Recently in Science / Technology Category
Recently my wife and I got iPhones. There's a lot to say about them, but most of it has been said, so I'll spare you. What I find most interesting and surprising, after about a week of ownership, is what spectacular reading devices they've turned out to be. In fact I find it easier to read a newspaper on my iPhone than I do on paper, probably because of the low-light problems associated with presbyopia. The iPhone screen resolution is just dazzling, and anyone with a special interest in the future of books, reading etc really ought to head over to the nearest Apple store and play with one. I read parts of The Mayor of Casterbridge on mine, and have installed the NY Times and Wall Street Journal apps.
Once you get started with this, any doubt you might have had about the future of ink on paper will likely fall away. Simply put, there is no future for ink on paper, at least not in the mass distribution and consumption of text. I've only briefly played with a Kindle, but I believe that Apple's long-rumored tablet (basically a big iPod Touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone) has the potential to be truly transformative, if it's priced right.
I wonder if they are considering some kind of subscription-subsidy model, like the iPhone with AT&T. Why not sell people the tablets cheaply if they agree to spend a certain amount each month on reading matter for a couple of years?
Although there are serious implications for people like me, who make their living with a keyboard, I think the shift to e-books is mostly a good thing, and has the potential to help revive literacy, as email has done. But this may be entirely wishful; it's only human to see virtue in necessity, and this change is coming whether I like it or not.
(Photo: Flickr/Christopher Chan)
Today I went to see a very capable podiatrist who really had no idea that he had ever seen me before. His office has only paper records, ships them off-site after three years and gets rid of them after five, at least according to what they told me. So I whipped out my ancient, steam-powered Treo 650, performed a global search that took perhaps two seconds, and said: "February 20, 2003 at 2 pm." Voila, electronic medical records.
A new Harvard study estimates that lack of health insurance kills about 45,000 Americans annually, which is 2.5 times as many as the previous best estimate commonly cited in the health care debate. This is a big difference (27,000 additional lives). But it still pales in comparison with the more than one million Americans who die annually by their own hands--which they use to light cigarettes, lift forks and convey too many alcoholic beverages to their lips. That so many die as the result of behavioral causes is no argument against universal health coverage, and the new Harvard study bolsters the case for covering everyone, which I suspect we could do just by harvesting some of the incredible waste in the system today. But the vast loss of life associated with bad habits does suggest that we could do vastly more good by changing people's behavior, whether by exhortation, better education or sumptuary taxes.
Tobacco offers a promising precedent; smoking is down by something like half since mid-century, as I recall, and while this has contributed (perhaps significantly) to our national weight gain, on net this reduction in smoking has saved many lives and much suffering and expense. Further reductions in tobacco, as well as an assault on over-eating and unhealthy foods, might produce similarly large gains.
A pdf of the study is here (it's quite brief) and an even briefer essay on the whole subject, from the Wall Street Journal, can be found via my earlier Atlantic posting about the devastation we inflict on ourselves by our unhealthy lifestyles. There is vast room for improvement in this area, and progress in it could be a major force for reducing our runaway health-care costs--not to mention saving the lives of so many of our fellow citizens. President Obama has rightly called on students to work harder in school. Why not rally the rest of us to save ourselves from early death?
(Photo: Flickr User Siege N. Gin)
For awhile now I've been dragging my feet on the task of upgrading our family's cell-phone service. It's the usual story: we want iPhones but we also want Verizon. There are four of us so it costs too much. And in general I have the idea that the cell-phone companies are gouging through their control of the regulatory environment.Having just returned from Europe, I find the shortcomings in American cell service particularly stark. If you too have a sense of being vaguely wronged (I have to marry a company for two years just to get a phone?!), check out this scathing piece on the whole subject, which lays it all out pretty nicely. The executive summary: we are getting royally screwed by anti-competitive practices and regulatory capture. And we pay for it every month.
It would seem to me that some ambitious politician ought to be able to make a lot of hay here. Evidently we can't expect much from Congress, which is largely bought and paid for (all of them? really? well it seems that way anyway). And sadly, Eliot Spitzer didn't get around to taking on these guys before he crashed and burned. Perhaps Andrew Cuomo (NY's current Attorney General) will do something. I can't imagine a more potentially popular crusade.
(Photo: Flickr User masochismtango)
There's a thoughtful piece in the Boston Globe arguing that some systems, like some businesses, are too complex to be allowed to fail--and therefore this complexity should be averted or abolished in some way by regulators. The idea, in a sense, is that dangerously complex systems are too complex to exist. And bigness is an implicit culprit. The author even suggests that instead of trying to deal with crises as they occur, the government could head off excess complexity:
Simplicity is always preferred of course. But is complexity really so bad? Modern life is way more complex than it was when someone painted the walls of that cave France. Publishing the Boston Globe is an immensely complex choreography, supported by a vast legal, financial, educational and physical infrastructure. Complex networks, even those whose failures can be catastrophic, deliver a lot of advantages, and I can't see much alternative to them. Like bigness--in business as well as government--complexity is here to stay. The challenge is not just imagining and controlling the risks, but taking the trouble to tote up the benefits.
The author of the Globe essay, it should be noted, works for Yahoo, whose big problem is gigantic competitors. But I doubt that Google or Microsoft meet anyone's definition of too big or complex to be allowed to fail.
On a routine basis, regulators could review the largest and most connected firms in each industry, and ask themselves essentially the same question that crisis situations already force them to answer: "Would the sudden failure of this company generate intolerable knock-on effects for the wider economy?" If the answer is "yes," the firm could be required to downsize, or shed business lines in an orderly manner until regulators are satisfied that it no longer poses a serious systemic risk.It's hard for me to think of a more implausible project. Talk about penalizing success! What if foreign regulators did not share our readiness to prune any trees that grew too large? And how much bigger--and more complex--would the government have to be to carry out this kind of sage adjudication?
Simplicity is always preferred of course. But is complexity really so bad? Modern life is way more complex than it was when someone painted the walls of that cave France. Publishing the Boston Globe is an immensely complex choreography, supported by a vast legal, financial, educational and physical infrastructure. Complex networks, even those whose failures can be catastrophic, deliver a lot of advantages, and I can't see much alternative to them. Like bigness--in business as well as government--complexity is here to stay. The challenge is not just imagining and controlling the risks, but taking the trouble to tote up the benefits.
The author of the Globe essay, it should be noted, works for Yahoo, whose big problem is gigantic competitors. But I doubt that Google or Microsoft meet anyone's definition of too big or complex to be allowed to fail.
Leon Wieseltier has a wonderful little meditation on fear and its uses that packs many insights into very few words. Fear is traditionally feared as the enemy of self-mastery, the trait that may well lie beneath all others, but the absence of fear is not just hubris, it's also a creepy kind of indiffference. If you don't fear for your kids, do you really care about them? Fearing nothing, can we live for anything? Why do liberals and conservatives deviate from one another so strongly in the forms of alarmism they embrace? Don't be afraid, check it out.
That's been the charm of Craigslist for awhile now: except for employment ads in two or three cities (and lately some erotic services), advertising has been free and easy. Which may be why the computer listings on Craigslist New York are now a wasteland of spam. This is an ominous sign for their business model, and perhaps another indicator that in the long run, for at least some important things, the "free" model on the Internet is not sustainable or perhaps even desirable.
If Craigslist had to charge for ads in order to deter spammers, that might erode the competitive advantage it has enjoyed over local news sites. The same would be true if Craiglist had to employ a lot of people to screen ads (and advertisers). But take a look, it's all spam, and I'm not sure why the same couldn't happen to other Craigslist categories and cities as well.
If Craigslist had to charge for ads in order to deter spammers, that might erode the competitive advantage it has enjoyed over local news sites. The same would be true if Craiglist had to employ a lot of people to screen ads (and advertisers). But take a look, it's all spam, and I'm not sure why the same couldn't happen to other Craigslist categories and cities as well.
Yesterday was a momentous day--the day my sons started shaving. This was of course a rare opportunity for Dad to impart some ancient tribal wisdom, now that we no longer need to practice bringing down a mastodon with a spear. It was striking how utterly mysterious the whole process was to them. More striking still is how much easier shaving is today than when I got going, back before the invention of soap.
In my day, I said in my best fatherly baritone, men all over the world began each morning by shedding their own blood. Shaving almost always meant cutting yourself. Guys sometimes came to work with bits of toilet paper stuck to their faces. There were styptic pencils.
All that's changed. Electric razors appear to be just as useless as they always were, but the improvement in razors and blades is astounding. I can go weeks without the slightest nick, and those pivot-headed multi-blade systems (so easy to mock in theory) are actually completely wonderful.
There is probably ample fodder here for a disquisition on evolving technologies, social customs, the difficulties of making hedonic adjustments in the measure of inflation etc. I leave that to others; i just want to focus for a minute on how much better the world is in so many ways that we hardly even think about.
In my day, I said in my best fatherly baritone, men all over the world began each morning by shedding their own blood. Shaving almost always meant cutting yourself. Guys sometimes came to work with bits of toilet paper stuck to their faces. There were styptic pencils.
All that's changed. Electric razors appear to be just as useless as they always were, but the improvement in razors and blades is astounding. I can go weeks without the slightest nick, and those pivot-headed multi-blade systems (so easy to mock in theory) are actually completely wonderful.
There is probably ample fodder here for a disquisition on evolving technologies, social customs, the difficulties of making hedonic adjustments in the measure of inflation etc. I leave that to others; i just want to focus for a minute on how much better the world is in so many ways that we hardly even think about.
Some crank has a piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning about the amazing number of deaths that result every year from smoking, overeating and other risky behaviors. The key grafs:
Dr. Majid Ezzati, a Harvard School of Public Health professor who co-authored the report, estimates that if you net out the double-counting, somewhat more than a million people die annually from the 12 behavioral risk factors, which include the obvious (immoderate alcohol consumption) and the less so (eating too little fish, which provides omega-3 fatty acids).Put more starkly: Of the 2.5 million deaths that occur annually in America, something approaching half could be prevented if people simply led healthier lives.
Compare this to the number of lives (18,000) it's been estimated would be saved annually by universal health insurance--which I'm favor of anyway, and so is Ezzati. Still, the numbers are sobering. An awful lot of deaths are essentially voluntary--so many that, as a group, the American people appear to be committing slow-motion suicide.
(You can read the full study here, and by the way, it doesn't take account of fast-motion suicide, which claims around 33,000 lives annually, or roughly twice the number claimed by homicide. The person most likely to murder you is you!)
This morning I made a mental note to have my kids call a physician's office when they get home so they can hear something they've never heard before: a busy signal.
Yes, modern medicine is a marvel. They can remove your large intestine through your left nostril, but they can't get a telephone system that kicks a call over to voicemail when all the lines are in use. You can't get a busy signal calling our house, or anybody else's that I know of, because regular American families have call-waiting, auto-forwarding etc. But medical offices remain museums of hoary communications technology, with all the potential for waste, error and frustration that this implies.
I have one doctor with whom I communicate only by fax because his line is chronically busy. What--you didn't think they'd have email, did you? Doctor's offices never have email. Ok, a few have email--but they're careful never to check it.
Prescriptions of course are scribbled on paper. Awhile back I had one the pharmacist couldn't read. Why on earth are there paper prescriptions? Written by hand? Then again, why are there pharmacists? Couldn't I just insert my credit card into a pill-dispensing machine, the way I do for a pre-ordered Amtrak ticket? Wouldn't this reduce the possibility of errors? Especially if the instructions that came with the pills weren't printed in four-point type with columns a foot wide. Another time I had a scrip for a medical test that the lab tech couldn't read. If I croak I fully expect penmanship to be listed as the cause of death.
There's a lot of talk lately about the billions of dollars it will take to launch online medical records. Maybe we should walk before we run and just get all the doctors gmail accounts. Imagine the salutary effect on the nation's blood pressure when patients no longer have to dial and dial and dial...
Yes, modern medicine is a marvel. They can remove your large intestine through your left nostril, but they can't get a telephone system that kicks a call over to voicemail when all the lines are in use. You can't get a busy signal calling our house, or anybody else's that I know of, because regular American families have call-waiting, auto-forwarding etc. But medical offices remain museums of hoary communications technology, with all the potential for waste, error and frustration that this implies.
I have one doctor with whom I communicate only by fax because his line is chronically busy. What--you didn't think they'd have email, did you? Doctor's offices never have email. Ok, a few have email--but they're careful never to check it.
Prescriptions of course are scribbled on paper. Awhile back I had one the pharmacist couldn't read. Why on earth are there paper prescriptions? Written by hand? Then again, why are there pharmacists? Couldn't I just insert my credit card into a pill-dispensing machine, the way I do for a pre-ordered Amtrak ticket? Wouldn't this reduce the possibility of errors? Especially if the instructions that came with the pills weren't printed in four-point type with columns a foot wide. Another time I had a scrip for a medical test that the lab tech couldn't read. If I croak I fully expect penmanship to be listed as the cause of death.
There's a lot of talk lately about the billions of dollars it will take to launch online medical records. Maybe we should walk before we run and just get all the doctors gmail accounts. Imagine the salutary effect on the nation's blood pressure when patients no longer have to dial and dial and dial...
Daniel Akst
