Monthly Archives: April 2004

Is American Healthcare more Productive?

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Tyler Cowen writes a useful summary of our healthcare system’s costs & productivity vs other nations:

The relevant measures were either life expectancy after treatment or measures of the quality of life. And how about the results:
The United States is more productive in all these diseases except for diabetes in the United Kingdom. [emphasis added] The reasons for this result can be traced directly to the huge differences in the way the health care sector is organized and governed across these three countries. The UK health care system is almost entirely government owned and run…The result has been that the United Kingdom has no invested as quickly in technologies that have dramatically improved the diagnostic capabilities of medicine and significantly reduced recovery time…Germany, on the other hand, has a system more like the United States had twenty years ago. In Germany, medical expenses are paid for on a task-by-task basis for services of doctors and hospitals. As a result, hospitals in Germany have no financial incentive to reduce length of stay.

Ocean Policy Report Released

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Felicity Barringer writes about the Ocean Commission’s new strategy for safeguarding the sea:

“Our oceans and coasts are in serious trouble,” the commission’s chairman, Adm. James D. Watkins, a former chief of naval operations, said at a news conference here today. The existing management system, which spreads responsibility across what he called “a Byzantine patchwork” of federal and state agencies and local fishing councils, “is simply not up to the task” of preventing degradation, Admiral Watkins said.

The Political Promise of the Internet

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Mitch Kapor writes about Korean politics, where a two year old party, The Uri (Our Party) decisively took over the National Assembly in last week’s elections:

It was done using the Net. It is no accident that the political coming-of-age of the Net came about in Korea where almost 70% of its households are broadband connected. Starting as a social movement organized through the Net, the new Uri party became a political phenomena.
In December 2002, the Uri party used the Net to go around Korea’s traditional political structures and elect Roh Moo-hyun President. Korea’s national politics have traditionally been regionally based. However, using the Net, the Uri put together a new political coalition based not on geography, but age, bringing together those under 30. Paradoxically, the Uri also used the Net to involve citizens at local face to face meetings.
The Net was used to begin to break the overwhelming political influence of Korea’s giant corporate conglomerates, the chaebols, who funded (both legally and illegitimately) much of Korea’s politics. The Uri use the Net to help fund their campaign with tens of thousands of small contributions.

Key Points: The Uri used the internet to route around the establishment (including entrenched media companies who have an interesting in keeping the establishment in power). Here’s a Saudi Blogger’s “diary of life in the “Magic Kingdom”, where the Religious Police ensure that everything remains as it was in the Middle Ages.” via Jeff Jarvis.

The Copyright Killing Fields

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J.D. Lasica writes about copyright law and its challengers:

For years, all was peaceful in the house of Horowitz. Jed Horowitz, a 53-year-old New Jersey entrepreneur with sharply chiseled features and gleaming bald head, had been running a small video operation called Video Pipeline that took Hollywood films, created two-minute trailers to help promote them, and distributed them to online retailers such as Netflix, BestBuy, and Barnes and Noble, as well as public libraries. Then one day in 2000, the Walt Disney Co. sent a cease-and-desist order, charging that Horowitz’s company was violating Disney’s copyright by featuring portions of their movies online.

FTC to evaluate “spyware”

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Or – why Windows PC’s can be unsafe at any speed. Yuki Noguchi writes

The Federal Trade Commission today is hosting a daylong workshop in Washington to discuss the effects of hidden software that may be used to control or spy on a computer without its user’s knowledge.
So far most “spyware” and “adware” programs, often placed on Windows PCs by such downloaded programs as file-sharing programs, appear to have been used for the relatively benign purpose of tracking consumer preferences, said Howard Beales, director of the FTC’s consumer protection division. The FTC is watching to see if criminals start making widespread use of this technology to steal credit-card and Social Security numbers of unwitting computer users, he said.
“So far [we] haven’t thought that it warranted regulation,” he said.

Some organizations, including the Madison schools, only support a computing monoculture – fertile ground for spyware…..

Good teaching matters….

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Alan Borsuk continues his recent series of education articles with a profile of five Milwaukee area teachers. One of them, Louise Guinn remarks:

“We push a lot for the kids to be successful.” And she is convinced all her students – all black, almost all from low-income homes – can learn “if given the right opportunities and the right environment.
She says she urges parents to limit television and to read more at home. Children are influenced by this.
But she also knows that many of her students lead challenging lives. During a class discussion of what fourth-graders can do that infants can’t, making your bed is mentioned by one student. Another says he doesn’t have to do that because he sleeps on the floor. Guinn understands that this means he doesn’t have a bed of his own.

Knob Gallery – Successful Milwaukee Web/Physical Business

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Joan Shelley translated a “knack for knobs” into a fast-growing $1.4m business, according to Doris Hajewski:

Knobs are an unusual foundation for a business, especially for a triage nurse.
The mother of eight children, Shelley turned a flair for decorating cakes into a home business. In rapid succession in the 1990s, that led to assisting with commercial kitchen design and then teaming up as a designer with Amish craftsmen from southern Illinois. They made cabinets, and every one of those cabinets needed a knob or handle.
“Customers, especially the high-end ones, wanted something special in hardware,” Shelley said.
She acquired lots of catalogs, but she wished there was an easier way to find what the customers wanted.
Enter Kristina Shelley, the self-described computer geek of the Shelley brood. At age 16, in the late 1990s, she had mastered the Web design classes at Oconomowoc High School. She started taking college classes and working part-time at Apex, a now-defunct Web development business in Milwaukee.

Wal-Mart – a nation unto itself?

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Steve Greenhouse writes a useful article on the economic & cultural implications of the Wal-Mart system:

We already know that Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer. (If it were an independent nation, it would be China’s eighth-largest trading partner.) We also know that it is maniacal about low prices. (Some economists say it has single-handedly cut inflation by 1 percent in recent years, saving consumers billions of dollars annually.) We know that its labor practices have come under attack. (It charges its workers so much for health insurance that about one-third of them do not have it.)

Battle of Information & Ideas

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Verlyn Klinkenborg nicely summarizes recent news in the recording industry’s battle against file sharing:

But this isn’t just a legal battle, of course. It’s a battle of information and ideas. A new book from Lawrence Lessig called “Free Culture” makes a forceful, cogent defense of many forms of file sharing. And ? perhaps worst of all from the industry’s perspective ? a new academic study prepared by professors at Harvard and the University of North Carolina concludes, “Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero.” This directly counters recording industry claims that place nearly all the blame for declining CD sales on illegal file sharing.