In particular, we're talking about people independently and coordinatedly reacting to a wide variety of complex circumstances with complex actions. 1% is damn impressive considering the processes for making those decisions and taking those actions. But the GP is right - it's not enough. That's the point of the article; if we can use checklists to improve on that 1%, we'll be a lot better off.
What crawled up your butt? Of course there are operational costs associated with maintaining checklists, but those are a lot less than the cost of creating them, and even more a lot less than the benegits. Now, to answer your questions...
1. then it'll be changed
2. nobody will control all of the checklists in the world; medicine already has processes for developing and disseminating best practices and then on an institution-by-institution basis incorporating those into formal policy. Some such processes include medical journals, seminars, consultants, base studies, and so on.
3. see 2
4. sometimes yes, sometimes they'll be on PDAs. probably somebody will do a study about which is less likely to carry diseases around, and another person will do a study on which costs less.
5. no
I can't sign a loan for a million dollars and then say you didnt really think I was going to pay you back did I?
But if you're a "too-large-to-fail" insurance company, and it's $123 billion, it's A-OK.:-(
More to your actual point though, you are assuming that employment is a perfectly competitive market, which it is not. There is potential for huge information asymetry (both ways), unequal bargaining power, high search and switching costs, and so on.
Luckily, by definition, the most viable markets are the ones with the most people. These markets are also the ones with the most disposable income, and the most historical propensity to vote "green". Even if these cars would only sell in a handful of US cities (and I'd say 10 cities is more likely than 3-5; a car like this would even be valuable in San Diego as a commuter car), that would be enough to get it off the ground. Tesla was able to drum up investment just selling to the even smaller demographic of movie stars and the other super-rich, not that they're doing too well right now. But they got off the ground for a second on a vastly smaller market.
Tire inflators aren't free where I am:( 75 cents! At that rate, I'd prefer to take a bicycle pump and get a little exercise.
A lot of universities/government buildings/big companies around here have free charging stations in their lot for electric cars, because electricity is dirt cheap. I betcha if these take off, we'll start seeing free (or cheap) compressed air stations too.
It's taking a long time to change the actual layout of cities, but in the last decade or so there has been a lot of evidence that (in certain situations) decreasing the speed limit on city streets improves capacity. That's right, not just reducing traffic jams by making it less desirable to drive, but actually increasing capacity. Freeways have long been known to have their highest capacity when just about everybody is going just about 55 miles/hour. There are lots of complicated reasons for this, but one of the obvious ones is that when cars go faster, the size of the empty bubble around them increases, particularly when not all cars are going the same speed.
I live in the UTC area of San Diego, and our main roads are three lanes each way and have speed limits of 45 miles/hour. That's great for the 20 seconds you spend accelerating to the next red light, which is probably about 2 minutes long.
In short, systems are more complicated than individuals. If you're the only person on the road, sure, you're going to go faster if you're going at 45mph than 28mph. But when there are intersections, stoplights, *other cars*, and traffic jams, are you going to go faster if everybody is trying to reach 45mph? Not necessarily, and in some cases emphatically NO.
A hundred people at a billion each when most of that billion will be publicly funded (with universities handing off the final stages of research to corporations, thus allowing them to get the patents) is unimportant. I know these aren't real numbers here, but there are opportunity costs - we could save many more people with that money.
HOWEVER, if treating the first hundred people in an encumbered and exorbitantly expensive corporate and regulatory framework later allows us to make the operation cheap and widely available - then bravo! The true genius of capitalism is when we are able to bridge a huge gulf by using the promise of high short-term profits. Too often corporations, which have different incentives, choose to bridge the gulf as slowly as possible and attempt to extract monopoly or cartel profits.
I do have a question though - I'm no physician, but I know that bone marrow transplants have been around for a long time. I think we know the basic idea of how to make them work by now. Is this really going to be something that requires all *that* much effort and money to perfect?
Half of marketing is figuring out what product to make. The other half, which you're talking about, is telling the world which you've made it. It is by far the more boring half.
Is the iphone a technological revolution? No. It's all marketing. But it's damn GOOD marketing.
All right, I'll bite: is China's authoritarian system which brutally suppresses free speech and competing ideas about government any better? Does the existence of a voluntary religion justify subjugating an "autonomous region"? And, to get a little philosophical on your ass, is a religion materially different from any other faith system (like nationalism), and if not, who gets to decide which faith systems the government will crush? Oh, the government you say?
I agree! Furthermore, architects who can't dig foundations have no business designing skyscrapers, and engineers who don't know how to fly an F-22 have no business trying to design them!
I bike halfway to work - in California we have these "park and ride" lots, where you can drive to a transportation hub and catch public transit the rest of the way. My long commute and lack of bike trails near home make biking all the way to work impractical, but there's a beautiful bike trail along the 56 freeway that I can take once I get to the park and ride lot.
Other than that, I stretch, do crunches, and do pushups every morning when I wake up. This is not only stay-in-shape exercise, it's also wake-me-up exercise - double benefits! On the weekents, I ride my bike to In N Out - the benefits may cancel out with the calories, but at least I'm getting exercise.:-)
To speak to your specific questions, you may want to consider pilates in the home. That gives you a pretty full body workout. You can get private pilates lessons (about $40/hour around here) to help you build a routine, and then go from there exercising at home. I tried that, but frankly I didn't like putting in half an hour to an hour per day.
Your statement is true but perhaps irrelevant. If we always held entities blameless for the actions of their contractors and suppliers, we would get nowhere. If a capacitor on a Dell motherboard blows up, do we call Dell or the capacitor manufacturer?
We cannot extend unreasonable blame to the purchasers of services; it would be silly to execute me for a war crime committed by Blackwater, for example, because although Blackwater is in the employ of every taxpaying US citizen, the actual role I played in hiring and directing the actions of Blackwater is infinitesimal. In contrast, one would expect Google to have a high degree of influence on the policies and routes of the contractors who take pictures of streets for Google Maps. If we do not hold Google responsible, then they would perhaps turn a blind eye to this and thus encourage future violations.
Specialized parts have a higher sale value, lower long term value, and a lower resale value. The original customer is willing to pay more for the X-Wing Lego box, because it's not just a pile of parts, it's a freaking X-Wing in potentia. Then the original customer is more likely to go back and purchase a new set (because he's tired of putting the x-wing together). Finally, the resale value is lower because now it's the year 2008 and all the kids want Transformers Lego sets (or whatever it is kids want these days...)
Hard to say if everybody wins here or not, but Lego definitely does.
One of the age old problems is the assumption that IT for most companies is simply capital expenditure. ROI is hard to measure for IT for most companies.
Too true mate - a company which I'm affiliated with but shall not name is going through a reorg right now. The reorg is surprisingly a good idea, and well-executed by the executives. However, I heard a middle manager explain it to a bunch of interns as "profit centers are called that because they generate profits, while cost centers only serve to drag a company down. That's why we're trying to minimize our cost centers as much as possible."
What made it extra funny is that a lot of the money freed up by the reorg is going into *new* "cost centers", and this middle manager himself works for a "cost center". I myself work for a "profit center", but honestly perform more of a functional role.
It's necessary to draw lines somewhere, and have accountants and accounting, but the fact of the matter is that some things are inherently hard to quantify. You look at the numbers but go with your gut.
Long answer: For certain tasks, especially anything that needs to be formatted or used with multiple Office products, no. For very simple tasks where collaboration takes precedent over formatting or power, YES.
I LOVE love love Office 2007. But I use Google Docs for team docs that are constantly being worked on and referred to by multiple people.
Would it be possible to build a browser extension which automatically sandboxes facebook, so the cookies are trapped and can't be used for this tracking?
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That's not the issue at all... This was a dispute between WARF and Intel, NOT between the professor and WARF and NOT between the professor and Intel.
In particular, we're talking about people independently and coordinatedly reacting to a wide variety of complex circumstances with complex actions. 1% is damn impressive considering the processes for making those decisions and taking those actions. But the GP is right - it's not enough. That's the point of the article; if we can use checklists to improve on that 1%, we'll be a lot better off.
What crawled up your butt? Of course there are operational costs associated with maintaining checklists, but those are a lot less than the cost of creating them, and even more a lot less than the benegits. Now, to answer your questions...
1. then it'll be changed
2. nobody will control all of the checklists in the world; medicine already has processes for developing and disseminating best practices and then on an institution-by-institution basis incorporating those into formal policy. Some such processes include medical journals, seminars, consultants, base studies, and so on.
3. see 2
4. sometimes yes, sometimes they'll be on PDAs. probably somebody will do a study about which is less likely to carry diseases around, and another person will do a study on which costs less.
5. no
I can't sign a loan for a million dollars and then say you didnt really think I was going to pay you back did I?
But if you're a "too-large-to-fail" insurance company, and it's $123 billion, it's A-OK. :-(
More to your actual point though, you are assuming that employment is a perfectly competitive market, which it is not. There is potential for huge information asymetry (both ways), unequal bargaining power, high search and switching costs, and so on.
Luckily, by definition, the most viable markets are the ones with the most people. These markets are also the ones with the most disposable income, and the most historical propensity to vote "green". Even if these cars would only sell in a handful of US cities (and I'd say 10 cities is more likely than 3-5; a car like this would even be valuable in San Diego as a commuter car), that would be enough to get it off the ground. Tesla was able to drum up investment just selling to the even smaller demographic of movie stars and the other super-rich, not that they're doing too well right now. But they got off the ground for a second on a vastly smaller market.
and personally I'd ease up and shove one of these little annoyances out of my way.
I was taking you seriously on your other comment, but now I'm wondering if you are just an Internet Tough Guy(TM)
Tire inflators aren't free where I am :( 75 cents! At that rate, I'd prefer to take a bicycle pump and get a little exercise.
A lot of universities/government buildings/big companies around here have free charging stations in their lot for electric cars, because electricity is dirt cheap. I betcha if these take off, we'll start seeing free (or cheap) compressed air stations too.
It's taking a long time to change the actual layout of cities, but in the last decade or so there has been a lot of evidence that (in certain situations) decreasing the speed limit on city streets improves capacity. That's right, not just reducing traffic jams by making it less desirable to drive, but actually increasing capacity. Freeways have long been known to have their highest capacity when just about everybody is going just about 55 miles/hour. There are lots of complicated reasons for this, but one of the obvious ones is that when cars go faster, the size of the empty bubble around them increases, particularly when not all cars are going the same speed.
I live in the UTC area of San Diego, and our main roads are three lanes each way and have speed limits of 45 miles/hour. That's great for the 20 seconds you spend accelerating to the next red light, which is probably about 2 minutes long.
In short, systems are more complicated than individuals. If you're the only person on the road, sure, you're going to go faster if you're going at 45mph than 28mph. But when there are intersections, stoplights, *other cars*, and traffic jams, are you going to go faster if everybody is trying to reach 45mph? Not necessarily, and in some cases emphatically NO.
A hundred people at a billion each when most of that billion will be publicly funded (with universities handing off the final stages of research to corporations, thus allowing them to get the patents) is unimportant. I know these aren't real numbers here, but there are opportunity costs - we could save many more people with that money.
HOWEVER, if treating the first hundred people in an encumbered and exorbitantly expensive corporate and regulatory framework later allows us to make the operation cheap and widely available - then bravo! The true genius of capitalism is when we are able to bridge a huge gulf by using the promise of high short-term profits. Too often corporations, which have different incentives, choose to bridge the gulf as slowly as possible and attempt to extract monopoly or cartel profits.
I do have a question though - I'm no physician, but I know that bone marrow transplants have been around for a long time. I think we know the basic idea of how to make them work by now. Is this really going to be something that requires all *that* much effort and money to perfect?
Half of marketing is figuring out what product to make. The other half, which you're talking about, is telling the world which you've made it. It is by far the more boring half. Is the iphone a technological revolution? No. It's all marketing. But it's damn GOOD marketing.
Many, however, are recorded in marketing databases :-p
All right, I'll bite: is China's authoritarian system which brutally suppresses free speech and competing ideas about government any better? Does the existence of a voluntary religion justify subjugating an "autonomous region"? And, to get a little philosophical on your ass, is a religion materially different from any other faith system (like nationalism), and if not, who gets to decide which faith systems the government will crush? Oh, the government you say?
When has it not been? Good software development even uses storyboards.
I agree! Furthermore, architects who can't dig foundations have no business designing skyscrapers, and engineers who don't know how to fly an F-22 have no business trying to design them!
Perhaps suburbs are inefficient and bike paths in real cities will encourage people to move.
Perhaps you work for the wrong tech companies :-) Try San Diego!
I bike halfway to work - in California we have these "park and ride" lots, where you can drive to a transportation hub and catch public transit the rest of the way. My long commute and lack of bike trails near home make biking all the way to work impractical, but there's a beautiful bike trail along the 56 freeway that I can take once I get to the park and ride lot.
:-)
Other than that, I stretch, do crunches, and do pushups every morning when I wake up. This is not only stay-in-shape exercise, it's also wake-me-up exercise - double benefits! On the weekents, I ride my bike to In N Out - the benefits may cancel out with the calories, but at least I'm getting exercise.
To speak to your specific questions, you may want to consider pilates in the home. That gives you a pretty full body workout. You can get private pilates lessons (about $40/hour around here) to help you build a routine, and then go from there exercising at home. I tried that, but frankly I didn't like putting in half an hour to an hour per day.
No change?
Your statement is true but perhaps irrelevant. If we always held entities blameless for the actions of their contractors and suppliers, we would get nowhere. If a capacitor on a Dell motherboard blows up, do we call Dell or the capacitor manufacturer?
We cannot extend unreasonable blame to the purchasers of services; it would be silly to execute me for a war crime committed by Blackwater, for example, because although Blackwater is in the employ of every taxpaying US citizen, the actual role I played in hiring and directing the actions of Blackwater is infinitesimal. In contrast, one would expect Google to have a high degree of influence on the policies and routes of the contractors who take pictures of streets for Google Maps. If we do not hold Google responsible, then they would perhaps turn a blind eye to this and thus encourage future violations.
Specialized parts have a higher sale value, lower long term value, and a lower resale value. The original customer is willing to pay more for the X-Wing Lego box, because it's not just a pile of parts, it's a freaking X-Wing in potentia. Then the original customer is more likely to go back and purchase a new set (because he's tired of putting the x-wing together). Finally, the resale value is lower because now it's the year 2008 and all the kids want Transformers Lego sets (or whatever it is kids want these days...)
Hard to say if everybody wins here or not, but Lego definitely does.
Too true mate - a company which I'm affiliated with but shall not name is going through a reorg right now. The reorg is surprisingly a good idea, and well-executed by the executives. However, I heard a middle manager explain it to a bunch of interns as "profit centers are called that because they generate profits, while cost centers only serve to drag a company down. That's why we're trying to minimize our cost centers as much as possible."
What made it extra funny is that a lot of the money freed up by the reorg is going into *new* "cost centers", and this middle manager himself works for a "cost center". I myself work for a "profit center", but honestly perform more of a functional role.
It's necessary to draw lines somewhere, and have accountants and accounting, but the fact of the matter is that some things are inherently hard to quantify. You look at the numbers but go with your gut.
Long answer: For certain tasks, especially anything that needs to be formatted or used with multiple Office products, no. For very simple tasks where collaboration takes precedent over formatting or power, YES.
I LOVE love love Office 2007. But I use Google Docs for team docs that are constantly being worked on and referred to by multiple people.
Would it be possible to build a browser extension which automatically sandboxes facebook, so the cookies are trapped and can't be used for this tracking?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
And the corollary to your sig: Never use a work in spoken form that you've only read and never heard.
WebCT was put on earth by aliens who are set to destroy us by slowly driving us insane. What other explanation is there?