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For the US healthcare system, technology has a huge role to play in improving things. Lots of low-hanging fruit, and an important mission given the state of things:

- Efficiency. The inefficiency of paper is pretty obvious. Nuff said.

- Record portability. Again, an obvious win to anyone who has been referred to see specialists and must complete a separate history for *each one*. Truly ridiculous.

- Reduced error in prescriptions. Many people get multiple prescriptions from different doctors who aren't fully aware of everything the patient is getting. And sometimes these combinations are dangerous.

- Datamining. This is the really really big one. And it's not about marketing to patients. It's about being able to learn from all that data out there that is currently locked up in paper and kept in separate silos (not shared between organizations).

The Commonwealth Club had a recent talk given by George Halvorson, CEO of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals. It includes a lot on how Kaiser is trying to improve their healthcare system using technology. Here is the podcast , worth a listen if this topic interests you.

One take-away I did get from Mr. Halvorson is that healthcare in the US won't be saved by technology, but the data tells us what would save it. The majority of costs come from just a few chronic illnesses, including heart-disease and diabetes (but not cancer, which is only 5% surprisingly). These diseases are largely preventable, but it will require widespread behaviour change in America: diet and exercise, I hate to say.

The speech certainly is revealing - it reveals cryptoluddite's agenda, which is anti-google.

One risk of that is that people don't get paid for their content, which is clearly a problem. I'd personally like to see a model where you can buy into the world's content. Let's say you pay $20 per month and get access to the world. Somebody else needs to figure out how to reward all the people who create the things that you use. This is basically what happens with a lot of systems today. Radio stations pay into a big fund, and then the organization decides which labels and which artists to reimburse, based on what got played on the radio. It's a nice model because it allows access to everyone for everything that exists, but you don't have to think about, "Oh, I'm going to spend five cents to look at this web page" or things like that. That will allow content producers to still get rewarded for what they do.

If you look at the quote in context, I think it's pretty clear that google is not talking about doing the selling, unless they are the gateway to ALL the content. They will never be that gateway. I do think that there is a market for commercial versions of some of this media, but I think the future is that you will pay only for directed media, and for convenient access to media. For instance a newspaper will have several classes of information, based on what they think they can sell to who; There will be information that is free on the web and also in print, information that is included in the cost of the paper but for which you must pay extra on the web, and so on.

In the meantime sites like E2 and Wikipedia will probably be freely available for the forseeable future, but I would like to see them have commercial or "pro" versions of the site. For example, the pay site would have full-text searching, and the free side might not (and in both cases, currently does not.) You would also be able to enter RFBs for research papers, and you could accept them based on price and posting history. This model would work better for E2 than for Wikipedia due to Wikipedia's collaborative nature, but it is not inapplicable to Wikipedia.

Anyway, any comissioned research would become a part of the database at an appropriate time (possibly part of the license agreement) and thus everyone would benefit. At the minimum, the site would make a commission, which would definitely benefit all of the service's users.

This is precisely the way software is going, and I don't see any reason that all kinds of media won't see the same development. In fact, I see no way that any kind of media can survive without making this transition.

Well the upper atmosphere is warming, but that can be easily explained by the weakening of the magnetic field which causes more radiation to hit the atmosphere in turn increasing the temperature in that region.

What? You don't know? I'm not surprised.

As for the ground data, Urban heat islands are the cause.

(1) Land surfaces are only 30 percent of the Earth's surface; and the area of the U.S. is only a few percent at most of Earth's surface. Since area weighting of all global land and sea surface temperature data is used to get global data sets, this modifi ed urban heat island effect - if it's real - would have a very small effect on the computed global warming.

When the early global warming models, which did not account for cooling caused by aerosols (which are also produced by burning coal and oil), were changed, the new models have forecast average temperatures "right on the nose," says Schneider.

Borehole temperatures can also provide an independent instrumental validation of surface measurements. Pollack et al.'s (1998) analysis of underground temperature measurements from four continents indicates that the average surface temperature of the earth has increased by about 0.5 C in the twentieth century.

Wow, what propaganda rags you been reading?

Insufficiently Jewish? Like the 1 million Arab-Israeli citizens with full citizenship rights? Like the various Arab political parties in Israel? Like the Arab supreme court justice in Israel? Like the Druze community in Israel? The only difference is that Israeli-Arabs are exempt from having to serve in the army for obvious reasons. Not bad for a 55 year old country - run a quick comparison with any other country in the region or even in Europe and you'll see just how amazing it is.

If you mean land that was always intended to be returned for some true peace, then you can obviously see why turning it over to a terrorist thug would have to opposite effect. That is why, although they wanted to trade the land for peace with all her neighbors in 1967, Arab mentality prevented it and continues to prevent peace to this day:

"On June 19, 1967, scarcely ten days after the cease-fire, the Israeli government decided in a secret cabinet session to return all of the Sinai Peninsula, all of the Golan Heights, to Egypt and Syria respectively in return for full peace treaties. At the same time, the Israeli government launched a clandestine operation to canvass 80 Palestinian notables on the West Bank about the possibility of creating an autonomous Palestinian entity, leading potentially to an independent Palestinian state. The Egyptians and the Syrians rejected this overture. They convened at Khartoum at the end of the summer, and they passed the infamous Three No's: no negotiations, no peace, no recognition of Israel. The Palestinian notables in the West Bank, the protocols of the discussions, all said they'd be interested in having an autonomous entity. They certainly wanted independence. But they were afraid if they concluded any peace treaty at all with Israel, they'd be executed. A historic opportunity was lost that summer, and we've lived with the consequences ever since"

I hope you're as concerned with your tax dollars going to the direct indoctrination of Palestinian children or the funds going to corrupt NGOs or to support Palestinian apartheid.

You have a right to comment. In fact, you even have a right to that incredibly stupid and uninformed comment you just made, but repeating mindless lies just makes you look all the more incompetent.

Thanks

Bruce

Regardless of the fact that the difficulty of destroying a sufficiently large meteor would be on par with killing all the cockroaches in Chicago with a spatula, missile defense in any incarnation is as practical as trying to stop traffic on the internet by targetting routers. Sure, you could hit a lot of them, in both cases, but the way the systems are structured, something will get through. Modern weapons have such high yields that one bomb, a one-percent margin of error, could result in 20 to 30 million deaths, depending on the weapon's objective. Two little things called redundancy and mutually-assured destruction. You don't have to take my word for it. You can go to the guy who [might have] built the thing. "Go back to bed America, your government is in control" -- George Bush pre

Lawrence lessig will also be appearing at the Commonwealth Club of California on Tuesday, February 20. This may be a more interesting appearance because the forum is not a traditional home of "cyber" issues. The Commonwealth Club is very much dedicated to all aspects of public affairs and has a very traditional (if staid) membership. I think it might be important to show policy groups such as this that these issues do matter in order to encourage more such events.

Lawrence lessig will also be appearing at the Commonwealth Club of California on Tuesday, February 20. This may be a more interesting appearance because the forum is not a traditional home of "cyber" issues. The Commonwealth Club is very much dedicated to all aspects of public affairs and has a very traditional (if staid) membership. I think it might be important to show policy groups such as this that these issues do matter in order to encourage more such events.

Lawrence lessig will also be appearing at the Commonwealth Club of California on Tuesday, February 20. This may be a more interesting appearance because the forum is not a traditional home of "cyber" issues. The Commonwealth Club is very much dedicated to all aspects of public affairs and has a very traditional (if staid) membership. I think it might be important to show policy groups such as this that these issues do matter in order to encourage more such events.