Here is a cool graphic from ‘information is beautiful’ site.
May 19, 2010
May 8, 2010
April 12, 2010
New Health Law offers free preventive healthcare
You may not yet be aware, though, of another notable improvement to insurance, a change that could save a consumer or family hundreds of dollars a year. Under the new law, insurers must offer preventive services — like immunizations, cancer screenings and checkups — to consumers as part of the insurance policy, at no additional out-of-pocket charge.
The idea is that healthy Americans will be less costly Americans.
“This is transformative,” says Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, a nonprofit organization for large employers. “We’re moving from an insurance model that was based on treating illness and injury, to a model that’s focused on improving an individual’s health and identifying risk factors.”
The trend toward offering free preventive care has been gaining steam for a decade among large companies that provide employee health benefits. “Employers recognize that if they want to control costs, they have to persuade their workers to be healthier, including their children,” Ms. Darling said.
Three out of four large companies now offer free preventive health services to their workers, according to a 2009 survey by Mercer, a benefits consulting firm. Smaller employers, though, and individual health plans have been less likely to offer free care of any type.
But under the new law, more generous “wellness” benefits should eventually be available to almost all Americans with insurance.
“Eventually” is the operable word, though. Although this feature of the law goes into effect at the end of September, it will apply to new insurance policies only. That means if you switch to a different policy, or buy a new one, the preventive services will be offered.
This is a very good thing in the long term. Current US Healthcare incetivizes treatment as opposed to prevention. This is one of the reasons for the high healthcare costs. Offering free preventive care will serve to reduce expensive treatment in the long run and lower costs.
December 25, 2009
Role of influencers on the tipping point
One of Malcolm Gladwell’s famous books is the tipping point where he writes about the importance of the influencers in spreading ideas. Duncan watts disagrees.
Don’t get Duncan Watts started on the Hush Puppies. “Oh, God,” he groans when the subject comes up. “Not them.” The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994–until a few New York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids copied them, and so on, until, voilà! Within two years, sales of Hush Puppies had exploded by a stunning 5,000%, without a penny spent on advertising. All because, as Gladwell puts it, a tiny number of superinfluential types (”Twenty? Fifty? One hundred–at the most?”) began wearing the shoes.
These tastemakers, Gladwell concluded, are the spark behind any successful trend. “What we are really saying,” he writes, “is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others.” In modern marketing, this idea–that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends–is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you’ll reach everyone else through them, basically for free. Loosely, this is referred to as the Influentials theory, and while it has been a marketing touchstone for 50 years, it has recently reentered the mainstream imagination via thousands of marketing studies and a host of best-selling books. In addition to The Tipping Point, there was The Influentials, by marketing gurus Ed Keller and Jon Berry, as well as the gospel according to PR firms such as Burson-Marsteller, which claims “E-Fluentials” can “make or break a brand.” According to MarketingVOX, an online marketing news journal, more than $1 billion is spent a year on word-of-mouth campaigns targeting Influentials, an amount growing at 36% a year, faster than any other part of marketing and advertising. That’s on top of billions more in PR and ads leveled at the cognoscenti.
Yet, if you believe Watts, all that money and effort is being wasted. Because according to him, Influentials have no such effect. Indeed, they have no special role in trends at all.
In the past few years, Watts–a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo –has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.
“It just doesn’t work,” Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. “A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.”
September 13, 2009
Borlaug, architect of green revolution, dies
RIP Norman Borlaug.
If anyone wants a role model for using technology to make a huge impact in the lives of people look no further than Norman Borlaug. He died today at the age of 95. He was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives for his agricultural inventions of high yeild crops that lead to the green revolution in countries such as india.
DALLAS – Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, the father of the “green revolution” who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in combating world hunger and saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday in Texas, a Texas A&M University spokeswoman said. He was 95.
Borlaug died just before 11 p.m. Saturday at his home in Dallas from complications of cancer, said school spokeswoman Kathleen Phillips. Phillips said Borlaug’s granddaughter told her about his death. Borlaug was a distinguished professor at the university in College Station.
The Nobel committee honored Borlaug in 1970 for his contributions to high-yield crop varieties and bringing other agricultural innovations to the developing world. Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.
Thanks to the green revolution, world food production more than doubled between 1960 and 1990. In Pakistan and India, two of the nations that benefited most from the new crop varieties, grain yields more than quadrupled over the period.
“We would like his life to be a model for making a difference in the lives of others and to bring about efforts to end human misery for all mankind,” his children said in a statement. “One of his favorite quotes was, ‘Reach for the stars. Although you will never touch them, if you reach hard enough, you will find that you get a little ’star dust’ on you in the process.’”
Equal parts scientist and humanitarian, the Iowa-born Borlaug realized improved crop varieties were just part of the answer, and pressed governments for farmer-friendly economic policies and improved infrastructure to make markets accessible. A 2006 book about Borlaug is titled “The Man Who Fed the World.”
“He has probably done more and is known by fewer people than anybody that has done that much,” said Dr. Ed Runge, retired head of Texas A&M University’s Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and a close friend who persuaded Borlaug to teach at the school. “He made the world a better place — a much better place. He had people helping him, but he was the driving force.”
The world needs more Borlaugs. RIP Prof. Borlaug.
May 18, 2009
Eric Schmidt CMU Commencement Speech
Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, gave the commencement keynote at CMU. Here is the video:
May 17, 2009
Korean Financial Nostradamus
NYT writes about the troubles of a korean finance blogger that captured nation’s imagination to only end up in jail.
Park Dae-sung with his mother after his release from prison last month
SEOUL, South Korea
FOUR months ago, Park Dae-sung became South Korea’s most celebrated — and vilified — blogger, when he was arrested on charges of spreading false information on the Internet with malicious intent. Prosecutors accused Mr. Park, whose financial postings under the alias Minerva had attracted a cultlike following, of damaging the nation’s economy with his “extremely pessimistic forecasts.”
On April 20, Mr. Park was acquitted in a court of law, but his troubles persist in the court of public opinion. In a society still negotiating the gulf between its traditionally hierarchical culture and the free-floating online world, he has been sharply criticized for, in effect, not being the authority figure most people had imagined him to be.
“I am disillusioned and disgusted,” Mr. Park said in an interview in his Seoul hide-out, where he was holed up to escape from most reporters, as well as online death threats. “I have seen the madness of Korean society. I can’t live here anymore. I want to emigrate.”
For months last year, Minerva riveted South Korea with his uncannily accurate analyses of the economy, his often scathing criticisms of government policy and his predictions of, among other things, the fall of Lehman Brothers and the collapse of the Korean currency, the won.
When some of his prognostications proved on target, readers dug up his earlier postings and eagerly awaited more. A civic group gave an award to the anonymous “citizen journalist.” A national television anchor called on the government to heed Minerva’s advice. Bookstores gave special displays to economics books recommended by Minerva.
It was not until January, with Mr. Park’s arrest, that the mystery of Minerva was finally solved. Mr. Park, 31 and jobless, had attended a two-year vocational college and had never even invested in the stock market. He was charged with spreading false information on the Internet “with intent to damage the public interest,” punishable by five years in prison.
Among his crimes, prosecutors said, was to state that the South Korean government had barred banks and major companies from buying American dollars in a desperate attempt to check the fall of the won.
On April 20, Mr. Park was acquitted on the grounds that, while not everything he wrote was correct, there was no evidence that he knew it was wrong or acted with malicious intent.
But his difficulties — at what seemed to be a moment of triumph — were far from over.
Mr. Park’s evolution from a former employee of a wireless communications company to a national sensation to an embittered outcast reads like a case study of what can happen to an unprepared blogger in this highly wired, and politically divisive, society.
Are we wired to acquire?
Seed magazine reviews the book ‘Spent’ written by univ of new mexico psychologist geofferey miller.
Why do some people pay a 100,000 percent premium for a Rolex when a Timex is such a sleek and efficient timepiece? Why do others kill themselves at work just so they can get there in a Lexus? Why do we pay 1,000 times more for designer bottles of water when the stuff that gushes from our taps is safer (because it’s more regulated), often tastier, and better for the planet? And how do we convince ourselves that more stuff equals more happiness, when all the research shows that it doesn’t?
In Spent, University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller contends that marketing—the jet fuel of unrestrained consumerism—“is the most dominant force in human culture,” and thus the most powerful shaper of life on Earth. Using vivid, evocative language, Miller suggests that consumerism is the sea of modern life and we are the plankton—helplessly tumbled and swirled by forces we can feel but not understand. Miller aims to penetrate to the evolutionary wellsprings of consumerist mania, and to show how it is possible to live lives that are more sustainable, more sane, and more satisfying.
Spent is about “display” consumerism. It leaves aside strictly utilitarian purchases like baloney or tampons. Understanding display consumerism, according to Miller, requires adding one part Thorstein Veblen to one part Darwin. From Veblen’s classic Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Miller appropriates the concept of “conspicuous consumption,” whereby people live and spend wastefully just to flaunt the fact that they can. From Darwin, Miller appropriates sexual selection theory—“costly signaling theory” in modern parlance—whereby animals compete by sending signals of their underlying genetic quality. As with the gaudy displays of peacocks, purchasing decisions frequently represent attempts to advertise “fundamental biological virtues” like “bodily traits of health, fitness, fertility, youth, and attractiveness, and mental traits of intelligence and personality.” Why spend $160,000 on a prestigious university degree? To make a “narcissistic self-display” of one’s intelligence and diligence. Why stuff yourself into a push-up bra and smear pigment across your lips and cheekbones? To try to enhance—or fake—your fertility signals.
May 9, 2009
New Age Discovery
WSJ has an interesting article on how the digital age is helping discover old never-seen-before lieterary treasures. These types are articles are the reason we need the newspaper industry to reninvent itself and prosper. Good old fashined journalism will be even more important in the new digital media world.
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Some manuscripts are in poor condition, like this worm-eaten, 17th-century Christian Arabic Book of Hours from Balamand Monastery, Lebanon.
In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures.
In the process, they’re uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable — blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians.
A Benedictine monk from Minnesota is scouring libraries in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Georgia for rare, ancient Christian manuscripts that are threatened by wars and black-market looters; so far, more than 16,500 of his finds have been digitized. This summer, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky plans to test 3-D X-ray scanning on two papyrus scrolls from Pompeii that were charred by volcanic ash in 79 A.D. Scholars have never before been able to read or even open the scrolls, which now sit in the French National Institute in Paris.
By taking high-resolution digital images in 14 different light wavelengths, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, Oxford scholars are reading bits of papyrus that were discovered in 1898 in an ancient garbage dump in central Egypt. So far, researchers have digitized about 80% of the collection of 500,000 fragments, dating from the 2nd century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. The texts include fragments of unknown works by famous authors of antiquity, lost gospels and early Islamic manuscripts.
Among their latest findings: An alternate version of the Greek play Medea, later immortalized in a version by Euripides, on a darkened piece of papyrus, dated to the 2nd century A.D. In the newly discovered version — written by Greek playwright Neophron — Medea doesn’t kill her children, says Dirk Obbink, director of Oxford’s Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project.
War and political instability in artifact-rich regions such as Afghanistan and Iraq, where untold numbers of antiquities have been lost through looting and destruction, have ignited the push to digitize rare documents. Recent tragedies, such as the earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, and the collapse this past March of the Cologne city archives in Germany, where conservationists are still working frantically to retrieve texts from the rain-soaked rubble, serve as reminders of how quickly cultural relics can be wiped out.
For as long as great manuscript collections have existed, their contents have been vulnerable. The ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt burned down in 48 B.C., incinerating works by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles; today, out of more than 120 plays by Sophocles, only seven survive.
While conservationists are quick to stress that pixels and bytes can never replace priceless physical artifacts, many see digitization as a vital tool for increasing public access to rare items, while at the same time creating a disaster-proof record and perhaps unearthing new information.
May 3, 2009
Larry Page Commencement Speech at Univ of Michigan
Pretty nice speech from someone who truly changed the world. Here is the video: