PragPub
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
The Pragmatic Programmer’s have started a monthly magazine, PragPub, available in PDF, mobi, and epub formats. Looks interesting.
Via Daring Fireball
The Cost Conundrum
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
I’ve had no comment thus far in the heated debate over rising medical costs because I simply didn’t know where the increased spending was going. Doctors? Procedures? Administration?
Finally, it seems, there is an answer: doctors and other healt-related companies are optimizing care for revenues instead of optimizing for patient health. This results in too much care and a dramatic rise in costs.
Health-care costs ultimately arise from the accumulation of individual decisions doctors make about which services and treatments to write an order for. The most expensive piece of medical equipment, as the saying goes, is a doctor’s pen. And, as a rule, hospital executives don’t own the pen caps. Doctors do.
The solution, in my opinion, is to somehow change the culture in the health care. I don’t think you can pass any law to fix this. It will just fill things with more beaurocratic red tape.
The Mayo Clinic has figured it out:
The core tenet of the Mayo Clinic is “The needs of the patient come first”—not the convenience of the doctors, not their revenues. The doctors and nurses, and even the janitors, sat in meetings almost weekly, working on ideas to make the service and the care better, not to get more money out of patients. I asked Cortese how the Mayo Clinic made this possible.
“It’s not easy,” he said. But decades ago Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. Mayo promoted leaders who focussed first on what was best for patients, and then on how to make this financially possible.
Another city with low costs, Grand Junction, Colorado has done something similar: pooled their doctor’s together to remove the financial incentive to over-treat patients.
Is there a law that can be passed to encourage this kind of behavior? Maybe. But it will be tricky. When the behavior you are trying to change is based on thousands of individual choices, I think the best first step is to inform and encourage doctor’s to solve the problems themselves. Then, if that fails, pass a law.
Read the full article by Dr. Atul Gawande in the New Yorker. Very informative and very convincing. According to some President Obama has read it and is using it to make policy. The author has even been on Fresh Air from WHYY.
How to Wrap Your Headphones
Thursday, 11 June 2009
This video shows (my now favorite technique) for wrapping and storing ear buds. It looks like it might work for any kind of cables, wires, etc. When you watch it, make sure you have your ear buds handy to practice. The tuck and pull move at the end is the most important part, and I didn’t learn it it until I did it.
Via Daring Fireball.
What Makes Us Happy?
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
The June 2009 issue of The Atlantic has a long article about George Vaillant and the ongoing Harvard Study of Adult Development, which began in “1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), [and] has followed its subjects for more than 70 years.”
Most of the essay focuses on Vaillant, but its worth a read for the parts that talk about the study results and conclusions. I enjoyed Vaillant’s thoughts on our emotional and mental defenses:
Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. Vaillant’s taxonomy ranks defenses from worst to best, in four categories.
At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or “psychotic,” adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the “immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.” The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).
Via Ben Casnocha
How to Use CSS's vertical-align Property
Thursday, 4 June 2009
Oops. Looks like I’ve been misusing CSS’s vertical-align property for years. That would explain why it never does what I want it to.
The Beatles Rock Band Opening Cinematic
Thursday, 4 June 2009
You must watch this amazing opening cinematic to The Beatles Rock Band. Makes me want to buy the game. Almost.
Double amazing.
Via Rands.
Users Don't Switch Browsers
Thursday, 4 June 2009
This is a really interesting graph. It seems to suggest that users don’t switch browsers. Instead, new users getting on the Internet are either 1) choosing a browser besides Internet Explorer; or 2) not on Windows.
Via Elsewhere on the Net.
What We Say Without Words
Tuesday, 2 June 2009
I’m always fascinated by human behavior: why we do what we do. In this slideshow from The Washington Post, former FBI-agent Joe Navarro discusses what various body movements and positions communicates to others, most of it sub-conciously.
Via Ben Casnocha
List of All Cities in the United States
Monday, 1 June 2009
RSnake has posted a list of all U.S. cites over at ha.ckers. Taken from his GEO IP database, it contains 20,580 entries. I have no idea what I would use this for, but it is cool nevertheless. I’ll think of something…
Odds of Dying in a Terrorist Attack 2
Thursday, 28 May 2009
Here are some more statistics regarding how likely it is to die in a terrorist attack. The answer: not likely at all.
As the data clearly shows, the things that genuinely threaten us are the ones we are most likely to ignore or simply accept. (We’re statistically far more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than by an action of Al Qaeda, for example.) The ones that we’re scared witless of – and spend trillions of increasingly scarce dollars to avert in our boundless paranoia – are less likely to harm us than a bag of peanuts. (Deaths in America due to peanut allergies average 50 – 100 per year.)
Via Schneier
Odds of Dying in a Terrorist Attack
Friday, 22 May 2009
The next time someone says we need to spend billions of dollars on fighting terrorism, or invade foreign countries that support terrorism, show them this list of the odds of dying in a terrorist attack.
If the point of fighting terrorism is to save lives, there are much better ways to spend the money. If the point of fighting terrorism is to help us not be scared, then stop fighting it. The very act of fighting terrorism validates its existence and the cause for which they fight.
There are better and more important things to fight.
Via Kottke.
Why Good Design Makes You Happy
Wednesday, 13 May 2009
Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, explains why design makes us happy. Fascinating. I’m a big believer that good design affects a product’s success or failure in the marketplace. Good design is about taking away people’s fears, and not only making them enjoy using your product, but want to use your product.
Via Ragged Clown
Get Outlook to Automatically Delete Old Trash
Monday, 27 April 2009
One of the nice features of Max OS X’s Mail application and, I think, Mozilla Thunderbird, is that they will permanently delete messages from trash older than a month (i.e., they keep a month’s worth of deleted items). To get the same functionality in Microsoft Outlook connected to an Exchange Server, I had to do the following:
- Right-click “Deleted Items” and choose “Properties”.
- Click on the Auto-Archive tab.
- Select the “Archive this folder using these settings:” option/radio button.
- Under that option, choose the “Permanently delete old items” option/radio button.
- Click the “Apply” button.
I think Outlook won’t do this until its Auto-Archive process runs. Start it manually from the Tools > Mailbox Cleanup dialog box.
Stumptown '09
Monday, 27 April 2009
For those interested, you can read about my experience at this year’s Stumptown Comics Fest.
John Madden Retires
Friday, 17 April 2009
Sunday Night Football is something not to be missed in our house, especially because of John Madden’s presence in the commentator’s booth. The guy knew football, and listening to him was, for me, half the fun. After 30 years, he’s retiring.
Watching football will never be the same. Here’s hoping it’s a short retirement.
Via Daring Fireball
ReSharper 4.5 Released
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
I’m a few days late, but ReSharper 4.5 has been released. I’ve been using the beta for a month or so and can say that it does use less memory. This is on my must-have tools list. It makes tedious coding a thing of the past.
Understanding Risk
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
Statistics lie, or at least deceive. This short slide show from BBC news shows just how misleading the numbers can be.
Via Adaptive Path
Things from Another World Watchdog Service
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
This looks to be a pretty cool service from Things from Another World, purveyor of all things geeky, from comics to statues to toys. The service allows you to save some search terms and they’ll send you an e-mail each week if any new products match your saved searches.
Since I’ve switched from reading monthly comics to reading trade paperbacks and graphic novels, hopefully this will help me stay on top of new work by my favorite writers and artists. You’ll have to create an account to use it, however.
Finding Non-ASCII Characters with Visual Studio
Thursday, 19 March 2009
Does trying to find a curly quote, em dash, en dash or other non-ASCII character in Visual Studio cause your eyes to bleed? Do you need to make sure the HTML you are sending to your users doesn’t contain any unicode characters? Try searching your code with the following regular expression:
[^\x00-\x7f]
Open any of Visual Studio’s find windows and enter the regular expression above into the “Find what:” text box. Click the “Find Options” plus sign to expand the list of options. Check the last box “Use:” and choose “Regular expressions” from the drop down menu.
