On the other hand, AMA's declaration could help increase funding for future obesity research. It could also lead to payment for doctors who want to simply talk to patients about nutrition or exercise -- time that's not currently reimbursed by insurance plans.
I don't know enough about medicine to discriminate well between a disease, condition, syndrome etc., but some of the points made in the article make it sound like this new designation of obesity as a disease is mainly to do with appearances.
Some obese people do eat a lot, but the causality direction is unclear. It's likely they eat a lot in large part because they're obese.
The human body in general is amazingly good at calibrating how much you eat versus how active you are to stay within a pretty consistent weight range - if it weren't, we'd all starve or become morbidly obese in response to tiny inadvertent changes in diet or exercise. But in some people, that calibration mechanism is off - they feel hungrier than they should or their metabolism works slower than it should given their size, and the mismatch leads them to become obese. We don't yet know why and we don't yet know what can be done to reliably change or fix it.
We've almost certainly been underthinking the whole thing.
This, totally. They basically have to make a custom app for every platform/browser, when a single responsive website would have done the trick. I really don't understand the rationale here. What does a plugin platform give them that a simple website does not, if not additional tracking behavior? Does their monetization strategy involve selling data?
Actually creating an add-on allowed a lot more than offering a simple web-site. Remember Feedly is not new, it's been out there for years. Back then, offering an add-on allowed them to lower the stress on their platform by allowing most of the network trafic to be directly between your browser and google's servers. Now they have migrated on their own Cloud platform, they will probably very soon offer a plain site version without the need for add-ons.
"They basically have to make a custom app for every platform/browser, when a single responsive website would have done the trick" ... well their are 2 things there: packaging add-ons for multiple platforms is not difficult. You create some kind of packaging wrapper code around a common codebase. It's building a codebase which works on many javascript and DOM engines that takes time and effort. So building a "responsive website" (that works on most browsers) is not much "easier" than packaging custom app for each browser.
Is the extension at least stable? I seem to have terrible luck with extensions and also seem to run into memory leaks or other issues so I tend to avoid them lately.
I'm taking two Coursera courses at the moment - Calculus One and Pattern-Oriented Software Architectures for Concurrent and Networked Software. I'm very pleased with the material and presentation in both, but I don't think I could handle more than two such (relatively difficult) courses at any one time.
Codecademy and Udacity allow you to freely dip in and out of lectures and assessments, whereas Coursera courses demand that you deliver quizzes/assignments every week. It's hard to recommend one approach over the other -- with weekly deadlines I find I have more of an incentive to engage in the lectures and course materials, but the added failure conditions can push students to abandon the course.
The performance might not be any better, but the comparison would be.