I reminded one of our content editors that we needed a text version of a diagram on an alternate page, to meet accessibility requirements and support screen readers.
So he created one, by laying the information out in a pretty table.
“You can hear voices, you can operate under intermittent delusions, you can see rabbits in the road that aren’t there and still be legally sane [by New York standards].”
Check the second of today’s new GTA IV trailers.
GTA IV has Prius!
Until he mentioned it in an interview, it had never occurred to me that Ira Glass might be related to Philip Glass.
One of the problems of working in tech is it can get annoying when you see lots of money being spent solving the wrong problems, or implementing completely ineffective solutions.
Take credit cards and RFID, for example. There’s a big push in the US to include RFID in every card. I’ve had a card with RFID for just over a year now. The benefit to me? Theoretically, I can hold the card against the card reader, instead of having to swipe it through the slot.
That’s it.
And I say "theoretically", because in the half dozen times I’ve tried it at local stores that have the equipment, it has only worked once. In every other case, I’ve had to fall back to swiping the card through the slot instead.
This is dismal. Why the hell are companies like American Express spending millions of dollars on this RFID crap that doesn’t even work, when magnetic stripes are far more reliable and get the same job done?
If they wanted to spend money on an actual problem, they could implement two-factor authentication like PayPal are doing and wipe out fraud. I’ve seen credit cards with displays built in, it’s quite possible.
Instead, they started checking expiry dates. Then when all the merchants started recording the expiry dates in their databases and the criminals got lists of card numbers with expiry dates, they added 3 or 4 more digits to the the card and called it a Card Verification Number. Now vendors are recording those, and in another year or two the criminals will be passing around card number lists with expiry date and CVN, and we’ll be back to square one.
Another great case of solving the wrong problem was in the news today. Google is going to spend money allowing people to put all their medical records on the Internet. This is in response to an earlier announcement from Microsoft of a similar HealthVault service.
C|net says it’s a "laudable goal". No, it’s not, it’s a stupid idea. Let’s go through some of the reasons why it’s stupid.
Firstly, as soon as you centralize your health records in this way, you have a single big target for criminals to attack. Right now, if some hospital screws up and exposes a bunch of medical records, the chances of my being affected are very remote; it’ll only be the few thousand people who used that hospital who are in trouble. If everyone’s medical records are stored on Microsoft’s servers and they screw up, tens of millions of people could be affected.
Secondly, you have a single point of failure. Microsoft’s service goes down, and suddenly nobody can check in to the ER. Yeah, great idea.
Thirdly, if you’re running a hospital, you don’t want to have your computers that are used for medical records connected to the Internet, for reasons that should be blindingly obvious to everyone. So in practice, hospitals will need extra Internet-connected computers to obtain the health records from these services, and they’ll then end up printing them out on paper like before. Either that, or they’ll take the risk and put their medical records processing systems on the Internet. So, ‘no benefit’ or ‘reduced security’, you choose.
Fourthly, a centralized record of all health information makes selective disclosure difficult or impossible. Right now, if I go to the drugstore, they have the medication I’m taking in a list and can flag possible drug interactions. That’s it, but that’s all they need. In the glorious future, they ask for my central database ID, and the guy at the counter can browse the results of my STD tests, see if I had therapy for alcoholism, and so on.
Now, it’s possible that Google are going to make an effort to allow compartmentalization of the information, with need-to-know disclosure. They’re smarter than Microsoft, they might have worked out why it’s a good idea. But it’s a hard thing to do. When I go to a drugstore for the first time, how is it going to be handled? Will I have had to log on to Google at home first and list the information that I want to allow the drugstore access to? Or will they have a web browser in the store so I can do that? (If not, what if I forgot something important?) If they have an in-store system that I log in to to allow them access to my info, how am I going to know I can trust it not to record my keystrokes?
This selective disclosure requirement is why a single national ID card for all government services is a bad idea. It’s why combining all the cards in your wallet into one universal card is a bad idea. And if we look at your wallet, we can see the obvious alternative: put the medical records on a card.
With the "medical records on a card" approach, there’s no central point of failure. There’s no way for criminals to get fifty million people’s medical records at once. There’s no need for hospital computers to be connected to the Internet. And selective disclosure can be done simply by having more than one card–a pharmacy card with my prescription drug list, perhaps a mental health card, and a full medical history card for my doctor. In fact, that’s pretty much what I already have, since several US pharmacies issue regular customers with pharmacy cards so they can check for drug interactions. All we really need to do is standardize the cards, put data chips on them to increase capacity, and get card readers in the hospitals.
Oh, sure, I can lose my card. I can also disclose my Google login, though, and I’m betting average mouth-breathers are far more likely to choose bad passwords or write them down or tell them to phishers than they are to lose a credit card.
But no, we’ll spend money on the dumb solution instead, perhaps because it’s really all about control. Solving the problem sensibly wouldn’t give any company control over fifty million people’s medical records, and that’s what this is really about.
Update: Via Slashdot, a WSJ story on the perils of a single centralized healthcare database : a woman’s insurer gets access to her mental health records because they’re stored in the same place as her regular healthcare information, and decide she’s probably malingering and deny her claim.
Obesity needs to be tackled in the same way as climate change, a top nutritional scientist has said.
In that case, let me get my soapbox…
You know, there is absolutely no proof that people are getting fatter. Sure, there are fat people around, but that’s just part of the long term historical trend towards people being better fed.
The occasional truly fat person is just a statistical blip. You’d expect to see a few around. That doesn’t mean there’s some sort of country-wide fattening.
Remember back in the 1970s and 80s when people were talking about “Live Aid” and the like? Back then, the big danger was getting thinner–and now they want us to forget about that and believe that the big danger is getting fatter! Hah!
There’s no proof that eating Big Macs makes you fat. Scientists are still undecided. There are a lot of possible alternative explanations. There’s no causal link, it might just be that fat people prefer the taste of Big Macs.
There’s a well-funded health industry conspiring to plant stories in the media suggesting that being obese and sedentary is bad for you, so that they can make more money selling diet aids and exercise equipment.
We can’t afford to do anything about obesity. If we did what the lunatic fringe wants, we’d destroy the fast food industry, Hershey’s, the TV and couch industries, and so on. We’d send America into another recession!
I’ve been reading Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus.
One of the things the book discusses is that the parts of the brain responsible for abstract goals and evaluating long term priorities are relatively recent additions to our ape brains. It was a big deal when scientists discovered that crows could make tools, because it demonstrated that they too could engage in a complex form of reasoning, continuing to work at something in spite of lack of positive outcome, in order to bring about a longer term goal.
But we’re not always as smart as crows. Our deliberative task juggling faculties require conscious engagement, and are easily sidetracked by the possibility of more immediate gratification. I speak of procrastination; as Despair, Inc put it in their Demotivator, Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now
. Sometimes we sit and watch TV instead of doing our taxes, or reach for another slice of cake while we think about whether to go out for a run.
In his book, Dr Marcus suggests a way to reduce the problem of procrastination. The brain has a much older mechanism for motivating us to do things, and it’s a lot more powerful than prioritizing the contents of our to-do list or considering our long term life goals. The trick is that the more primitive goal processing part of the brain only understands motivations of the form if I do [some action], then [some immediate outcome] happens.
This is the kind of reasoning all animals can do, the kind that lets squirrels learn that humans will give them treats, or lets you teach dogs that they’re not allowed on the furniture.
Part of the reason why GTD works is that by making sure all your to-do items are actionable concrete next steps, you make them processable by this primitive goal processing engine. But now you add the second trick David Allen hasn’t included in GTD yet: you give each next action an immediate payoff.
It’s something I do all the time. If I go to the dentist for a checkup, I get myself a doughnut. If I sell some junk on eBay, I immediately buy myself a new video game. When we file our taxes, we go out for Thai curry. If I do some yard work, I buy a Frappuccino.
OK, you’re saying, but what’s to stop me from buying the Frappuccino anyway?
Nothing. That’s the best thing about this technique–it doesn’t matter if you buy a Frappuccino anyway without doing any work, so long as when you do perform the task, you get the reward. (Yes, two Frappuccinos in one day, if necessary.) The primitive goal engine isn’t advanced enough to work out that you could have gotten the reward anyway; it just registers that the unpleasant action resulted in the reward, and then it helps subconsciously motivate you to perform similar actions in future.
Of course, you have to be a little careful that your rewards aren’t all high fat sugary ones, or expensive ones. You might think that there aren’t enough healthy ways to reward yourself, but it doesn’t appear to matter whether the reward is something you would do anyway. I would play video games anyway, but if I do so immediately after tidying the house and consciously think of it as a reward, it becomes easier to motivate myself to tidy the house. Since normal activities can be rewards, this vastly increases the number of things you can use to motivate yourself. Maybe you could reward yourself with a hot bath, an afternoon nap, or your favorite TV show.
The only thing you have to remember when setting rewards is that they have to involve immediate gratification. Money doesn’t work; it’s too abstract, the animal brain doesn’t understand it. Affirmations and other good thoughts don’t work either, they’re a tool of the deliberative mind. Forget self esteem, you need to think of a treat that appeals to you at the animal level, you need to indulge in it fairly immediately after performing the unpleasant task, and you need to think about the fact that the reward was because the task was performed.
Maybe this method won’t work for everyone, but it seems sound based on the information about how the mind works in Dr Marcus’s book, and I’ve been using the technique on myself for years with a good degree of success. If it changes your life, feel free to shower me with gratitude.
I gather that increasing numbers of people these days use their cell phone to tell the time, and don’t bother with a watch.
However, the watch is fighting back. Behold, the quad band GSM phone in a wristwatch, with Bluetooth (so you can pair it with a headset for phone use) and OLED display showing analog hands. Plus 1.3MP camera, kinetic battery recharge, and MP3 player.
At 13mm thick it’s still pretty bulky, but not much worse than my Casio G-Shock.
I think it was Gareth who introduced me to Larry Marder’s Beanworld. I have managed to collect the four books put out by Beanworld Press, two of them autographed. It’s my favorite comic book, and I’d love to recommend that everyone dash out and buy book one and start reading, but that might be a little difficult as copies currently go for anything from $50 to $200.
There’s good news, however. Larry Marder now has a journal on the web, and is posting teasers. He says there should be a republished edition of the Beanworld story to date, and Beanworld web comics.
“There was a transvestite whose privates were covered with tape who crouched on all fours in a kiddie pool of glitter and stuck a lit sparkler in his bum while America the Beautiful played. There was an overweight stripper who pretended to eat a bunch of dollar bills, then left nothing to the imagination as to the results of the digestion of such a meal. The next performer came out, picked up the string of bills onstage and waved it under his nose.”