” that makes most women believe they will eventually prove unfaithful partners.

• Should a beautiful woman date someone who is not so fortunate in the looks department - he will treasure and appreciate her more and much better.

To explain all this in a simple manner one only has to bring up the axiom: "Women marry MPI, Men marry facial and physical attractiveness"
In other words it does not matter too much how the male looks to the female as long as he has MPI (more detail later but basically males that exudes charm and power and combined with wealth and status) she will be happy. To the man what makes him happiest is how attractive his mate is.

Links:
http://www.theseductionbible.com/2008/04/13/why-beautiful-women-marry-less-attractive-men/
http://www.xfxmb.com/content/health/happier-marriages-result-from-attractive-women-who-wed-uglier-men/
http://emilyteng.livejournal.com/21237.html
http://udothedishes.com/2008/04/03/ugly-men-with-pretty-women-just-works-better.aspx
http://teamsugar.com/1547365
http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showthread.php?t=43539
http://laurafreberg.com/blog/?p=221
http://www.gossiprocks.com/forum/love-relationships/68892-why-women-marry-less-attractive-men.html
http://swampbubbles.com/why-beautiful-women-marry-less-attractive-men

Can mobile phones eradicate poverty?

After publishing my last blog entry I noticed that I am not alone in my views:
Shop Talk - Innovation, Marketing and Alliances: Can mobile phones eradicate poverty?
Links:
http://shoptalkmarketing.blogspot.com/2008/04/can-mobile-phones-eradicate-poverty.html
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/04/reality_trails_by_mo.html

A COMMUNICATIONS UTOPIA

I just ran across this on an old unpublished website I had written a few years ago interestingly I still believe strongly in this idea. Hopefully one day it will come to be.

This is just a short note of my view of what the world should be like from a utopian communications viewpoint.

Essentially my belief is that:

1. All communications should be free.

2. When you are born you should be assigned a telephone number which will follow you for the rest of your life.

Imagine this world.

You are born Mark Johnson, your telephone number is 514-416-978-3906. You are given a microphone implant and cochlear implants with this phone number. You essentially have technological telepathy. If it any point you want to be not disturbed, no problem, disconnect and divert to voice messaging or accept only text messaging to your single e-mail account which is linked to this phone number. You can also block unwanted numbers accept calls from people you want to talk to even when you are busy, caller id, whatever, you have the freedom to choose. You can disallow GPS location, or allow it.

Imagine you go off to Malaysia for a business trip, you can talk to your wife all you want for free, even on the airplane if you so wish, she can call you if she needs you. You can talk to your kids when they are at school, anything. Just say the word, "call little johnny", and there he is, talking to you in your head.

It does not make sense that wireless licenses are being sold by governments for exorbitant sums to big business whom in order to make back the money has to fleece the consumer. Government exists to serve the people not big business, the people I believe want free communication, let us use the money for that, or at least not demand it in the first place.

Software for Facial Attractiveness

Recently there have been many discussions on a software an Israeli team of computer scientists has developed that ranks facial attractiveness of women first reported in Haaretz, some links include: Haaretz; Geekpicks; Fuzzlinks; CautionInc; ZDNet; Radio Vice; Tech News Daily; Chat Marchet.

One of the most common questions asked by reporters and bloggers is why the software only focuses on female faces? There are, in fact, several reasons for why the researchers made the software focus on women only. The research and software build directly on my PhD work found in "Is an Objective Measuring System for Facial Attractiveness Possible?" available at Amazon.

In that work it is shown that objective models of attractiveness are far more accurate for female faces than for male faces. Software for male faces is possible but would be very unlikely to be as accurate. One of several underlying reasons for this, for example, is that male faces vary in attractiveness to female observers depending on the point they are at in their menstrual cycle. At mid-cycle or ovulation, women find more masculine faces more attractive and at menses, they prefer slightly more feminine male faces. This also correlates with when women are more likely to cheat on current partners.