Where are our media drones?

Todays NYT has a story about difficulties in getting permission for media overflights of the BP spill area.  Here's something I've been wondering for some time:  why doesn't someone invest in drones for use by media organizations?

That might not work here, of course, because there might be yet other restrictions on their use. But you certainly could use them for disaster coverage, and imagery from regions too violent for journalists on the ground.

This is a limited capability, no substitute for close observation, but it would seem profitable in a variety of areas:  people pay for fast footage of earthquakes, fires, and other natural disasters.  Feeds from Somalia, Burma, or Zimbabwe might not be in such high demand, but still would be useful to someone.

Anyone have a line on a used Predator?

Punitive green

I appreciate efforts to be environmentally sensitive.  But is it really necessary to go to the lengths of banning shopping carts at grocery stores?

Look what it says right under the picture of the evil shopping cart: "Shopping carts make us buy more stuff than we can carry home."

I knew there were evil forces abroad in the land, but I had not suspected the depths of depravity to which they could sink....

This is just silly. So, if you are a busy parent with several children, you are right out of luck in Sydney, Australia, which is implementing such a ban. I buy many of my groceries by bicycle, and can testify that dealing with gallons of milk, cereal boxes, and things like toilet paper and paper towels, can be a real pain. And if you have a number of people to feed and clean up after...the Sydney city council must be mostly single people.

This is why normal people think green activists are oppressive, clueless jerks. The backlash is going to be ferocious. Is that really what we want?

Our crumbling infrastructure--and sense

The physical substrate of the world we live in can be astonishingly fragile. For example, Boston's water supply was recently contaminated because of the sudden collapse of a pipe in the distribution system.  My city, Cambridge, escaped, because it has its own water treatment plant.

Now, the contamination was really fairly minor. You could shower, wash, etc. And even if you drank it, it would probably just make you a little sick, unless you have a compromised immune system. In much of the world, this would have been perfectly good water.

But it came out of a clear blue sky. One pipe (actually, a collar connecting two 10-ft pipes) ruptured, and an entire metropolitan area had water problems. And a federal emergency was declared, which is, frankly, kind of embarrassing.  A plumbing problem, even a big plumbing problem does not make us a disaster area.

And people were accused of price gouging when they sold...bottled water.  People reported stores that sold bottle water above some "fair" price.  Economists, of course, are all over this one.  But, for heaven's sake, it wasn't like they were withholding insulin from diabetics, or something. There was plenty of water pouring out of every tap. A few drops of bleach, or a boil, and you could have as much drinkable water as you wanted. 

Almost no one really believes in the free market. They just believe in cheap stuff. Fortunately, that's what the market usually provides. When it doesn't, people want to whack the delicate machinery of the market with a big monkey wrench to get it working again.

Infrastructure isn't only physical. It's behavioral too. If it's poorly maintained, you can get a catastrophic failure.  We'll need to be prepared for more disasters of both kinds.

"Alarm fatigue": is the Facoder a solution?

A recent Boston Globe story related how a patient died at Mass General because various monitors were either beeping and unheeded, or had been turned off.

When alarms are going off constantly for non-critical matters, you become desensitized to them, or even interfere with their function just to have some peace and quiet.  Then, when the real critical matter comes up, you ignore it, and your patient dies, or the reactor overheats, or the train goes through a switch and crashes.

To improve things, you'd have to decide ahead of time which things are critical, and which aren't, and make sure the alarms reflected this priority.  Only a few problems would qualify: the mind can't pay attention to more than a couple of things at once.  You'd need to make sure less-critical but still important problems get bumped up for investigation periodically.  But if one of those "non-critical" problems then causes a death, you, the alarm designer, are in real trouble. And you know that somewhere, at some time, that will happen. What really matters is not what makes sense, but what you can be sued for.

The problem, however, was solved years ago by David E. H. Jones, who wrote a wonderful column for New Scientist called "Daedalus", about bizarre yet plausible devices created by a company called DREADCO.  I have a collection of these columns, long out of print, called The Inventions of Daedalus, which includes a column on the Facoder, from 1973. My copy is not inscribed, but I remember it being given to me by my old friend Dave Platt, with whom I have recently reconnected.  Thanks, Dave!

Here's the principle of the facoder.

Unless they have some autism-spectrum disorder people respond to human faces with subtlety and complexity. They instantly gauge moods, even with limited cues. Even simple caricature faces can convey these emotions.

Using the example of a control panel for a complex chemical plant, Daedalus proposed a "facoder": a display of schematic faces, instead of dials or other readouts. As a specific system started to malfunction, the face would look more and more alarmed, instantly attracting the attention of the monitoring engineer. The entire mood of the plant could be gauged with a quick glance across the display, much as a performer gauges the mood of an audience (this is my analogy, not Daedalus's, BTW). A bank of happy faces would be the reward of good management.

The same thing could be installed a a nurse's station, with faces standing in  for patient vital signs. In a hospital setting, unlike the chemical plant or nuclear power plant, these would be competing with real patient faces, so it would have to be used with due consideration for the human desire for emotional shortcuts.

I'm actually surprised some version of the facoder hasn't come to pass.  I think its time has come.

The cost of urban preservation

I like a nice old sandstone Richardsonian Romanesque office building, with columns, cornices, and elaborate entryways.  Like this one:

But I don't have to pay to maintain the thing, install modern fire-control equipment, remove asbestos, or try to rent to finicky commercial tenants who care more about the conformation of the space they lease than they do about architectural detail.

So I found the discussion about the Northwestern Guaranty Loan Building in Minneapolis, on one of my favorite sites, Shorpy, extremely enlightening.  The building was torn down in 1961, in one of those fits of urban renewal that characterized the era.  One hates the soul-sucking monstrosity that replaced it (as posted in a comment by bipto), while understanding the gigantic expense that would have been required to keep it operational, as pointed out by Minnie A. Politan and Anonymous Tipster.  If you've ever done even minor work on your house, you know how much things like that can run.

So I am a bit chastened, after my rambling rant yesterday about the beauty of cities.  No wonder city centers of older cities are somewhat theme-park-like.  How else can you pay to maintain all those old facades, while removing dangerously obsolete wiring and keeping the roof from falling in?  You have the pimp the buildings out to preserve them. No matter what structure you see, anywhere in the world, you have to reflect that the world is doing its best to destroy it. Keeping it standing takes vigilance, and money.  A lot of money. The struggle is eternal.

As my friend James Patrick Kelly pointed out on our Boskone panel about cities, most science fiction writers don't know any economics.  If you really want beauty, you have to be willing to pay for it.

Habit is everything

And the most important conscious decision you can make is what habits to acquire.  Conscious decisions otherwise seem almost epiphenomenal, "say it, brother!" exclamations to validate unconscious decisions already made.

So I biked to work today, though the day never got above 15 F.  I'd never start biking on a day like today, but I have a habit, and so it actually takes a carefully considered decision to keep me from biking in.  Fortunately, the modern world is full of great equipment:  with balaklava, neoprene booties, lobster mitts, and warm jacket, it's really not uncomfortable.  The worst is the tiresome unpeeling when I get to work.

I've been too busy at work to get to the gym at lunch, so this has been my only workout for the past few days.  If you have to exercise in order to get home, you are way more likely to do it.

What caused the financial crisis?

Another of the ways I make my bike ride to work more dangerous is listening to podcasts from Russ Roberts' Econtalk.  Roberts is a great interviewer, and sounds quite boyish.  The best of the recent ones was one with Charles Calomiris, about the banking crisis.  Calomiris manages to talk at great speed with complete clarity on a complex topic, barely letting the usually gabby Roberts get a word in edgewise.  "All I learned about economics I learned from reading blogs" isn't completely true of me, but has a lot of truth in it--and most economics books I've read are by people who blog as well.  Despite these less than impressive credentials, I think I understood Calomiris pretty well.

Moral hazard is behind a lot of what goes wrong, not just in banking, but in healthcare as well.  Build a guardrail, and people not only get closer to the precipice than they would otherwise, they lean on it, then build their houses on it.  Everyone is enraged when it breaks and everyone falls in.  Don't blame Calomiris for this metaphor--it's all my own.

Calomiris is dismissive of securitization and "originate and distribute" as the causes, and is persuasive on that score.

The interview is worth a listen, maybe two--I think it covers a lot of issues very clearly.  The Richard Posner interview on the same topic a few weeks later was quite otherwise.  Though I'm a big fan (I love Sex and Reason), I thought he was dull and a bit of a blowhard--I'm not persuade he's the right person to go to on this topic.  Calomiris clearly is.  I'll tell you what I learned about the FDIC some other time.

Giving voice to silent cars

In its annual Ideas issue, the NYT Magazine notes that hybrid and electric cars are completely silent, which makes them dangerous to pedestrians, who can't hear them coming.

I certainly depend, almost unconsciously, on the sound of approaching cars while I'm bicycling.

In fact, I think people underestimate how noisy cars really are, being so used to them.  I wouldn't mind things getting quieter, without sacrificing those unconscious cues we use to keep ourselves safe.  The article wonders what sound would be best, but doesn't mention one that might be fun:  the clipclop of hooves and the neighing of horses.  With a little effort, we could have the soundscape of a 19th century street, without the smell- and turdscape.

Life is good: we have dentists

This morning I went in to my dentist for a routine cleaning.  Every time I go in to have my gums probed and my teeth examined, I reflect on this relatively unsung hero of our happy existence.

Improperly treated, teeth can cause incredible pain, both chronic and acute.  They rot, cause damage to the jaw, and fall out.  The remaining teeth then shift, and get loose in their turn.  Once you have few teeth, food is harder to eat, your diet suffers, and your overall health declines.  Soon, you are old.
Enlightened dental hygiene combined with regular dentist visits prevent this.

This is incredibly boring, isn’t it?  "Enlightened dental hygiene".  Something you would expect from your most blowhard relative over turkey.  How quickly the miraculous becomes mundane.  Good dental care adds healthy and pain-free years to your life.

Interestingly, I can think of no fairy tale where someone wishes for a new set of teeth (I am no folklore scholar:  does anyone know of one?).  Of course, no one asks for lifelong resistance to infectious disease, escape from death in childbirth, or a smokeless chimney either.  Were these things literally unimaginable?  Most likely it’s just that a fairy tale requires some element of believability to be adequately comforting.  One can imagine a bigger house, more food, or a nicer spouse.  Decent teeth were far beyond the realm of possibility.  It wasn't even something that would occur to anyone.

But so far from being unbelievable, these things are now routine.  So, this Thanksgiving, in addition to giving thanks for all you have, give thanks for dentists.  And vaccines, public health, and smokeless domestic heat as well, while you’re at it.

The benefits of silence

I just got back from visiting my mother, who had bypass surgery a few weeks ago.  She's doing fine.

There is no internet connectivity at her retirement community, and it proved difficult to get anywhere I could get some.

On the other hand, I'm not as comprehensively mentally connected as most other people.  I often read people complaining about shortened attention spans, distraction, etc., and I certainly feel that when I have connectivity.

When I don't, however, I'm perfectly happy.  Her apartment is looks out over the roofs of the other buildings into a Midwestern oak forest.  It is utterly silent.  So, while my mother napped, I read, alternating Middlemarch and Victor David Hanson's analysis of the Peloponnesian War, A War Like No Other.  No, I didn't discern any deep connection between the two works.

Now I'm back, and catching up.

Should a wonderful private moment be public?

Via Andrew Sullivan, I watched this moving video... No one can watch it without tears, I think. I certainly didn’t.

I was deeply moved. And then I thought. Not about pro- or anti-intervention positions, or the consequences and costs of sending troops abroad for extended missions. But about privacy.

I was moved by a private and personal moment. And I was moved, perhaps more than by great art.  Any artist who could stimulate emotion like this would be regarded as a genius.

This is probably one of the most significant events this girl has ever experienced. What right do I have to participate in it?

I think this girl had a right to feel this emotion completely and utterly in private. I don’t know what to do about the fact that she couldn’t, that she was compelled against her will to share it with millions of strangers, and that I participated in that violation, but I’m trying to figure it out. I think we all need to figure it out.

And I linked to it. And I encouraged you to watch it. I have participated fully in violating her privacy. Maybe she doesn't mind.  Maybe she's even proud, or will be someday. But that is all beyond the realm of her own choice.

We’ve been spared all sorts of ethical decisions simply because it was previously technically impossible to do any number of things, from examining fetuses at early stages to uploading videos of private moments. We didn’t have to take a position on texting while driving in the past, because there was no way to do it. There was no way to quickly copy and distribute music, or text, or images.  Now there is.

If the meek inherit the earth, it’s because they lack the power to do evil, not because they have decided not to do evil. Virtue implies the ability to do otherwise.  With power comes responsibility. We can’t duck the technology, and we can’t duck the need to decide what to do about its consequences. The answer may be “nothing other than moderate regulation, with an occasional hysterical overreaction to some egregious edge condition”. That is likely, in fact, to be the only possible answer.

But we have to make the choice consciously, with full knowledge of what it entails. We cannot evade it.
This particular little snippet is a useful place to start thinking. It is entirely positive. No one involved has anything to be embarrassed or ashamed about. It is really quite wonderful.  I think everyone should see it.

Should it be private? Or do we have a right to share?  Who decides, and how?  The fact that the questions are hard to answer does not mean they shouldn't be asked.

Update on 2009-11-11 01:23 by Alexander Jablokov

Mark-

All good points, and thanks for taking the time to think about it.  I'm not just ranting about our vanishing privacy in a kind of generic way--we've invented the concept only recently, and there was a time not too long ago where that girl's emotion would have been witnessed, and shared, by her entire family and village, with no idea that it would be any other way.

I don't really know why I responded the way I did.  I just felt so...intimate.  I felt like a voyeur.  And yet, even knowing what I know now, I wouldn't say I should have foregone the experience.

My main point stands, however.  What were previously limits imposed by physical reality must now be replaced with limits that are chosen.  This doesn't just apply to privacy, but to any number of other areas, from reproduction to large-scale manipulation of nature.  Who choses and how?

Biking with lunatics in Sao Paolo

Treehugger has an interesting piece on speeds of various means of transportation in Sao Paolo (via The Infrastructurist).  It had the merit of testing various types of bicyclist (including an untrained cyclist who stayed on side streets) against buses, cars, helicopters, etc.  Most contests stack the deck by not including regular folks on regular bikes (a fast cyclist did in 26 minutes what a regular guy did in 66 minutes, so you can see what effect that has).  A delivery trained cyclist and a trained cyclist on a fixed-gear bike beat even the helicopter six plus miles across town.  Pretty much everyone with control over their speed beat the car (82 minutes).  Even a bus beat the car, so Sao Paolo must be both a commuting nightmare, and have some separated bus lanes.

I ride a fixie about six miles to work every day, so I appreciate that.  But bicyclists are annoying and smug, and everyone hates them, and I understand that.  I bike every day, all year, in Boston weather and traffic, and find it normal, and don't get why other people would like sitting in cars, but I know I am in a minority.

But even I found the bicyclist in the video scary.  He's riding through tunnels, on busy highways, at night, with no taillight or reflective gear.  Sao Paolo looks like a great place to get killed.  It's new.  Boston is old, so the deranged street patterns actually make bicycling easier.  Cars are clearly the intruders here.  But only a madman would put his butt out on a bike in Sao Paolo.  My personal opinion, anyway.

Plus, the guy in the helicopter wasn't really trying.

Remember: medicine is magic

Healthcare is not just another business, and what we buy when we buy it is not just another set of services.  Medicine is magic.

This is clearly true, even though free market types (I'm one) want to see it as amenable to normal laws of supply and demand. It’s not that those laws don’t apply to it. They clearly do. It’s just that there are other drives on healthcare consumption far beyond (or beneath) those laws that make it hard to analogize from other businesses.

All these people screaming at healthcare meetings show that. Agree or disagree with their position, they are not just dupes of sinister manipulators. There's more to it than that.  They have visceral reactions to what is being proposed. It doesn’t even matter if they’ve understood the proposed changes—arguably, almost none of us understand any of the plan, we just decide by who is proposing it whether we think it's good or bad—but it’s clear that they are driven to respond, in a way they would not be on other subjects.

There have always been doctors, and they have always supplied a service to meet a demand. This is true, even though until about 1910 or so, physicians killed more people than they helped. Before the mid-19^th century, all they could really do was bleed you, blister you, make you throw up, or give you diarrhea. And, aside from bone-setting and a few crude surgical techniques that probably still killed you as often as they helped you, that was about all they could do for you. None of those "treatments" did a damn bit of good, but they often weakened you or dehydrated you, so you died sooner. And when physicians put you into a hospital, all that did was put you in close contact with people who had diseases even worse than yours.

But people kept paying for medical services, and the wealthy paid more and got physicians with elaborate degrees from Oxford or Paris who knew nothing whatsoever about the human body. So the wealthy died more often from overexcited physician interventions.  And, what’s more, every physician was positive that what he was doing was beneficial.  People wanted to be treated, so physicians existed, were trained, had certifications, etc., showing that economics is often the achievement of irrational goals through rational means.

So there is an emotional substructure to these debates that needs to be recognized. You can talk comparative effectiveness, you can talk procedures that have no positive outcome, you can talk overused imaging equipment...all of it essential to maneuver to improvements in healthcare provision, but it won’t go anywhere unless you realize that healthcare is still, at its root, magic, and doctors are magicians. It just so happens that their magic both works (a topic for another post) and costs an incredible amount of money.

A short guide to healthcare finance

There is a lot of activity and discussion around reforming healthcare finance right now.  It's clear that the members of Congress and the Executive Branch are the wrong people to come up with a good long-term solution.

But solution to what?  What's the story here?

A few things to think about:

People consume healthcare services.  In any given year, some people consume a lot, some people consume less, some consume little or none.

There are many arguments over whether people use too many services, the wrong kind, etc.  I presume there are process improvements possible here and there, maybe even significant ones, but the distribution of use is pretty much dependent on whether people are sick or injured, and actually need them.

Reform question: are services distributed differently than health distribution would lead us to expect?

The amount of services consumed in aggregate will increase over time.

More and better services are constantly available, and as our aggregate wealth increases, we will want to get more of them.  This will happen even if the average person doesn't get less healthy.

Reform question:  are more services provided and consumed that these conditions would lead us to expect?

These healthcare services cost something.  Salaries, supplies, and facilities are paid for.

We may, again, argue about whether this or that costs too much (it's rare that someone says something like "OTC anti-allergy medications are absurdly cheap given their effectiveness"), but as the amount of services consumed goes up, so will costs.  People who provide healthcare tend to be high-value employees who provide one-on-one services and thus are paid a lot;  the devices, drugs and procedures used are precise, highly regulated, have to pay off a lot of research, need to be sterile, etc. etc., so healthcare is more expensive than other industries where the risk of killing or damaging you isn't so high.

Reform question:  are unit costs significantly higher than these conditions would lead us to expect?

Some people can afford many healthcare services, some a few, some almost none

So poor people whose conditions require a large amount of healthcare services either go without, or we take money from those who can afford more and buy healthcare services for them with it.  If healthcare services are cheap relative to average incomes, fewer people need assistance.  If they are expensive relative to average incomes, more people need assistance.  If too many people need assistance then there is no one to contribute money for others.  Note that the distribution of "can't afford" and the distribution of "use a lot of services" don't correlate particularly.

Reform question: how many people genuinely can't afford the healthcare services their health conditions require?  How many more could afford them only with some financial pain?  How much financial pain is "too much"?

So now what?

You can push down on aggregate healthcare service consumption or on costs per unit consumed, once you know that one or the other is "too high".  You can distribute money to enable necessary consumption among those who cannot otherwise afford it.  Pushing down on aggregate costs would decrease the amount of money that needs to be distributed, but not eliminate the need for distribution.

And that's about it.  Everything else is detail.  But no one wants to be clear about any of this, so I really don't know what any of us should do.

Healthcare and the writer

One negative feature of our current system of healthcare finance is the fact that health insurance is tied to employment.  This makes changing jobs more difficult and self-employment more expensive, since employer-provided healthcare benefits are excluded from tax while self-employed people can only deduct it from their taxes, a deduction that might be worth very little.

I have other reasons for not trying self-employment, but this is a significant barrier.  The reason it's hidden away there in that employer contribution is so that we don't know how much it actually costs, and, as I pointed out yesterday, even the obvious part costs a lot.  The self-employed see more of the real cost.

That's not to say that the cost is obviously too high.  "More than I wish I had to pay" is not necessarily too high.  But I wish we could all clearly see the cost, and that the cost didn't depend on whether you had a large or small employer, or whether you decided to provide your services on a contract basis rather than as part of firm.  None of those things have anything to do with the actual provision of healthcare services.

Hearing aids: one of those things people wish someone else would pay for

Living in a state with incredibly high medical costs (Massachusetts), having worked in several healthcare businesses (including a Medicaid health plan), I'm always reading and thinking about our "healthcare bubble", and trying to understand what the problems actually are, and what a long-term solution would look like (hint:  nothing Congress will come up with).

This article about hearing aids caught my eye.  It's mostly about how to choose them, etc., but it starts by pointing out that they are expensive ($2000 - $5000), and people are surprised that insurance doesn't pay for them.

If I needed a hearing aid, I'd prefer that someone else pay for it too.  Heck, if I had a roof leak or my refrigerator stopped working, I'd prefer that someone else pay for those.  For these examples I tried to pick "things that have gone wrong that really need to be fixed", and in two areas that for most of us affect our daily life much more the healthcare does:  food and housing.

It's not like there's some moral hazard involved in having insurance pay for hearing aids.  It's unlikely that anyone would be more likely to expose themselves to situations involving hearing loss because they know that somewhere down the line they'll be able to get a cheap hearing aid--though moral hazard and risk homeostasis can be slippery things, and are certainly not well understood yet.

It's just that I think that there are medical expenses, with real quality of life consequences, that we should pay for ourselves, unless we are genuinely financially unable to do it.

We don't want to hear that.  I don't want to hear it.  I'm forced to pay a lot for health insurance (many months it is my fourth largest expense, after food, mortgage, and taxes).  Once I've done that, I want it to pay for medical products and services that I need.  If my doctor will lobby for me to get it covered, I'll be fine with that.

Then I'll be irritated that my health insurance consumes an even greater part of my income.

The Great Carbon Transition

I used the phrase "Great Carbon Transition" in my last post, and then wondered where I had gotten it.  I did a phrase search and found...that it had come from the inside of my own head.  Google found no other uses.

I think this is a great term for what the next fifty years or so are going to involve.  And it's the kind of absurd Capitalized Phrase For A Historical Period that always appears in SF novels set in the far future to describe historical events that occured between that time and the present, which real people so seldom use.

But we are, after all, the future's past, so Great Carbon Transition it is.  Remember, you heard it here first.

Where's a heavy-lift cargo airship when you need one?

This story in the New York Times detailed how hard it is to move gigantic wind turbine parts to their final locations.  Either truck or train, the limits of how big they can be and still go under bridges and make road turns are being reached.

Where are the graceful lighter-than-air cargo vessels we were so long ago promised?

Like many science fiction writers, I cherish a sentimental attachment to those great whales of the sky, though in my more sober moments (I do have them) I realize that it was a historical accident that allowed them to flourish at all, and that they don't really make any sense.

Except for lifting and transporting large, cumbersome, heavy objects to remote or, it seems, heavily populated areas.  This seems like a perfect use.

I doubt anyone is going to finance the development of the things just for this purpose.  The various efforts of recent years all finally ran out of money and closed up shop.

Since I think wind turbines are a bit of a historical accident themselves, gadgets from the early phases of the Great Carbon Transition, the fad for them might not last long enough for them to provide a good motivation.

Of course, then the airship can be used to take away the gigantic parts once the turbines have become white elephants and need to be dismantled.

Sleep training

Yesterday, in his New York Times column, David Pogue reviewed the Zeo, a sleep analysis tool (you may need to register to read it).  You strap on a headband and it can show you your waking, REM, light sleep, and deep sleep periods.  If you have trouble sleeping this thing will tell you that, yep, you have trouble sleeping.

But we're all after efficiency.  A great feature of the thing is that you can set your alarm to wake you when you are in light sleep, so you don't wake up groggy.  It won't wake you later than a predetermined time.  And, over time, I suppose you could start seeing whether your sleep cycles are 90 minutes or something else, so you can plan to go to sleep so a light sleep period coincides with when you should wake up.  And you can see how that works for naps.

I've always wanted a nap alarm that I could set, not for 20 minutes, but to go off after I had been asleep 20 minutes, which is quite different.

The thing costs $400, so I'm not getting one any time soon.  But there will be competitors and cheaper, more effective versions coming along.  Then I can finally get into sleep training.