When she was ten years old, Veronica Laka disobeyed her father, and talked back when she knew she shouldn't have. Her punishment came slowly in the form of the "Taps." As her father holds a nail under her fingernail, he taps it with a hammer just hard enough to draw blood, slowly, one finger at a time . . . Fifty years later Dr. Veronica Laka may seem like a harmless old lady, but with her partner Dr. Mark Ivy, the pain machine was born, a device that can transfer pain from one person to another. First, they have to figure out how to measure pain on levels. Then, they have to find human volunteers, a person who feels the pain, and a doctor to accept it by going "under the wires." But it would never be Veronica. Ever. She can never forget the "Taps."
Tips, Techniques, and Step-by-Step Color Photos to Get the Most Out of Your TENS Unit Pain can hinder every aspect of your life, making even the simplest of tasks unbearable. Instead of endlessly ingesting only partially effective over-the-counter painkillers or turning to dangerously addictive opioids from your doctor, there is now a powerful at-home alternative solution: TENS. Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) units can decrease acute and chronic pain while significantly reducing, or even eliminating, the need for medication. For beginners to more advanced users, this book has solutions for everyone. It offers not only an overview of how the units work, but also how to properly place the electrodes and how much power to use to get the best results for various injuries and ailments throughout the body, including: Upper and Lower Back Pain Neck and Shoulder Tightness Hamstring and Calf Strains Fibromyalgia Peripheral Neuropathy Tension Headaches
This comprehensive text describes the origins, mechanisms, beneficial applications and practical details of frequency specific therapy - a treatment technique that uses frequencies, micro amperage current and the principles of biological resonance to treat pain and a wide range of medical conditions. It includes condition specific frequency protocols for the treatment of various pain complaints, and multi-center clinical case reports documenting successful application of the technique. Each section includes a review of condition pathophysiology and differential diagnosis, plus current research. A DVD feature a lecture from the author, Powerpoint teaching slides, practical demonstrations of techniques, fully searchable text and downloadable images from the book!
"Nickel and Dimed for the Amazon age," (Salon) the bitingly funny, eye-opening story of finding work in the automated and time-starved world of hourly low-wage labor After the local newspaper where she worked as a reporter closed, Emily Guendelsberger took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon fulfillment center outside Louisville, Kentucky. There, the vending machines were stocked with painkillers, and the staff turnover was dizzying. In the new year, she travelled to North Carolina to work at a call center, a place where even bathroom breaks were timed to the second. And finally, Guendelsberger was hired at a San Francisco McDonald's, narrowly escaping revenge-seeking customers who pelted her with condiments. Across three jobs, and in three different parts of the country, Guendelsberger directly took part in the revolution changing the U.S. workplace. Offering an up-close portrait of America's actual "essential workers," On the Clock examines the broken social safety net as well as an economy that has purposely had all the slack drained out and converted to profit. Until robots pack boxes, resolve billing issues, and make fast food, human beings supervised by AI will continue to get the job done. Guendelsberger shows us how workers went from being the most expensive element of production to the cheapest - and how low wage jobs have been remade to serve the ideals of efficiency, at the cost of humanity. On the Clock explores the lengths that half of Americans will go to in order to make a living, offering not only a better understanding of the modern workplace, but also surprising solutions to make work more humane for millions of Americans.
Pain assessment has remained largely unchanged for decades and is currently based on self-reporting. Although there are different versions, these self-reports all have significant drawbacks. For example, they are based solely on the individual’s assessment and are therefore influenced by personal experience and highly subjective, leading to uncertainty in ratings and difficulty in comparability. Thus, medicine could benefit from an automated, continuous and objective measure of pain. One solution is to use automated pain recognition in the form of machine learning. The aim is to train learning algorithms on sensory data so that they can later provide a pain rating. This thesis summarises several approaches to improve the current state of pain recognition systems based on physiological sensor data. First, a novel pain database is introduced that evaluates the use of subjective and objective pain labels in addition to wearable sensor data for the given task. Furthermore, different feature engineering and feature learning approaches are compared using a fair framework to identify the best methods. Finally, different techniques to increase the interpretability of the models are presented. The results show that classical hand-crafted features can compete with and outperform deep neural networks. Furthermore, the underlying features are easily retrieved from electrodermal activity for automated pain recognition, where pain is often associated with an increase in skin conductance.
Visionary designer and technologist John Maeda defines the fundamental laws of how computers think, and why you should care even if you aren't a programmer. "Maeda is to design what Warren Buffett is to finance." --Wired John Maeda is one of the world's preeminent interdisciplinary thinkers on technology and design. In How to Speak Machine, he offers a set of simple laws that govern not only the computers of today, but the unimaginable machines of the future. Technology is already more powerful than we can comprehend, and getting more powerful at an exponential pace. Once set in motion, algorithms never tire. And when a program's size, speed, and tirelessness combine with its ability to learn and transform itself, the outcome can be unpredictable and dangerous. Take the seemingly instant transformation of Microsoft's chatbot Tay into a hate-spewing racist, or how crime-predicting algorithms reinforce racial bias. How to Speak Machine provides a coherent framework for today's product designers, business leaders, and policymakers to grasp this brave new world. Drawing on his wide-ranging experience from engineering to computer science to design, Maeda shows how businesses and individuals can identify opportunities afforded by technology to make world-changing and inclusive products--while avoiding the pitfalls inherent to the medium.
"Moral Machines is a fine introduction to the emerging field of robot ethics. There is much here that will interest ethicists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and roboticists." ---Peter Danielson, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews --
Drug overdose, driven largely by overdose related to the use of opioids, is now the leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. The ongoing opioid crisis lies at the intersection of two public health challenges: reducing the burden of suffering from pain and containing the rising toll of the harms that can arise from the use of opioid medications. Chronic pain and opioid use disorder both represent complex human conditions affecting millions of Americans and causing untold disability and loss of function. In the context of the growing opioid problem, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched an Opioids Action Plan in early 2016. As part of this plan, the FDA asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene a committee to update the state of the science on pain research, care, and education and to identify actions the FDA and others can take to respond to the opioid epidemic, with a particular focus on informing FDA's development of a formal method for incorporating individual and societal considerations into its risk-benefit framework for opioid approval and monitoring.
