ARTS & FARCES internet

ESRD

More than 25 percent of the American citizenry has two or more chronic conditions, defined by a US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report (.pdf; 242KB) as including arthritis, asthma, dementia, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, HIV, kidney disease, mental illness, obstructive lung disease, and osteoporosis. These conditions require ongoing medical care and often limit patients’ life activities. Predictably, it gets worse as we age: 66 percent of Americans older than 65 and 75 percent older than 80 have multiple chronic ailments. It’s no surprise that HHS has discovered “people with multiple chronic diseases commonly receive disjointed, often conflicting care,” according to Steve Lohr, writing for the New York Times, reports that as part of its 2009 economic recovery package, the Obama administration and the US congress allocated some US$27 billion—up to US$44,000 for each physician—to incentivize doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic records. Predictably, the Republicans are looking for ways to de-fund the initiative even though it has enjoyed bipartisan support for years. Lohr reports that only 30 percent of physicians in the US currently use digital records. In my experience, the problem isn’t incentivizing the use of digital records; rather it’s the lack of incentive to interconnect disparate digital records that already exist. I haven’t been to an on-the-grid practitioner in years that doesn’t use digital records. The problem is that few practitioner’s systems interconnect with those of a hospital or her colleagues. This causes far more problems than it solves and leads to mistakes and inefficiencies like needing to draw blood from a patient from whom it is nearly impossible to find an appropriate vein from which to draw minutes after dialysis treatment has been completed, where an extra blood draw would have taken mere seconds. Another example: Scheduling a kidney failure patient for a CT scan—using contrast dye, which is toxic to kidneys—immediately after a dialysis treatment rather than before so the dye could be dialyzed off immediately afterward. Both of these happened to me in hospital, in the last three days.

Internet

The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that blogging by 12- to 17-year-olds fell by half between 2006-09. Currently, only 14 percent of that age group that use the internet have blogs. Lapsed bloggers cite lack of time and readers as the reason they’ve migrated en masse to Facebook and Twitter. Elisa Camahort Page, one of BlogHer’s co-founders tells Verne G. Kopytoff, writing for the New York Times, that blogs are still where discussions of substance take place. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter,” Camahort Page tells Kopytoff. Meanwhile, 16 percent of those between ages 34-45 who use the internet have blogs, an increase of six percent; 11 percent of those 46-55; and eight percent for the 65-73 age group.

Google has made changes necessary to its search algorithm that would “raise the rankings of high-quality websites and reduce those of lesser sites, affecting 12 percent of search queries,” according to Claire Cain Miller, writing for the New York Times. Cain Miller reports that Google makes about 500—mostly minor—changes annually to its search algorithm but Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, told her, “We haven’t done a change where we have impacted low-quality sites at this level in years. It’s a clear evolution of the algorithm as the web is evolving, the content on the web is evolving, the user expectation is evolving.”

Media

Amazon, in a not-so-subtle move to challenge Netflix for video distribution, has begun to offer instant streaming of more than 5,000 movies and television shows to its Amazon Prime members at no additional charge. Amazon Prime is a US$79 per year membership program that offers free two-day shipping on Amazon orders. Because it uses Adobe Flash, Amazon’s video streaming service won’t work on any of Apple’s iOS devices. Until that’s addressed, Netflix still has a distinct advantage. By current Hollywood standards, Amazon’s streaming offerings are currently pretty weak, but this could be a distribution answer for independent film productions.

Politics

Johann Hari, writing for The Nation, pinpoints the most bewildering question on anyone’s mind that’s been paying the least attention for the past few years. Imagine a progressive Tea Party, one where instead of sniping at each other, the citizenry instead bands together across false political boundaries to rail against the true offenders. “To demand the government finally regulate the behavior of corporations and the superrich, and force them to start paying taxes,” writes Hari. The fake populism of the Tea Party transforms into real populism and points the way to a true “alternative to making the poor and middle class pay for a crisis caused by the rich.” Hari points out that this shift has already taken place in Britain thanks to a group known as UK Uncut, noting that £7 billion in cuts to services for the poor and middle class is offset by Vodafone’s outstanding tax bill of £6 billion. UK Uncut staged a single sit-in at Vodafone’s busy Oxford Street store, shutting it down. The next day three additional Vodafone stores were shut down in Leeds and the group then announced a national day of protest. All of the actions were coordinated and organized solely through Twitter, with UK Uncut asking direction from its audiences. Most remarkable, according to Hari, is the diversity of the participants—most of whom had never before engaged in political action. The common ground was as simple as it was palpable: If you want to do business in our country, you’ll pay our taxes. Can this British movement translate across the Atlantic? Hari writes, “The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) calculated in 2008 that 83 of the 100 biggest US corporations hide fortunes in tax havens. And even without these shelters, the rich have been virtually exempted from taxes across America. Billionaire Warren Buffet recently conducted a straw poll in his office and found he paid a lower proportion of his income in taxes than anybody else there—and considerably less than his secretary.” Eliminating tax havens was, after all, one of President Obama’s big campaign issues, promising to pay for his programs by “closing corporate loopholes and tax havens.” Predictably, he’s done almost nothing to realize that goal. Time for a nudge.

Kevin Drum, writing for Mother Jones, has penned one of the best pieces of political analysis I’ve read in a very long time. The labor unions provided an institutional base for the Democrats until they stupidly refused to endorse George McGovern in 1972, despite McGovern’s stellar record supporting organized labor. As a result, the Democrats abandoned organized labor and we’ve had three decades of deregulated business and finance. “There were a lot of ways America could have responded to the twin challenges of ‘70s-era stagflation and the globalization of finance, but the polices we chose almost invariably ignored the stagnating wages of the middle class and instead catered to the desires of the superrich: Hefty tax cuts on both high incomes and capital gains,” writes Drum. “Deregulation of S&Ls (.pdf; 138KB) that led to extensive looting and billions in taxpayer losses. Monetary policy focused excessively on inflation instead of employment levels. Tacit acceptance of asset bubbles as a way of maintaining high economic growth. An unwillingness to regulate financial derivatives that led to enormous Wall Street profits and contributed to the financial crisis of 2008. At nearly every turn, corporations and the financial industry used their institutional muscle to get what they wanted, while the working class sat by and watched, mostly unaware that any of this was even happening.” Accordingly, Drum points out, income disparity has grown far faster and far worse in the US than in other developed countries. In 30 years the US has migrated from something close to an egalitarian economy to an extractive economy based completely on benefitting the rich and superrich. “The entire bottom 80 percent now loses a collective US$743 billion each year, thanks to the cumulative effect of slow wage growth. Conversely, the top 1 percent gains US$673 billion. That’s a pretty close match. Basically, the money gained by the top 1 percent seems to have come almost entirely from the bottom 80 percent.”

Ian Murphy, editor of the Buffalo Beast, crank-called Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, posing as right-wing billionaire and Tea Party financier David Koch. in the 20 minute conversation, Walker acknowledged considering using provocateurs to disrupt the protestors rallying against his anti-collective bargaining legislation and other political dirty tricks. Adam Weinstein, writing for Mother Jones, has analysis and an interview with Murphy. The Society of Professional Journalists called Murphy’s outlaw journalism interview “underhanded and unethical” cautioning “credible” news organizations to be cautious in their reporting of the story. Big surprise.

Publishing

It’s getting more interesting to watch traditional publishers and pundits carp about Apple’s subscription terms for its App Store. Apple takes a 30 percent cut on subscriptions sold for its iOS devices through its App Store. The consensus seems to be that this is outrageously high. David Carr’s recent column for the New York Times—bizarre high school metaphor and all—is just the most recent. If you’ve ever tried to negotiate a distribution deal—a single magazine title or a small book imprint, take your pick—you know that 30 percent is, if anything, something of a bargain. Or, for subscriptions, think solely about subscriber acquisition cost; it’s always much more than 30 percent per subscriber per year. David Wertheimer, executive director of the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California is being disingenuous when he tells Carr, “If you are a publisher, it [Apple’s terms] puts things into a tailspin: The business model you have been working on for many years just lost 30 percent off the top.” Publishers who don’t want to distribute their publications through Apple are free not to do so. The only problem I have with Apple’s terms for subscriptions is the same problem I have with Apple’s App Store terms in general: Apple inserts itself in the middle of the relationship with the customer. As I’ve written in the past, the alternative for publishers is simple: Sell your subscriptions and your digital publications on your website, without digital rights management (DRM) and instruct your customers how to move the material to their iOS devices through iTunes. Under regulation pressure, Apple will most likely eventually give up on its prohibition against publishers linking to their websites for subscription sales and absolute and sole control over customer data. Until then, publishers will have to decide for themselves whether or not they can thumb their collective noses at Apple’s 100 million iTunes customers (and their 100 million credit cards). As Carr writes, “That shimmering retail environment, home to more than 100 million credit cards freely given, is the only place on the planet that has shown an ability to separate consumers from their money for digital media.”

Spirituality

China has instituted a new policy—or is actively enforcing an old policy, I’m not sure which, whereby Tibetan living Buddhas must obtain permission to reincarnate. For some time, the Chinese government has insisted that it has the sole authority to approve the appointments of both the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. In 1995, the Dalai Lama announced that a search had identified the 11th Panchen Lama, who has since disappeared. As a response to the Dalai Lama’s announcement, the Chinese restarted the search and picked one at random from three finalists. Jane Macartney, writing for the Sunday Times, reports that the traditional search for a reincarnate involves clues left by the deceased and the visions of leading monks.

Technology

Apple announced new MacBook Pro laptops built around Intel’s Core i5 and Core i7 dual- and quad-core chips and a new high-speed data and display port called Thunderbolt. The new MacBook Pros are expected to be about twice as fast. While the Intel chips incorporate an integrated graphics processor, Apple included discrete AMD Radeon graphics chips on the 15- and 17-inch laptops. A new camera, capable of streaming 720p video is also included. But the big addition is Thunderbolt, Apple’s name for its implementation of Intel’s Light Peak project. Capable of a theoretical 10 Gbps symmetrical throughput, Thunderbolt is twice as fast as USB 3.0 and more than 10 times faster than FireWire 800. Initial testing will reveal how close real-world performance is to the 10 Gbps theoretical ceiling. The Thunderbolt port provides up to 10 watts of power to a maximum of six daisy-chained peripherals—either high-performance data devices or a single high-resolution display. It’s unfortunate that Apple’s initial implementation supports only a single display. Originally designed to use fiber-optic cable, Apple’s initial iteration of Thunderbolt will use copper interconnects and will be limited to three-meter cable lengths. The Thunderbolt port on the new MacBook Pros looks just like Apple’s Mini DisplayPort and monitors that support Mini DisplayPort can be connected to Thunderbolt as can DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, and VGA devices with Mini DisplayPort adapters. Imagine that, a new port from Apple that doesn’t require new connectors.