Fact Checking Dave Ramsey

Recently I've been listening to a lot of Dave Ramsey podcasts. I've been using Pocket Casts ($4 on the Google Play store), which is great for playing podcasts at faster speeds (I use 1.5x). I really like listening to his show, but I've noticed that sometimes he gives statistics that are blatantly false.

Some examples:

• Dave Ramsey was speaking to someone whose son was applying for medical school. Dave was discouraging any kind of debt, of course, and then mentioned that something like 75% of medical students drop out and do not finish (I don't remember the actual number, but it was around there). This sounded pretty suspicious to me, so I did a little research. I found this study by the Association of American Medical Colleges, where they found that around 81% of medical students graduate within 4 years, 94% finish within 7 years, and 96% within 10 years of their initial matriculation.
  
  
• The other day, Dave was talking with a woman who had just found out her husband was having an affair and was addicted to porn. Dave spoke about the evils of pornography, then said that the porn industry had more revenue than all professional sports in America combined. A simple internet search showed that this is also untrue. I'm not saying that the porn industry isn't huge or not a problem, but we don't have to lie in an attempt to make our points stronger when the truth is plenty of evidence in our favor.

Sorry I don't have dates for any of these. If I come up with more, I'll try to post them here with more specifics.

Update: On 5/29, Dave repeated the statement that most medical students don't graduate. It was part of a longer monologue that included similar statements about undergrads and law students (both of which I am much more ready to believe). He actually gave a statistic for undergrads, that only 60% finish. That sounds about right. Conspicuously, he gave no such statistics for medical students or law students, although I suspect he's more correct about law students.

ADAC/Philips Pinnacle3 Postscript to PDF Hotscripts

A few months ago, I noticed a need at work for an improved method of digitization treatment plans for radiation therapy. The images that were being digitally archived were pretty poor quality. To improve the images and simplify workflow, I developed a set of three hotscripts in Pinnacle³. Below are descriptions and links to each script. The scripts are saved as .txt files so they can be easily viewed in your browser, but to use them they should just have the .p3rtp extension. Anyone who uses these will likely need to edit the file paths for their clinic's specific filesystem.

1. MakePatientFolder2.Script.p3rtp - This script makes a patient directory named with the patient's last name and their medical record number. In Pinnacle, it also sets the current printer to "Print to file" in that directory for both color and plan printing.
2. Ps2PdfMerge3.Script.p3rtp - This script takes all .ps files (must be named *.ps) that are in the current patient's directory (as created by the first script above) and merges them into one PDF file. The quality is reasonably high (see below for a few more details). 
3. DeletePatientFolder.Script.p3rtp - Optional script to delete the current patient's folder and anything inside it. Useful for keeping the directory free of clutter without manually going in and deleting folders and files. WARNING: Be careful when editing the file paths if using this. If you put in the wrong file path, you just might start recursively deleting everything on your server. While it might make a cool (toy) story, it may not make for a pleasant performance review.

When I originally wrote the script, I was using the PS2PDF option "-dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode", which produces lossless images. It really made some great looking PDF files, and they were pretty small in size. However, after the clinic started using the scripts, I found that certain pages in some files (but not all) were throwing an "Insufficient data for an image" error in Adobe Reader 11 (and Acrobat 9, and likely others, but not Reader 8 or Foxit reader). After struggling with it for a while, I finally had to admit defeat and changed to using the option "-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress", which is the highest lossy quality available. The file sizes are about twice what they were with the lossless option, and there are some small compression artifacts, but the results are still good. There's some more information about this in comments in the Ps2PdfMerge3 script.

Link to folder of scripts: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B5kK96g_etabamJLMzZxdTRmaGc&usp=sharing

Infromation

Why do I always type "infromation" instead of "information"? Glad I have spell check and autocorrect!

Conservative talk show hosts

I realized yesterday that conservative talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity really want the Democrats to stay in power. They want a Democrat in the White House, and they want Democrats controlling as much of the federal government as possible. It makes their jobs a lot easier because they can just take any action by the Democratic leaders and denigrate and ridicule it.

When Republicans are in power, they don't have a readily available scapegoat for political problems. Ridiculing the Right would look foolish, since that's what they supposedly stand for (not that they seem to care about looking foolish), but continuing to harp on the left would make them look like bullies, and no one likes to see someone getting kicked when they're down (not to mention it would look even more foolish to keep blaming the people who aren't the one's in power). So they end up with tougher jobs and have to actually put some effort into their shows.