For some unknown reason my most recent links post, which is pushed to my blog from delicious.com/werty once a day, won’t stop posting. I went so far as to turn off the notification stream this afternoon, but it’s still showing up. Apologies to folks whose RSS feeds are choking with my repeats.
I’m not sure how to fix it–suggestions are welcome (@djacobs, hint hint).
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I really don’t know what to make of the healthcare political arguments as they happen, but I am firmly in the system-needs-fixing camp. Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed in Thursday’s New York Times clarifies why.
The data he cites is so startling, it bears repeating. According to recent surveys by organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation:
- the United States ranks 31st in life expectancy, tied with Kuwait and Chile
- the U.S. ranks 37th in infant mortality and 34th in maternal mortality–an American woman is 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as a woman in Ireland
- a child in the United States is two-and-a-half times as likely to die by age 5 as in Singapore or Sweden
- an African-American in New Orleans has a shorter life expectancy than the average person in Vietnam or Honduras
- Americans take 10 percent fewer drugs than citizens in other countries–but pay 118 percent more per pill that they do take
Read the entire piece for more detail and context. (Bullet points above are quotes from the editorial.)
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Is it still Big Brother if you know what they know?
Nathan has this new coat for fall that Amy picked up somewhere. It’s a hip brand, and a nice coat, all corduroy and fleece and fluffy soft and cute in its big-people-style-little-people-size way.
Of course, distressed clothing is in these days, and Nate’s coat is skidded with white. On both sides of the front of the jacket, and covering most of the back, is a big, pale streak.
This, we’ve discovered, is the end limit for distressing clothes. Because while we know it’s intentional, other people think it’s, well, shmutzy. “Did Nate sit in paint?” is a line we’ve heard more than once. Concerned looks become a different kind of concern when we say, “No, that’s the style.”
Oh well. He’s warm and he’s still cute. But now I know why I’ve never wanted to buy jeans with a hole in the knee.
(As an aside, I love Rafe’s thoughts on modern aesthetics, which have stuck with me for a long time.)
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Love (although I don't like "intelligent" in the text.. more like "educated")
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BONG
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And to think I bought nice new blended-fabric pinstriped pants a few weeks ago. How passé of me!
I received in email today an invitation to be in a research study tracking web searches. The teaser for the study says:
“In this study, we’re interested in learning more about how people use search engines to find information on the Web. … The duration of the study is 3 weeks. To participate you will need to … be willing to install a small piece of software on your home computer that will log your web browsing & searches [and] answer a few simple questions related to your searches on a daily basis (for a 3 week period).”
The research group is offering $200 for participation, which seems like a rather paltry total for the privacy invasion it invites. But the question is a good one for the masses: how do we use search engines to find information on the Web? So obvious yet so undefined.
I decided to peek at my own Google queries on my work computer to analyze themes and trends. I consider myself a pretty solid, if shallow web searcher: I can almost always find what I’m looking for, though I tend to rephrase searches to find better results than dig past the first 20 or 30 results.
Some of my own trends, exposed:
- I use quotes. A lot. Many of my searches force Boolean-style operations on Google, allowing me to pinpoint terms as written. I find a lot of proper nouns this way, such as “dan gingold” “mach five”, which helped me track down my former coworker’s band. (I have Pandora to thank for that one. And Dan is now my Facebook friend. Natch.)
- I do a lot of iterative searching, as noted above: “fountains of wayne” then “fountains of wayne store” then “fountains of wayne closed” and “fountains of wayne timely demise.”
- Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I have a whole bunch of mp3 searches in my results, for when I want to hear that one song one time at work.
- I use Google Maps a lot, and I apparently fine-tune my mappings a lot–I’ll do a town-to-town search, then I’ll put in the specific destination, and then tweak my settings somehow. (So restless.)
- I also use Google for a lot of searches that could take place on the site itself, because it’s easier just to do the google. I have dozens of people’s names with linkedin in the search, and many references to aiaio or Timely Demise from cross-referencing my own archives.
I’m sure there’s more insight to be had, but that’s quite an interesting start. How do you do the google?
This is a cross-post from aiaio.
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The perfect obituary
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Today's fun fact: this past quarter, three out of every four new-device activations at AT&T Wireless were iPhones
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"Can't bloggers and citizen journalists replace [newspapers]?"
"In my honest opinion, that notion is based on basic ignorance on how news is gathered and verified. The so-called mainstream media has its faults, but how, for example, can the information that you get from a blogger be accepted if you don't know his background; you don't know who might be paying him; you don't know what experience he's had or what his personal prejudices may be. When you have a newspaper, you have at least one person besides the writer who looks at the product critically. The information that you get from online is often not the product of an organisation interested in the enterprise of verification."
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for this stat: "Two-thirds of all the income gains from the years 2002 to 2007 — two-thirds! — went to the top 1 percent of Americans."