Archive for the 'Health' Category

Ideas About Ideas

Published by Jarred on December 20, 2009 in Advertising, Books, Business, Computing, Consumer Behavior, Copyright, Culture, Design, Environment, Google, Health, Legal Issues, Lifestyle, News, Politics, Privacy, Science, Social Networks, Space and Web 2.0. View Comments

The New York Times recently issued the ninth edition of its annual Ideas feature for its magazine.  I’ve read through most of the entries and found several really fascinating; others were also interesting but neglected to surface other important angles.  I thought I’d use this space to highlight both, seeing as Tropophilia is all about ideas that may bring about change in our world.

The Advertisement That Watches You - I’ll leave the details of this particular implementation to the article, but the essence of the technology is a billboard with a built-in camera that, through facial recognition technology, can tell when anyone within a certain radius of the advertisement is looking at it.  This one, interestingly, changes to its main message when people are not looking.  You can imagine, however, how this technology might develop over time: electronic ads could be powered off until it new there were passersby actually looking at the space.  Facial recognition could also be used to power an impressions-based ads payment system, much like exists on the web: advertisers would only have to pay per “view” or elapsed “eyeball time” on the ad.  Of course, such commercial use of facial recognition technology also raises enormous privacy concerns (How long are camera images kept?  Would the technology eventually be used to identify people and serve ads based on their personal interests, or  even the clothes they were wearing or the book they are reading at that moment?).  It will be interesting to see how this area grows, if at all.

Bicycle Highways - I thought this was a cool idea, but I’m not sure I see it gaining widespread adoption outside of cities that have significant numbers of bike commuters.  What I think is really clever is the possibilities raised with GPS and RFID technology that would allow for bikers to create on-the-fly pelotons, which in turn would be able to gain privileges for traffic lights and such: a mix between EZPass and carpool lanes.  Throw in a custom social network for the city so you could plan your departures in order to meet up with a regular riding group, and this could be really great for those cities with big biking cultures.

The Counterfeit Self - I think this research has implications for the Web.  There has long been a debate about authentication online: when writing a blog, posting comments, or joining a social network, is it “better” for users to have the ability to remain anonymous or pseudonymous, or should they be encouraged or required to use their real identity (obfuscated to whatever degree they prefer).  Many argue that encouraging or requiring authentication would, for example, solve the problem evidence by the (often hateful and troll-like) comments of any given YouTube video.  Opponents summon the right to free dom of speech as a defense of anonymous use of the web.  Some governments, like South Korea, actually require what is referred to as “real name verification” for websites in their jurisdiction that surpass a certain threshold of users; users are required to authenticate against a national registry before they can interact with the site.  Considering the idea of how behavior is influenced by fake identity could offer a fresh perspective in this debate.

Good Enough is the New Great - One aspect that this idea doesn’t cover (and I can’t remember anymore if the Wired article does or not) is information.  Just as consumers are turning to cheap cameras, low-fi music files, and YouTube videos, they are also turning to Twitter for their information fixes.  Many argue that in moving from mainstream to social media as our main source of information, we make a similar sacrifice of quality for convenience.  I think that may be true in the short-term, but I’m hopeful that just like companies are starting to fit better and better sensors into those tiny Flip cameras, so will Twitter eventually recapture some of the fidelity of the “news” that it carries.

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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?  

The Pace of Human Progress

Published by Jarred on June 4, 2008 in Computing, Health, Humanism and Science. View Comments

Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity

Man… that would be a great name for a band, wouldn’t it? Alas, Mr. Kurzweil – to my knowledge – is not sick nasty at the guitar. He did, however, invent “the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.”

According to his biography, Ray Kurzweil “has been described as ‘the restless genius’ by the Wall Street Journal, and ‘the ultimate thinking machine’ by Forbes.” He’s part entrepreneur, part inventor, part futurist. He’s been receiving lots of press recently. Why? Because Mr. Kurzweil believes in the coming of the Singularity.

What is the Singularity? According to Kurzweil’s website, it’s:

an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. In this new world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. We will be able to assume different bodies and take on a range of personae at will. In practical terms, human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped; world hunger and poverty will be solved. Nanotechnology will make it possible to create virtually any physical product using inexpensive information processes and will ultimately turn even death into a soluble problem.

Before you dismiss Kurzweil as having watched The Matrix a few too many times, you should understand the logic behind his seemingly preposterous claims.

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Monday Links: May 19th, 2008

Published by Taylor on May 19, 2008 in Business, Energy, Environment, Health and Monday Links. View Comments

As always, your Monday Links (I’m off to a slow start this morning, so they’re a little late):

  • This article from the NY Times Technology section describes a really neat idea for an online marketplace that links inventors with corporate purchasers more efficiently:

The marketplace is an online registry that will have descriptions of inventions for browsing by prospective buyers. But it will have an unusual twist: before inventions are listed, the registry will provide in-person or online workshops to help inventors recast their often technical prose in jargon-free descriptions for the business and industrial customers that are expected to shop at the site

[...] Company software will [also] evaluate the invention’s probable cost to the buyer before the first sale as well as other business angles, and add the information to the capsule description.

How, [the article's author] asks, is this any different than steroids? Well, assuming we had the long term data, and could prove the safety conclusively, you could also ask how it’s different than college, or preschool. It’s something you pay for that makes you smarter and more cognitively efficient. If I felt sure that it would never harm me, I’d probably pop them like candy. Enough people doing that, of course, and you create a collective action problem in which everyone needs to use them to keep up. It could be a problem. Or, in the future, it could just be the norm.

Though the airships are small by blimp standards, only 20 m long, they can house about 120 square meters of CIGS solar cells, producing up to 125 kWh / day. That’s enough energy to power 25 shallow water pumps, providing clean water for up to 12,000 people. Or enough to power 400 medical refrigerators.

Habitual Thinking

Published by Jarred on May 11, 2008 in Business, Culture, Education, Health and Science. View Comments

I read an interesting article in The New York Times (our favorite source) about habits and their influence on human creativity and innovation. Janet Rae-Dupree writes that

brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks. Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

Rae-Dupree goes on to note that, in addition to today’s much emphasized powers of analysis and procedure, we’re born with equally strong innovative and collaborative problem-solving capabilities. Those two approaches, however, are known to go under biological and cultural attack throughout our younger years. Biologically, at puberty the brain often “throws out” innovation and collaboration because they go underutilized and are deemed less cognitively “valuable.” Culturally, the emphasis these days on analytic and systematic learning (especially in the face of standardized testing) fosters less development of the more creative mental faculties.

It turns out that “stretching” our minds into new ways of thinking can be beneficial in multiple arenas. Physically, learning to think in new ways keeps our brains and even our bodies healthy. One interviewee in the article notes that “researchers who asked folks to do something different every day — listen to a new radio station, for instance — found that they lost and kept off weight. No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general”.

Encouraging unique thought processes can also benefit businesses, non-profits, and government. More and more, I hear about job interviews where people are asked something like: “How many golf balls does it take to fill up a school bus.” They don’t know the answer, and don’t really care what number the candidate comes up with. Smart companies are investigating and investing not in what potential hires know, but in how they think.

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