Archive for 2008

France is healthcare leader, US comes dead last: study

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Profit verses what’s best for the people. Here’s a classic story that reveals the inevitable outcome when the pursuit of profit runs rough shod over all other considerations.

The richest country in the world with the worse health care of all the western industrialized nations.

All of this began, I think, when corporate America began to take over the medical world in the U.S. Corporate profit driven medicine – now there’s an oxymoron.

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WASHINGTON (AFP) — France is tops, and the United States dead last, in providing timely and effective healthcare to its citizens, according to a survey Tuesday of preventable deaths in 19 industrialized countries.

The study by the Commonwealth Fund and published in the January/February issue of the journal Health Affairs measured developed countries’ effectiveness at providing timely and effective healthcare.

The study, entitled “Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis,” was written by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It looked at death rates in subjects younger than 75 that could have been prevented by timely and effective medical care.

The researchers found that while most countries surveyed saw preventable deaths decline by an average of 16 percent, the United States saw only a four percent dip.

The non-profit Commonwealth Fund, which financed the study, expressed alarm at the findings.

“It is startling to see the US falling even farther behind on this crucial indicator of health system performance,” said Commonwealth Fund Senior Vice President Cathy Schoen, who noted that “other countries are reducing these preventable deaths more rapidly, yet spending far less.”

The 19 countries, in order of best to worst, were: France, Japan, Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

More…

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A hat tip to cryptogon for this story

About censorship and Al Jazeera in the U.S.

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Al Jazeera LogoIt would be hard to be unaware of Al Jazeera in the U.S. It is, of course, the Middle East news agency. I’d always thought that Al Jazeera was focused on delivering news about the Middle-East to the Middle-East and that the only time their reports surfaced on U.S. media was when major things were going down in their area and they had the best news feeds.

So, imagine my surprise when I found myself looking at Al Jazeera here in New Zealand on cable. And even more surprising is how utterly professional they are. Their news shows rival anything that CNN, the BBC or the German DW networks are putting out. When I first saw their stuff some years ago, they seemed small and provincial. They are anything but that now.

So, where are they on the U.S. networks? The answer -is that they simply are not there. They’ve been banned from the U.S. networks by the government.

If they were simply a transparent propaganda mouthpiece for radical Islamic viewpoints, then I could understand, perhaps, this censorship. Though, in general, I disagree with censorship – if folks don’t like something, they are free to tune away from it.

But, the Al Jazeera network isn’t a lot of grainy video of mullahs extolling young Islamic men to become martyrs for Islam and Allah. It is, instead, just another international news network – one that happens to originate in the Middle-East.

We in the U.S. don’t agree all the time with the Germans or the Chinese or even the British, but all of their networks can been found among our cable channels if one goes looking. Frankly, I don’ get the logic for this suppression.

And, the worst of it is, I didn’t even know it was suppressed until I came here and saw it on New Zealand’s cable.

I am impressed with the courage of the New Zealand governmental authorities. They seem so sure that allowing Al Jazeera to be broadcast over the New Zealand airwaves isn’t going to cause the corruption and destruction of New Zealand culture. I wonder what they know that the U.S. folks don’t?

If you want to see Al Jazeera, there are ways to watch it from the U.S. via the Internet. Here’s a link:

Take a look and see if you understand why it’s been banned in the U.S.

Can You Count on Voting Machines?

Monday, January 7th, 2008
“One might expect computer scientists to be fans of computer-based vote-counting devices, but it turns out that the more you know about computers, the more likely you are to be terrified that they’re running elections.”

A excellent and in-depth article from the NY Times about electronic voting machines. I certainly agree with the quote from the article, above. After spending an entire career deep inside computers, I can tell you that the potential for abuse is huge and the public’s trust for the technology is entirely misplaced. If someone knows computers and wants to make them do nefarious things, there is very little anyone can do to stop them.

When you combine the fact that the inner workings of computers are a great mystery to most folks and the fact that huge stakes are in play for those who win elections, you have a beautiful combination of motivation and opportunity here.

I’ve been focused on the issue of whether or not electronic voting machines are a good idea for some time now. And my vote has been a resounding ‘No!‘ from the beginning.

The problem isn’t computers per se, however. It is, rather, how computers are being used for voting in the U.S. that I object to.

Companies are producing electronic voting machines which contain proprietary (that means privately owned intellectual property that you and I have no right to see and inspect) hardware and software and then asking us to ‘trust’ that their products will work fairly and impartially. No way should anyone trust such an approach. And, I believe, the only reason we do is because people are so deeply unknowledgeable and naive about computers.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The Australians have taken a much better approach. One that ensures that the machines do what they are designed to do and that every bit of their internal workings are an open book for anyone who wants to verify their correctness.

You have to ask yourself why an approach like this isn’t being supported here in the U.S? I have – and I don’t think the answer is pretty.

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Jane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the secure room filled with voting machines. It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for 22 hours straight. “I guess we’ve seen how technology can affect an election,” she said. The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were causing trouble again.

For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. About 200,000 voters had trooped out on the first Tuesday in November for the lightly attended local elections, tapping their choices onto the county’s 5,729 touch-screen voting machines. The elections staff had collected electronic copies of the votes on memory cards and taken them to the main office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, glass-encased room fed them into the “GEMS server,” a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer that tallies the votes.

Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes. Cuyahoga County technicians clustered around the computer, debating what to do. A young, business-suited employee from Diebold — the company that makes the voting machines used in Cuyahoga — peered into the screen and pecked at the keyboard. No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working — until an hour later, when it crashed a second time. Again, they rebooted. By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn’t been solved.

Worse was yet to come. When the votes were finally tallied the next day, 10 races were so close that they needed to be recounted. But when Platten went to retrieve paper copies of each vote — generated by the Diebold machines as they worked — she discovered that so many printers had jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved in the recounted races lacked paper copies of some of the votes. They weren’t lost, technically speaking; Platten could hit “print” and a machine would generate a replacement copy. But she had no way of proving that these replacements were, indeed, what the voters had voted. She could only hope the machines had worked correctly.

More…

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– Thx to John P for research

– This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, recently, a friend of mine suggested the website bugmenot.com :arrow: as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

080108 – Tuesday – Back from my trip

Monday, January 7th, 2008

Queen Charlotte Sound near Havelock

I’m back from my jaunt up to Golden Bay and back. I’m preparing a post on the trip with lots of photos but it’ll be another day or so before I publish it.

Until then, here’s my routing for those of you who know New Zealand’s South Island.

Northbound (January 2nd):

Christchurch > Waipara > Springs Junction > Murchison > Motupiko > Motueka > Takaka.

Eastbound (January 5th):

Takaka > Motueka > Richmond > Nelson > Havelock > Picton.

Southbound (January 6th):

Picton > Blenheim > Kaikoura > Cheviot > Gore Bay > Waipara > Christchurch.

– more to come on this trip soon.