ARTS & FARCES internet

The Occupy Wall Street movement has finally hit upon a sure-fire way to garner widespread attention to itself. The United States has never had a full-blown national general strike. Ever. All that changes on Tuesday, 1 May 2012 when Occupy Wall Street initiates its first major action of 2012: A national general strike.

Occupy May Day general strike.

The premise is simple:

“Building on the international celebration of May Day, past General Strikes in U.S. cities like Seattle and Oakland, the recent May 1st Day Without An Immigrant demonstrations, the national general strikes in Spain this year, and the on-going student strike in Quebec, the Occupy Movement has called for A Day Without the 99% on May 1st, 2012.”

The idea is simpler: Don’t go to work, don’t go to school, and don’t buy anything. If you’re self employed, don’t work or produce anything.

The US has never seen a resistance where everything in the country—work, commerce, education, spending, shopping, everything—simply shuts down.

Occupy May Day general strike Twin Cities.

There are planned actions in more than 125 cities across the US, including Minneapolis and Saint Paul up here on the far edge. A pre-May Day march is planned in the Twin Cities for Friday, 27 April 2012, 4:30PM at Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis.

My good friend Jerry Daniels is once again seeking the ultimate in self-contained online publishing. He’s been doing this—off and on—for the last 25 years or so.

Daniels started with µFilm Reader and Writer for the Mac back in the 1980s. It was software that let an individual publish (µFilm Writer) electronically in a format that closely resembled microfilm. Because the microfilm metaphor was close to exact, it was immediately apparent to the user how to read the publication. These were the days of nine-inch Macintosh screens, CompuServe, and GEnie. Neither AOL, nor the commercial internet, nor the web yet existed.

I published both a weekly and a monthly for several years using µFilm Writer. The process was fairly painless, as I remember. I wrote each issue in MacWrite and fed it into µFilm Writer which converted it. Then I uploaded it to the Mac file libraries on CompuServe and GEnie. They were shareware publications and I enjoyed a reasonably large readership. Daniels and his wife published the original MacWEEK using µFilm Writer and later sold the name to Patch Communications who eventually sold it to Ziff-Davis.

Now Daniels is back with WOLF, a Mac-only self-contained online publishing system. And a self-contained online publication, Wolf Not Dog: Satisfying your thirst for freedom. Delivered as a freestanding Macintosh application, Wolf Not Dog delivers a new article from Daniels just about every day or so. The next day the article is published on a freely accessible website, but seemingly disappears upon publication of the next article. That’s right, no archive and no RSS feed.

If you want to read something Daniels wrote a month ago, or even a day ago, you’ve got to buy the WOLF application for US$5. Then you get the whole shebang accessible via index, search engine, and tag cloud—all of which are internal to WOLF. Also included in WOLF is a three-tab web browser (no more; no less). The first tab contains a Twitter list of people Daniels follows (you can change this to whatever you like); the other two tabs are available for linked content from articles in the main content section of the application. The tabs can be locked and when filled, links will open in the default browser. All of the available webviews are preloaded when the application is launched making navigating content within the WOLF environment quick. There are also buttons to tweet or email links for articles within WOLF.

Two years ago, ProPublica—the independent, nonprofit investigative news organization—published a website detailing data on individual dialysis centers, focusing on a dozen quality measures. The website was made possible by data ProPublica received in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Recently, ProPublica obtained and published dialysis facility statistics through 2010 and included a new quality metric: How often dialysis patients of an individual dialysis center are required to go to a hospital emergency room.

ProPublica’s quality metrics for measuring the performance of individual dialysis centers are considerably more extensive than those used by the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which regulates dialysis centers. The ProPublica metrics include:

• Survival rates for dialysis patients overall and in their first year of treatment
• Comparative rates of patient hospitalizations for infections and septicemia
• Comparative rates of patients who receive transplants and patients on transplant waiting lists
• Comparative rates of patients who were not under the care of a nephrologist prior to starting dialysis
• Comparative rates of hospitalizations, length of stays, and now emergency room visits
• Clinical benchmark comparisons including anemia management and dialysis adequacy
• Comparative rates of patients with vascular accesses relative to patients with catheters
• Comparative inspection rates

For example, here’s the comparative data for the available dialysis centers closest to my home.

Very few people know that before my family and I landed in Stillwater, MN in 1982, we were headed to Woodstock, NY. We’d already settled on a home on Tinker Street and the local paper had already done a profile on ARTS & FARCES and Karen and me. Our intention was to loosely collaborate with Bart Friedman and Nancy Cain—two of the original Videofreex—and see what happened next.

Just before setting out in our 1970 Volkswagen camper (ingeniously modified at the factory so the refrigerator could be accessed while the bed was folded down) we got cold feet. We decided we would go broke in an inordinate amount of time being that close to New York city.

Instead, we ended up here on the far edge, first in Stillwater and then in Saint Paul.

I find myself wondering from time to time how our lives would have been different had we made the move to the Catskills. The creative community there was unparalleled at the time and incredibly supportive—as was the entire area. The music scene was among the best in the country. Todd Rundgren was just up the road in Bearsville; Pat Metheny was a fixture at various spots around town; and something extra special interesting was always shaking at Levon Helm’s barn. Unlike other musical hot-spots, the area of the Catskills around Woodstock was always known for a vast diversity of musical genres that liked to bump up against each other from time to time and then retreat to their respective corners and think about it. It was (and is I imagine; I haven’t been there in many years), quite simply, a very special place.

Now comes the sad news that Levon Helm is in the final stages of throat cancer. Diagnosed more than 10 years ago, I was pretty sure he had beaten it, but the disease recurred in 2009. His 2010 show with John Hiatt at the Minnesota Zoo sold out within minutes and was stellar, if too short. His 2009 sold-out date at Saint Paul’s Fitzgerald Theater was one of the best shows to take place in that room.

It’s not news that there’s a tremendous shortage of viable transplant organs across the globe. If Keith Murphy, chief executive of Organovo has his way, transplant organ shortages will be a thing of the past. He plans to print replacement organs on a three-dimensional printer using a patient’s own cells as the biological equivalent of toner or ink.

David Holmes, writing for Fast Company, reports that Organovo’s three-dimensional bioprinter is already capable of creating blood vessels and connective tissue. The device works by creating bioink out of a patient’s own cells and then duplicating and programming the arrangement of the cells with software that works like putting together Lego blocks.

Unlike other companies that use three-dimensional printing technology in this space, Organovo’s device does not require or rely on the construction of underlying scaffolding from artificial materials. Organovo’s approach keeps the cells appropriately arranged without any foreign material; they’re completely biological. “Our system can get you to a fully cellular structure which is important if you’re trying to study the behavior of cells in their natural environment,” Murphy tells Holmes.