Sunday, October 9, 2005

re Health Care policy, we have a complex conversation sputtering along. Health Care and Life Expectancy: Numerators Versus Denominators, by Bryan Caplan The Sensible Knave's newborn daughter was born a couple months early. But not only is she doing well, she's giving her dad some thought-provoking ideas about international health comparisons. The highlight: In a tragic sort of way, inferior prenatal care could actually boost average life expectancy while lowering health care costs. Adequedate prenatal care may reduce the incidence of miscarriage, especially in the second half of pregnancy. Had my wife's perinatologist not detected her dilating cervix in the 22nd week of pregnancy, we would probably have lost our daughter. And she would have been a miscarriage statistic, not an infant mortality statistic. [...] Late fetal death rates are lower in the United States than in many industrialized countries. Here are some 2001 rates for selected countries, taken from the table: United States - 3.2 Canada - 3.3 Germany - 3.9 Sweden - 3.8 United Kingdom - 5.3 (2000, latest available data) France - 4.6 (1999, latest available data) Despite my overall skepticism about the benefits of health care, my own experience with premature births makes me think the Sensible Knave is one of the most lucid new dads around. [EconLog: Library of Economics and Liberty] 8:25:10 PM    comment []

Fleet Week Photo from whileseated . [FlickrBlog] 8:19:16 PM    comment []

Some good thoughts on blogging from Joi Ito, check his entry. Blogging style Apologies again for my semi-hiatus from blogging. I've reached level 40 (I now have a robo-chicken mount) on World of Warcraft and have completed (ahem) 80% of my research. One of the things I've been thinking about while not blogging is... blogging. A number of people have asked me to help new bloggers by giving them advice. In retrospect, I was giving people very specific advice based on my personal style. I thought I'd share some of the tips. 1 - You're probably stupid - Well, maybe not stupid, but at least ignorant. Often you are the last one to figure out that you're not as smart as you think. Assume that someone will think you're stupid and will kindly point this out in the comments. Preempt that by assume you're stupid and uninformed. In other words, be humble and don't try to write something conclusively smart-sounding. Start a discussion where someone smarter than you can step in easily.... 5 - Write early write often - Don't wait for your ideas to be completed. When you have some inspiration, get it out of the door quickly. Update the post or write new ones as the thought or story unfolds. Having said all that, I don't follow my own rules. Like this post and the last post... But this is the advice that I would give myself. [Joi Ito's Web] 8:13:36 PM    comment []

Sinbad vs. the Mermaids Sinbad vs. the Mermaids (& what it means to "Extreme Democracy") Thomas Friedman (New York Times) writes on October 5, 2005 of the cultural gulf off the coast of Iraq. This is a steep chasm the advocates of Extreme Democracy don't see. "...Iraq is a multiethnic society that had to be held together by a dictator's iron fist. What Iraqis are struggling with today is whether they can forge their own social contract in which Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis can live together - without an iron fist. That is critical because virtually every Arab state today is a mix of religions and ethnicities held together by a hard or soft fist. If Iraqis can find a way to live together, any people out here can, and democracy has a future. If the Iraqis can't, probably no one can, and we can look forward to dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world - with all the pathologies they bring - forever. But change is hard. "When the Iraqi Navy drops you off on the Chosin, a guided-missile cruiser, two things just hit you in the face: one is the diversity of the U.S. Navy - blacks, whites, Hispanics, Christians, Jews, atheists, Muslims, all working together, bound by a shared idea, not an iron fist. To be sure, it took America a good 150 years after independence to embrace pluralism and women's rights, and we're still working at it...." "Somewhere along the way we forgot that underpinning each transaction was a relationship...." (below) Yup, and sometimes those relationships are dynamic, chasm spanning complexity. Social Network Dynamics and Participatory Politics "Somewhere along the way we forgot that underpinning each transaction was a relationship. At scale this means financial credit. But there is value in the small. The smaller transactions that are underpinned by social capital yield emergent patterns that are perhaps more disruptive." a Wified book chapter at Eventspace: Openfield (This is a draft chapter for the O'Reilly book on Extreme Democracy, edited by Jon Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe.) Social software and politics This is something I wrote for the discussion on the WELL; thought it would be worth reposting here: This has been a high-level discussion of the subjects we cover in the book, but before we're done, we should get to the nitty gritty... the actual technologies and how they're built. Blogs are important in this context, but they're not everything. Along with the ascendance of the blog came a whole social software movement that was gathering steam around 2002. Social software is pretty much any software that supports community or collaborative work over computer networks, i.e. the Internet. Nancy White (http://www.fullcirc.com/) and I had a discussion as I was putting together a presentation for an online conference around that time, and we realized that the real strength of social software was in combining tools, as in the "happenings" Joi Ito set up, with Ross Mayfield's help and input, to bring a bunch of us together online for the discussions that fed into the Emergent Democracy paper we include in _Extreme Democracy_. The happening was multimodal: teleconference plus IRC chat plus wiki (and later QuickTopic for a stage of collaboration on the paper). The chat supported the call by allowing visual cues: you could see when someone wanted to speak, and there was a way for participants to show thumbs up or down (by using a greencard or redcard widget, and there was a yellowcard for a ho-hum response to an idea). The wiki was for note-taking and, later, for collaboration on the text. The first version was Microsoft Word, and that was added to Quicktopic which has a way for you to upload a Word document and gather comments. Finally Joi added a version to his wiki, more comments were added, and that's the piece that I edited for the book. Social software applications included blogs, content syndication (RSS, Atom), forums, chats, instant messaging, collaborative editing, social network platforms like LinkedIn and Orkut, social bookmarking (del.icio.us), tagging (del.icio.us, flickr), etc. The purpose of my Deanspace piece in the book was to establish that project not just in the context of the Dean campaign, but also in the context of the social software movement, which had become very robust by then, and which influenced Zack Rosen, Neil Drumm et al. to pull that project together. Like many social software instigators, they were influenced by Reed's Law, which is David Reed's insight that the utility or value of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. (See Reed's essay "That Sneaky Exponential - Beyond Metcalfe's Law to the Power of Community Building" - http://www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/reedslaw.html). [Extreme Democracy] 7:18:23 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Russ Savage. Last update: 11/2/05; 5:45:35 AM.