For months now, the health sector has led the economy in job creation, producing more than 300,000 more jobs since this time last year. Even as overall job creation sputtered last month, the health sector added 44,000 new positions.
But health-care job growth isn’t necessarily a good thing, at least when it comes to controlling our skyrocketing health costs. More health-care jobs mean more health-care spending, the opposite of what most health policy wonks want to see happen.
A New England Journal of Medicine article this morning really gets at this tension, between the good of job creation and bad of growing health costs. It suggests that a key driver behind our health-care job growth is a decline in productivity. We’re adding more workers, the article argues, because, in the aggregate, each health-care worker is doing less. And that’s the opposite of every other industry sector that’s growing right now. Take a look:
We Are All Just Data
Recently for English, we had to write a quick paragraph using a bunch of vocabulary words we had learned while reading American literature. I chose to write about a potential conversation that I would love to have with Larry Page. Here it is:
“I sat down in the theater for what would become an arduous, yet interesting conversation with Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. I started off by asking him if the new social network Google had been working on was received with much approbation. He said it was doing great, with tens of millions of users and active engagement with everyone on the site, though Facebook’s new Timeline feature and Open Graph would require Google’s vigilance to come up with new innovations in the social space. My next question led to a change in his disposition, as I asked him whether “free” products such as the ones from Facebook and Google were artifices to gather immense amounts of data to give marketers super-focused ad placement. He then said that the usurpations I was alleging were incredibly false, that I was an insidious person, and that he was going to leave.”
Let’s gaze upon the corpse of the Fourth Amendment
Summary: Most of the Bill of Rights has been de facto voided, as Courts sometimes — or often — rely on specious logic to ignore the word’s plain meaning. A few phrases retain their force, giving us the illusion of liberty (eg, we are well-armed sheep). Over time the dead area probably will continue to expand, the arrival of the inevitable again surprising us. Here we look at the corpse of the fourth amendment.
Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through:
See what a rent the envious Casca made:
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabb’d;
And as he pluck’d his cursed steel away …Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up
To such a sudden flood of mutiny.
They that have done this deed are honourable:
What private griefs they have, alas, I know not,
That made them do it: they are wise and honourable,
And will, no doubt, with reasons answer you.
Privacy Study: Top U.S. Websites Share Visitor Personal Data
A study released Tuesday shows that 45% of the top 185 U.S. websites transmit identifying details about their visitors to at least four outside websites.
The data transmitted was primarily a “username” – which is the name a person uses to log into a website – or a user ID assigned by the website to a user. It was usually transmitted through referrers – which is information about the web page transmitted automatically.
In some cases, the data went much further: the study found for instance that the online dating website OKCupid sent the gender, age, zip code, relationship status and ‘drug use frequency’ to two companies that sell personal data in auctions, BlueKai and Lotame.
On the historic context of institutionalized gathering of personal data
As Dediu acknowledges, this in itself is not a new insight — there has been plenty of coverage of privacy controversies at Facebook, Google and other companies. What was interesting, however, was that he linked this to a larger historical context, referring to the process of institutions (state and private) gathering information about individuals over the last few centuries. This reminded me of an interview that Cabinet Magazine conducted with Valentin Groebner in 2006, about the medieval and pre-modern tracking of individuals.
Groebner,? Professor of History at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, is the author of Who Are You?: Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe, and his interview with David Serlin talks about the history of passports, in the context of larger historical surrenderings of privacy in the last two hundred years.
It is possible that the current wave of institutional data-hoarding may in effect be the last. The companies who are leading it are far more efficient than previous authorities — historically, state and church authorities. They are taking the data from people who are apparently far more willing to give it than in previous eras. And they are going to be able to analyse and process personal data far more finely than anyone else ever has. This is not really an alarmist conclusion — although the situation itself is alarming — but simply an acknowledgement of existing reality. Dediu’s comment that “this will become a political question” and that “these things are doomsday issues for some” is interesting in the context of the recent successes of the privacy-advocating Piratenpartei (Pirate Party) in the 2011 Berlin state elections.
Food Stamps: Wisconsin, Minnesota & Massachusetts 2006-2010
Food Stamps WI, MN, MA 2006-2010
Data via: http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/snapmain.htm.
Taste Buds
Dawn of the Smart City: The next generation will see a historic migration to urban areas around the world. So who’s going to benefit?
Cities are experiencing one of the biggest booms since the Industrial Revolution got under way.
In 2008, the number of urban dwellers for the first time in history eclipsed the number living far from the madding crowd. The United Nations projects that by mid-century, cities will be home to 70% of the world’s 9.2 billion inhabitants, a figure that tops today’s population by 30%.
The trend is mostly the result of the welcome prosperity of the emerging markets and should bode well for the world economy. Cities are the engines of innovation, as economist Edward L. Glaeser asserts in his recent book, Triumph of the City. Urban growth raises output per capita. In the United States, for example, Glaeser reports that workers in big metropolitan areas earn 30% more than workers laboring elsewhere,reflecting this higher productivity.
Smart cities get their own operating system
Smart cities with devices chatting to each other may dot the planet in the near future
Cities could soon be looking after their citizens all by themselves thanks to an operating system designed for the metropolis.The Urban OS works just like a PC operating system but keeps buildings, traffic and services running smoothly.
The software takes in data from sensors dotted around the city to keep an eye on what is happening.
As Federal Crime List Grows, Threshold of Guilt Declines
Gary Fields & John Emshwiller:
For centuries, a bedrock principle of criminal law has held that people must know they are doing something wrong before they can be found guilty. The concept is known as mens rea, Latin for a “guilty mind.”
This legal protection is now being eroded as the U.S. federal criminal code dramatically swells. In recent decades, Congress has repeatedly crafted laws that weaken or disregard the notion of criminal intent. Today not only are there thousands more criminal laws than before, but it is easier to fall afoul of them.
As a result, what once might have been considered simply a mistake is now sometimes punishable by jail time. When the police came to Wade Martin’s home in Sitka, Alaska, in 2003, he says he had no idea why. Under an exemption to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, coastal Native Alaskans such as Mr. Martin are allowed to trap and hunt species that others can’t. That included the 10 sea otters he had recently sold for $50 apiece.