Quantum Dental: Fill & Download for Free

Quora, like many other forms of social media, is using a selective feedback algorithm to determine what stories to show you.It’s trying to guess what you’re going to be interested in, and show you more of those, and fewer of the stories you aren’t interested in.So you start out with a feed with, say, equal amounts of quilting, high energy physics, underwater basket weaving, atheism, hair bands, architecture, and intelligence. Hundreds of other topics also exist, but those are the ones that were being talked about in general that day, so they just happened to be your starting feed.Well, you weren’t interested in a couple of those topics, and it happened that the questions in a couple of the others didn’t grab you for whatever reason even if you normally might be interested. But there was a question in Atheism, and one in Intelligence, that seemed interesting, so you clicked on them and read them.Next time you refreshed the list, there were a couple new questions in those categories, and most of the other questions had been replaced by new questions in unrelated categories. Jet aircraft, atheism, futures trading, intelligence, orange grove management, atheism, Quantum dental hygiene, and intelligence.Again, you saw interesting atheism and intelligence questions, and maybe you tried the dental one as well because what the heck is that even about?Only there aren’t many quantum dental hygiene questions, so your interest there doesn’t mean much, but by now half your feed is atheism and intelligence, because you keep clicking on those stories.If you don’t like it, the fix is to stop reading so many of them. Just skip over the stuff you don’t care about, it will gradually fade back into the woodwork.But the point is, Quora itself has large amounts of conversations in topics you aren’t seeing, it isn’t really focussed on the ones you happen to see. If you go to a buddy’s computer and look at his Quora feed, you’ll see stories you never even heard of.Same will be true on Facebook, and other social media that uses similar schemes to try and keep your attention, by the way, even if it ends up being self defeating when applied to many of us.If you feed me nothing but quantum dental hygiene stories, I’m going to get bored and leave your media fairly quickly.

Dentistry, and competent dentists, will always be in demand, as long as humans have teeth. In fact, good dentists are a disappearing breed in India.The quantum of incompetence creeping into the profession in India is worrisome.Sometime in the late 1980s, we saw the appearance of the first few private dental colleges in India. For some convoluted reasons, there has been a mushrooming of such institutes thereafter (309 at last count), with a pure profit motive and hardly any checks and measures regarding quality. At the same time, there had been a shortage of competent, dedicated teachers in these institutes, and a vast influx of students who were more interested to ‘buy’ a degree rather than learn the art and science of dentistry.As a result of the scarcity of teachers, the last decade has seen both academicians and clinicians, irrespective of their commitment to teach, being welcomed with open arms to these institutes. The shortage of teachers was perceived by the dentists’ regulatory body to be due to inadequate post-graduate seats, and institutes were allowed to start post-graduate courses with scores of seats, irrespective of the quality of teachers, students or facilities.The output was often below par. Yet, if one had a post-graduate degree, one could join the bandwagon of dental faculty, and sail through promotions based on years of service, rather than quality of teaching and research. With the massive inflow of fresh faculty, colleges took advantage of the situation, removing good teachers on higher salaries and taking on those that were willing to accept a lower pay - thus extending the institutes’ profit margins further.Today, there are fewer jobs than dental graduates and post-graduates, and the pay has become progressively abysmal. No good student in his right mind wants to take up dentistry as a career - which is evident from the newspaper report this week. In order to have some sort of standardisation of student quality, a National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) was introduced compulsorily from this year, with the 50th percentile being considered as the minimum standard for eligibility.Since a large number of seats still did not have any takers, the dentists’ regulatory body decided to lower the standards, to allow seats to be filled and for colleges to make enough money to carry on business as usual.This gives us a fairly good idea about the quality of students now entering post-graduate studies across the country. In 3 years’ time, they will be populating the faculty positions in the same institutes, accepting lower pay than whatever is given today. And the cycle will keep on repeating itself. Till a good, intelligent, competent dentist would be really really hard to come by.As to the faculty, underpaid positions do not attract good people, Yet, many colleges are now reducing the salaries of faculty on the pretext of not being able to fill seats (and make profits). Here’s an example from one such institute. Others convey the message verbally.For those who consider a career in academics after going through 8–9 years of dental education, I am sorry to say that the picnic is over - and it will get worse in the next 5–6 years. For those that want to consider dentistry as a career with their own independent practice after receiving their degrees, the advice is, find yourself a good college to go through (the government-owned colleges still maintain some quality), learn well and learn to work well, start your own practice (it won’t be easy, since you will need to build your reputation in an arena where a majority of practitioners are disgustingly incompetent), remain true to your patients, and you as a dentist will certainly be in demand.Good luck!EDIT: After almost 3 years of having written this, in 2020, dentists all over the world including India shut shop for months on end, terrified by the unknown dread of the Coronavirus and COVID-19. After another year, or almost 4 years after I wrote the initial piece, dentists have opened up their practices again, and the demand for good, safe dentistry is still there. Many dentists that dared to continue to practice in India in 2020, were infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, simply due to a lack of understanding & guidelines about how the virus is transmitted and how to prevent such transmission. Today, most dentists are back to work, because their profession continues to be in demand, but they (as also many other medical specialists) still fail to understand how the virus spreads. Let us hope that the multitude of COVID-19 vaccines will prevent deaths, even with uncontrolled spread.Yours truly worked as a dentist without a break all through the pandemic, without getting infected. Transmission of diseases by all kinds of microorganisms can be controlled and prevented, only if due diligence is done to every recommended sterilization and sanitization measure. Those dentists that do not learn about it, will not be in very much of demand in another 2–3 years.

The upside of Jill Biden dropping her honorific would be soothing the fragile egos of men who still privately fume that women are “allowed” in higher education. The downside of Jill Biden doing so would be reinforcing the notion that proper women are uneducated, and that educated women should hide their intelligence lest they seem unfeminine.Let’s start with the fact that the argument Joe Something-or-other — not a doctor of anything, not a professor, not even an adjunct, and not a quantum physicist, so I refuse to refer to him by his full name, okay? — the argument that he makes is completely disingenuous. Can you honestly imagine him spilling this much bile over a man referring to himself as “Doctor”?As a litigator, I routinely deal with experts, some of whom are medical/dental doctors and some who have doctorates in other fields, such as physics, chemistry or engineering. The basic rules of etiquette require that you use the honorific “Dr.” when addressing, or referring to, someone who has earned a doctorate in whatever field it happens to be. To knowingly use “Ms.” or “Mr.” instead — to say nothing of addressing a learned woman as “kiddo”, “honey”, “tootsie”, “sweetheart”, “sugartits”, or whatever other denigrating epithets men like Joe-Whatever like to employ when commanding women to be more modest — is rude, and an insult.The only difference in addressing a medical doctor, or a dentist or a veterinarian, as opposed to a PhD, a doctor or education, a doctor of nursing, etc. is that with the former, the term “doctor” can be a stand-alone, whereas in the latter categories, it’s used only as an honorific before the person’s surname.Joe-Schmoe goes a step further to state that no one should be referred to as a “doctor” unless he — it can only be a “he”, of course — has delivered a baby. This is truly bewildering. Delivering babies is part of obstetrics, which is a subset of medicine most doctors do not practice. Only a fraction of physicians are OBGYN’s, and the vast majority of them are women. (How medical specialties vary by gender) Neurosurgeons don’t deliver babies. Cardiologists don’t deliver babies. Now, it’s true that residents rotate through Labor & Delivery even if they aren’t training to become obstetricians, and so, it’s not impossible for a resident to deliver a baby when the OB attending is not available, but this is not normal practice, and the odds of it happening for any particular resident MD or DO are low. I get that Joe Gramps was born in the early 14th century, before medical specialization, but the world has changed quite a bit since then. The idea that all medical doctors deliver babies is arcane and juvenile; perhaps if Crazy Grandpa had ever thought to expand his education beyond English literature and interacting with ignorami such as himself, he’d be aware of that.On the other hand, obstetricians are not the only ones who deliver babies as a routine part of their job. Nurse-midwives do that too, but something tells me WSJ’s discount columnist would rather gnaw his limbs off than to call a nurse-midwife “doctor”.In other words, the “wise man” who supposedly told our impressionable Joe-baby that only men who deliver babies should be called “doctors” was, in fact, a moron.More than anything, however, we should drop any pretense that that editorial was written in good faith. It is dripping with misogyny and impotent anger. Its complaints run the gamut from lamenting that the prestige of PhD’s has supposedly declined (since women started getting them in significant numbers), to insinuating that education is not a valid field for academic study (as opposed to hyperanalyzing countless grim, predictable, narcissistic examples of male wish fulfillment, which is what Joe studied occasionally, when he had free time from chasing wenches, back before electricity), to dismissing Dr. Biden’s doctoral dissertation on the ground that its title is not “promising” to someone with a mind as impoverished as Joe Whatsisface’s.In other words, it was a typical WSJ column.