It's an age-old problem for large publicly traded companies, regardless of industry.
Two groups want a new toolbox (for example)
They can each build their own to a local specification, or they can agree to build one toolbox:
Option I. Build a toolbox to local specification
Group A: $10
Group B: $10
Group A + B: $20vs.
Option II: Build a toolbox to group specification
Group A: $14 (40% over budget)
Group B: $2 (80% cost reduction)
Group A + B: $16 (20% savings)
Options I works.
Option II saves the company 20%, but the manager of Group A is now unemployed and the manager of Group B is now a VP.
Back in Economics 101 we learned how markets solve this particular problem [1], but most publicly traded companies don't have internal markets [2].
I'm interested in examples of publicly traded companies, in any industry, that have made a go at mitigating this problem. If there are no minimally successful examples that's also important to know.
I'd be most grateful for examples of companies to look at, for comments or feedback, or for references to academic papers. Comments to this post or email to me are equally welcome!
(Brad, any thoughts?)
--
[1] See also: comparative advantage -- aka "I can do it better than you, but I have better things to do.").
[2] Apparently Czechoslovakia was relatively good at this sort of thing before the fall of the Soviet Union.
Update 2/4/08:In 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do organizations exist? Why don't people just buy and sell their own services in a market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market's transaction costs: buyers and sellers need to find one another, then reach agreement, and so on. The Coase theorem implies that if these transaction costs are low enough, direct markets of individuals make a whole lot of sense. But if they are too high, it makes more sense to get the job done by an organization that hires people.In a related vein consider Coding Horror's discussion of the costs of software reuse.
Economists have long understood the corollary concept of Coase's ceiling, a point above which organizations collapse under their own weight -- where hiring someone, however competent, means more work for everyone else than the new hire contributes. Software projects often bump their heads against Coase's ceiling: recall Frederick P. Brooks Jr.'s seminal study, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison-Wesley, 1975), which showed how adding another person onto a project can slow progress and increase errors. ...
Jacob Reider, the master of the terse post, apparently likes Microsoft's FeedSync.
Of course, Jacob, you didn't bother to say why you liked it. Or even what it might be good for!
It turns out that FeedSync was originally a Ray (Lotus Notes -> Microsoft CTO) Ozzie project. I don't know what it started out as, but now claims to be an open source specification for enabling data synchronization.
Jacob is presumably interested for two reasons. One is general geekhood, the other healthcare related. First the geek stuff.
As a fellow-geek Jacob, like me, is constantly trying to synchronize data across platforms. Anyone who's been around the block with Outlook, Exchange, Palm, mobile phones, iPhones, Gmail, iSync, etc, etc, will have learned that this is a non-trivial problem even in the relatively trivial domain of synchronizing address books.
We geeks would like, for example, to move our images and metadata readily from Picasa to Flickr and back again. Good luck - even if Google claims they're opposed to Data Lock enabling synchronization between competitors is rather a difficult proposition -- particularly when the services define photo collections differently (include by reference or by copy?).
Heck, we'd like to move our metadata from iPhoto to Aperture -- two desktop apps Apple controls. We can't even do that. (ex: photo book annotations). Forget Aperture to Lightroom!
How hard is this problem? I have long claimed that data synchronization issues between Palm and Outlook/Exchange were one of the top three causes of the collapse of once promising Palm OS ecosystem. OS X geeks know that Apple has a long history of messed up synchronization even within the completely controlled OS X/.Mac environment. IBM has had several initiatives to manage this kind of issue (the last one I tracked was in the OS/2 era) -- all disasters. Anyone remember CORBA transaction standards? Same problem in a different form. The only experience I've had of synchronization working was with the original Palm devices synchronizing to the original Palm Desktop -- where everything was built to make synchronization work. Lotus Notes, of course, was into synchronization in a very big way -- that's how the different Notes repositories communicated with one another (hence Ozzie's interest). I don't know how well that really worked, but I'm told it took an army to make Notes work.
Personally, I think this problem gets fully solved about 10 milliseconds before Skynet takes over. There are too many nasty issues of semantics, of each system knowing what the other means by "place", to achieve perfect results between disparate systems. Even the imperfect results achieved by using language between mere humans requires a semblance of sentience, shared language, and even shared culture.
Reason two for Jacob's interest is, of course, his health care IT background. HL-7. SNOMED terminfo models. HITSP and Continuity of Care Records. Even Google's fuzzy Personal Health Record interchange services. Microsoft's various healthcare IT initiatives. Many HCIT vendor transaction solutions. They're really all about data synchronization on a grand scale -- even if the realities tend to be fairly modest.
Jacob, btw, is fond of those loosely-coupled mashup thingies.
So what's "FeedSync"? (emphases mine)
Windows Live Dev FeedSync Intro
The creation of FeedSync was catalyzed by the observation that RSS and Atom feeds were exploding on the web, and that by harnessing their inherent simplicity we might enable the creation of a “decentralized data bus” among the world’s web sites. Just like RSS and Atom, FeedSync feeds can be synchronized to any device or platform.
Previously known as Simple Sharing Extensions, FeedSync was originally designed by Ray Ozzie in 2005 and has been developed by Microsoft with input from the Web community. The initial specification, FeedSync for Atom and RSS, describes how to synchronize data through Atom and RSS feeds.
The FeedSync specification is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License and the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.
... FeedSync lays the foundation for a common synchronization infrastructure between any service and any application.
... Everyone has data that they want to share: contact lists, calendar entries, blog postings, and so on. This data must be up-to-date, real-time, across any of the programs, services, or devices you choose to use and share with.
Too often today data is “locked up” in proprietary applications and services or on various devices. As an open extension to RSS and Atom, FeedSync enables you to “unlock” your data—making it easy to synchronize the data you choose to any other authorized FeedSync-enabled service, computer, or mobile device. FeedSync enables many compelling scenarios:
- Collaboration over the web using synchronized feeds
- Roaming data to multiple client devices
- Publishing reference data and updates in an open format that can be synchronized easily
... FeedSync enables multi-master topologies,
... publish a subset of his calendar more broadly using a FeedSync feed. Consumers of the publish-only feed can only see a subset of the calendar, and don’t have permission to make changes. Because of the FeedSync information in the feed, though, they are reliably notified of updates to Steve’s shared calendar. And unlike current feeds, when Steve deletes an item from the calendar, the item is deleted on everyone’s calendar.
... RSS and Atom were designed as notification mechanisms, to alert clients that some new resource is available on a server. This is a great fit for simple applications like blogging.
But those feed formats are not a natural fit for representing collections of resources that change, such as a contact list, or a collection of calendar items. Atom Publishing Protocol is designed for resource collections, but it is a client-server protocol and isn’t suitable (by itself) for multi-master scenarios. FeedSync extends RSS and Atom so that FeedSync-enabled RSS and Atom feeds can be used for reliable, efficient content replication and multi-master data synchronization.
One of the great benefits of FeedSync is that it doesn’t attempt to replace technologies like RSS, Atom, or Atom Publishing Protocol. Instead, FeedSync is a simple set of extensions that enhances the RSS or Atom feeds that people are already using today...
There you go. Nerdvana indeed.
Grumph.
Ok, I won't rain too hard on this parade. I said "perfect results" weren't feasible. We can't do synchronization for anything that's not trivial -- at least not without monstrous effort. The interesting question is whether there's some kind of "good enough" compromise that we can start with that, with a lot of time and evolution, might lead to some sort of emergent solution. Preferably without Skynet. Something that bears the same relationship to the original Palm synchronization that Google does to the original memex/xanadu vision...
I've been thinking the same thing for a while, looking for an opportunity to say it.
FT.com | Clive Crook's blog: How the press played the race card
... I think the press played the race card, not the Clintons.
It's the same old game -- getting attention at any cost. The American public never learns ...
Months after he was written off, McCain is the GOP favorite. I assume the Trilateral Commission is at work, otherwise I can't explain this at all.
The GOP now has a choice between Mitt "thumbscrews" Romney and John McCain. Assuming continuation of bizarre trends, there's only a 1/3 chance of Romney winning. If Romney wins, I'm guessing, based on Florida numbers, that there's only a 1/3 chance of his getting the presidency.
So there's about a 90% [1] probability that America's next president will be Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John McCain.
Right wing talk radio hates McCain; it's hard to imagine a better endorsement. I would be disappointed if McCain won, but I would not be thinking about emigrating.
So today we have a 90% probability of a better future for America.
Wow, I didn't expect to be thinking that already.
So how does this change my thoughts my thoughts ahead of Minnesota's primary?
If Florida's Dem delegates had counted, Hilary Clinton would now be planning to wrap-up the primary contests. If Giuliani had won Florida I'd be wearing my Hilary button now.
Today, though, I feel freer.
I think she's still the best option for winning the presidency, but I still don't care for the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton dynastic progression. I still fear Obama can't win Florida, but if McCain is the nominee that might be a risk to consider.
Or maybe I should go with Edwards, and give him the power to choose both the President and the Vice-President.
Today I'm thinking I want John Edwards to be the kingmaker.
[1] 1 - (1/3*1/3) = 8/9 = 89%
Update: Ok, so much for that.
...top strategist Joe Trippi explained the timing of the decision like this: "It became increasingly clear on Sunday and Monday that we were totally blocked out of the news story. John Edwards didn't want to play politics. He didn't want to stay in the race to be a kingmaker or a spoiler. There was just not a clear shot at the nomination.
One of the most innovative features of the early Macintosh machines were that each file had a unique identifier. The file "name" was a user convenience, the software used the identifier.
Move a file? No problem. The OS knew where it was.
That's been more and more broken in the past few years. I don't know if the move is deliberate, or if it's a sign that Apple's most brilliant developers have all retired.
Alas, Time Machine demonstrates how broken this feature is.
Exploring the sands of Time Machine
...Time Machine doesn't handle the ol' switcheroo very well; renamed files and folders get backed up right alongside their previous iterations. This means that if you have a 2GB folder of images in your Desktop called "Purty Pi'tures" one day, then do nothing but rename the folder to "Rilly Purty Pi'tures" the next day, you just ate up 4GB of space on your Time Machine drive. Going further, Murphy Mac discovered that Time Machine makes some odd (and potentially unfortunate) decisions when throwing out backups. When Time Machine decides to retain a single backup out of the previous day's hourly backups, it chooses the first one of the day (presumably beginning at 12:01am). This means that some files could still be slipping through the sands of time (c'mon, I had to), depending on your computing habits...
It will be a sad day when Vista's file system is clearly better in every way than the Mac's.
Sleep - Brain - Neurons - New York Times:Both autism and schizophrenia have, at various times, been connected with disorders of pruning neuronal networks. (Errors both ways -- too much and too little.)
...So Dr. Tononi and a colleague, Chiara Cirelli, have hypothesized that during sleep, the synapses weaken. The downscaling is across the board, so that the synapses’ relative strength is maintained. Those that have been used (those involved in learning) stay stronger than those that haven’t....
I remember when putting 15 gigabits a second across a fiber optic connection was real research news. Rough Type points to today's NYT article about transmitting putting 15 terabits a second...
Cisco to Sell Faster Switch for Flood of Remote Data...
... the Nexus 7000, will provide a sharp increase in traffic capacity over the company’s current products, to 15 trillion bits of data a second.
Cisco, of San Jose, Calif., the world’s largest producer of network equipment, offered a range of examples to try to capture the significance of the increase in speed. It said the switch could transfer all 90,000 Netflix movies in 38.4 seconds or send a two-megapixel digital image to every human being on earth in 28 minutes...
... In marketing the new switch, Cisco will emphasize that it will cut the energy costs of large data centers. Changing the design of a data center, made possible by the need for fewer networking interfaces, could reduce a data center’s energy use by 8 percent...
john
If I had the only vote in America, I'd probably vote for John Edwards. Otherwise, If he passed much more study than I've bothered with to date, Barack Obama.
Alas, I don't have the only vote in America. So my "vote" in the oddball Minnesota caucuses next Tuesday will be for whoever is most likely to beat Romney and/or McCain. That means whoever is mostly likely to win Florida, because, yet again, Florida will decide who the next President will be.
So I searched for a reference to guide me, and I found this ...
January 27, 2008 - Florida Primary Preferences
... Hillary Clinton leads Barack Obama among men 59% to 25%, with 13% for John Edwards, and she leads Obama 61% to 28% among women, with 6% for John Edwards. Clinton leads Obama among early voters 65% to 19% and she leads Obama among in-person voters 58% to 31%, with 8% for Edwards. Clinton leads among white voters with 64%, with Obama at 21% and Edwards at 11%. Obama leads Clinton among African American voters 71% to 21%. And Clinton leads among Hispanic voters with 71%, with Obama at 22% and Edwards at 1%.
My recollection is that, in Florida, it's the Hispanic voters that decide presidential contests.
So it's Clinton then. My personal preferences don't count.
Update: for a biting and darkly humorous perspective with a similar (implied) conclusion, read Jon Swift.
The New York Times that is.
In a reprise of John Tierney's NYT interview with Nick (we're in a simulation) Bostrum Dennis Overbye writes about a topic featured in some of my favorite physics blogs - Boltzmann's brain ...
Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? - New York Times
...cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.
CV fills in some more background
... The point about Boltzmann’s Brains is not that they are a fascinating prediction of an exciting new picture of the multiverse. On the contrary, the point is that they constitute a reductio ad absurdum that is meant to show the silliness of a certain kind of cosmology — one in which the low-entropy universe we see is a statistical fluctuation around an equilibrium state of maximal entropy...
In other words, the silliness of the naked flying space brain demonstrates that we don't understand entropy and the arrow of time.
CV uses the same Bayesian logic used by Bostrum to point out that if our current model of entropy were correct then it would be overwhelmingly likely that you are a Boltzmann's Brain and I don't exist...
... In the set of all such fluctuations, some brains would be embedded in universes like ours, but an enormously larger number would be all by themselves. This theory, therefore, predicts that a typical conscious observer is overwhelmingly likely to be such a brain...
CV concludes today's essay with a, to me, tantalizing comment ...
...So what are we to conclude? That our observed universe is not a statistical fluctuation around a thermal equilibrium state. That’s very important to know, but doesn’t pin down the truth. If the universe is eternal, and has a maximum value for its entropy, then we it would (almost always) be in thermal equilibrium. Therefore, either it’s not eternal, or there is no state of maximum entropy. I personally believe the latter, but there’s plenty of work to be done before we have any of this pinned down..
That last link is to an 207 CV article on how it all began.
It's a little secret of national politics that, past the primaries, 99% of the electorate with any significant connection to reality has made up their mind.
So all the advertising, all the spin, all the media manipulation -- none of it is for you or me. We're just in the way.
It's all for the undecided voter and for the intermittent non-voter -- two groups that overlap.
Cosmic Variance has just learned the bad news. Sean is young I think, so no shame in being naive. For obvious reasons this isn't something politicians talk about. They may despise the chore of selling themselves to the arational and illogical, but that's what the game is all about.
There's a bright side. The next time you hear an astoundingly idiotic campaign statement, remember who it's aimed at. Politicians are not as a stupid as they sound, they're just profoundly cynical.
AT&T "Rebate" Case Going Forward - O'Reilly Emerging TelephonyMore on the lawsuit -- so it went forward in 2007. There are a few web references to this topic, but I couldn't find anything new.
...I also clearly remember my dismay at getting a VISA debit card as my “rebate” and the many hoops that I had to jump through to use it simply as a credit on my next Cingular bills...
Gordon's Tech: Nokia 6555b: the pleasant surprise, and its iSync Plug-inI've gone a bit further since doing that, including a visit to the Google BlackBerry mobile page and building a personal Google page for Emily's Blackberry. It all comes together in an interesting way.
...We've turned Emily's Blackberry Pearl into a proto-Android, and it works pretty well that way. So we have a data phone with Google Maps, Google Talk, Google Mail and some other odd Google things....
Pets deserve better food standards: expertSmall privately held companies can manage their services, and their reputations, in ways that large publicly held companies cannot. There's a lesson here that goes beyond my personal interest in Kateva's diet.
To make a point about pet food, veterinarian Meg Smart brewed up a pot of leather boots, wood chips and motor oil."It would pass (Canadian) standards," she said about her concoction.
Smart, a nutrition expert from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, will be featured on a CBC documentary about the pet food industry on Thursday night.
"It's a complex system," said Smart about the industry. "Most diets aren't out there to harm animals. Most are adequate."
But many pet foods aren't adequate. In the spring of 2007, pet owners across North America watched as nearly 50,000 of their cats and dogs fell ill because of tainted food [1]. Menu Foods, a Toronto-based manufacturer, recalled all of their products containing contaminated wheat gluten, an ingredient the company imported from China.
Smart said these companies made a mistake and would never knowingly produce a dangerous product, but the ingredients used in the food may not be carefully monitored.
"I'd like to see a set of requirements, like for humans . . ." said Smart. "Or else, people have no way of knowing what they're feeding their pets."
Today, very few regulations exist for pet food. Leather boots contain enough nitrogen to pass Canadian standards. Wood chips contain enough fibre and carbohydrates. Motor oil contains enough fat.
Pet food ingredients are controlled and monitored by the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, but they only monitor food manufactured in Canada. Most of the pet food Canadians purchase, around 85 per cent, is manufactured in the U.S.
So, what are you feeding your pet? Smart recommends people read food labels carefully because some pet food is well made.
Jason Skotheim has operated Horizon Pet Nutrition in Rosthern since the company started in 2004. He said his company is making sure the ingredients in their product are top quality and locally grown.
"We're trying to make this food like a Hundred Mile Diet for your dog," said Skotheim, referring to the popular diet book for humans.
His company sources all its ingredients and stays completely away from wheat gluten in favour of whole grains.
"Pets are part of the family unit," he said. "We want to make a premium pet food that people can trust."
Skotheim refers to small pet-food companies like Horizon as a cottage industry in Canada. Despite their competition from pet-food giants like Del Monte, Mars and Procter & Gamble, Horizon's business continues to grow.
Smart uses Horizon dry pet food for her dogs, but she says commercials are misleading when they say the food is recommended by veterinarians.
BBC NEWS | Health | Vitamin E 'may ward off decline': "Vitamin E may ward off physical decline in elderly people, research suggests."Not.
.... Lead researcher Dr Benedetta Bartali said... "Our results suggest that an appropriate dietary intake of vitamin E may help to reduce the decline in physical function among older persons."Saying things like that should get a researcher banned from publication for two years. Heck, life. It's the academic equivalent of the "boiled frog" analogy. Just stupid.
Greater Good Science CenterThe essay goes on to describe additional research demonstrating not only that aggressive primates can behave well, but that under some conditions the new behaviors can become established and communicated across generations.Peace Among Primates
by Robert M. Sapolsky... as field studies of primates expanded, what became most striking was the variation in social practices across species. Yes, some primate species have lives filled with violence, frequent and varied. But life among others is filled with communitarianism, egalitarianism, and cooperative child rearing.
Patterns emerged. In less aggressive species, such as gibbons or marmosets, groups tend to live in lush rain forests where food is plentiful and life is easy. Females and males tend to be the same size, and the males lack secondary sexual markers such as long, sharp canines or garish coloring. Couples mate for life, and males help substantially with child care. In violent species, such as baboons and rhesus monkeys, the opposite conditions prevail.
... although human males might not be inflexibly polygamous or outfitted with bright red butts and six–inch canines designed for tooth–to–tooth combat, it was clear that our species had at least as much in common with the violent primates as with the gentle ones. "In their nature" thus became "in our nature." This was the humans–as–killer–apes theory popularized by the writer Robert Ardrey, according to which humans have as much chance of becoming intrinsically peaceful as they have of growing prehensile tails.
...After decades' more work, the picture has become quite interesting. Some primate species, it turns out, are indeed simply violent or peaceful, with their behavior driven by their social structures and ecological settings. More importantly, however, some primate species can make peace despite violent traits that seem built into their natures. The challenge now is to figure out under what conditions that can happen, and whether humans can manage the trick ourselves.
Two classic studies have shown that primates are somewhat independent from their "natures." In the early 1970s, a highly respected primatologist named Hans Kummer was working in a region of Ethiopia containing two species of baboons with markedly different social systems. Savanna baboons live in large troops, with plenty of adult females and males. Hamadryas baboons, in contrast, have a more complex and quite different multilevel society. When confronted with a threatening male, the females of the two species react differently: A hamadryas baboon placates the male by approaching him, whereas a savanna baboon can only run away if she wants to avoid injury.
Kummer conducted a simple experiment, trapping an adult female savanna baboon and releasing her into a hamadryas troop and trapping an adult female hamadryas and releasing her into a savanna troop. The females who were dropped in among a different species initially carried out their species–typical behavior, a major faux pas in the new neighborhood. But gradually, they absorbed the new rules. How long did this learning take? About an hour. In other words, millennia of genetic differences separating the two species, a lifetime of experience with a crucial social rule for each female—and a miniscule amount of time to reverse course completely...
When I finally gave up on the doddering Economist about two years ago, I replaced it with Scientific American and The Atlantic. I've generally been very pleased by the magazine, I'm surprised it's losing money but encouraged by the apparent energy and direction.NYT: “... The magazine is still in the red, in the $3-to-$5-million range,” he said, but he hopes to be in the black in five years.
The Atlantic seems to have stabilized after a period of turmoil. The previous editor in chief, Michael Kelly, stepped down in 2002, and the owner, David G. Bradley, left the post vacant for more than three years...
While the managing editor, Cullen Murphy, ran the magazine, it won numerous awards for excellence but circulation dropped sharply. In 2005, Mr. Bradley moved The Atlantic from Boston, where it was founded in 1857, to Washington, leading Mr. Murphy and many other staff members to leave.
For a few months, it seemed that no one was in charge, until Mr. Bennet was hired less than two years ago.
BBC NEWS | Americas | Canada FM regrets 'torture list'
...The Canadian foreign minister has apologised for including the US and Israel on a list of states where prisoners are at risk of torture.
Maxime Bernier said the list, which formed part of a manual on torture awareness given to diplomats, 'wrongly includes some of our closest allies'."...
Huckabee wants to change the US constitutionThat makes sense. If one truly believes that one's particular deity desires a particular world order, then there's no choice but to enforce that order.
...but I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view....
Mature Human Embryos Created From Adult Skin Cells - washingtonpost.comWe knew this was coming a few months ago.
Scientists at a California company reported yesterday that they had created the first mature cloned human embryos from single skin cells taken from adults, a significant advance toward the goal of growing personalized stem cells for patients suffering from various diseases.Creation of the embryos -- grown from cells taken from the company's chief executive and one of its investors -- also offered sobering evidence that few, if any, technical barriers may remain to the creation of cloned babies...
...Five of the new embryos grew in laboratory dishes to the stage that fertility doctors consider ready for transfer to a woman's womb: a degree of development that clones of adult humans have never achieved before.
No one knows whether those embryos were healthy enough to grow into babies. But the study leader, who is also the medical director of a fertility clinic, said they looked robust, even as he emphasized that he has no interest in cloning people.
"It's unethical and it's illegal, and we hope no one else does it either," said Samuel H. Wood, chief executive of Stemagen in La Jolla, whose skin cells were cloned and who led the study with Andrew J. French, the firm's chief scientific officer.
The closely held company hopes to make embryos that are clones, or genetic twins, of patients, then harvest stem cells from those embryos and grow them into replacement tissues. When transplanted into patients, the tissues would not be rejected because the immune system would see them as "self."...
...Asked what it was like to look at embryos that were replicas of himself, Wood said: "I have to admit, it's a very strange feeling. It is very difficult to look at an embryo and realize it is what you were a few decades ago. It is you, in a way.
Medical Staff Update - Chief of StaffOf course not all sticks are equal. A superficial scrape is not the same as a jab deep into muscle.
...When a needle stick occurs, the health-care worker should go to Employee Health if that office is open (usually between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m.); otherwise, exposed staff members should report to the Emergency Department. The Emergency Department or Employee Health nurse will start the process of getting blood drawn from the source patient during the initial risk assessment. This will include completion of an employee-accident injury form.
Exposed staff members will be screened for HIV antibody, HBsAb, HCV antibody and HCV PCR qualitative...
Gordon's Tech: DRM, the new iPods and the unanticipated:I think it might work. (Originally on my tech blog, but in a post on the DRM technology of the newer iPods I slid over into opinion.)
.... I'd be buying up used CDs and destroying them, while distributing new music by wire -- with full DRM support. Is anyone visiting used CD store looking for suspicious batch buyers?
What about the strategy of selling non-DRMd music on Amazon? Sure, it's good for beating up Apple, but I think it's really about destroying the CD. Buy up used CDs and destroy them, migrate consumers off CDs and onto the wire, then introduce robust watermarked identifiers so music can always be traced to the purchaser.
Not a bad strategy really, but it's sure to have unanticipated consequences. What will it mean when all thinks identify us? What will happen to the use and value of these identifiers? Will kidnappers force people to turn over their music collection? Will owners be able to 'repudiate' their data, so it becomes unplayable? How will all this data be mined?
Reagan and revenue - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog:
... Is it really possible that all the triumphant declarations that the Reagan tax cuts led to a revenue boom — declarations that you see in highly respectable places — are based on nothing but a failure to make the most elementary corrections for inflation and population growth? Yes, it is. I know we’re supposed to pretend that we’re having a serious discussion in this country; but the truth is that we aren’t....
The Algebraist [1]
...The Truth was the presumptuous name of the religion, the faith that lay behind reality. It arose from the belief that what appeared to be real life must in fact - according to some piously invoked statistical certitudes - be a simulation being run within some prodigious computational substrate in a greater and more encompassing reality beyond. This was a thought that had, in some form, crossed the minds of most people and all civilizations. However, everybody quickly or eventually came round to the idea that a difference that made no difference wasn't a difference to be much bothered about, and one might as well get on with (what appeared to be) life.
The Truth went a stage further, holding that this was difference that could be made to make a difference. What was necessary was for people truly to believe in their hearts, in their souls, in their minds, that they really were in a vast simulation. They had to reflect upon this, to keep it at the forefront of their thoughts at all times and they had to gather together on occasion, with all due ceremony and solemnity, to express this belief. And they must evangelise, they must convert everybody they possibly could to this view, because - and this was the whole point - once a sufficient proportion of people within the simulation came to acknowledge that it was a simulation, the value of the simulation to those who had set it up would disappear and the whole thing would collapse.
If they were all part of some vast experiment, then the fact that those on whom the experiment was being conducted had guessed the truth would mean that its value would be lost. If they were some plaything, then again, that they had guessed this meant they ought to be acknowledged, even - perhaps - rewarded. If they were being tested in some way, then this was the test being passed, this was a positive result, again possibly deserving a reward. If they had been undergoing punishment for some transgression in the greater world, then this ought to constitute cause for rehabilitation.
It was not possible to know what proportion of the simulated population would be required to bring things to a halt (it might be fifty percent, it might be rather smaller or greater), but as long as the numbers of the enlightened kept increasing, the universe would be constantly coming closer to the epiphany, and the revelation could come at any point.
The Truth claimed with some degree of justification to be the ultimate religion, the final faith, the last of all churches...
...It could also claim a degree of universality that the others could not. All other major religions were either specific to their originating species, could be traced back to a single species - often a single subset of that species - or were consciously developed amalgams, syntheses, of a group of sufficiently similar religions of disparate origin...
... The Truth could even claim to be not a religion at all, where such a claim might endear it to those not naturally religious by nature. It could be seen more as a philosophy, even as a scientific postulate backed by unshakeably firm statistical likelihood.
There were some potentially unfortunate consequences implicit in a profound belief in the Truth. One was that there was a possibility that when the simulation ended, all the people being simulated would cease to exist entirely. The sim might be turned off and everybody within the substrate running it would die. There might be no promotion, no release, no return to a bigger and better and finer outside: there might just be the ultimate mass extinction...Personally my experience with, and indirect knowledge of, mortal life makes the "punishment" thesis particularly plausible. On the other hand maybe we're just contaminants in the culture dish, or a forgotten version 0.7a of the simulation that's been left to to run on some obsolete hardware.
I liked Krugman's aside in a post written on a different topic:
Bush tax cut mythology - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog
...If we ever have legislation decreeing death of the first-born, it will be named MPAPRA, the Motherhood Patriotism and Apple Pie Reconcilation Act, or something like that...
I posted previously about the brilliant name given the organization that has quietly transformed the medical knowledge industry. The lesson is clear: when you want something to be accepted in the face of a powerful opposition, use the name that your opposition would choose for some cause they like (which need not be in any way related to your own cause).
Republicans pioneered this technique, but, at long last, naive Dems have at last caught on. Now the titles of most legislation are largely unrelated to the content, but they sound vaguely uplifting to all.
Want to build bicycle paths? Call your organization the Coalition for Automative Rights (CAR). Can't fail.
I don't think Orwell anticipated this. It's really post-Orwellian.
Personally I'd like to see Apple's share price fall about 20%. Very few companies can resist the intoxicating power of a constantly rising share price, just as few people can resist the effect of uninterrupted success. Arrogance is inevitable. It's a sign of Apple's new reputation that even supportive geeks like DF are ready to suspect the worst.Daring Fireball: Keynote Roundup
...But so now Time Capsule is here, and there’s no word from Apple about backing up to hard drives attached to base stations. Which in turn is leading to the suspicion that perhaps the reason hard drive/base station Time Machine backups were pulled from Leopard was to make the feature exclusive to Apple’s own Time Capsule hardware. Check the comment thread on this article at Macworld to see some angry customers — people who bought hard drives and base stations in advance of Leopard specifically in anticipation of this feature.
Again, I think Time Capsule is a great idea and a great product. But if Apple has pulled support for hard drive/base station backups to eliminate Time Capsule competition, that’s ******, pure and simple. To be clear, though, it’s still an “if” at this point...
Duct Tape More Effective than Cryotherapy for Warts - February 1, 2003 - American Family Physician (KARL E. MILLER, M.D.)This business of treating warts in children with duct tape has been around for at least 16 years, but I've never really believed in it.
Focht DR III, et al. The efficacy of duct tape vs cryotherapy in the treatment of verruca vulgaris (the common wart). Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med October 2002;156:971-4.
Common warts (verruca vulgaris) are a common problem among patients who present in family physicians' offices. Although a significant number of warts will spontaneously resolve over two years, patients frequently request treatment to clear their skin of the lesions. Treatments such as cryotherapy, acid preparations, laser therapy, heat, and tape occlusion have been used in the management of warts, with cure rates ranging from 32 to 93 percent. However, most of these therapies are expensive, painful, or labor intensive. A few small, nonrandomized trials have studied the use of tape occlusion in wart treatment, with one study reporting cure rates of approximately 80 percent. Focht and associates compared the effectiveness of cryotherapy with duct tape applied to common warts.
The study was a prospective, randomized controlled trial with two treatment arms. Participants were patients three to 22 years of age who had viral warts and presented to a military clinic. Participants were randomized to receive cryotherapy or occlusive therapy with duct tape. Cryotherapy consisted of 10-second applications of liquid nitrogen to each wart every two to three weeks for a maximum of six treatments. The other group applied small pieces of duct tape to each wart. They were instructed to leave the tape in place for six days and were taught how to re-apply tape if it fell off. At the end of the sixth day, the patients removed the duct tape, soaked the wart in water, and gently debrided it with an emery board or pumice stone. The tape was left off overnight, then re-applied for another six days. This pattern was repeated for two months or until the wart resolved. Warts that did not resolve were measured. The main outcome measured was complete resolution of the wart.
In patients treated with duct tape, 85 percent of the warts completely resolved, compared with 60 percent in the cryotherapy group. These results were statistically significant. Resolution of warts treated with duct tape usually occurred within the first 28 days of therapy. If there was no response within the first two weeks, the warts were unlikely to respond to a longer course of therapy. The main adverse outcomes with duct-tape therapy were difficulty keeping the tape on the wart and minor skin irritation. The main adverse effect in the cryotherapy group was mild to severe pain at the freeze site during and after the treatment.
The authors conclude that duct tape occlusive therapy is more effective than cryotherapy in the treatment of common warts. They also state that duct tape therapy is less expensive and has fewer adverse effects than cryotherapy.
Charlie's Diary: Marketing MusingsI don't have anywhere near the patience to play this game here, but I think the mid-length contract and mid-range phone ideas might be a good rule of thumb to follow.
... the sweet spot on Vodafone's tariff curve (in the Anytime business packages) seems to be Anytime 500 on a 18 month contract. (By the time you hit Anytime 500 on 12 month contract, costs are beginning to rise; and anything less than Anytime 500 on the 18 month contract is in the "soak the trend-follower" category.)And there's my second point: 12 month tariffs are weighted on the assumption that you're a trend-follower and may be part of the general customer churn. They invariably have a much higher total cost of ownership than the 18 month tariffs...
... the total cost of a twelve month contract costs nearly 90% of the price of an eighteen month contract. If you take the twelve month contract and stay on it for eighteen months, you'd be paying a whisker under £800. The mark-up for going for a short contract is huge; they're counting on your natural reluctance to be locked in for an extra six months to lead you to pay hugely over the odds.
(Want a twelve month contract? You might as well buy an eighteen month contract — if you decide to switch telco, the break-even point is thirteen months. At that point you might as well buy a new phone, set call divert on your old number, take the old sim out and cut it up so you can't run up any additional charges, and get going: you're still ahead of the game. The system is loaded insofar as it relies on customers fixating on the contract lock-in period and not realizing that they can "buy themselves out" at any point by cutting up a SIM and making a note on their calendar to remind them to close the account when the lock-in expires. And on most people not running the total cost of ownership through a spreasheet before they buy.)..
...The TCO per minute for a phone purchased on the superficially cheap-looking Talk 75 tariff turns out to be two and a half times higher than the TCO per minute for Talk 200, and a ridiculous seven times higher than on Talk 500...
The TUAW Macworld 2008 Keynote Predictions - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) collection is pretty good. Inspired by that list, here's mine:
The only one on this list that's not been widely predicted is the Home media server and, of course, the Adobe acquisition.
Wired has a must-read summary of the birth of the iPhone.
The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry
... It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster...
It's no surprise to read that months before the release date the iPhone was a disaster. My guess is that Apple's taking so long to add my "must have" features because the thing is held together with duct tape and bailing wire. It usually takes at least a year to dig out from a hole like that, so maybe they'll have a stable environment by this summer.
One of the most delicious parts is a sidebar comparing the Motorola ROKR vs. the iPhone
...Apple has created two music phones. The ROKR, made with Motorola in 2005, respected the traditional relationships between manufacturers and carriers. The iPhone, released last summer, completely overturned them....
Supposedly Jobs thought the RAZR was a sign that Motorola could build a good phone. As a RAZR owner, I'm surprised. I thought Jobs was smarter than that.
Anyway, he learned another lesson, and he must have staff who understood that the Motorola RAZR is very ugly software in a pretty shell.
The $1.4 Trillion QuestionBush's America has not been a paragon of reasoned action. It's reasonable to assume that China, now newly in command of vast financial power, might be similarly impulsive and unpredictable.
....The fair reason for concern is, again, the transparency problem. Twice in the past year, China has in nonfinancial ways demonstrated the ripples that a nontransparent policy creates. Last January, its military intentionally shot down one of its own satellites, filling orbital paths with debris. The exercise greatly alarmed the U.S. military, because of what seemed to be an implied threat to America’s crucial space sensors. For several days, the Chinese government said nothing at all about the test, and nearly a year later, foreign analysts still debate whether it was a deliberate provocation, the result of a misunderstanding, or a freelance effort by the military. In November, China denied a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the Kitty Hawk, routine permission to dock in Hong Kong for Thanksgiving, even though many Navy families had gone there for a reunion. In each case, the most ominous aspect is that outsiders could not really be sure what the Chinese leadership had in mind. Were these deliberate taunts or shows of strength? The results of factional feuding within the leadership? Simple miscalculations? In the absence of clear official explanations no one really knew, and many assumed the worst...
Portland, Ore., Acts to Protect Cyclists - New York Times:I'm not sure how that will work -- drivers will be irritated if they can't turn right. An irritated driver is a dangerous driver. If the experiment does work I hope we adopt it in the Twin Cities.
... By allowing cyclists to wait in front of motorized traffic, the bike boxes are intended chiefly to reduce the risk of “right hook” collisions, the kind most frequently reported in Portland, in which a driver makes a right turn without seeing a cyclist who is in his path. Drivers will not be allowed to pass through the bike box to turn right on a red light, although many right hooks now occur after the light has turned green, when traffic quickly accelerates.
Right hooks were what killed the two cyclists in October, a college student and a bike racer hit by large trucks. The drivers say they did not see them...
Ooooh. This is good.
Jon Swift: The Crying of Maureen Dowd
When New York Times reporters walked into their offices last night, people were clustering around one office to watch what they thought they would never see: Maureen Dowd with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes...
Maureen Dowd long ago traded integrity for popularity; she's a sad demonstration of both wasted talent and the lowly state of the American "elite". Today's Dowd dump is a typically annoying, and intensely personal, rip on Hillary Clinton's ocular discharge.
I had nothing useful to say about the column, but the infamous conservative* writer Jon Swift did a lovely job of sword inversion. Read Dowd first, then read Swift.
* Ok. So with a pen name like "Swift" certain self-descriptions may be suspect.
Update: That was it?!E. J. Dionne Jr. - A Candidacy's Prose and Cons - washingtonpost.comWe know Hilary has been been brought low because Gloria Steinem is saying her problems are gender related. (I couldn't make myself read the Steinem article. For Hilary I imagine it adds insult to injury.)
...There is a certain melancholy in watching Clinton do battle. Obviously aware that the bottom is falling out from under her, she choked up Monday during her last day of campaigning here. By way of proving her tenacity and the depth of her policy knowledge, she has subjected herself to unremitting rounds of questions from voters about every issue from health care to global warming.
Clinton knows her stuff and would pass the most rigorous test available under any "No Policy Left Behind" program for politicians. If we chose a president by examination rather than election, she would win. In Hampton on Sunday night, Maggie Wood Hassan, a prominent state senator, said of Clinton's savvy on health care: "There isn't a single piece of the puzzle she hasn't figured out." True, but voters right now are not thinking about intricate puzzles....
James Fallows reveals our plans...
James Fallows (January 07, 2008) - The NYT introduces a wordsmith
... Perhaps this is more proof of a cunning, leftist NYT master plot? Bringing in a conservative who will demonstrate that conservatives have little interesting to say? Inquiring minds want to know. But only time will tell...
We tested the waters with David Brooks. Could we really get away making an articulate but mockable propagandist the NYT spokesperson for the GOP?
It worked; even the GOP was pleased. Perfect. Now for Phase II. Compared to Kristol even Brooks is semi-sentient.
The Trilateral Commission is pleased. Our plan for the rehabilitation of the GOP is proceeding smoothly.
Mitt Romney - Mormonism - Mormons - Presidential Election of 2008 - Politics - Elections - New York TimesWell, yes, to a secular humanist all of these revelations are equally respectable -- but to a fundamentalist believer there's a rather huge difference.
.... Still, even among those who respect Mormons personally, it is still common to hear Mormonism’s tenets dismissed as ridiculous. This attitude is logically indefensible insofar as Mormonism is being compared with other world religions. There is nothing inherently less plausible about God’s revealing himself to an upstate New York farmer in the early years of the Republic than to the pharaoh’s changeling grandson in ancient Egypt. But what is driving the tendency to discount Joseph Smith’s revelations is not that they seem less reasonable than those of Moses; it is that the book containing them is so new. When it comes to prophecy, antiquity breeds authenticity. Events in the distant past, we tend to think, occurred in sacred, mythic time. Not so revelations received during the presidencies of James Monroe or Andrew Jackson...