ARTS & FARCES internet

ESRD

If you want to be a barber in Minnesota, you have to be licensed. If you want to work as a dialysis technician in Minnesota—the single most invasive medical procedure that takes place outside of a hospital—you don’t need a license, or a certificate, or anything. It’s the same most everywhere in the US. All that changed on 15 April 2010, when the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) ESRD Conditions for Coverage (.pdf; 1.4MB) published on 15 April 2008 went into effect. Dialysis technicians that provide direct patient care now must hold a national license. It’s about time. Of course there’s a predictable political hole (.pdf; 217KB) big enough to drive a proverbial truck through. “[Patient Care Dialysis Technicians] PCTs hired after October 14, 2008, must be certified within 18 months of their date of hire.” Once again, evidence that all US laws are enacted to solely benefit the corporations.

Internet

Google will let users encrypt their searches beginning next week. About time.

Politics

Firedoglake’s Jane Hamsher has a typically excellent analysis of how President Obama has packed the Debt Commission with advocates of both benefits and privatization of Social Security. Both parties want this commission’s activities to happen in public, but the commission has refused. THe commission has also refused to make its findings public prior to the November election. Obama, Hamsher reminds us, has been intent on cutting Social Security since he took office. This is how political reporting should be done; intensive research instead of “sources” with an agenda.

Privacy

For the last month Facebook has been falling all over itself to explain changes it made to its privacy policy while at the same time dealing with security issues (email addresses, IP addresses, and chat logs have all been exposed). Facebook is making the mistake of thinking it’s just internet technophiles who are riled up about privacy issues; that normals just don’t care that much. Here’s how you can tell that’s a smokescreen: Facebook recently hired Timothy Muris, US Federal Trade Commission chair under George W. Bush, to manage what has become unmanageable. Danah Boyd has published “Facebook and ‘radical transparency,” the best analysis of the situation I’ve found.

Publishing

Nobody knows what journalism or journalists, for that matter, are worth any more. After reading Andrew Rice’s “Putting a Price on Words” for the New York Times, it’s clear that we’re in the middle of a race to the bottom.

User experience

Jakob Nielsen has published a preliminary usability finding for Apple’s iPad. Nielsen draws comparisons between the iPad and the 1993 web when Mosaic introduced the image map. Any part of any image can be a user interface element. “... anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device,” writes Nielsen. “There are no standards and no expectations.” Nielsen goes on to note that there are few perceived affordances on the device. All of the elements are “flat.” “There’s no lighting model or pseudo-dimensionality to indicate raised or lowered visual elements that call out to be activated.” According to Nielsen, the penalty for the beautiful appearance of apps on the iPad is “the re-emergence of a usability problem we haven’t seen since the mid-1990s: Users don’t know where they can click.” That’s not the end of it. Inconsistent interaction design across apps makes it impossible for users to transfer skills across apps. It just gets worse from there. Nielsen offers some fairly solid advice for app developers and the 93-page report of findings is a must read for user experience professionals and app developers alike.