Monthly Archives: August 2009

Pointless babble or something more important

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Doug Clow has a thoughtful blog post sparked by a cod ‘research’ report that 40% of the stuff on Twitter is “pointless babble”.

Fundamentally, though, this study (almost) entirely misses the point of what people on Twitter experience. It sampled the Twitter public stream, which is the total assemblage of what everyone using the service is producing.

But what looks like ‘pointless babble’ isn’t pointless, if it’s from people you know or care about. It’s social grooming, it’s keeping in touch. It’s what most human conversation is about. If you think this stuff is pointless babble, you’re really not going to enjoy parties. Or indeed be likely to maintain fulfilling personal relationships. On Twitter, you get to choose whose ‘pointless babble’ you want to follow. Almost nobody who actually uses Twitter uses it by reading the public stream.

If you learn about Twitter by reading these sorts of reports, you’ll get a bizarre view that really tells you very little about what it’s like to use as a service…

I’m consistently amazed by the way people in the mainstream media and elsewhere project their fantasies onto Twitter — much as they used to do with blogs until their employers told them that they had to blog. Twitter is one of the most useful web services that I use, but that’s because it provides me with a low-intensity way of plugging into the collective IQ of colleagues, friends, acquaintances and peers. For me it’s at least as important as RSS, and that’s saying something.

Can the US fix itself?

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I’m working on a theory of incompetent systems — i.e systems which are in danger of catastrophic failure but which, for various reasons (absence of effective feedback loops, undue power of vested interests, etc.) will not be able to fix themselves in time to avoid catastrophic failure. Climate change looks to me like an incompetent system problem. Intellectual property law is another. And the American healthcare system is yet another. Watching the way the public debate about health reform in the US has been maliciously hijacked by powerful vested interests was reminiscent of the way debates about IP are skewed. But healthcare is far more important, and yet it’s being allowed to happen. It’s unbelievable.

Not surprisingly, therefore, I was struck by this blast from Mark Anderson. Excerpt:

If it were not such a tragic struggle, watching the entrenched interests fighting any change in the U.S. healthcare system would be vaguely amusing, like watching elephant races.

Unfortunately, these aren’t cute elephants, but a cancer on our society: the growth in their wastefulness, and in the value they subtract from the healthcare process every year, is bankrupting good companies, destroying the business foundations of the country, and enriching a few at overwhelming cost to the many.

While the American healthcare system has many problems and parts, it does not defy analysis. And while it will take many different reforms to perfect it, just a single change would bring it back from the dead. The problem is simple: private insurance companies. These groups do not have patient care in mind; they are only focused on extracting money from the system. They do not even operate as part of a healthcare system: with the same basic structure, they could extract money from any supply chain.

The worst part of this scheme is that the real customer, the patient, is essentially prevented from being the customer. She does not know the cost of her care, she has little or no control over those costs, and the result is the vendor is free to drive them to the sky, with everyone getting a cut – except the patient. Why not charge $100 for aspirin? Who cares? Why not charge 2x for a broken leg? Why not run 4x too many MRIs? Who cares? The MRI vendor is happy, the hospital with the new machine needing to be paid off is happy, the doctor getting paid per use, and reviewed for quotas, is happy, and the patient – Who cares?

Most insurance companies learned long ago that their real business is in investment: life insurance companies are the obvious early case. Collecting and paying out premiums and claims is just a sideline, a way to get the cash needed for the investment business. You knew this, right?

So it is with American healthcare. These companies are not in the business of healthcare: they are in the business of extracting as much cash as possible from the system, on a compound annual growth basis which is 3-4x the cost of living. How much would they spend to keep this bloodletting from being interrupted? Well, the bank lobby spent $1B to remove the Glass Steagall protections, just before the banks helped blow up the US economy. I would guess that what we are seeing right now, in Washington, DC, is the largest amount of money ever spent on lobbying a single cause – all in the name of retaining a broken system, one which costs more than twice the next one down, one often classified as something like 37th in the world, just behind Slovenia…

When the US — after eight years of moronic, destructive, wasteful government — succeeded in electing Obama I remember being struck by the country’s extraordinary ability to reinvent itself. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe Obama was just a blip?

On the other hand, if he can succeed in getting meaningful healthcare refore passed, then he will go down as the greatest president since FDR.

Labour’s “Twitter tsar”

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From today’s Guardian.

The Labour party has appointed a ‘Twitter tsar’ with the responsibility of encouraging MPs to use new media.

Kerry McCarthy, MP for Bristol East, has been made the party’s new media campaigns spokeswoman ahead of an election next year that she says will be the first ‘new media election’. A recent study for a newspaper voted McCarthy the most “influential MP” on Twitter – with more than 1,600 followers.

Labour’s advisers are buoyant this week because the party thinks it stole a march on the Conservative leader, David Cameron, by using Twitter to get out a defence of the NHS in the aftermath of an attack by Conservative MEP Dan Hannan on the health system.

Though all involved insist the “we love the NHS” Twitter topic grew organically and was not composed of purely Labour activists, the prime minister and his wife Sarah Brown used Twitter to get their defences in first. The “we love the NHS” trending topic was so popular that the site crashed on Wednesday night.

I’m assuming that the soubriquet ‘tsar’ is the Guardian‘s, not Labour’s. If so it’s just the latest example of a lazy, historically-illiterate habit. It first surfaced in journalism, I think, many years ago in the US media with stuff about a President (Nixon?) appointing a “Drugs Czar”. This was not, as you might pedantically have supposed, the capo di tutti capi of the illegal drugs racket, but a government official charged with running the so-called “war on drugs”, which was at least as misguided as the later “war on terror”.

Er, harrumph!

Thanks for Pete for the original link.

For Google read dopamine

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Interesting new angle on the Is-Google-Making-Us-Stupid meme.

Berridge has proposed that in some addictions the brain becomes sensitized to the wanting cycle of a particular reward. So addicts become obsessively driven to seek the reward, even as the reward itself becomes progressively less rewarding once obtained. “The dopamine system does not have satiety built into it,” Berridge explains. “And under certain conditions it can lead us to irrational wants, excessive wants wedd be better off without.” So we find ourselves letting one Google search lead to another, while often feeling the information is not vital and knowing we should stop. “As long as you sit there, the consumption renews the appetite,” he explains.

Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a ‘CrackBerry.’

The system is also activated by particular types of cues that a reward is coming. In order to have the maximum effect, the cues should be small, discrete, specific—like the bell Pavlov rang for his dogs. Panksepp says a way to drive animals into a frenzy is to give them only tiny bits of food: This simultaneously stimulating and unsatisfying tease sends the seeking system into hyperactivity. Berridge says the “ding” announcing a new e-mail or the vibration that signals the arrival of a text message serves as a reward cue for us.

And how about this?

The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopamine circuits “promote states of eagerness and directed purpose,” Panksepp writes. It’s a state humans love to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused—cocaine and amphetamines, drugs of stimulation, are particularly effective at stirring it.

Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling? Thank dopamine. Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem.

Hmmm…

GM’s Volt: cost-benefit analysis

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GM is claiming that its forthcoming electric car, the Volt, will do 230 mpg. Amazing, if true. But it will cost $40,000. Writing in The Atlantic, Daniel Indiviglio reported on some calculations to see how long he’d have to drive a Toyota Corolla before he’d have recouped the purchase price of the Volt.

The price difference in 2011 between the Volt and Corolla should be approximately $24,189. Next, I figured out how much it would cost to drive a mile in each car. That’s around 11.9 cents per mile for the Corolla and 1.3 cents per mile for the Volt. Thus, it’s around 10.6 cents more expensive per mile to drive the Corolla.

From this point, it’s pretty simple. Just divide the price difference by how much more per mile it costs to drive the Corolla. That tells us that you would need to drive the Volt approximately 229,000 miles before you break even for paying more to buy it.

Clearly, my methodology takes a few short cuts. Each year you drive the Volt, the price of gasoline may continue to increase. So the number would likely be a little less. For example, if you assume $4 per gallon, then you’d need to drive around 177,000 miles to break even.

There’s a little more help that Volt drivers will get — from Uncle Sam. There will be a government rebate of $7,500 available when you buy a Volt. That lowers its potential price tag to $32,500, reducing the difference in 2011 prices between the Volt and Corolla to $16,689. As a result, you would need to drive approximately 158,000 miles to break even, based on my other original assumptions.

158,000 miles is still a lot. Unless the price of gas truly skyrockets well past the $3 level after 2011, then the argument for purchasing a Volt will remain based more on environmental ethics than economics. That is unless you drive cars for a really, really long time.

Obama on healthcare reform

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Good Op-Ed piece by him in the NYT.

OUR nation is now engaged in a great debate about the future of health care in America. And over the past few weeks, much of the media attention has been focused on the loudest voices. What we haven’t heard are the voices of the millions upon millions of Americans who quietly struggle every day with a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for them.

And,

Lastly, reform will provide every American with some basic consumer protections that will finally hold insurance companies accountable. A 2007 national survey actually shows that insurance companies discriminated against more than 12 million Americans in the previous three years because they had a pre-existing illness or condition. The companies either refused to cover the person, refused to cover a specific illness or condition or charged a higher premium.

We will put an end to these practices. Our reform will prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage because of your medical history. Nor will they be allowed to drop your coverage if you get sick. They will not be able to water down your coverage when you need it most. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime. And we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses. No one in America should go broke because they get sick.

Most important, we will require insurance companies to cover routine checkups, preventive care and screening tests like mammograms and colonoscopies. There’s no reason that we shouldn’t be catching diseases like breast cancer and prostate cancer on the front end. It makes sense, it saves lives and it can also save money.

This is what reform is about.

Attaboy!

Facebook, Friendfeed and, er, Google (of course)

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This morning’s Observer column.

Google’s page-rank search technology is good, but it’s still pretty primitive – try looking for a hotel in rural France or a plumber in any UK town. You could say that search is about 5% solved, with 3% of that down to Google. With 95% still to do, many people think the next advances will come from adding social or collaborative dimensions to pure computational algorithms.

Which is where social networking comes in…

Just what I was thinking…

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Lovely diary par by Simon Hoggart.

There are few tribes more loathsome than the American right, and their vicious use of the shortcomings in the NHS to attack Barack Obama’s attempts at health reform are a useful reminder.

I was thinking of this during a visit to my 91-year-old dad who is still in an NHS hospital after three weeks, recovering from a broken hip. He has had fantastic care, including a new metal hip, blood transfusions, different antibiotics to match every aspect of his condition; all administered by nurses who remain cheerful even when asked to perform tasks on men – the lethal combination of pain and old age makes some in the ward exceedingly grumpy – that I would not want to do for £1,000 a time. If he was in an American hospital he’d be using up half his life savings to get that standard of care, and few ordinary Americans could afford the insurance that would provide it. (This is because health insurers spend a large part of their income on PR against the ‘socialised medicine’ and on sending pro forma letters explaining why your policy doesn’t cover actual illness.) All over the US there are people whose lives are being destroyed for lack of proper health care provision, and there is no sight more odious than the rich, powerful and arrogant trying to keep it that way.

He’s right. The US ‘debate’ over healthcare reform is becoming increasingly surreal. It’s almost as though the American Right has decided that this is the way to undo what it sees as the blip of an Obama presidency.

Elsewhere the Guardian has a nice piece by an American academic who has lived in this country for many years. He points out — rightly — that the biggest difference between the two countries (and this is true not only for the UK but also for most of the big European democracies) is that fear of bankruptcy has been disconnected from the universal fear of serious illness.

The relationship between doctors and their patients at every level is different from that in the States; here money does not change hands. An American friend of mine with five children was terrified when he became unemployed, fearful that one of them might become ill. I became ill when I was briefly back in the US some years ago, attending a meeting. With an acute urinary obstruction, the first person I saw, and the only one who could admit me for treatment, was the woman in charge of payment. My credit card probably saved my life.

There may be delays, frustrations and bureaucracy with the NHS, but the system delivers outstanding healthcare at no cost to the patient and far less of the GDP that the US system consumes. Being over 60, all prescription drugs are free. Perhaps it is that absence of fear of becoming ill that is the most important aspect of the system.

It’s difficult to believe that the hysterical lobbying against universal health care that’s currently raging in the US could derail Obama’s attempts at reform. But then this is a country where 46 million people voted for McCain/Palin, and where many people think Palin would make a serious presidential candidate.