ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

WTFnoway.com has created and published a tremendous visualization of US debt. Putting things in understandable context always helps.

On a related note, David Wallechinsky and Noel Brinkerhoff, writing for Government in the Lab, cite Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) researchers: “If corporations and richest Americans were taxed at 1961 rates, US would gain US$716 billion a year.” Tax rates on household incomes greater than US$1 million that are 23.1 percent now were 43.1 percent in 1961. The average corporate tax rate in 1961 was 47.4 percent; it’s 11.1 percent now.

ESRD

The Ventura County Star has published a series of four articles critical of home-town pharmaceutical giant Amgen, the manufacturer and patent holder for Epogen, the drug most commonly used to manage anemia in end-stage renal disease patients on dialysis. Tom Kisken’s “Safety of Epogen dosages questioned” reveals the startling assertion that Amgen has lobbied politically against providing kidney transplant patients with the drugs needed. Kisken’s follow-up with John M. Gonzales from the University of Southern California, “Medicare limits anti-rejection drugs that transplant patients need,” examines the outcomes of the present Medicare benefit for kidney transplant patients (Medicare covers the cost of anti-rejection drugs—which run up to US$2000 monthly—for only 36 months). Kisken then takes a close look at an individual kidney patient who lost a transplanted organ when she could no longer afford her anti-rejection drugs in “Thousand Oaks woman gained miracle kidney, funding restrictions helped take it away.” The final article in the series, Gonzales’s “16 surgeries later, transplant within reach for second-generation dialysis patient,” takes a look at another individual case, a 50-year-old woman waiting for a kidney-pancreas transplant.

The Sunlight Foundation has released Sunlight Health, a smartphone app that provides information on healthcare facilities, including dialysis clinics, and drug information. Sunlight Health is available for both iOS and Android devices.

Politics

James Fallows, writing for the Atlantic, has a fantastic analysis of the difference in policies between Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama based on a chart that appeared in the New York Times. Where Bush spent US$5.07 trillion on new policies, Obama has spent US$1.44 trillion. Fallows’s point is that this chart should accompany all discussions of the debt ceiling. Bush’s tax cuts alone were responsible for US$1.8 trillion—more than all of Obama’s new policies including the stimulus and health reform. While governments control policy, they cannot control external shocks.

Markos Moulitsas has written a compelling analysis of “Why the GOP won’t take ‘yes’ for an answer.” According to Kos, the Republicans are intent on embarrassing the president and they desperately need political cover for endorsing and voting for the Ryan budget that drastically cut Medicare.

Publishing

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo have all removed stores and links to same from their iOS applications in order to meet Apple’s new rules enforcement for in-app purchases, rather than give Apple a 30 percent cut of their sales. Google Books, on the other hand, was simply disappeared from Apple’s App Store. David Carnoy, writing for CNET, best sums up the situation: “When all is said and done, Apple’s iBooks will be the only iOS app that will allow you to buy e-books directly from within the app. But at least Apple has allowed e-reading apps from other companies to remain in the App Store. You can choose to see that as a magnanimous gesture—or not.” On the magazine side, things are shaking out rather differently. This week Conde Nast announced a partnership with Flipboard. Conde Nast titles Bon Appetit, the New Yorker, and Wired will produce iPad-optimized content for Flipboard, American Express and Lexus will sponsor the Flipboard editions with advertising, and Conde Nast and Flipboard will split the revenue. Tim Carmody, writing for Wired, opines that magazine publishers will prefer to do business with Amazon—even to get on the iPad—routing around Apple altogether.

Business

Apple posted its earnings for its third fiscal quarter this week, and as expected, they were enormous. Apple reported third quarter revenue of US28.57 billion and a net profit for the quarter of US$7.31 billion (US$7.79 per share), a new record. All this without a new iPhone. Reminding us that it’s a hardware company, Apple sold 3.95 million Macs, a 14 percent increase over the same quarter last year. It sold 20.34 million iPhones—a whopping 142 percent increase over the same period last year. The iPad was clearly the winner, however, as Apple sold 9.25 million of the devices, a 183 percent increase over last year’s third quarter. Apple now has US$76 billion in cash, US$10 billion more than last quarter.

Internet

Randall Stephenson, chief executive of AT&T, told the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners this week that DSL broadband technology is “obsolete.” Stacey Higginbotham, writing for GigaOm, cites Comcast spokesperson Sena Fitzmaurice as saying that Stephenson told his audience, “to chase Comcast we built DSL, it is obsolete now” during a question-and-answer session.

US House Republicans have proposed legislation that would allow broadcasters to buy their way out of the public interest. All they have to do is purchase spectrum licenses at the next auction. Similarly, the legislation would allow wireless providers to buy their way out of the public interest with the same terms. “Unlicensed spectrum”—the public airwaves—are being auctioned once again to the highest bidder. According to Stacey Higginbotham, writing for GigaOm, this puts “... the future of the proposed White Spaces broadband, also known as Super Wi-Fi… in doubt.” Public Knowledge sponsored a national day of action earlier this week.

Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Demand Progress and fellow at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, has been indicted in Boston on charges of stealing more than four million documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and JSTOR, an online journal archive. If convicted, Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison and a US$1 million fine. The indictment alleges that Swartz broke into an MIT wiring closet to commit wire fraud, computer fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture. Demand Progress equated Swartz’s actions with “... checking too many books out of the library,” but failed to address the allegation that Swartz broke into a wiring closet. JSTOR, for its part, published a “misuse incident” statement, claiming that “the content taken was systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems.” JSTOR also denies being a part of any legal action against Swartz. Milton J. Valencia, writing for the Boston Globe, has the most complete account of the situation. Nancy Scola, writing for the American Prospect, has the best initial analysis. Ryan Singel, writing for Wired, reports that two days after Swartz’s indictment, “... a giant collection of articles from the same service has been posted to the notorious file sharing search engine, The Pirate Bay.”

Business

For my generation’s entire life we were told in no uncertain terms that home ownership was the bedrock of responsible personal finance. Now, of course, we’ve all learned—the hard way—that was a load of crap. Robert Bridges, writing for the Wall Street Journal, lays it on us in his lede graf: “At the risk of heaping more misery on the struggling residential property market, an analysis of home-price and ownership data for the last 30 years in California—the Golden State with notoriously golden property prices—indicates that the average single family house has never been a particularly stellar investment.” Bridges notes that the culture has “diverted capital from more productive investments and misallocated scarce public resources.”

Internet

As the mad rush to Google+ continues, I remain nonplussed about the new service. I knew right off that I would be able to maintain Twitter or Google+ but probably not both. Google+ has some interesting bits—I expect hangouts will become more important than anyone currently recognizes—but it’s also made me appreciative of Twitter’s 140 character enforced brevity. What I absolutely don’t understand is some percentage of the digerati announcing that Google+ will serve as their primary internet presence. Marshall Kirkpatrick provides excellent analysis of why this is a terrible idea. “Google Plus doesn’t have RSS feeds, or email subscription options,” writes Kirkpatrick. “Both are important to me; I want to speak to my readers however they want to be spoken to. Some day, we’ll be able to write to and read from any platform in any other platform, just like we can call one phone network from inside another phone network now.” Marco Arment picks up where Kirkpatrick leaves off, insisting on the importance of owning your own identity on the internet. “But all of these proprietary networks that want to own and hold in your content are reversing much of the web’s progress in some other areas, such as the durability and quality of online identity,” writes Arment. “If you care about your online presence, you must own it.” Dan Gillmor adds to the conversation in a piece published by the Guardian. “We all need to face up to some issues surrounding control, including ownership and value,” writes Gillmor. “We’ve been too casual about this, and we can’t afford to stay that way.”

Media

Wired has finally published what it claims is the complete (albeit redacted) chat logs between Bradley Manning and Adrian Lamo, its pet informant. Glenn Greenwald did a tremendous job last June of analyzing the history between Lamo and Kevin Poulsen, a Wired editor. Many of Lamos claims in various media outlets could not be verified because Wired refused to publish the entire logs. Now Greenwald has done an excellent job of analyzing precisely why Wired was reluctant to release the information. At the time of its initial story, Wired claimed—and subsequently continued to claim quite adamantly—that the withheld log data was either personal information about Manning that was irrelevant or “apparently sensitive government information.” As the newly released entire logs clearly show, this was false. Very early on, for example, Lamo told Manning that the logs would never be published and that because he was both a journalist and a minister, some legal protection could be provided.” Wired actively hid this from its audience. And that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Read Greenwald’s piece; it’s well worth it.

The New York Times is being unusually agressive in its coverage of Rupert Murdoch’s News International disintegration. Don Van Natta Jr., in his coverage of the publishing empire’s relationship with Scotland Yard, for example, depends extra-heavily on anonymous sources. “At best, former Scotland Yard senior officers acknowledged in interviews, the police have been lazy, incompetent, and too cozy with the people they should have regarded as suspects,” writes Van Natta Jr. “At worst, they said, some officers might be guilty of crimes themselves.” Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s former chief executive of News International, was arrested on Sunday, charged in the phone-hacking scandal. Shortly thereafter, Paul Stephenson, the chief of Scotland Yard, resigned as a result of the scandal. This comes two days before a parliamentary inquiry into the series of events.

Politics

Minnesota is a microcosm of the US. In 1994 we paid an overall tax rate of about 13 percent; by 2008 that had dropped to 11.5 percent. In the 2000-09 period, city spending in Minnesota dropped by about 8 percent, inflation adjusted, while city revenue collection dropped 11 percent. The small-government Republicans are winning in Minnesota—they just got Governor Mark Dayton to cave on his campaign promise to tax the rich. Expect a similar outcome from President Obama. In Minnesota, because of a shift from income taxes to property taxes (in 2006, 37 percent of state and local taxes were income taxes; two years later, in 2008, income tax accounted for only 35.2 percent—in the same period property taxes rose from 30.1 percent to 32.1 percent) households with annual incomes higher than US$130,000 pay higher effective income taxes, but lower property taxes. In 2008, the bottom 10 percent paid only 2.4 percent of the total tax burden but earned only 0.9 percent of the income. The top 10 percent paid 38.5 percent of the total tax burden but earned 42 percent of the income. The rich pay more dollars but at a significantly lower rate. These are the numbers provided by the Minnesota Department of Revenue in its “2011 Minnesota Tax Incidence Study” (.pdf; 935KB) released last March. Similar numbers at the federal level are borne out by FactCheck.org. Meanwhile the state’s superrich tell Dee DePass and David Phelps, writing for the Star Tribune, that they won’t pay more, claiming it will hurt job growth. I’m still waiting for a cogent explanation of that particular cognitive dissonance; we’ve had more than 10 years of tax cuts for the wealthy—where are the jobs?

Privacy

Surprise: Online advertising networks are not honoring do-not-track requests from internet users even after promising to do so. That’s the core finding of a study from Stanford University Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

User experience

In 2004, Edward Tufte developed the sparkline. A sparkline is a “word-size graphic with typographic resolution” designed to be embedded anywhere a word or number can be used. Twenty years before that Tufte developed a visualization device that he’s only recently begun to call the slopegraph. Slopegraphs are used to “compare changes over time.” Charlie Park has written a really good guide to using slopegraphs.

Censorship

John Brownlee, writing for Cult of Mac, reports that Apple is filtering outbound MobileMe email based on content. The filtering is being done without the knowledge (or notification) of the user. “It appears that in an overzealous attempt to discourage mass emailers from using MobileMe, Apple is simply refusing to send any outgoing email sent through their web app that triggers their anti-spam, mass email conditions… giving the appearance of political censorship,” writes Brownlee. Apple responded by saying that the filtering was not political. “Occasionally, MobileMe’s automated spam filters may block legitimate user emails by mistake,” Trudy Muller, an Apple spokeswoman told Brownlee. “If a customer feels that a legitimate email of theirs was blocked this way, we encourage them to get in touch and report the issue to MobileMe support.” But to report the issue, the customer would have to know her email has been censored. Apple’s address isn’t infinite loop for nothing.

ESRD

For every death from acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in the US, somewhere around US$69,000 in grant funds is generated. For every death from Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) approximately US$570 in grant funds is generated. So reports Maryn McKenna, writing for Wired. Based on grant funds, antibiotic resistance must be a very low priority issue. Except it’s not. The World Health Organization, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and various medical journals have all said it’s a global health concern. This isn’t to say that HIV/AIDS research should be cut back to better fund antibiotic resistance. Not at all. It’s not an “or” logic or zero-sum situation (or at least, shouldn’t be). It’s an “and” logic situation: HIV/AIDS and antibiotic resistance.

Media

Everyone knows Joe Zawinul wrote “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!” for Cannonball Adderley. Except over the years I’ve come to believe it was written for Dean Magraw. I bet I’ve heard Magraw play the piece—in a wide variety of combinations from solo guitar to jazz trios and quartets to a jam band—more than 20 times. They’re all different, and the last one was always the best. Dean Magraw, one of the world’s finest guitarists, has spent the last two years in a battle with lymphoma and underwent a bone marrow transplant. He’s just now starting to play again and one of his first playing appearances was this past Tuesday at Saint Paul’s Black Dog Cafe. Long-time friend and musical co-conspirator Bruce Kurnow sat in on harmonica and Michael Bisonette provided percussion. Oh, what a special, transportational show it was. And yes, this last “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!” was indeed the best. Even better, Magraw will be playing at the Black Dog on the first Tuesday of every month at least through September with percussionist Davu Seru. Magraw plays next Friday and Saturday at the Artists’ Quarter with saxophonist Brandon Wozniak, drummer Kenny Horst, and bassist James Buckley.

What’s the answer for sustainable quality journalism? Nobody seems to know, but as Clay Shirky notes in a new essay, there are lots of ideas ranging from capitalizing on the new monogamous relationship between publishers and customers to philanthropy. “... people have never actually paid for news. We have, at most, helped pay for the things that paid for the news,” Shirky writes. As a result, there has never really been a news business outside the financial press; there was only the advertising business. Journalism traditionally has been mostly an accident. “But even in their worst days, newspapers supported the minority of journalists reporting actual news, for the minority of citizens who cared,” Shirky continues. “In return, the people who followed sports or celebrities, or clipped recipes and coupons, got to live in a town where the City Council was marginally less likely to be corrupt. Writing about the Dallas Cowboys in order to take money from Ford and give it to the guy on the City Desk never made much sense, but at least it worked.”

Publishing

Rupert Murdoch’s News International has announced the closure of its News of the World, a UK tabloid accused of hiring private investigators to hack into cell phones and the resulting cover-up. The Guardian has a timeline of the situation and published Nick Davies’s investigative piece in 2009, reporting that the 2005 hacking of Prince William’s voicemail was the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Earlier this week, the Guardian broke the story that News of the World had hacked the voicemail of a murdered girl. “Recent allegations of phone hacking and making payments to police with respect to the News of the World are deplorable and unacceptable,” said Murdoch in a statement. Um, it’s the phone hacking, corruption, and cover-up that are deplorable and unacceptable, Rupert, not the allegations.

Sustainability

In a stunning article, Scott Russell Sanders, writing for Orion, makes a case for our collectively and individually confusing financial wealth with real wealth as the cause of our deteriorating natural systems. We’ve come to treat the natural world—and our fellow humans—as commodities “subject to damage or destruction if enough money can be made from the transaction,” he writes.

Technology

One of the most surprising parts of Apple’s forthcoming iCloud service is iTunes Match, a feature that for US$25 per year scans your iTunes library and provides you with immediate access to up to 25,000 song matches in iCloud. Those song matches will be provided in unprotected 256Kbps AAC format. The question on everyone’s mind is whether or not Apple will cooperate with the record labels to discover pirated music. Chris Foresman, writing for Ars Techica, provides a disturbing answer: Maybe. Technically, this is certainly something Apple could do without problem. Apple “would not comment when asked if iTunes Match does any sort of analysis to determine if tracks are legitimate purchases or not,” writes Foresman. “This lack of denial leads us to believe that Apple is doing some kind of analysis along these lines for its own purposes. However, the company told Ars that it definitely does not share any iTunes Match information with third parties beyond aggregate information reported to record labels and music publishers for determining royalties.” But the information, if collected by Apple, could be subpoenaed.

Business

Cheyenne, Wyoming has become the new standard for corporations seeking to hide assets or other nefarious deeds. To be more specific, 2710 Thomes Avenue in Cheyenne is the new haven for corporate misdeeds. Kelly Carr and Brian Grow, writing for Reuters, investigates Wyoming Corporate Services, which apparently specializes in setting up shell and shelf corporations. Carr and Grow cite Wyoming Corporate Services’ website: ““A corporation is a legal person created by state statute that can be used as a fall guy, a servant, a good friend, or a decoy. A person you control… yet cannot be held accountable for its actions. Imagine the possibilities!” Registration of business entities is not regulated in the US, nor is the incorporation industry.

Minnesota Second Judicial District Court Judge Gregg E. Johnson has ruled that cutting cost of living adjustments for state workers is not unconstitutional. The retirees had argued that the benefits were contractual and protected by state and federal constitutions, both of which forbid impairment of contracts.

Censorship

The US Supreme Court has struck down an Arizona law (.pdf; 406KB) that provided matching funds to political candidates who accept public financing. The same five justices in the majority in the wrong-headed Citizens United case last year are again the usual suspects in this decision. The majority said that the law violated the First Amendment rights of candidates raising private money or using their own, once again equating money with speech. “Laws like Arizona’s matching funds provision that inhibit robust and wide-open political debate without sufficient justification cannot stand,” wrote Chief Justice John G. Roberts for the majority. Too bad he got it exactly wrong. Public financing of political campaigns, by definition, generates more speech, not less. But then, Roberts knows that. “What the law does—all the law does—is fund more speech,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan on behalf of herself and Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor.

ESRD

Three dialysis patients in Poland have received vat-grown blood vessels made from their own skin cells. The implanted vessels have worked for eight months and researchers hope that these bioengineered replacement arteries will be viable for other uses as well, including heart bypass. Steven Reinberg, writing for US News & World Report, reports that the “vessels were made from sheets of cultured skin cells, rolled around a temporary support structure in the lab. Upon implantation the vessels typically measured about a foot long and a fifth of an inch in diameter.” Todd N. McAllister, co-founder and chief executive officer of Cytograft Tissue Engineering, Inc. told Reinberg, “Perhaps most interestingly, we have seen no clinical manifestations of an immune response.”

According to a University of Minnesota study, 10 percent fewer Minnesotans get health insurance through employers now than 10 years ago. Nationally, the drop was about 8 percent. While 71 percent of people across the state get employer-offered coverage, paying 85 percent more for healthcare than they did a decade ago. Jackie Crosby, writing for the Star Tribune, reports “The percentage of Minnesotans using public healthcare has doubled during this time frame, from 8 percent to 15 percent, while the ranks of the state’s uninsured grew from 7 percent to 9 percent.”