ARTS & FARCES internet

ESRD

Judge Roger Vinson of the Federal District Court in Pensacola, FL, in a 78-page opinion (.pdf; 270KB), has ruled it unconstitutional to require US citizens to purchase commercial insurance. Vinson, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, invalidated the entire Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) on the grounds that the insurance requirement was “inextricably bound” to the law’s other provisions. “The act, like a defectively designed watch, needs to be redesigned and reconstructed by the watchmaker,” wrote Vinson. Vinson’s opinion holds that the insurance requirement exceeds Congressional regulatory powers under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Interestingly, Vinson went further, writing that Article I of the Constitution, granting Congress authority to make “necessary and proper” laws didn’t apply.

The US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released its final rule for the Quality Incentive Program (QIP) for end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients. There are only three metrics in the final rule: The percentage of patients with hemoglobin below 10 g/dL; the percentage of patients with hemoglobin above 12 g/dL; and the percentage of patients with a urea reduction ratio (URR) of at least 65 percent. Jeffrey Berns, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and editor of Medscape Nephrology says these metrics are reasonable but questions whether they’re adequate.

Intellectual property

US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) wants to know just what the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is doing by seizing internet domain names under its Operation In Our Sites program. While the domain seizures have all been approved by a federal judge, owners of the domains get no warning or chance to challenge the alleged illegality of their websites. Nate Anderson, writing for Ars Technica, reports the domain for a sports website was seized after having twice been found legal by Spanish courts was seized.

Internet

US Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) and Al Franken (D-Minnesota) have introduced the Internet Freedom, Broadband Promotion, and Consumer Protection Act (.pdf; 61KB), asserting that the US Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) open internet rules just don’t go far enough with regard to network neutrality. The proposed legislation would extend network neutrality to all internet access, including wireless. Specifically, the bill would prohibit internet service providers from charging for different levels of quality of service or prioritized delivery; prohibit any sort of prioritization unless the user requests such prioritization; and prohibit interconnection refusal.

The European telecommunications giants have commissioned a report (.pdf; 5.2MB) that concludes—surprise, surprise—they need to be able to meter bandwidth, raise charges, and charge three times for each packet that traverses their networks. Nate Anderson, writing for Ars Technica reports the European internet service providers want to charge content providers almost US$0.04 per GB transferred. Unless it’s to a mobile network; then the charge rises to almost US$2.50 per GB.

Microsoft has announced Internet Explorer 9 will support H.264 video natively and has released plug-ins for Windows versions of Firefox and Chrome to support the video codec. Perhaps more importantly—and certainly more interestingly—Microsoft has called Google out to answer questions about liability, risks, and support for WebM.

Kat Aaron, writing for Mediashift, calls on news organizations to take a stand on the network neutrality issue, despite their bicameral love-hate relationship with the internet. Aaron writes that news organizations benefit greatly by distributed research and reporting made available by an open and bi-directional internet. “No one knows just what the web looks like without net neutrality,” Aaron writes. “... What we do know is this: Without an open internet, all the creative crowdsourced projects are castles built on sand. Despite journalism’s increasing reliance on a neutral network, most journalists and their trade associations have been silent on this issue.”

Law

Demonstrating their commitment to libertarianism in name only, Republicans in the US House of Representatives have scheduled a vote on extending some of the more onerous provisions of the Patriot Act. If not extended, the provisions would expire at the end of February 2011. The provisions in question include roving wiretaps, seizure of “any tangible things” seen to be relevant to an investigation, and the ability to obtain wiretaps against terrorism suspects who are unconnected to any foreign government or known terrorist group. In the US Senate, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) has proposed extending the provisions through 2013 with additional controls and reporting requirements. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California), actually working in favor of the extension, has proposed extending the provisions through 2013 without change. Various Republicans want the provisions made permanent, blocking a Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Leahy’s measure.

Media

AOL’s plan to master the media universe is as disappointing as it is depressing. It’s all about quantity and not a mention of quality anywhere. Increase stories to 55,000 per month. Increase pageviews per story to 7,000. Optimize 95 percent of stories for search engines. Sigh. Just add water and you too can have your own content farm. I’m going to crawl into a corner and re-read Pirsig for, oh I don’t know, the 19th time (I’ve only re-read LILA twice; it’s much too difficult and I’m not intelligent enough).

Relatively new web services and applications are changing the way we read online content in a manner similar to the effect the digital video recorder (DVR) had on television, according to Jenna Wortham, writing for the New York Times. These services and applications more completely separate content from presentation on websites with a single click. The reaction by commercial online publishers when they hear of these applications is, predictably, sheer horror. Readers are, after all, avoiding advertising and carefully crafted (or not) layouts. Readability, one of the leading applications—and the code upon which Apple built Safari’s Reader—is launching a new service that charges a subscription fee and distributes 70 percent to publications used by its readers. “We were never about stripping ads or being an ad blocker,” Richard Ziade, the creator of Readability, told Wortham. “Can we come up with a mechanism to make the experience of reading on the web better, but also support content creators and publishers?” Readability has published its article publishing guidelines for publishers that’s heavily dependent on HTML5 and the hNews microformat specification.

Publishing

The New York Times has launched a story recommendation service on its website. It displays a collection of 20 stories you haven’t read but probably should. It’s remarkably accurate—I would have never found Doreen Carvajal’s article about a surgeon suspected of trafficking in human organs without it. One of the more interesting aspects of the service is the scoreboard in the right-most column displaying how many Times articles you’ve read this month and from which sections. For example, I’ve read 76 articles in the past month with the Business Day section leading ever so slightly over the Technology section, followed closely by US, World, and Arts. You can bet that one if the primary use cases the designers considered in developing the recommendation service was the shock value of just how many stories heavy users of the Times read in preparation for the newspaper’s forthcoming paywall.

What’s to happen of longform journalism? Magazines are dying an agonizing death and those that are surviving are dropping both rate base and page count in order to survive. Michelle Castillo, writing for Time‘s Techland, provides a good backgrounder on the problem and points to a possible solution. Wired editor Evan Ratliff, New Yorker editor Nicholas Thompson, and Jefferson Rabb, a freelance graphic designer, have collaborated on the development of The Atavist—a digital magazine and book publishing hybrid focused on producing longform journalism. Each piece, rather than being packaged with others around a theme or timeframe, is released as a standalone article. “The fact that there’s not a market for (longer writing) is entirely the product of print,” Ratliff told Castillo. “The reason that market disappeared is because you can’t find the pages in the magazine to do something that long because it requires advertisers to sustain it, and it’s too short for a book when have to charge US$25 for the hardback.” Two versions of each article are produced: A basic text and image treatment with audio of the author reading is available for US$1.99 as Amazon Kindle Singles and Barnes & Noble NOOKbooks; and an enhanced treatment, available for US$2.99 through Apple’s App Store, that includes “additional content like videos, timelines, brief biographies, and music files to further the reading experience.” Castillo reports The Atavist provides a four figure advance to authors and about 50 percent of net sales.

Speaking fees for writers—especially journalists—has always been a touchy ethical subject. But now that’s all changed. As Nick Summers, writing for the New York Observer, notes, “Old model: Tour the country to promote your book. New model: Write a book to tour the country.” And the fees are outrageous: “Today, pretty much everyone has a price; the Washington Speakers Bureau discreetly lists a fee range next to each of its clients, from Luke Russert (US$7,501 to US$10,000) to John Heilemann (US$10,001 to US$15,000) to Christiane Amanpour (US$40,001 and up),” writes Summers.

News Corporation’s The Daily launched this week. As expected it’s not even good enough to criticize—what would you expect from a digital publication that is completely and utterly disconnected. One thing The Daily does do, according to Peter Kirwan, writing for Wired, is to effectively set the bar for paid corporate-produced content on the web. “... For US$1 a week, or US$40 a year, US-based iPad users are being promised 100 pages of original editorial content every day,”  writes Kirwin who attributes the price point to “the absence of parallel production lines for print, web, and apps.”

Sustainability

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has approved Monsanto’s genetically modified alfalfa, a flowering pea used mainly for cattle feed. Most organic farmers oppose the move, except Organic Valley, Stonyfield Farm, and Whole Foods Markets; three of the biggest names in organic foods in the US. Arial Schwartz, writing for Fast Company, has the best analysis.

User experience

Andy Clarke’s Hardboiled Web Design is one of the better web “design” books to come down the pike in a while. And it for sure has the best cover. If you need to get up to speed on HTML5 and CSS3 now, this is one of the three books I recommend (the first two offerings from Jeffrey Zeldman’s A Book Apart—Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers and Dan Cederholm’s CSS3 for Web Designers—are the other two). Zeldman’s An Event Apart is bringing Clarke to the US for two full-day workshops in August; one in Seattle, the other in Boston.

Patrick C. Walsh has a good survey of a viable content strategy methodology. Instead of focusing on methodology for the sake of methodology, Walsh leverages Dan Brown’s (Communicating Design) focus on deliverables.

Interaction-design.org has launched an open-access, peer-reviewed encyclopedia on the human aspects of design. So far, seven chapters—action research, bifocal display, data visualization for human perception, human computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, user experience and experience design, and visual representation—have been published with more to come in less than a month.