Friday, May 31, 2013

The Dictatorship of Data

Robert McNamara epitomizes the hyper-rational executive led astray by numbers.

Big data is poised to transform society, from how we diagnose illness to how we educate children, even making it possible for a car to drive itself. Information is emerging as a new economic input, a vital resource. Companies, governments, and even individuals will be measuring and optimizing everything possible.

But there is a dark side. Big data erodes privacy. And when it is used to make predictions about what we are likely to do but haven’t yet done, it threatens freedom as well. Yet big data also exacerbates a very old problem: relying on the numbers when they are far more fallible than we think. Nothing underscores the consequences of data analysis gone awry more than the story of Robert McNamara.

From MIT Technology Review

Justice Is in Our Nature

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/05/29/justice-is-in-our-nature/

Social contracts are written into our biology. As is the justice they need. The arc of our evolution has long bent towards the justice of “laws” fittest for team survival. We bred ourselves, by artificial selection, to internalize and feel strongly about social rules.

Christopher Boehm in Moral Originsconcludes, after intensive analysis of 50 representative hunter-gatherer cultures, that our ancestors likely experienced a “radical political change,” evolving from a hierarchic “apelike ‘might is right’…social order,” to become more egalitarian. About 250,000 years ago, their survival became a team sportbecause chasing big-game toward teammates was much more productive than solo hunting. But only if profit-sharing was sustainable. Even with fit teammates hunting needs luck (e.g. 4% success today). Then, as now, the logic of social insurance solved team problems by sharing profits and risks. Productivity gains in interdependent teams radically changed our evolution. Cooperators thrived. As did teams with the best adapted sharing rules, provided they were well enforced.

Boehm says all surviving hunter-gatherers enforce law-like social rules to prevent excessive egoism, nepotism, and cronyism. They use rebukes, ridicule, shame, shunning, exile and execution (typically delegated to close male kin of the condemned, to avoid inter-family feuding). For example, meat isn’t distributed by the successful hunter but by neutral stakeholders. Excessively dominant alpha-male behavior—like hogging more than a fair share of meat—is punished by “counterdominant coalitions.” If the strong abused their power they were eliminated, in a sort of inverted eugenics. Resisting injustice and tyranny are universal traits in today’s hunter-gatherers. They likely run 10,000 generations deep in our prehistory.

Social punishment created powerful selection pressures. Self-control becomes the lowest-cost strategy for avoiding social penalties. Shame and guilt likely evolved as mechanisms for internalizing the logic of team rules—a social contract written into our biology. We intuitively recognize what is considered punishable. And often punish ourselves. Cultures configure shame and guilt system triggers differently. But rules balancing short term individual selfish gain with longer-term or team interests are more evolutionarily productive. Thinking of our evolved urges as irresistible is a deep error, since self-control, especially relative to social rules, has long been needed for survival (see “evo-irresistible error”)

Our ancestors bred themselves to be team players. They used intelligently directed artificial selection of good cooperators as mates (“auto-domestication”). Bad cooperators were less likely to be selected for, or successful at, the hugely costly and highly collaborative business of raising long helpless offspring.

Justice, wrote Hesiod, poet of the ancient Greek masses and Homer’s rival, was “Zeus’s greatest gift” to us. Greatest or not, without it human nature wouldn’t be what it is. And we wouldn’t exist.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Intel Fuels a Rebellion Around Your Data

Big data and personal information are converging to shape the Internet’s most powerful and surprising consumer products. They’ll predict your needs, store your memories, and improve your life—if you let them. Read more: http://www.technologyreview.com/businessreport/big-data-gets-personal/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130522

Intel is a $53-billion-a-year company that enjoys a near monopoly on the computer chips that go into PCs. But when it comes to the data underlying big companies like Facebook and Google, it says it wants to “return power to the people.”

Intel Labs, the company’s R&D arm, is launching an initiative around what it calls the “data economy”—how consumers might capture more of the value of their personal information, like digital records of their their location or work history. To make this possible, Intel is funding hackathons to urge developers to explore novel uses of personal data. It has also paid for a rebellious-sounding website called We the Data, featuring raised fists and stories comparing Facebook to Exxon Mobil.

View full report

Monday, May 20, 2013

What do we eat? New food map will tell us

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) — Do your kids love chocolate milk? It may have more calories on average than you thought.

Same goes for soda.

Until now, the only way to find out what people in the United States eat and how many calories they consume has been government data, which can lag behind the rapidly expanding and changing food marketplace.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are trying to change that by creating a gargantuan map of what foods Americans are buying and eating.

Part of the uniqueness of the database is its ability to sort one product into what it really is — thousands of brands and variations.

Dear American consumers: Please don't start eating healthfully. Sincerely, the Food Industry.

Dear Consumers: A disturbing trend has come to our attention. You, the people, are thinking more about health, and you’re starting to do something about it. This cannot continue.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/05/19/dear-american-consumers-please-dont-start-eating-healthfully-sincerely-the-food-industry/

Sure, there’s always been talk of health in America. We often encourage it. The thing is, we only want you to think about and talk about health in a certain way—equating health with how you look, instead of outcomes like quality of life and reduced disease risk. Your superficial understanding of health has a great influence over your purchasing decisions, and we’re ready for it, whether you choose to go low-calorie, low-fat, gluten-free or inevitably give up and accept the fact that you can’t resist our Little Debbie snacks, potato chips and ice cream novelties.

Whatever the current health trend, we respond by developing and marketing new products. We can also show you how great some of our current products are and always have been. For example, when things were not looking so good for fat, our friends at Welch’s were able to point out that their chewy fruit snacks were a fat free option. Low fat! Healthy! Then the tide turned against carbohydrates. Our friends in meat and dairy were happy to show that their steaks, meats and cheeses were low-carb choices. Low carbs! Healthy!

But we’re getting uneasy.

In 2009, Congress commissioned the Inter-agency Working Group (IWG) to develop standards for advertising foods to children. The IWG included the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Congress identified these organizations as having “expertise and experience in child nutrition, child health, psychology, education, marketing and other fields relevant to food and beverage marketing and child nutrition standards.”

We were dismayed when the IWG released its report in 2011. The guidelines said that foods advertised to children must provide “a meaningful contribution to a healthful diet.” For example, any food marketed to children must “contain at least 50% by weight one or more of the following: fruit; vegetable; whole grain; fat-free or low-fat milk or yogurt; fish; extra lean meat or poultry; eggs; nuts and seeds; or beans.”

This report was potentially devastating. These organizations, experts in nutrition, were officially outlining what constituted “a meaningful contribution to a healthful diet.” Thankfully, we have a ton of money and were able to use it to get the IWG to withdraw the guidelines.

In a public comment posted on the FTC website, our friends at General Mills pointed out that under the IWG guidelines, the most commonly consumed foods in the US would be considered unhealthy. Specifically, according to General Mills, “of the 100 most commonly consumed foods and beverages in America, 88 would fail the IWG’s proposed standards.” So you see? If you people start eating the way the nutrition experts at the CDC and USDA recommend that you eat, that would delegitimize almost 90 percent of the products we produce! Do you realize how much money that would cost us?

According to the General Mills letter, if everyone in the US started eating healthfully, it would cost us $503 billion per year! That might affect our ability to pay CEOs like General Mills’ Ken Powell annual compensations of more than $12 million.

But revamping the food environment will also cost you money. The General Mills letter stated “a shift by the average American to the IWG diet would conservatively increase the individual’s annual food spending by $1,632.” Sure, we’ve heard talk about costs to the individual that arise from being obese. One 2010 paper from the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services estimated that the annual costs to an individual for being obese can be upwards of $8,000. We like to think of this as a small price to pay for consumer freedom.

Of course, we don’t necessarily want you to be unhealthy. It’s just that it’s so much more profitable to provide foods that happen to be unhealthy. We’ve been able to industrialize the food system so that we can produce massive amounts of the cheapest ingredients available, in the cheapest, most efficient way possible.

On top of that, we understand human biology. Humans evolved in situations in which food was scarce. This led to an evolutionary adaptation that causes you to crave salty, sugary and fatty foods. Consuming foods with these characteristics actually lights up the same pleasure centers in the brain as cocaine. Who wouldn’t play upon that biological craving to increase profits? If one company didn’t, their competitors would, so we all kind of have to do it.

We are also able to provide you with perceived value. Because it doesn’t cost us that much more to make a soda, say, 42 ounces instead of 22, we can almost double the size of a beverage and only charge you 20 percent more. How could you resist a deal like that? You can’t. Trust us, we know.

So you see, dear consumer, everything is fine. We’ve got a good thing going here. There’s no need for you to start worrying about the industrial food system. If you do start thinking about your weight, check out our line of Healthy Choice frozen meals. If that doesn’t work, our friends over in the pharmaceutical industry, the health and fitness industry and the healthcare industry will be happy to help you to continue to fulfill your role as an American Consumer.

Images: by the author

Telecom’s Big Players Hold Back the Future - NY Times

If you were going to look for ground zero in the fight against a rapidly consolidating telecom and cable industry, you might end up on the fifth floor of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York.

Susan Crawford, a professor at the school, has written a book, “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age,” that offers a calm but chilling state-of-play on the information age in the United States. She is on a permanent campaign, speaking at schools, conferences and companies — she was at Google last week — and in front of Congress, asserting that the status quo has been great for providers but an expensive mess for everyone else.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Why Health Care Should Bring Back the House Call - Harvard Business Review

by MICHAEL FLEMING

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/why_healthcare_should_bring_ba.html?utm_source=Socialflow&utm_medium=Tweet&utm_campaign=Socialflow

Years ago, as a family physician in Louisiana, I made house calls. Certain patients were too sick or too hurt to get to my office. Sometimes a condition or injury had worsened, requiring my evaluation bedside. I would visit patients at home for the simplest of reasons: home was where they needed care.

By the mid-1980s, the pressures of time and money prevented most physicians from making house calls anymore. But I kept seeing patients at home until I retired from my practice after 29 years. Home visits enabled me to better detect, diagnose and treat most health conditions. Many of the patients I saw might otherwise have wound up in an emergency room and eventually been admitted to a hospital.

If we hope to rein in health care costs and improve quality, we need, in effect, to bring back the house call. Americans are living longer than ever before and a higher percentage of the population is elderly, with both trends sure to accelerate drastically in the decades ahead. Baby Boomers are now turning age 65 at the rate of roughly 10,000 per day.

As the older demographic expands, so, too, does the number of people who live with chronic diseases, chiefly diabetes, high blood pressure and heart failure. About three in four of Americans age 65-plus suffer from more than one such chronic condition. The single biggest and fastest-growing contributor to healthcare costs is chronic disease. That's why an estimated, 49% of our health care costs go toward 5% of Medicare beneficiaries.

Yet the U.S. health care system is still based on a massive misconception: that health care for the sickest of the sick, typically the elderly and the chronically ill, should be carried out almost exclusively in institutions, primarily hospitals, but also nursing homes and assisted living facilities. And that health care delivery should consist largely of, say, a trip to the emergency room or a four-day hospital visit for pneumonia. That kind of episodic engagement represents short-term thinking. When it comes to health care, hospitals are essential, but are only a part of the answer.

Rather, health care should be practiced year-round, and even minute-by-minute. Managing chronic disease should involve post-acute care, complete with daily monitoring of vital criteria, including blood pressure, diet and physical activity. Only under such regular oversight can chronically ill patients expect to function well, much less fully. No single approach can do this better than home care. It can shorten hospital length of stay and lower readmissions. And there is mounting evidence that health care delivered at home enables patients to live longer lives and, equally important, better ones.

In the process, home care is doing exactly what's most needed -- increasing quality and driving down costs. An Avalere Health study found in 2011 that health care at home improved outcomes and saved $2.8 billion among patients with diabetes, congestive heart failure and COPD. A 2009 study revealed that home health care reduced hospitalizations and short-term nursing stays, saving Medicare dollars. Indeed, expanding access to home health care for chronic-disease patients could save a projected $30 billion, that same study concluded.

Yet the value of home care remains under recognized. As a result, vast needs are still going unmet. Here's what has to be done:

Define the discipline better. The medical community, including physicians, medical schools, and hospital administrators must better describe what home care does and why it matters in order to bring it to life for policymakers and family caregivers.

Get in sync. Primary care physicians particularly, but also nurses, therapists, social workers and others, must align better with home-care clinicians to coordinate care, especially during and immediately after the transition from hospital to home.

Physician, educate thyself. Physicians should learn about home-care options and discuss them with patients who could benefit.

Adopt new technologies. More companies in the home-care business should use innovative technology to coordinate care in real time, including point-of-care laptops, telemonitoring devices, and Internet portals for physicians that allow all providers to share a patients' information.

Remove policy obstacles. Reimbursements from Medicare and private insurers should reflect the true value of home care. But the payment system now in place sees home care, quite mistakenly, as merely an add-on with little clinical benefit. Policymakers should create a payment model that aligns providers' clinical and economic interests, assigning proper value to good outcomes and recognizing that home care is pivotal to success.

Health care at home is patient-centered, outcomes-driven and truly collaborative, making it a microcosm of how the health care system should function across the board. Only by embracing home care can we truly reform the health care system.

Saturday, May 18, 2013

The Biology of Kindness: How It Makes Us Happier and Healthier

There’s a reason why being kind to others is good for you — and it can now be traced to a specific nerve.

When it comes to staying healthy, both physically and mentally, studiesconsistently show that strong relationships are at least as important as avoiding smoking and obesity. But how does social support translate into physical benefits such as lower blood pressure, healthier weights and other physiological measures of sound health? A new studypublished in Psychological Science suggests that the link may follow the twisting path of the vagus nerve, which connects social contact to the positive emotions that can flow from interactions.

Friday, May 17, 2013

Google and NASA Launch Quantum Computing AI Lab

The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab will use the most advanced commercially available quantum computer, the D-Wave Two.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

How Drug Companies Keep Medicine Out of Reach - The Atlantic

The promise of delinking research and development from the actual manufacture of drugs, and why the pharmaceutical industry rejects an idea that could turn neglected diseases into profit.

Glimpses of a World Revealed by Cell-Phone Data

An examination of simple cell-phone records reveals maps of poverty levels, ethnic divides, and the movements of sports fans.

WHY IT MATTERS Cell phone data could be used for development, transportation planning, and public health.

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Here's to the Moms!

Mother's Day is coming soon. One day a year just isn't enough to thank all the moms.

http://www.google.com/landing/mothersday/index.html?utm_source=twitter

New public database shows hospital billing all over the map

Most reputable companies that provide services tell you what you’ll get for your money. Hospitals are an exception. They haven’t traditionally made public the cost of operations and other procedures. This secrecy has let hospitals set widely different prices for the same procedure. It’s also made it impossible to do any comparison shopping.

Yesterday’s release to the public of a once very private database shows just how big the differences can be from hospital to hospital.

On the South Side of Chicago, where I grew up, one hospital’s charge for implanting a pacemaker to keep the heart beating at a steady rhythm was $49,601, while another hospital charged $63,979 to do it. In Boston, a hospital not far from where I work charged $76,121 to implant a pacemaker while another hospital less than three miles away charged $55,687.

According to The New York Times, the Keck Hospital of the University of Southern California charged an average of $123,885 for a major artificial joint replacement (six times the average amount that Medicare reimbursed for the procedure) while Centinela Hospital Medical Center, also in Los Angeles, charged $220,881 for the same type of joint replacement surgery.

The database, released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, details what 3,300 hospitals charged for the 100 most common treatments and procedures in 2011.

The data reinforce the big differences in charges from one part of the U.S. to another. What’s new and surprising are the huge differences sometimes seen between hospitals in the same city, or even the same neighborhood.

Keep in mind that these “charges” aren’t hard and fast. Medicare doesn’t pay the full charge. Insurers don’t either, as many of them negotiate lower charges. As NPR’s Robert Siegel said about the database, “it sounds like what you’ve got is a survey of the sticker prices in car lots all around America, but every deal is a special deal.”

At least for now, the database isn’t especially easy to use. It’s just an Excel spreadsheet listing the hospitals by state along their charges for the 100 procedures.The Washington Post created a nifty interactive tool that you can use to look at charges in your state for 10 conditions. Choose your state and the tool shows how its hospitals stack up against the national average, as well as the highest and lowest charges for these ten procedures. Expect other creative apps incorporating this information to be coming along soon.

If you decide to dive into the data, be aware—especially if you have private insurance (not Medicare)—that appearances can be deceiving. It may look like Hospital A charges more than Hospital B, but that may not be so. Your insurer and Hospital may have actually agreed on a lower payment. So the data don’t necessarily say what your insurance company is actually going to pay.

Reverberations

A few weeks ago, I finally finished reading “Bitter Pill,” Steven Brill’s extraordinaryTime magazine article on the crazy cost of healthcare in America. I say “crazy” because, according to Brill, how hospitals set their prices has little rhyme or reason. The database from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reinforces that notion.

Publishing this information is one small step toward making the cost of healthcare more transparent. While it will be a long time before most of us will be able to figure out how much an operation or a hospital stay costs, the database could nudge hospitals with exorbitant charges to bring them in line.

Related Information: Living Better, Living Longer: The secrets of healthy aging

Can These Foods Help Prevent Stroke? - Cleveland Clinic

What you eat may protect you from a ‘brain attack’

What you eat each day can play a big role not just in weight control, but also in protecting you against stroke. So put down the potato chips and read on.

“Food as it relates to stroke is all about prevention,” says certified nurse practitionerSusan Jaeger. “Your food choices can reduce the risk of cholesterol buildup in the arteries, and these blockages are a major cause of stroke.”

Think of it this way: Stroke is often referred to as a “brain attack” because it’s affecting your brain as a heart attack would your heart. That means a heart-healthy diet can also protect against stroke, which kills nearly 130,000 Americans every year and is the fourth leading cause of death in America.

A Quantum Computer Aces Its Test - NY Times

The long-sought quantum computer, a machine potentially far ahead of today’s best supercomputers, is almost as hard to define as it is to build. For at least a few particular uses, however, the unusual computer made by D-Wave Systems now seems to be very fast indeed.

High-Powered Computing Heralds Digital Industrial Revolution [Preview] - Scientific American

Digital simulations have become so powerful that companies send their products through the wringer—sometimes literally—before ever building a prototype

By James D. Myers

DIGITAL WASH: P&G used intensive simulations to ensure that Tide Pods would behave properly inside the chaotic environment of a washing machine.Image: Travis RathboneSpecial Report Illustration by Justin Metz

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=high-powered-computing-heralds-digital-industrial-revolution

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet for Over Two Years

A quantum internet capable of sending perfectly secure messages has been running at Los Alamos National Labs for the last two and a half years, say researchers.

One of the dreams for security experts is the creation of a quantum internet that allows perfectly secure communication based on the powerful laws of quantum mechanics.

The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs of snooping that the receiver can detect. That allows anybody to send a “one-time pad” over a quantum network which can then be used for secure communication using conventional classical communication.

That sets things up nicely for perfectly secure messaging known as quantum cryptography and this is actually a fairly straightforward technique for any half decent quantum optics lab. Indeed, a company called ID Quantique sells an off-the-shelf system that has begun to attract banks and other organisations interested in perfect security.

These systems have an important limitation, however. The current generation of quantum cryptography systems are point-to-point connections over a single length of fibre, So they can send secure messages from A to B but cannot route this information onwards to C, D, E or F. That’s because the act of routing a message means reading the part of it that indicates where it has to be routed. And this inevitably changes it, at least with conventional routers. This makes a quantum internet impossible with today’s technology

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/514581/government-lab-reveals-quantum-internet-operated-continuously-for-over-two-years/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130507

Sunday, May 5, 2013

African-Americans sent-thousands of anti-slavery petitions in the 18th and 19th-century

Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783, but throughout the 18th and 19th century, the state’s legislator fielded thousands of petitions calling for an end to lingering slavery, segregation and the uncertainty caused by legislation like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and by the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857. And among these documents were “some of the first petitions prepared, signed, and circulated by African-Americans in North American history,” says Daniel Carpenter, the director of Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies.

In order to make these documents more accessible, the center will catalogue, transcribe and digitize around 5,000 of the petitions, currently owned by the Massachusetts State Archives. The center aims to complete the project by June 2015.

The petitions speak to fear and anxiety in African American communities, even though slavery had already been abolished in the state. African Americans living around Boston feared re-enslavement, for example, or that their basic life freedoms would be limited by discriminatory regulations.

How do electronic health records (EHRs) connect you and your doctor?

Electronic Health Records Infographic

How do electronic health records (EHRs) connect you and your doctor? In the past, medical data was only stored on paper, making it difficult for your health care providers to share your information. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of doctors using anEHRsystem grew about 57%, making it easier for you and all of your doctors to coordinate your care, and often reducing the chance of medical errors. Where are electronic health records headed? In this Infographic, view the history of electronic health records and see how they may improve your health and health care in the future.

View Infographic: http://www.healthit.gov/patients-families/electronic-health-records-infographic

Support family caregivers

How can eHealth tools help support me as a family caregiver?

We are a nation of caregivers. According to the National Alliance for Caregiving and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), in any given year more than 65 million people in the United States provide care for a chronically ill, disabled or aged family member or friend. On average, family caregivers spend 20 hours per week providing care for their loved one. Thirteen percent of family caregivers spend 40 hours a week or more on caregiving.

The role of family caregiver brings with it numerous physical, emotional, and financial challenges. Family caregivers may find solutions to some of these challenges among the resources listed on other pages of this Tools You Can Use guide. But several organizations also offer resources specifically geared towards helping family caregivers understand and cope with difficult circumstances.

The Department of Health and Human Services or the U.S. Government does not endorse any product, service or general policies of any non-Federal entity nor is responsible for the content of any individual organization’s material or web pages found at these links.

Below, learn more about:

General family caregiver Support Several organizations work to raise awareness of the challenges faced by family caregivers, and many provide online and in-person support networks to help caregivers connect to one another.	National Family Caregivers Association	A national advocacy organization for family caregivers, the NFCA website also offers a large library of support materials and connections to support communities.
	National Alliance for Caregiving	A national advocacy organization for family caregivers, the NAC particularly highlights news and legislation relevant to caregivers.
	Caregiver’s Survival Network	The Caregiver’s Survival Network offers several methods of connecting family caregivers to one another, and also provides a blog with news and features of interest to caregivers.
	Veterans Administration (VA) Caregiver Support	The VA’s caregiver support site offers a large number of resources and tools for family caregivers looking after veterans. In addition to the web site, the VA also offers a telephone support line.
	American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) Caregiving Site	AARP offers a wide variety of information and resources for caregivers, as well as access to a telephone support line.
	Alzheimer’s and Dementia Caregiver Support	A collection of caregiver information and resources specifically geared towards family caregivers working with a loved one suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia. The Alzheimer’s Association also offers connections to local support groups, and access to a telephone helpline for caregivers.

Tools and other services for family caregivers	Many Strong	A site allowing family caregivers to create mini-communities of family members and volunteers to work together and stay informed about a loved one in need of care.
	CarePlanners	A paid service to help caregivers and others navigate the complexities of the health care system.
	Help Near Home	A VA-provided resource to help family caregivers of veterans identify local resources such as long-term care facilities and home hospice services.
	Technology for Caregivers	A blog post from the Caregiver’s Survival Network highlighting apps and other technology tools designed to help family caregivers.

Chester Eastside News