ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Because kids just aren’t exposed to enough advertising, Twin Cities schools are beginning to allow advertisers to present their messages to students on their school lockers. Norman Draper, writing for the Star Tribune, reports the Centennial school board is scheduled to decide 1 November if it will allow advertising “on up to 10 percent of the available surfaces in all of the district’s seven schools.” Draper reports the district stands to make US$184,000 per year from the deal. The St. Francis schools have already entered into one-year experimental agreement with Coon Rapids-based School Media’s who will begin installing the ads next week. School Media’s expects to have nine local school districts under contract by the end of the year. Other school districts have decided against such advertising, at least for now, and the Minneapolis School District prohibits such advertising.

Censorship

News Corporation, in ongoing contract disagreements with Cablevision, extended its blackout of the Fox Broadcasting network by blocking Cablevision customer access to fox.com and Hulu. The message to customers: You’re not going to watch Fox programming online if you aren’t paying for a Fox cable package. Brian Stelter, writing for the New York Times, cites Corie Wright, Free Press’s general counsel as saying, “access to fox.com and hulu.com is completely unrelated to Fox’s relationship with Cablevision.” Stelter also cites a statement by Representative Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts): “The tying of cable TV subscription to access to internet fare freely available to other consumers is a very serious concern.”

ESRD

If your health insurance company doesn’t enjoy “most favored nation” privileges with your health care providers, you may be paying 30-40 percent more than you should. That’s the assertion of the US Justice Department and the State of Michigan in a lawsuit against Blue Cross Blue SHield of Michigan. Robert Pear, writing for the New York Times, reports Christine A. Varney, the assistant attorney general who filed the lawsuit, as saying, “Our lawsuit alleges that the intent and effect of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan’s contracts is to raise hospital costs for competing health plans and reduce competition for the sale of health insurance. As a result, consumers in Michigan are paying more for their health care services and health insurance.” Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan is by far the largest health insurer in the state, insuring “more than nine times as many Michigan residents as its next largest commercial health insurance competitor,” according to Pear. The insurer negotiated prices with providers that included favorable pricing at the alleged mandatory expense of competitors—the so-called “most favored nation” clause. The complaint alleges that the insurer required five hospitals to charge other insurers between 25-39 percent more.

In its latest project, ProPublica has the first in a series of investigative reports on physicians on the pharmaceutical industry’s payroll. Big Pharma insists it hires only the most respected doctors to teach about their drugs. “But an investigation by ProPublica uncovered hundreds of doctors on company payrolls who had been accused of professional misconduct, were disciplined by state boards, or lacked credentials as researchers or specialists,” write Charles Ornstein, Tracy Weber, and Dan Nguyen. As part of its investigation, ProPublica developed an extensive database of drug company payments to doctors, covering US$257.8 million since 2009. ProPublica used the database to identify “the highest-paid doctors, then checked their credentials and disciplinary records.” And that’s just from the drug companies that have disclosed their payments.

I stopped reusing dialysers years ago, but every so often my dialysis provider asks me to reconsider. It’s almost certainly driven from corporate, as a cost-savings measure. I always politely decline. You should too. Peter Laird, writing for Dialysis from the sharp end of the needle, cites the most recent study, but they all say the same thing: Non-reuse is associated with improved survival rates. Early on, reuse of as many parts in the process possible was necessary in order for the highest number of patients to receive dialysis at all. That’s no longer the case and hasn’t been for decades. As Laird writes, “The burden of cost to the medical system from one new case of Hepatitis C dwarfs the expected cost savings of reuse, not to speak of the impact on patient’s lives.”

Internet

Scott Rosenberg has a thought-provoking article applying the Gutenberg parenthesis to what’s become known as the “open web.” The Gutenberg parenthesis is the notion that something generally seen as innovative is collectively seen as a step up or forward but may, in reality, be a temporary period of disruption in the dominant regime. Rosenberg: “‘Open,’ then, isn’t a category; It’s a spectrum. The spectrum runs from effectively locked-down platforms and services (think: Broadcast TV) to those that are substantially unencumbered by technical or legal constraint. There is probably no such thing as a totally open system. But it’s fairly easy to figure out whether one system is more or less open than another.”

Media

Tanzina Vega, writing for the New York Times, reports that the Huffington Post‘s Investigative Fund will become part of the Center for Public Integrity. At more than 50 employees, the Center for Public Integrity becomes one of the largest nonprofit investigative newsrooms in the US. According to Vega, the Huffington Post “will transfer US$2 million in grants and financing from the investigative fund to support the new venture” and will feature articles from the Center for Public Integrity on its website. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation provided an additional US$250,000 for the transition. Walter E. Buxenberg, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity told Vega that “the center expected to file 500 investigative reports this year, with a dozen of them being major projects.”

Privacy

To reinforce its case for an overhaul to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), the Obama administration has disclosed two episodes in which court-approved surveillance was delayed because of technical problems with two major telecommunications carriers. In 2008-09, more than 100 court-ordered wiretaps were unable to be executed for two periods lasting eight months and nine days, respectively. Earlier this year another carrier was unable to comply with 14 court-ordered wiretaps for various periods of time ranging from nine days to six weeks. Problems executing the wiretaps were reportedly a result of network updates by the carriers. The administration is also garnering support for a plan to bring communications-based internet companies—Blackberry, Facebook, Gmail, and Skype for example—under the mandates of CALEA. As Charlie Savage, reporting for the New York Times, writes, “The issue has added importance because the surveillance technologies developed by the United States to hunt for terrorists and drug traffickers can be also used by repressive regimes to hunt for political dissidents.” Civil libertarians note that the law never anticipated US law enforcement to have such broad reach.

Technology

Is the iOS/Android competition a rerun of the Macintosh/Windows competition of the 1980-90s? Well, it’s certainly open v. closed all over again. Mitch Kapor, who knows a thing or two billion about this stuff is quoted by Miguel Helft in the New York Times as saying, “Having a tightly controlled ecosystem, which is what Apple has, is a large short-term advantage and a large long-term disadvantage. The question is, how long is the short term?” Kapor expands on his reasoning, briefly, in “How the long run favors the more open ecosystem.”

User experience

Andy Clarke’s Hardboiled Web Design appears to warrant a look. Following the model of Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers, Clarke’s book aims to get web workers up to speed on HTML5 and CSS3 as quickly as possible. Available for preorder in print and electronic formats from Five Simple Steps.

Jeffrey Zeldman’s “iPad as the new Flash” is a must read for all user experience professionals. Declaring that “never have so many embraced a great product for exactly the wrong reasons” with regard to the iPad, Zeldman rails against publishers and designers who fall back into the old habits of doing “things they once did in Flash—without the taint of Flash.”