Monthly Archive for December, 2008

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Everybody’s Working for the…Health Insurance

Published by Taylor on December 5, 2008 in Health. View Comments

There are plenty of compelling anecdotes that make a UK-style national health plan sound like an enormous improvement over our current system. Just as there are many valid criticisms of the British and Canadian systems. I’ll happily outsource my health wonkery to Ezra Klein and others who are far more intelligent on the subject than I am. But reading this “dissent of the day” on Andrew Sullivan’s blog (an ex-pat Brit who is a harsh critic of the UK’s system), I’m struck by how potentially stifling it is that our health insurance is so often and so precariously linked to our employer (emphasis mine):

I have lived and worked in the US and the UK. In the summer of 1999, I disappointed a work client by deciding against a planned move from the UK to the US. I had my visa in place, I had scoped out housing and childcare. In the end, I didn’t think it was worth the trouble of moving my family, with a young son and a baby daughter, thousands of miles away from friends and relatives.

A few months later, my 4-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia.

Had I moved to Chicago, the three-year chemotherapy nightmare would have been accentuated by constant worries about insurance. My job was a good one; I would have been covered as long as I kept working. But the company was an IT startup, and in fact did downsize after a while. Like to bet your kid’s health on staying in work? Staying in the UK I found other clients, cut my hours right back, and intermittently stopped working altogether, to care for my family. He got three years of world-class treatment, without any question of payment. Many years later, he continues to be very well, and I continue to believe that we dodged a bullet by staying in the UK.

I think Jarred and I (like many of you reading this blog) believe fervently in the power of start-up businesses and ventures to creatively tackle problems and introduce exciting innovations into our culture. But the possibility of starting an enterprise from scratch–or joining a budding start-up–is severely limited for individuals who are responsible for providing health insurance for children or spouses, not to mention folks who depend on health insurance to cover consistent medical services or who develop a condition that could make it hard to switch insurers.

This is a health care issue to be sure. But it’s also an issue of economic health: the more barriers we place in front of bright people with creative ideas, the less likely it becomes that any of us will benefit from that great idea. How many brilliant engineers, scientists, thinkers, designers, etc face the same dilemma captured by the quoted passage above and forego riskier (and potentially more important) endeavors in favor of steady employment with the guarantee of stable health insurance?

A Sign of the Times: “Extra” Lets You Really Read All About It

Published by Jarred on December 5, 2008 in Business, News and Web 2.0. View Comments

Too much wordplay in that title? Nah.

Times Extra associates articles from across the web with NYT headlines

In an interesting move, the New York Times has started to beta test a feature called “Times Extra” on their homepage (to try it out, click “Try Our Extra Homepage” to the right of the search box). Once enabled, each headline will be accompanied by a box full of links to related stories across the web — be they from blogs or even rival newspapers.

The service is powered by Blogrunner, a service bought by the NYT sometime in 2005 (I briefly gushed about it in the opening paragraph of this post on the social graph back in January, but haven’t used it regularly since). Blogrunner runs as its own service at blogrunner.com, but it has also been providing links on the NYT tech page since November 2007. It uses a mix of computer algorithms and human editorial oversight to match and organize articles based on topic and theme. For example, check out this clustering based on a NYT article about the Big Three, or this one based on the Official Google Blog post announcing the general availability of Friend Connect.

The step from geeky sidebar widget to a fairly prominent beta test on the latest and most important headlines is large and bold — and the management is fully aware of it, too.

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Here’s What I’m Thinking About

Published by Taylor on December 5, 2008 in Business, Consumer Behavior, Environment, Philanthropy, Politics and Social Entrepreneurship. View Comments

Taking a page out of Ezra Klein’s playbook (and continuing our trend here of shamelessly copying features from other blogs…ahem), here are a few things I keep meaning to write about:

The NC legislature commissioned a study report by a few of the best environmental and public policy academics in the state to look at water quantity and allocation. The report, currently in draft form (PDF), is very well done and a nice synthesis of policy and science. Water quantity is not the sexiest issue, but after recent severe droughts I think more folks are starting to give water policy the attention it deserves.
The Acumen Fund invests in social enterprises around the world–businesses, generally operating at a below-market return for investors, that have as central tenets to their mission alleviating a social problem or improving lives of vulnerable populations. A recent think piece by Acumen’s Chief Investment Officer, Simple Measures for Social Enterprise (PDF), is a good reminder for social investors and philanthropists alike that sometimes just capturing consistent and reliable data can lead to greater improvements than the thorough impact assessments we all think of as ideal.
I’ve been meaning to write about Nate Silver (creator and whiz behind fivethirtyeight.com) for a while. Even though the election is long past, this NY Times profile is worth a look.
Speaking of the NY Times, this piece from the Magazine about the Netflix recommendation engine and the “Napoleon Dynamite problem” is fascinating (apparently Napoleon Dynamite is a love/hate kind of movie, and it’s nearly impossible to consistently predict whether someone will like it based on their other movie preferences).

Carbon Neutral for a Day

Published by Taylor on December 4, 2008 in Energy and Environment. View Comments

You may remember that way back when Tropophilia received free carbon offsets from Move Neutral, a carbon-offset company based out of Austin, TX. We’ve also featured a badge in our sidebar as part of the 350 Challenge from Brighter Planet in Middlebury, VT. Brighter Planet is feeling festive and is offering the gift of free carbon offsets. Just follow the link below to pass along some carbon credits to your eco-geek friends. ‘Tis the season to be neutral:

White Spaces and the Road to Ambient Intelligence

Published by Jarred on December 4, 2008 in Computing, Google and Privacy. View Comments

A reminder: the views expressed on Tropophilia are those of the authors, and not necessarily those of their employers.

Though outdone by a separate (but welcomed) victory on November 4th, Google and its allies scored a few political points of their own on that fateful day last month. In a 5-0 decision, the Federal Communications Commission voted to open up “white spaces” for general public use.

Non-techies, stick with me. I promise this will be cool to you too.

First, what exactly are white spaces? As you may recall from high school physics, radio waves exist on a spectrum of frequencies. This spectrum is divided up for different uses: FM radio, television, military, airplane communication, satellite communication, cell phones, etc.

White space is the “snow” between the channels on your TV when you try to use the antenna. They are unused frequencies in the spectrum that, as television broadcasters move away from airwave transmission to cable distribution, simply exist in the invisible ether serving no purpose. And as Google and other tech companies have quickly figured out, these unused frequencies could be used to build the next generation of wireless data networks… as long as the regulatory bodies say its OK. And last month, that’s exactly what they did.

OK, thanks for sticking with me, non-geeks. I promised you relevance, so here it is. From the section on the Free the Airwaves campaign site called “What are the benefits?”, here are three examples of how white spaces could be used:

Internet Access: TV white spaces offer nothing less than the possibility of affordable, ubiquitous, high-speed Internet connections to all Americans, anywhere, at any time.

Education: White spaces could provide America’s schools with affordable, mobile, high-speed Internet access. Teachers and students could be able to communicate and compete more effectively with their peers around the world. Videoconferencing could help enable distance learning for students in remote locations.

Public Safety: Over the past several years, it has become clear that giving public safety agencies reliable, interoperable voice and data communications is a matter of national security. Today, though, first responders continue to suffer significant interoperability problems. Unused TV spectrum represents a new national technology platform that could improve communications for America’s police officers and firefighters. In emergencies, devices connected to these important airwaves could ensure reliable communications at emergency sites.

While those are the practical uses, there’s more.

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