Sanjena Sathian:

Keeping track of health measurements at home is pretty simple: Step onto a scale in the bathroom, take a glucose measurement on the way out the door, or strap on a blood pressure cuff while watching television.

Now, doctors increasingly want access to those at-home measurements in an effort to keep patients healthier and reduce health care costs.

Boston’s Partners HealthCare last month launched a system that allows patients to upload information from their medical devices, often wirelessly, directly into their electronic records in doctors’ offices. Patients can use glucometers, blood pressure cuffs, bathroom scales, and pulse oximeters (which measure blood oxygen levels) at home, to take regular measurements and send them to their doctors.

Partners is among the first health care systems to integrate such at-home devices into the electronic health record, said Dr. John Halamka, chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who is not involved with the Partners technology.

The Lake Harriet Band shell.

Michael Sivak:

This study examined recent trends in the numbers of light-duty vehicles (cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and vans) in the U.S. fleet. The analysis considered both the absolute numbers and the rates per person, per licensed driver, and per household. The period examined was from 1984 through 2011. The absolute number of vehicles reached a maximum in 2008. However, it is likely that this was only a temporary maximum and that the decline after 2008 was primarily driven by the current economic downturn that started in 2008. Consequently, with the improving economy and the expected increase in the U.S. population, it is highly likely that (from a long-term perspective) the absolute number of vehicles has not yet peaked. On the other hand, the rates of vehicles per person, licensed driver, and household reached their maxima prior to the onset of the current economic downturn.

Consequently, it is likely that the declines in these rates prior to the current economic downturn (i.e., prior to 2008) reflect other societal changes that influence the need for vehicles (e.g., increases in telecommuting and in the use of public transportation). Therefore, the recent maxima in these rates have better chances of being long-term peaks as well.

However, because the changes in the rates from 2008 on likely reflect both the relevant societal changes and the current economic downturn, whether the recent maxima in the rates will represent long-term peaks as well will be influenced by the extent to which the relevant societal changes turn out to be permanent.

Information about Sustainable Worldwide Transportation is available at http://www.umich.edu/~umtriswt

Ketaki Gokhale:

Devi Shetty is obsessed with making heart surgery affordable for millions of Indians. On his office desk are photographs of two of his heroes: Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi.
Shetty is not a public health official motivated by charity. He’s a heart surgeon turned businessman who has started a chain of 21 medical centers around India. By trimming costs with such measures as buying cheaper scrubs and spurning air-conditioning, he has cut the price of artery-clearing coronary bypass surgery to 95,000 rupees ($1,583), half of what it was 20 years ago, and wants to get the price down to $800 within a decade. The same procedure costs $106,385 at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
“It shows that costs can be substantially contained,” said Srinath Reddy, president of the Geneva-based World Heart Federation, of Shetty’s approach. “It’s possible to deliver very high quality cardiac care at a relatively low cost.”

Philip Greenspun:

Consumer Reports has rated the Tesla sedan the best car that they’ve ever tested (list). Tesla has a market capitalization of about $14 billion (July 22, 2013). According to Wikipedia, Tesla seems to have required about $1 billion in debt and equity funding.

The GM/Chrysler bailout required roughly $85 billion in taxpayer funds (Wikipedia). Instead of preserving these relics we could have instead have had nearly 85 startup automobile manufacturers on the same scale as Tesla. Wouldn’t that have been a lot more interesting and more likely to push forward the automotive state of the art?

John Naughton:

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world’s mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.

In a way, it doesn’t matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.
Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users’ data.

Peter Buffett:

But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life.

And with more business-minded folks getting into the act, business principles are trumpeted as an important element to add to the philanthropic sector. I now hear people ask, “what’s the R.O.I.?” when it comes to alleviating human suffering, as if return on investment were the only measure of success. Microlending and financial literacy (now I’m going to upset people who are wonderful folks and a few dear friends) — what is this really about? People will certainly learn how to integrate into our system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2 a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But doesn’t all this just feed the beast?

Crony capitalism is a growing problem. See cozy big government telco, healthcare, bank and energy relationships among many others.

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Today’s Financial Times Weekend Magazine is a special graphics edition. My contribution is to share the biggest of the 14 grape-variety pedigrees/family trees included in our award-winning tome Wine Grapes – a complete guide to 1,368 vine varieties including their origins and flavours (did I ever mention that Julia and I had written a book about grapes with grape geneticist José Vouillamoz?).

Should you see the magazine, which includes Nick on menus, you’ll see there are two family trees, one labelled Pinot and one Cabernet Sauvignon, but in fact the latter is a subsection of the former. The Pinot family tree shows so many varieties (156 in all) that it is impossible to show usefully on this site, but you can enjoy it free in all its glory here on our special Wine Grapes site.

Lisa O’Carroll:

A British-based computer scientist has been banned from publishing an academic paper revealing the secret codes used to start luxury cars including Porsches, Audis, Bentleys and Lamborghinis as it could lead to the theft of millions of vehicles, a judge has ruled.
The high court imposed an injunction on the University of Birmingham’s Flavio Garcia, a lecturer in computer science, who has cracked the security system by discovering the unique algorithm that allows the car to verify the identity of the ignition key.

The UK injunction is an interim step in a case launched by Volkswagen’s parent, which owns the four luxury marques, against Garcia and two other cryptography experts from a Dutch university.

It complained that the publication could “allow someone, especially a sophisticated criminal gang with the right tools, to break the security and steal a car”. The cars are protected by a system called Megamos Crypto, an algorithm which works out the codes that are sent between the key and the car.

Allstate:

Car crash fatalities are at the lowest level they’ve been since 1949, but still average more than 32,000 every year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

“It is vital for us to educate American drivers about safe driving behaviors they can demonstrate on the road that will help make our roadways safer,” said Roche. “Minimizing distractions, obeying traffic laws, and using your car’s safety features like turn signals and headlights, are all ways to be safer, no matter where you drive.”
Big-city vs. Small-city Driving
Different levels and types of traffic, noise and activity, as well as varying road conditions and rules, can make big city driving different than driving in smaller cities or more suburban areas. Allstate offers the following tips for driving in both settings. In larger cities:

More here:

The first task is to consider mileage. The Center for Neighborhood Technology’s Housing and Transportation Affordability Index estimates the number of miles that members of an average household travel by car in a year, broken down by city. Among our candidates, the average is 14,433 miles. (Garland, Tex., tops our list at 19,234 miles, while New York City is at the bottom with 9,375). We’ll incorporate this information into the data by creating a multiplier based on how many miles a city’s residents drive relative to the average. The Allstate rankings, for example, are based on the number of years between accidents. San Franciscans average 6.5 years between crashes, but they drive 74 percent as many miles as the average for cities in our survey, so we lower their years-between-accidents to 4.8 to account for how rarely they drive.