Month: July 2012

A friend of mine wants to deliver some one-on-one online teaching via video chat. It seems like a good idea, except for the fact that I can almost never get a Skype video session to work reliably or smoothly with a friend or relative, even when both ends are served by broadband and reasonably new devices. Given that there will be a range of students and they will have differing hardware, software, and connectivity situations, what are some good choices?

And let’s maybe renew the discussion that I started in February asking why Skype was so bad. The companies offering video chat, e.g., Skype (Microsoft), Yahoo!, Google, and Apple, have near-infinite money. So there should not be any constraint on programmers or fancy algorithms. As the software runs peer-to-peer, there should not be any constraint on how much CPU and bandwidth can be consumed. Yet a comment on the previous posting stated, quite credibly, that the Polycom system worked far better than PC-based systems. Is there a non-free system that would be reasonable for students and teachers to install that would work a lot better than the standard free ones?

[Update: I forgot to ask… why don’t these systems allow recording for later review? Isn’t it just as easy for the software to write to the hard drive at the same time that it is writing to the display?]

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At a dinner party the other night in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was asked if I was looking forward to November 7, 2012, when the U.S. presidential election would be over. I responded that I hadn’t been following the election because (a) I assume the Barack Obama will be reelected, and (b) there wouldn’t be any dramatic changes if Mitt Romney were elected. The host, who’d grown up in a wealthy New York family, and is a passionate Obama supporter, questioned me regarding this. I said “Well, under Bush we were embroiled in foreign wars, subsidizing government cronies with tax dollars, watching states bankrupt themselves with public employee pension commitments, and watching our children walk into some of the world’s most expensively funded and least effective schools. Obama is about as different from Bush as a U.S. politician could be and yet nothing substantive has changed. Why would we expect huge changes from Romney? And if we don’t expect huge changes, why it is worth spending a lot of time and energy following the election?”

This segued into a discussion regarding Obama’s achievements in office. It turned out that, for the host, Obama’s most important achievement was “standing up to Netanyahu”. The host regarded Israel’s 7.5 million people as the greatest reservoir of wrongdoers on the planet, apparently, and was impressed by the Commander in Chief of the world’s largest military “standing up” to the leader of a country whose $243 billion GDP is comparable to the combined GDP of Baltimore and Cincinnati.

What do the readers think? Perhaps we can fill up the comment section with what folks think are Obama’s biggest achievements over the past 3.5 years. For comparison, here’s the semi-official list for Eisenhower.

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In this interview with Niall Ferguson, he says that China is more like mid-1970s South Korea (i.e., poised for a lot more growth) than it is like late-1980s Japan.

[Coincidentally, right now I’m reading Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power by the same author.]

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Technology Review, the MIT alumni magazine, has two recent articles that should depress publishers everywhere:

• why publishers can’t make money with iPad, etc., apps
• why publishers, including Facebook, can’t make money with Web advertising

Don’t let your kids grow up to work in the publishing industry!

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/19/olympic-games-g4s-bill is sort of a fun article if you do some arithmetic on what the British are spending on one facet of security at the London Olympics. There were supposed to be 10,000 guards and the cost of their uniforms was 65 million pounds or roughly $10,200 per guard. In the best tradition of an ossified bureaucratic moribund society, more money is allocated to management (125 million pounds) than labor (83 million pounds). Overall, had things worked out as planned/hoped, the British would have spent $446 million (enough to have financed 15 Googles) to have 10,000 minimally trained security guards work for the 17-day event. That works out to $44,600 per guard or $2,623 per guard per day. As it happens, though, the contractor wasn’t able to supply the 10,000 guards, many of them could not speak English, and many were unable to stay awake during their minimal training. So the cost per actual guard may be closer to $100,000.

[The guards themselves don’t receive this $100,000, of course. They receive roughly $13.30 per hour, according to this article.]

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A friend of a friend runs a small HMO for a university (students, faculty, staff). Part of his job is negotiating with vendors for procedures and hospital care. “[A local academic-affiliated hospital] charges $2800 for a colonoscopy. I got a deal with a colonoscopy center, though, for $900. Same doctors. Same procedure. Same anesthesia.” Was there anything else that affects the price? “On top of these charges, the centers encourage patients to ask for Propofol as an anesthetic. That’s the Michael Jackson drug. It doesn’t work any better, but it has to be administered by an anesthesiologist and the centers and hospitals are able to tack on another $1000 in charges. Insurance companies will pay for it so the providers try to convince patients that it is better so they will ask for it. We tell them that we won’t pay for it!”

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The Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government can try to coerce Americans into buying health insurance. What I haven’t seen in the news articles covering this event is a comparison to other things that the government tries to get Americans to do. The government tries to get teenagers to graduate from high school, but about 20 percent fail to do so. The government tries to get Americans to stop smoking marijuana, but about 20 percent light up periodically, despite the criminal penalties that attach to this activity. The government tries to get Americans to drive more fuel-efficient cars, and has various tax penalties associated with gas guzzlers, but SUVs and pickups clog our highways (I parked next to a monster one yesterday that had an “Eco Boost” badge on the side!).

The penalty for those who don’t buy health insurance is an extra tax, but http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2009/04/taxes_schmaxes.html notes that roughly 7 million Americans (out of about 150 million civilians in the labor force) don’t bother to file tax returns.

Was it really worth two years of drama to turn America from a country in which millions of people lack health insurance into a country in which millions of people lack health insurance?

I’m still a fan of my own health care reform plan, which provides universal coverage, not just a nagging scolding nanny state that has proven itself to be incapable in the past of nagging and scolding with sufficient effect.

What will happen in 5-10 years when we discover that America still has a huge population of uninsured folks? The currently approved law does not seem to be a great stepping stone to universal coverage.

[Separately, if I were not a taxpayer, I would have been amused to see that each state got $8 million to do planning, but not actual programming, for a Web site to serve as a health insurance exchange. In other words, the federal government spent $400 million (50 states times $8 million) to do planning for the kind of Web service that a private start-up would build with five young people sharing an apartment and coding for three months.]

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