ARTS & FARCES internet

935. That’s how many times President Bush and seven core members of his administration—including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld—lied in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and the six months immediately following the invasion. These administration officials—or the president himself—said there were direct links between Iraq and Al Qaeda or weapons of mass destruction 532 times. So says a new report, The War Card, co-published by public interest groups the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism.

President Bush alone lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq 232 times and lied 28 times about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda.

Key to The War Card project is a massive database of 380,000 words of public statements by these government officials. The lies are highlighted in yellow within the context in which they were delivered.

Share...

We’ve just implemented a new information architecture on the College of Design Web site at the University of Minnesota. It’s been a long, excruciating process and now comes the fun part—usability testing. I really like the usability testing process because, like open or closed card sort exercises, it yields valid data for improving the site. And I’ve been doing it long enough to be comfortable with it.

I’m quite excited about this particular exercise because the college’s chief of staff has approved a budget for using the University’s usability lab, complete with fancy-dancy eye-tracking capabilities. One thing that’s always driven me nuts with usability testing is when the subject hovers the cursor right on top of the appropriate navigation element and fails to “see” it. Now I’ll be able to tell what they’re actually looking at.

I’ll be working with a team without much, if any, usability experience so I’m using this as a refresher for myself.

Usability simply measures how well the Web site meets the needs of its users through five basic aspects suggested by Jakob Nielsen:

1. Learnability: Users unfamiliar with the site must be able to learn how to use it to accomplish basic tasks without becoming frustrated.
2. Efficiency: Experienced users should be able to accomplish basic tasks quickly.
3. Memorability: Casual users should be able to remember how to use the site, as assisted by the interface design. The classic cognitive reference for this is George Miller’s “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information.”
4. Error tolerance and recovery: User errors should be minimized and users should be able to recover from errors quickly by figuring out where to go if they make a mistake.
5. Subjectively satisfying: The interface design should be aesthetically pleasing. Users should enjoy using the site and be eager to return.

Nielsen just published a new article and research report indicating that the return on investment for usability has fallen over the past six years from 135% to 83%. Nevertheless, getting an 83% return on whatever is budgeted for usability is still a no-brainer.

Share...

Dialysis providers have always kept their pricing structures for those of us with private insurance very close to the vest, which of course makes the Republican insistence for patients to compare prices as laughable as it is. It’s impossible for providers to cloak their pricing in the case of Medicare patients, however, because the Medicare reimbursement is public information (US$200-US$250 based on geographic location). But a lawsuit brought in Georgia (.pdf; 2.1Mb) by National Renal Alliance (.pdf; 212Kb) against Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia has lifted the veil on these long-protected provider pricing structures.

Insurance companies contract with providers for services. Any provider with which an insurance company does not have a contract is considered to be “out of network.” And these “out of network” fee structures is what the National Renal Alliance lawsuit is all about. National Renal Alliance charges that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia has cut its out of network reimbursement rates by 88 percent.

So, just how much is National Renal Alliance charging insurance companies? According to Urvaksh Karkaria’s Atlanta Business Chronicle report, between US$2,000-US$9,000 per treatment. According to the complaint, “Insurance companies like Blue Cross use so-called ‘usual, customary, and reasonable’ charges to determine the reimbursement for a particular service. In 2006, Blue Cross determined that the usual, customary, and reasonable charge for National Renal’s dialysis services was approximately $2,900 per treatment. This reimbursement was in line with the reimbursement National Renal received (and continues to receive) from other commercial payors. Suddenly, on January 1, 2007, however, Blue Cross cut this reimbursement by 88%, a level far below the usual, customary and reasonable charge.”

The complaint reveals that Blue Cross decided that US$350 was a more usual, customary, and reasonable reimbursement, probably at least partially based on the Medicare reimbursement. Apparently National Renal thinks that’s how Blue Cross arrived at its new reimbursement rate as well and claims that doing so is illegal based on the “federal Anti-Discrimination Statute which expressly prohibits a group health plan from ‘taking into account’ an End Stage Renal Disease patient’s Medicare-eligible status when determining their benefits.”

The reimbursement discrepancy—US$200 on the one side and US$9,000 on the other—is, quite simply, the best argument to date for universal single-payer healthcare in the United States. That the government can negotiate a maximum payment of US$250 for a service that the private sector can’t negotiate for less than US$2,900 says volumes about the value of having a single entity negotiating for all patients.

Share...

Within the next ten years it’s likely that damaged organs will be replaced with ones grown in vats.

University of Minnesota researchers have successfully created a rat heart from the cells of a baby rats. Subscribing to the principle of using nature’s own building blocks, the researchers were able to grow a living, beating rat heart in the laboratory within two weeks. Researchers removed cells from a dead rat heart, leaving the organ’s infrastructure and valves, and injected heart cells from baby rats.

The vat-grown hearts were transplanted into unrelated rats, were not immediately rejected, and began to operate normally—including developing a blood supply and regular beat. The cells from the donor hearts even began to reline the blood vessels. Researchers hope the anti-rejection drugs would only need to be used temporarily.

The research indicates that an individual’s bone marrow stem cells can be used to grow a human heart by placing the cells in a cadaver heart’s infrastructure. Doris A. Taylor, the team lead, told the New York Times that the process is applicable to other organs as well. The research “opens the door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas—you name it and we hope we can make it.” Taylor also noted “the principle problem in escalating it to humans is one of scale, not cell biology, and that is an easier problem to solve potentially.”

Share...

Three Carnegie Mellon computer science researchers, Tuomas Sandholm, Avrim Blum, and David Abraham, have developed an algorithm for matching altruistic kidney donors with recipients. Say you’re an end-stage renal disease patient on the waiting list for a cadaver kidney. Your spouse wants to donate one of his kidneys to you but isn’t a match. Instead, your spouse donates to a matching recipient selected by the Carnegie Mellon software, becoming an altruistic donor. If everyone plays fair, someone down the line matches you and altruistically donates an organ.

This chain of matching altruistic donors with best-case recipients goes on, in theory, forever.

For those waiting for kidneys—right now that’s close to 75,000 folks—this is potentially a lifesaver. Live donor organs are qualitatively better than cadaver kidneys and last year alone, almost 4,000 folks died waiting for a kidney.

Share...