Stig Dagerman: An Elegy

Stig Dagerman has had the touch of magic on my soul, irritably shaking the core with his shockingly direct and masterfully aggressive style. Daggerman epitomize the very simple and defenseless intellectual exposed to harsh reality of 20^th century. Sweden, his homeland was passing a crucial period with much pressure hinging on the low-income working class. Anarchism and syndicalism was surging all across the Europe stirring up the calm nature of region. Joining syndicalism was the fruit of a complicated political/social background which is less dignified in Dagerman's profile. Like all well-known public black-outs, a surging interest in his works has appeared since 1980s and a reward is called to his honor. He was the full-view representative of intellectuals highly affected in the wake of post-world war II era. His writings convey the themes of existentialism via artfully expressed feelings of fear and uncertainty. Imagine Kierkegaard’s level of consciousness stripped of all arbitrary chase for spirituality (Kierkegaard’s 2^nd and 3^rd layers) more focused on aesthetics of social conducts and family affairs. A malicious anxiety woven in the very texture of his words, a hail of abhorrence and rejection (look at his heart-wrenching short story "Surprise"), all and all a very unique, a very uneasy and yet a very modern experience for the readers. Ideologically i must confess i'm against his political school of thinking. I rate the line pretty  premature then and outdated now. Yet I still like him and his works. I respect him as the son of his harsh circumstance, who stands for some principles and express his thoughts artfully.

I think something, still unrecognized or less understood dominate his lines. Some of the features in his short stories and novels are so hard to decipher, like the man himself. Definitely some sorry themes in Dagerman’s family life and emotional conflicts have made the fair ground for his outstanding streak of writing to flow. I’ve spent a number of my desolation days with the highly emotive pulsation of Daggerman’s “Snake” under my skin. Feeling insecure, lonely and hopeless is not a heavenly gift but admittedly transformed into some literary masterpiece, as history has shown.

Pedram, June2013

My Author of The Month (December 2011)

Stig Daggerman has had the touch of magic on my soul, irritably shaking the core with his shockingly direct and masterfully aggressive style. Daggerman epitomize the very simple and defenseless intellectual exposed to harsh reality of 20^th century. Sweden, his homeland was passing a crucial period with much pressure hinging on the laborer and low-income. Anarchism and syndicalism was surging all across the Europe stir up the calm nature of region. Joining syndicalism was the fruit of a complicated political/social background which is less dignified. Like all well-known public black-outs, a surging interest in his works has appeared since 1980s and a reward is called to his honor. He was the full-view representative of intellectuals highly affected in the wake of post-world war II era. His writings convey the themes of existentialism via artfully expressed feelings of fear and uncertainty. Imagine Kierkegaard’s level of consciousness stripped of all intangible chase for spirituality (Kierkegaard’s 2^nd and 3^rd layers) more focused on aesthetics of social conducts and family affairs instead.

I think something, an unknown factor still dominates his lines, haunting the reader. Definitely Dagerman’s family life and emotional conflicts have made the fair ground for his outstanding streak of writing to flow. I’ve spent a number of my desolation days with the highly emotive pulsation of Daggerman’s “Snake” under my skin. Feeling insecure lonely and hopeless is not a heavenly gift but admittedly has yielded some literary masterpieces, as history has shown.

I spent some pleasant time with Stig Dagerman's short stories in december. pedram

My Author of The Month (May 2011)

Stig Dagerman 1923 - 1954

...so gain to build and build to gain because others will bring you down on a little small hanging string...

Physician Time Should Be Considered A Resource

This is especially true for primary care physicians who set as their goal the delivery and coordination of comprehensive care for patients. Achieving such a goal requires availability, a broad spectrum of medical knowledge, effective use of the local health care system, and attention to both the “big picture” and the details of a patient’s life and health. And, above all of this is the management of your daily patient schedule.

The physician’s time has never been looked upon as a resource more so as in the modern times. There has been relatively little study of physician time as a resource. Yet both as a contribution to health care costs and as a key element in patient-doctor relationships, there is reason to believe that it deserves more attention. Furthermore, with an increasing emphasis on value and efficiency in health care delivery, quality time between the physician and patient is an increasingly valuable resource.

Time is relative


The physician must keep in mind that like for everyone else time is finite and they do need to make the best use of it. If the physician wants to utilize the time well, then they must have a set time schedule in place and must follow it to the best of their ability. In between these time schedules they must keep a time gap for buffer of about 5 minutes. This will give them the requisite breathing space and if time overflows for a patient they can still stick to the overall schedule.
I certainly understand how just one event in the office can put a provider behind by a half hour or even an hour.

Your day just became more intense

For example, a patient comes in with a chief complaint of “chest pain”. However slight this may be, there is the usual need to work-up this complaint and decide whether it is cardiac or non cardiac.
This changes the flavor of the visit and can make a regular fifteen minute appointment change into an hour of identifying the problem, getting testing from an ECG to a chest x-ray and even a call to your friendly cardiologist to see if he/she can see the patient to evaluate them.
In some instances you may need to transport the patient to the hospital by ambulance and that will take time to call EMS to come to your office and pick up the patient and take them to the emergency room.
All this takes time and your face-to-face time to care for the patient and an hour slips by fast. When this is all done and you get to start again, you are behind for the whole day trying to get caught up.
.It is quite interesting to note that the amount of time that the patient spends with the doctor varies from country to country. In the US and Sweden it is up to 20 minutes and in the UK it is about 10 minutes.

Try to stay focused

A physician with experience will be able to maintain the schedule far better than one who has a less direct approach to managing the chief complaint, as they will be able to elicit the responses by the patient better by asking pertinent and relevant questions. On the other hand, those physicians who weren’t able to communicate appropriately are the ones who fall behind in the patient schedule.
Therefore, time management and training the ancillary staff to manage patient flow is a crucial component for a physician in order to be able to stick to the time and schedule that has been chalked out beforehand. Multi-tasking many rooms in the office is also a key component if you are to keep the patients flowing and the day running smoother.

 
by : Adam Alper
Medical Biling and Coding For Physicians

Hacker Threatens More Attacks On WikiLeaks Foes

On Thursday, a man identifying himself as one of the activists from a group called Anonymous, who used the pseudonym Coldblood in an interview with BBC radio, said: “This campaign is not over from what I’ve seen. It’s still going strong.” The speaker had an English accent and said he was a 22-year-old software engineer with no specific political loyalty.
Within 12 hours of a British judge’s decision on Tuesday to deny Mr. Assange bail in a Swedish extradition case, attacks on the Web sites of WikiLeaks’s “enemies,” as defined by the organization’s impassioned supporters around the world, caused several corporate Web sites to become inaccessible or slow down markedly.
Targets of the attacks, in which activists overwhelmed the sites with traffic, included the Web site of MasterCard, which had stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; Amazon.com, which revoked the use of its computer servers; and PayPal, which stopped accepting donations for Mr. Assange’s group. Visa.com was also affected by the attacks, as were the Web sites of the Swedish prosecutor’s office and the lawyer representing the two women whose allegations of sexual misconduct are the basis of Sweden’s extradition bid.
The Internet assaults underlined the growing reach of self-described “cyberanarchists,” antigovernment and anticorporate activists who have made an icon of Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian.
Though Reuters said that no major Web sites appeared to be under attack early Thursday, a Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet, reported that the Swedish government’s Web site had gone down briefly during the night.
The speed and range of the attacks appeared to show the resilience of the backing among computer activists for Mr. Assange, who has appeared increasingly isolated in recent months amid the furor stoked by WikiLeaks’s posting of hundreds of thousands of secret Pentagon documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Mr. Assange has come under renewed attack in the past two weeks for posting the first tranche of a trove of 250,000 secret State Department cables that have exposed American diplomats’ frank assessments of relations with many countries, forcing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to express regret to world leaders and raising fears that they and other sources would become more reticent.
The New York Times and four other news organizations last week began publishing articles based on the archive of cables made available to them.
In recent months, some of Mr. Assange’s closest associates in WikiLeaks abandoned him, calling him autocratic and capricious and accusing him of reneging on WikiLeaks’s original pledge of impartiality to launch a concerted attack on the United States. He has been simultaneously fighting a remote battle with the Swedish prosecutors, who have sought his extradition for questioning on accusations of “rape, sexual molestation and forceful coercion” made by the Swedish women. Mr. Assange has denied any wrongdoing in the cases.
American officials have repeatedly said that they are reviewing possible criminal charges against Mr. Assange, a step that could lead to a bid to extradite him to the United States and confront him with having to fight for his freedom on two fronts.
The cyberattacks in Mr. Assange’s defense appear to have been coordinated by Anonymous, a loosely affiliated group of activist computer hackers who have singled out other groups before, including theChurch of Scientology. Last weekend, members of Anonymous vowed in two online manifestos to take revenge on any organization that lined up against WikiLeaks.
Anonymous claimed responsibility for the MasterCard attack in Web messages and, according to one activist associated with the group, conducted waves of attacks on other companies during the day. The group said the actions were part of an effort called Operation Payback, which began as a way of punishing companies that tried to stop Internet file-sharing and movie downloads.
The activist, Gregg Housh, who disavows a personal role in any illegal online activity, said that 1,500 supporters had been in online forums and chat rooms organizing the mass “denial of service” attacks. His account was confirmed by Jose Nazario, a senior security researcher at Arbor Networks, a Chelmsford, Mass., firm that tracks malicious activity on computer networks.
Most of the corporations whose sites were targeted did not explain why they severed ties with WikiLeaks. But PayPal issued statements saying its decision was based on “a violation” of its policy on promoting illegal activities.
Almost all the corporate Web sites that were attacked appeared to be operating normally later on Wednesday, suggesting that any economic impact was limited. But the sense of an Internet war was reinforced when Netcraft, a British Internet monitoring firm, reported that the Web site being used by the hackers to distribute denial-of-service software had been suspended by a Dutch hosting firm, Leaseweb.
A sense of the belligerent mood among activists was given when one contributor to a forum the group uses, WhyWeProtest.net, wrote of the attacks: “The war is on. And everyone ought to spend some time thinking about it, discussing it with others, preparing yourselves so you know how to act if something compels you to make a decision. Be very careful not to err on the side of inaction.”
Mr. Housh acknowledged that there had been online talk among the hackers of a possible Internet campaign against the two women who have been Mr. Assange’s accusers in the Swedish case, but he said that “a lot of people don’t want to be involved.”
A Web search showed new blog posts in recent days in which the two women, identified by the Swedish prosecutors only as Ms. A. and Ms. W., were named, but it was not clear whether there was any link to Anonymous. The women have said that consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange became nonconsensual when he stopped using condoms.
The cyberattacks on corporations Wednesday were seen by many supporters as a counterstrike against the United States. Mr. Assange’s online supporters have widely condemned the Obama administration as the unseen hand coordinating efforts to choke off WikiLeaks by denying it financing and suppressing its network of computer servers.
Mr. Housh described Mr. Assange in an interview as “a political prisoner,” a common view among WikiLeaks supporters who have joined Mr. Assange in condemning the sexual abuse accusations as part of an American-inspired “smear campaign.”
Another activist used the analogy of the civil rights struggle for the cyberattacks.
“Are they disrupting business?” a contributor using the name Moryath wrote in a comment on the slashdot.org technology Web site. “Perhaps, but no worse than the lunch counter sit-ins did.”

John Markoff and Ashlee Vance contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
NYTIMES