Freiburg: First Large German City Under Curfew
“I don’t give a damn about Corona”, said an acquaintance at a recent gathering. That was exactly two weeks and two days ago. It sounded crude and nonchalant but not absurd. Now this is a sentence from another world. The tragedy is that many of the presumed main carriers of the virus –young adults– carry on living by this motto.
Explore the world with amuz. iOS and Android.
Kevin Hundley, via a kind email from my Father:
Almighty God, we come before you to plead for your protection and guidance. We acknowledge that nothing takes place on this planet without your observation and control and that even natural disasters and dreadful diseases are known to you. According to your will and ways, spare us and those we love from the discomfort of the Coronavirus and especially from its more serious consequences. Give wisdom to health agencies in our community, our nation, and the world to work together to slow the spread of this disease, care for its victims, and discover a reliable cure. Move the forces of government to assist those affected by the disease and to coordinate a calm and fitting response. In your good time restore common sense among us and return a spirit of order to our society.
Gracious Lord, we believe that you use disasters and diseases to remind us and our world of your sovereignty and significance. Let people everywhere acknowledge that we human creatures are not in control of life and death and that there is a divine power under whom we live and breathe and have our being. Bring us to our knees as we recognize your power and our sins. Then let Christian messengers around the world share the healing power of the gospel so that souls may be directed to your life-saving love in Christ. During this troubling time lift our eyes to the cross of your Son to see your wisdom, power, and love and may that cross lead many to repentance and faith. We pray through Jesus Christ, Our Lord.
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“That will be $25.00.”
I’ve been blessed to travel extensively. Events, weather and other issues may arise and require changes. For decades, one could often make a call or an in person request and a flight or schedule update was made.
The $25.00 fee for me, was the beginning of the end.
Up until a few weeks ago, airlines seemed to master fees for everything from a boarding pass, assigned seats to schedule and price changes and of course additional fees for frequent flyer tickets.
That $25.00 moment remains etched in my memory. Delta’s customer service agent delivered it quickly and professionally. She responded to my request for waiver with “those fees pay my bonus”. I marveled at the organizational skills required to make the fees for everything business model stick.
Yet, I wondered when the airline fee house of cards might crumble. The organizational, training and software complexity required to support fees for everything is substantial. Increasingly cramped planes have further reduced the air travel allure.
Today, zoom’s (video communication app) market capitalization is $29.7B, exceeding Delta’s 24.55B, United’s $10.32B and Southwest’s $21.35B.
There is no substitute for face to face meetings, imho. That said, augmenting experiences and relationships with FaceTime, zoom, amuz and other digital services is here to stay.
Perhaps we may arrive at a more citizen friendly balance between fees for everything air travel and pure digital services.
Federal electronic medical record data sharing rules have been released, many years after the $38B+ federal taxpayer backdoor subsidy, which promised “interoperability”.
Rick Pollack, CEO of the American Hospital Association, said in a statement Monday that the final ONC rule fails to protect patient information. “The rule lacks the necessary guardrails to protect consumers from actors such as third-party apps that are not required to meet the same stringent privacy and security requirements as hospitals,” he said.
Nick Hatt, a product designer at Madison-based health care data-sharing company Redox and a former Epic employee, said Epic “didn’t really get very much in the final (ONC) rule. The content did not change substantially, so it was kind of a win for the patient-access side.”
The rule requires full exports of patient data, beginning in three years, to patients or hospitals if requested, Hatt said. “You’re being asked to develop something that helps your customers switch from your software to someone else,” he said.
Also, screen shots of electronic medical records will become more public, which Epic didn’t want, Hatt said. “They really don’t want to have screen shots of their software out on the internet, and now essentially it’s illegal for them to put those kinds of clauses in their contracts,” he said.
But the scope of data that must be shared will be limited for two years, and companies such as Epic will be able to warn patients about the dangers of sharing data with third-party apps — changes that were in Epic’s favor, Hatt said.
The rules apply to scenarios such as patients wanting to share clinical data and check lab results with Apple’s Health app, Hatt said.
Epic has said the proposed ONC rule could threaten patient privacy and intellectual property, and increase health care costs. CEO Judy Faulkner urged customers to support a letter in opposition to the rule. More than 60 health system CEOs, including those at UW Health, UnityPoint Health-Meriter and Gundersen Health System, signed the letter sent in February to HHS Secretary Alex Azar.
Related:
1. Paying – Repeatedly – for Epic’s Walled Garden
2. Airdrop trumps $40B Taxpayer Medical Record Subsidies.
3. Madison’s Property Tax Base Growth; $38B+ Federal Taxpayer EMR Subsidy.
4. $37,920,077,070 in Taxpayer Electronic Medical Record Subsidies: 2009 – January 2018
5. Epic Electronic Medical Record Implementation: $100,000,000 for Stanford Hospital in 2005.
6. Epic Systems Clearing Storm Landscape Images.
7. A failed 2007 attempt to use Wisconsin taxpayer funds for electronic medical record subsidies.
7. More notes and links on Epic Systems and its founder: Judy Faulkner
8. Federal electronic medical record data sharing rules: 474 page pdf.
Federal agencies have big contracts with Virginia-based Babel Street. Depending on where you’ve traveled, your movements may be in the company’s data.
U.S. law enforcement agencies signed millions of dollars worth of contracts with a Virginia company after it rolled out a powerful tool that uses data from popular mobile apps to track the movement of people’s cell phones, according to federal contracting records and six people familiar with the software.
The product, called Locate X and sold by Babel Street, allows investigators to draw a digital fence around an address or area, pinpoint mobile devices that were within that area, and see where else those devices have traveled, going back months, the sources told Protocol.
They said the tool tracks the location of devices anonymously, using data that popular cell phone apps collect to enable features like mapping or targeted ads, or simply to sell it on to data brokers.
Ships contain simple systems that are easy to operate and easy to understand, which makes them easy to fix, which means they have less downtime. An important quality, considering that “downtime” for a ship could mean being stranded thousands of miles from help.
Take the ship’s steering system, for instance. The rudder is pushed left or right by metal rods. Those rods are moved by hydraulic pressure. That pressure is controlled by a hydraulic pump. That pump is controlled by an electronic signal from the wheelhouse. That signal is controlled by the autopilot. It doesn’t require a rocket scientist or a naval architect to find the cause of and solution to any problem:
Maybe it’s cold, and you need some winter gloves. You know the brand of your favorite coat and remember who made your warmest sweater. Gloves, however, have always just been gloves, purchased without too much thought. So you open up Amazon and search: “winter gloves.”
On the first page you might see a brand you’ve heard of before, like Carhartt, whose W.P. Waterproof Insulated Glove, priced in my search at $24.37, has been positively reviewed thousands of times. Scroll a bit further and you might find the venerable Isotoner offering another popular basic glove.
Mostly, you’ll notice gloves from brands that, unless you’ve spent a lot of time searching for gloves on Amazon, you’ve never heard of. Brands that evoke nothing in particular, but which do so in capital letters. Brands that are neither translated nor Romanized nor transliterated from another language, and which may contain words, or names, that do not seem to refer to the products they sell. Brands like Pvendor, RIVMOUNT, FRETREE and MAJCF. Gloves emblazoned with names like Nertpow, SHSTFD, Joyoldelf, VBIGER and Bizzliz. Gloves with hundreds or even thousands of apparently positive reviews, available for very low prices, shipped quickly, for free, with Amazon Prime.
Eric Wilson, Marco Rubio’s digital director during his Presidential run, in 2016, told me, “The best online marketers are agnostic, as opposed to prescriptive. Anyone with a lot of money can buy a lot of ads, but what really matters is measurement, because without that you have no idea which ads are having any effect.” This sort of measurement is the province of “ad-tech” firms. Clients decide which metrics they want maximized—often some quantitative measure of success on Google and Facebook, which together control about half of the online ad market—and the ad-tech firms optimize for that outcome. In the summer of 2016, Parscale hired two leading ad-tech firms—Sprinklr, based in New York, and Kenshoo, based in Tel Aviv—to send subcontractors to work for him in San Antonio. Sprinklr also assigned remote employees, stationed in various time zones, to crunch numbers at all hours. In addition to data provided by the R.N.C. and traditional voter files, the Trump campaign had access to a repository of information provided by the Data Trust, a private company that Karl Rove and other conservative bigwigs had established in 2011. There are restrictions that prevent certain kinds of data sharing among nonprofit political entities, but those don’t apply to for-profit companies.
The Obama campaigns used Facebook and other digital tools extensively, as well.
2018: Facebook and elections event.
Adjunct, a novel by Geoff Cebula, is a love letter to academia, a self-help book, a learned disquisition on an obscure genre of Italian film, and a surprisingly affecting satire-cum-horror-comedy. In other words, exactly the kind of strange, unlucrative, interdisciplinary work that university presses, if they take any risks at all, should exist to print. Given the parlous state of academic publishing—with Stanford University Press nearly shutting down and all but a few presses ordered to turn profits or else—it should perhaps come as no surprise that one of the best recent books on the contemporary university was instead self-published on Amazon. Cebula, a scholar of Slavic literature who finished his Ph.D. in 2016 and then taught in a variety of contingent positions, learned his lesson. Adjunct became the leading entry in the rapidly expanding genre of academic “quit-lit,” the lovelorn farewell letters from those who’ve broken up with the university for good. Rather than continue to try for a tenure-track teaching gig, Cebula’s moved on and is now studying law.
The novel’s heroine, Elena Malatesta, is an instructor of Italian at Bellwether College, an academically nondescript institution located somewhere in the northeast. Her teaching load—the number of officially designated “credit hours” per semester—has been reduced to just barely over half-time, allowing the college to offer minimum benefits even though her work seems to take up all of her day. Recently, the college has been advised to make still deeper cuts to the language departments, which are said to not only distract students but to actively harm them by inducing an interest in anything other than lucre. Elena responds with a mixture of paranoia and dark comedy: after the cuts there will be only so many jobs in languages left—maybe the Hindi teacher, anxious about her own position, is conspiring to bump her off? Then Elena had better launch a preemptive strike: this could be a “kill or be killed” situation.