Medicaid Stimulus Provides South Dakota over $19M to Promote Electronic Health Records

We're still having trouble persuading Governor Dennis Daugaard to expand Medicaid to help South Dakota's working poor. All that Obamacare money is just too unreliable to dirty South Dakotans' hands.

But Governor Daugaard has had no problem handing out an extra $19,340,218.57 in extra Medicaid money from President Obama to South Dakota hospitals, doctors, and other caregivers. That's the amount of federal money, as of August 7, that the South Dakota Department of Social Services disbursed through its Electronic Health Record Incentive Payment Program. This money comes to South Dakota courtesy of the HITECH Act of 2009, which Congress folded into the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—yes, our friend the 2009 stimulus.

So far 29 of South Dakota's 50 hospitals have received EHR incentive payments as a reward for adopting, implementing, and/or upgrading computerized record-keeping methods. Such rewards are money well-spent: electronic health records are good medicine, as demonstrated by the pioneering Veterans Health Administration.

The spreadsheet I received yesterday from DSS also shows 216 individual health care providers who have received EHR incentive payments. They include:

• 76 physicians
• 68 pediatricians
• 37 nurse practitioners
• 5 certified nurse midwives
• 7 dentists
• 24 physician assistants.

The first payments DSS lists went out on March 23, 2012, to the Mobridge hospital ($646,400), two physicians, ten pediatricians, and two NPs. A steady stream of disbursements has followed, including, on May 2, 2013, a payment of $21,250 to Annette Marie Bosworth.

Yes, the Annette Marie Bosworth who, one month and one day later, let leak her first public mention of her intent to run for Senate as a Republican determined to fight government involvement in health care.

Republicans from Governor Daugaard to candidate Bosworth understand the GOP drill: fulminate against federal money, but take all the money Uncle Sam offers.

LAIC Buys into Main Street Program; Madison the New India?

Two noteworthy economic developments are afoot in Madison. First, I hear from my local correspondents that Lake Area Improvement Corporation director Julie Gross has officially endorsed—i.e., spent money!—on making Madison part of the Main Street program. The idea of the LAIC doing exactly what I recommend under previous do-nothing CYA director Dwaine Chapel. But Gross has bought into Main Street and convened a downtown development committee that is open to the public. I hope this isn't a sign that we are going to freeze over hard this winter.

The LAIC also gets to toot its horn about Dakota State University's new partnership with Advantenon, the evil overlord of Gamma Regulus whose robot hordes are invading this sector of the galaxy—oh, oops! Sorry, the cool alien name threw me.

Advantenon develops software for mobile devices. They base their business model on employing college students in rural areas to keep costs down—i.e., to pay less wages than they would hiring experienced talent in spendy urban areas. Advantenon discusses this strategy on a page called "Why Rural?"

Advantenon delivers mobile applications more efficiently, with fewer issues than applications outsourced to offshore teams, at costs up to 50% less than traditional on-site development.

By leveraging technically competent resources in lower cost rural communities, project costs are significantly reduced. By combining staff located outside major metropolitan areas with a limited number of onsite resource Advantenon delivers the benefits of rural and onsite flexibility [Advantenon, "Why Rural?" company website, retrieved November 5, 2012]. 

For years, IT companies have been saving money by offshoring labor to India and other lower-wage countries. The labor cost-savings outweigh the disadvantages of language barriers, time-zone separation, and quality control. As wages in India catch up with the West, the cost advantage erodes. South Dakota wages may still carry a premium over India, but they are 29% lower than in Minnesota, Advantenon's home base. Hire college students, and the premium is even less. For their money, Advantenon gets quality work (you DSU kids do have the storied Midwestern work ethic, don't you?) from folks who sprechen sie Englisch, are smack in the middle of most North American customers' time zone range, and are a short domestic flight away from a snap inspection by the boss.

This can be our niche, South Dakota! Get trained, know your tech, and you can be the next Indians. You won't even have to make up a normal sounding name to answer the phone... until the Chinese become our primary customers.

And when you get done with work, you'll be able to walk downtown and enjoy a wonderfully revitalized commercial and cultural core district.

Rolling Homework: Web Buses!

I don't know if this project is a money-saver or not. But for all those kids around South Dakota with long rides to and from school, maybe we can maximize our educational impact by transforming all of our buses into rolling Web classrooms:

One school bus in Arkansas’ Pope County has been transformed into a mobile classroom equipped with computer screens mounted to the ceiling, earphone jacks, wireless Internet access and a separate scanning device to record bus activity.

The five 19-inch customized computer screens stream math and science content from PBS, NASA, the Discovery Channel, CBS News and the Smithsonian Institution for students to watch on their hour-long rides to and from school. The screens also include video-conferencing capabilities [Lauren Katims, "High-Tech School Bus Teachers Students on the Road," Government Technology, 2010.12.14].

I know DSU athletes get to travel on a Web-capable bus. Does the tour bus the MHS boosters bought for our athletes have that capability? Kids could travel to games during the day and still watch class via webcam!

Web buses could have application beyond giving the kids a chance to do homework and web-chat with teachers on the way home. Perhaps we should start up a Web bus service for commuters from Madison to Sioux Falls. Just hook up some satellite wireless and let all the adults enjoy a couple extra hours a day of laptop productivity while the bus driver keeps things between the ditches.

Madville Times Tech Changes -- Suggestions?

In the coming weeks, I plan some significant technological changes on the Madville Times. I'd like your input.

I may be liberal in politics, but I can be darned conservative when it comes to information technology. I'm still using Windows XP. I still set my Start menu to the Classic settings so it looks like the customizations I made on my NEC Ready 120LT when I got it eleven years and two laptops ago.

When it comes to blogging, I've stuck with Blogger for over five years and with the same basic three-column template ("Thisaway Blue" by Dan Rubin with three-column modification by Ashwini Khare, blogger beta templates) for over three years.

I approach I.T. change with trepidation... but I'm ready to do it. Here's what I will change:

1. The Big Change: I'm going to move from Blogger to Wordpress. I still believe Blogger is superior to Wordpress.com for free blogs. However, as I look at Wordpress.org, the paid Wordpress platform, I am finding enough plugins, coding options, and keyboard shortcuts (yes, the ability to use the keyboard and keep my hand off the mouse is that big of a deal to me) to be comfortable with switching. Doing what I want to do with Blogger would also cost me a couple bucks more a month... and I'm darned cheap.
   
2. Layout: I will keep the three-column layout, but I am going to move the main content to the left and put both sidebars on the right (see drawing). That layout lets the main content load before all the links and graphics in the sidebars. That allows you and search engines alike to get the main info first. If you're on a skinny screen, you're less likely to have to scroll to read the main content.
3. More Layout: The template will change. Fonts, colors, and sizes may switch here and there.

Now let me be clear about what I'm not changing:

1. I'm still writing. My blog, my voice, my responsibility.
   
2. I'm deleting nothing. You'll still be able to read over 4400 posts and over 18,000 comments right here. I'm also attempting to import the full content of the Madville Times into the new platform.
3. I will still include South Dakota blogrolls and RSS feeds in the sidebars, as well as recent comment feeds, graphics, ads, the tip jar... probably more stuff than a good Web designer would advise. But I think of my sidebars as bookshelves, a South Dakota library for anyone interested. Maybe I'll clear some clutter by creating separate pages, but I still want to feature as much of the South Dakota blogosphere on the front page as I can.
   

Now I recognize that changing the format of the blog can make folks like grudznick really cranky. I thus welcome your suggestions. What would you like to see me do? Design preferences, widgets you find useful on other blogs, things you want me to keep, things you'd like me to do more or less of (photos? videos? on-site reporting? weather?)... I'll listen to pretty much any suggestion short of "STFU". If I like your ideas, I'll add them to the blog-migration to-do list.

Design, content, you name it—the comment section is open for your thoughts. Or you can send me a private note. Fire away... and stay tuned!

Bloggers Killing Trees? Dutch Study Says Wi-Fi Harms Plants

Here's something to drive a stake through a green blogger's heart: researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands have found that wireless Internet signals may harm plants:

The study exposed 20 ash trees to various radiation sources for a period of three months. Trees placed closest to the Wi-Fi radio demonstrated a "lead-like shine" on their leaves that was caused by the dying of the upper and lower epidermis of the leaves. This would eventually result in the death of parts of the leaves. The study also found that Wi-Fi radiation could inhibit the growth of corn cobs [René Schoemaker, "Wi-Fi Makes Trees Sick, Study Says," PC World, 2010.11.19].

Corn cobs?! Could we bloggers be reducing crop yields? Oh no!

But hold the iPhone: the media is headlining these results a little more confidently than are the Dutch researchers. Lead researcher Dr. Andre van Lammeren says the results are preliminary:

I think it's too early for alarm about this. The study that we have completed was a pilot study over three to four months, and we want to continue work on the issue now with more controls [Dr. Andre van Lammeren, in Greg Wiser, "Wireless Internet Hubs May Damage Trees, Study Finds," Deutsche Welle, 2010.11.26].

The research summary notes that the leaves manifesting the apparent damage sat 50 cm away from the Wi-Fi source for a few months. So even if this study demonstrates actual harm, it just says don't set your houseplant on the same table as your router.

Deutsche Welle also reports contradictory prior research from a Swiss forestry agency that found wireless Internet signals causing harm to spruce and beech trees only when researchers cranked up the wattage past elgal levels... and even then the harm came from thermal effects, not the signal itself.

Also not addressed in the Dutch research: the comparative harm to trees if we converted all our e-mails and blog posts and research reports back to paper.

VoteEasy App Says Herseth Sandlin and Noem Not So Different

Speaking of Project Vote Smart, my neighbor and State Rep. Gerry Lange just pointed me toward a cool little candidate comparison app at VoteSmart.org. VoteEasy lets you indicate your position on a range of issues (abortion, Afghanistan, crime, economy...) as well as the relative importance of those issues to you. VoteEasy then compares your positions with your Congressional candidates' positions.

The Project Vote Smart folks say they spent thousands of hours punching votes, public statements, and other candidate info into their database. All that data gets translated into a nice, simple graphic: as you enter positions, little yard signs with each candidate's face move toward you or away from you. They also include little percentages showing how similar each candidate is to you.

My disheartening results:
Politically, none of South Dakota's Congressional candidates are like me. Democrat Stephanie Herseth Sandlin is closest to my politics, and she's only 43% similar. Republican Kristi Noem is just five percentage points back at 38%. Independent B. Thomas Marking scores 18% on my scorecard; Republican Senator John Thune scores 10%.

So if I take VoteEasy's analysis at face value, I'll only be a little more frustrated with Kristi Noem than I will be with Stephanie Herseth Sandlin. Teabagger vs. BlueDogger—is there really that little difference?

Fortunately I can question that analysis. Just twelve issues, each represented by a single question, may not accurately capture the full breadth of one's political philosophy. The twelve questions proposed happened to address some key issues—public option health insurance, gun rights, definition of marriage—on which SHS and I disagree. The environment question asks only about climate change and ignores a host other issues like pollution, erosion, and wilderness preservation (although SHS still hasn't spoken up in favor of the Tony Dean Cheyenne River Conservation grassland wilderness... I'm waiting!). SHS and I could probably find a number of other specific policy issues—like, say, the Tribal Law and Order Act—that would increase our similarity rating.

Still, I leave for your enjoyment the question of what it means that Herseth Sandlin and Noem seem more similar to each other than to the Madville Times.

But enough about me: click on each yard sign, and wow! you get all sorts of tasty information, like SHS's 71% party loyalty rating on 31 key votes. (Senator Thune has 100% party loyalty on 45 key votes.) The app lists those key votes, as well as endorsements, campaign finance info... this program is one heck of an electoral dashboard!

Don't take my word for it. Try VoteEasy yourself, see how similar the candidates are to you, and tell me (and the Project Vote Smart folks!) what you think.

Texting Bans Don't Improve Road Safety: Toss or Tighten?

I was wrong... sort of. Last month, I suggested there could be a connection between U.S. House candidate Kristi Noem's habitual lawbreaking and her votes against texting-while-driving bans in the South Dakota Legislature. I stand by my contention there that Noem's disregard for the law may incline her to vote against holding other drivers accountable for dangerous behavior.

However, my original argument did not anticipate this study, which finds texting-while-driving bans do not reduce the number of highway crashes. The study actually finds a slight uptick in insurance claims for vehicle damage in three of the four states surveyed. The researchers speculate that thumb-typing addicts are not only ignoring the bans but using their devices in their laps, out of view of the cops, thus taking their eyes that much more off the road.

So what's the proper response? It's clear that texting behind the wheel is dangerous. Even if we can't stop people from doing it, we should hold accountable the folks we catch doing it. If people respond to a law against bad behavior by behaving worse, do we abolish the law? Do we seek other ways to curtail the bad behavior? Or do we conclude that the law isn't tough enough and stiffen the penalty?
--------------------------
Bonus Highway Mayhem: The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which was involved with the texting-ban study, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last year by crashing a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air into a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu. Good old American steel against modern plastic—that couldn't be pretty, could it? Well, it wasn't... for the dummy driving the tail fins. Both cars were totaled, but the passenger compartment in the Malibu remained almost wholly intact, while the passenger compartment in the Bel Air crumpled into the driver. See video with commentary here.

Social Media Study: South Dakota Good Place for Captions

They could at least have made us legendary.

NetProspex issues a really cool report rating cities, corporations, and industries on their use of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. Given that one report earlier this year found South Dakota had the highest percentage of residents with Facebook accounts of any state in the Union, I was curious how we'd rate in this study of social media in general.

[map of top cities using social media, from 2010 Social Business Report, NetProspex, p. 22; click image to enlarge!]

Alas, we don't. For NetProspex, South Dakota and its High Plains neighbors are just a convenient empty space to squeeze in captions.

But we do learn where the leaders are in tweeting, Facebooking, and other clicky diversions:

Top Industries	Top Companies	Top Cities
Search Engines and Online Portals Advertising and Marketing (e.g.: @Buzz52: Mad Men last night-OMG! C-Hndx ++smokin!) Banking Traditional Media (not the laggards we might think they are!) Toys and games	Google Microsoft Amazon Juniper Networks Adobe (No South Dakota companies make the top 50)	San Francisco, CA San Jose, CA New York, NY Austin, TX Boston, MA

NetProspex takes time to note that the Midwest is the "Least Social Media-Savvy U.S. Region." What? Have they not seen Travis Dahle's Twitter feed? Now there is some legendary tweeting. :-)

HealthPoint Wins More Stimulus Dollars to Support Health Care and Jobs

Here's a half-million in stimulus dollars South Dakota's Republicans did not and just cannot approve of: on top of the $5.7 million Dakota State University received last spring to create the HealthPoint resource center to help South Dakota hospitals implement electronic health records (and create a few jobs right here in Madison), the health info-tech center now snags another $576K from the Recovery Act to provide technical assistance to rural South Dakota hospitals.

As one of my favorite local Republicans observed, a strong local health care industry is an "important asset for any community." Expanding the use of electronic health records will make it easier for rural doctors and nurses to do their jobs, as they will have more resources available. Among other benefits, the tech this grant supports will help a doctor at the clinic in Gettysburg get advice and treatment from a specialist at Avera without making the patient take a day off work to drive to Sioux Falls.

This latest stimulus grant for rural health information technology is an excellent example of government at work in our backyard, providing tangible benefits and improving basic services.

But if you prefer seeing rural communities struggle to recruit doctors and provide health care locally, well, go ahead and keep listening to the Republicans and teabaggers who tell you government can't do anything right.

Groton School Bribes Test Takers with Tech Toys

The KELO headline catches my eye: "Groton Uses Laptops to Improve Test Scores." I've discussed previously the mixed evidence on whether laptop computer improve test scores. Might Groton have evidence that computers are boosting their kids performance?

Not quite. The Groton school district didn't study student computer usage and find that prior use of technology boosted academic performance. No, this story is about good old bribery: study hard, kids, and we'll give you prizes:

To motivate the students to do their best on the Dakota STEP and not just race to get it done, the school announced last year that students could win a lap top if they did well.

"I think it's going to be awesome if I do win it because it'd be so cool if I had a laptop. It'd be awesome," Jennifer Fjelstad said.

Each class has a performance goal on the test. If the class reaches its goal, every student in it gets their name in the drawing. If the students individually achieve a proficient score or higher, they get their name in the drawing again.

"They're all excited and all of them have that chance so what greater way to motivate them," 4th grade teacher Joel Guthmiller said [Erich Schaffhauser, "Groton Uses Laptops to Improve Test Scores," KELOLand.com, 2010.09.09].

What greater way to motivate... oh, I don't know, maybe by creating a learning culture in which excellence is its own reward, where kids learn to do the right thing because it's right, not because they'll get stuff?

Of course, the awards aren't even guaranteed to go to the kids who actually worked hard. Suppose a student who usually slacks off in class was induced by the promise of prizes to bust her chops and boost her score up to "Proficient" instead of her usual "Basic." She still has no more chance of getting a reward than the smarty-pants in the front row who could have aced the tests but goofed off and marked just enough bubbles to get "Proficient" instead of the "Advanced" that reflects his true abilities.

Principal Dalchow at Groton Elementary notes that the prizes aren't just laptops. Students apparently can win either a laptop or an iPod Touch. Believe it or not iPods can be used for educational purposes.

The school and parents spent time holding fundraisers to pay for the prizes, so apparently no tax dollars were used in the bribing of your children. But I would ask Groton parents and teachers to calculate the time and resources expended on this bribe program. Then calculate how well those resources might have been used for other projects that could raise test scores, like, oh, say, actually teaching.

Computers Evaluate South Dakota Student Writing

"So how do I persuade a computer?"

That was the profound question asked by a skinny freshman in my English classroom eight years ago. His query was prompted by a new directive from Pierre: our ninth-graders would take their state-mandated writing test online. Rather than penciling essays for well-indoctrinated moonlighting English teachers to grade, the students would type their essays online, and a computer program would instantly assign numerical scores representing the quality of their writing. That year, the essay type was persuasive, so the implication was that the computer was now able to assess the persuasive quality of student writing.

My student posed a perfectly logical question, and we started looking for a logical answer. The result: this essay in which a little research and reverse-engineering showed what one would expect: the computer had no concept of the actual persuasive quality of writing. The software the state purchased could only turn words to numbers, counting word frequencies and other interesting statistical data about each essay. Students could mash key topic words into Yoda-like sentences of consciously varied length infused with random prepositions, sporadic unusual big words, and occasional semi-colons and dashes, and ace the test.

For example, the above paragraph might score just as highly as the following string:

Computer concept persuasive a writer mash unusual sporadic could really fly. Frequencies word intelligent with the quality of logical freedom only turn my result fruitless; never will show the actual words to a big persuasive computer. Quality arises? Certainly. Again concept consciously varied semi-colons—exception to the rule!—can better convince computer that this essay by macaroni rocks, though state money of software the purchase replace Pogany hilarious would be. Random, infused, yet persuasive writing beats essay actually composing understand the readers will not, but bean-counters of souls of students cog-in-the-machine always souls of students degradation to data cold digital.

The state didn't run the computer-scored essay test again while I was teaching. But the Department of Education has apparently found a better algorithm and are returning to computer-scored essays. Kids, start your writing engines!

As state director of assessment Wade Pogany notes, the computerized writing tests do offer some advantages. Practically speaking, teachers can derive some data about student spelling, grammar, and word choice. Where the human-scored essays have to be read and returned, computers will score these essays immediately, meaning teachers can use the software over and over to get data about their students' writing and help them improve (the fancy term: "formative assessment").

And of course, the testing companies can increase their profit margins by decreasing their labor costs. They pay a panel of writing experts to score maybe several hundred sample essays, then pay a few computer geeks to run statistical analyses of those human scores and the correlated quantitative linguistic features in the essays. After that, the testing companies don't have to pay anyone but tech support and the marketing people who convince state departments of education to spend our tax dollars on this soul-numbing technology.

So remember, kids, you're not writing for humans any more. Your words aren't art. Play the game, pass the test... and heaven help you if you ever need to express your creativity.

Sentences per paragraph: 4.5
Words per sentence: 19.2
Characters per word: 5.4
Passive sentences: 3%
Flesch Reading Ease: 41.6
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 12.0

Big Brother at Your School: Check Tech Policy for UN Rights Violations

As you get ready to send your kids back to school (before Labor Day? far too early! it's still summer!), keep an eye out for those wordy Internet/Technology Use Agreements your kids will surely bring home for you to sign. Those are the hefty policies that basically say that if your kids touch a computer at school, the district owns their soul.

You might want to pay particular attention to the rules your school sets for monitoring your kids' computer usage at school, whether by spyware or even via webcam. As Web scholar Jill Walker Rettberg points out, your school may be violating the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children (to which, yes, the United States is a signatory). Walker Rettberg highlights these two relevant articles of the UNCRC:

13. The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.

16. No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.

Does your child enjoy those freedoms? I know ours does... in home school.
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Update 18:05 CDT: But oh my gosh: the kids are sexting! Aaaaccckk! Lock down all the computers! Confiscate all the cell phones!

Oh well: at least if they sext in a committed relationship, it won't hurt their grades.

Qwest Rant: Stop Ringing My Phone After Midnight

Do any other Qwest customers get the phantom half-ring between midnight and 1 a.m.? We have had this problem here at Lake Herman for several years. Last night, we were up late chatting when our phone gave one crisp half-ring. No further ring, no one on the line, just a single truncated ring, happening on our old phone and new phone alike.

Now the sound of a phone ringing in the middle of the night is fraught with doom. A midnight call means either disaster or prankster; either way, we are conditioned to respond with a surge of fight-or-flee adrenaline.

In our case, we've learned our choice is to fight or flee Qwest. We have called numerous times to ask them to fix the problem. The closest thing to a logical explanation Qwest's operators have offered is that the half-ring is a side effect of the scheduled line tests they automatically conduct in the middle of the night to make sure our phone is working. Evidently the voltage the phone company uses is enough to set off the ringer.

We've asked Qwest to fix it. Their reps have told us they'd fix it. They never have. I've told the Qwest rep they are welcome to not check whether our phone is working, vowing that, really, if our phone isn't working, we'll run over to the neighbors' and let Qwest know we have a problem... in the morning.

We found this noise particularly exasperating when our Divine Miss K was a little baby learning to sleep through the night. Any little midnight noise could rouse her for a gloomy session of crying and rocking. Thank you, Qwest, for testing our parenting ability.

Our little one sleeps more soundly now (last night's thunderstorm didn't even rouse her!). Yet the phantom ring remains a mild annoyance. But even more annoying than the unwanted noise intruding on our house in the middle of the night is the runaround we get from Qwest "customer service" in the morning.

One more time, Qwest: our phone works. You don't need to test it. Hit the little button on your computer that will fix this problem.

As I Said, Wellmark Hiking Rates; Hi-Tech Medicine Not Helping

Two and a half weeks ago, I reported that Wellmark would be raising South Dakotans' health insurance premiums 18.5%. That Sioux Falls paper now confirms: your Wellmark bill goes up July 1. Reporter jon Walker finds out Wellmark wanted a 20.3% hike, but the state Division of Insurance talked them down to 18.5%.

Walker also provides a list of Wellmark's rate increases over the past half decade:

• 2005: 8.6%
• 2006: 12.3%
• 2007: 7.0%
• 2008: 13.2%
• 2009: 14.5%
• 2010: 18.5%

That comes out to almost exactly a doubling of Wellmark health insurance premiums since 2004. And has your paycheck doubled since 2004? Boom: that's a big part of why Americans are wallowing in debt and the recession stings so much.

Walker cites Avera's PR guy Daryl Thuringer saying these health care price hikes (including Avera's own 10% jump) come in part from increased use of CT scans and other great American technology. This comes at the same time as the AP reports all that technology isn't really making us healthier. Americans get more medical radiation (CT scans, etc.) than anyone else. We use fetal monitors that have increase C-sections but have not reduced deaths or cerebral palsy. Suggestions that we pay doctors to conduct end-of-life consultations with patients to help them understand which procedures will actually help them live better and which are a waste of time and money get twisted into angry cries of "death panels!"

I still remember feeling like the doctor might call Social Services on me when I questioned her call for the air ambulance and asked if my newborn daughter would do just as well going to Sioux Falls by ground. But the doctor told me our little one's case wasn't that serious. I declined the chopper, she called the regular ambulance, and I saved the insurance company $5000.

This year's health reform laws are a good start, but if we want cost control, we still need single-payer... and we need some serious, rational discussion about what health care we really need.

Blogger Outage Over! Madville Times Still not Switching to Wordpress

Whew! We're back! Since about 7 p.m. last night, Blogger.com's authoring tools were offline for a number of users. You and I could read this blog, but I couldn't post any new material. Comments were also acting weird as well—my apologies to any of you who lost good zingers! Perhaps it was an angry God, punishing us secular leftists for embracing counterfeit marriage. ;-)

Following some stressed and cranky comments in the Blogger forum and on Twittter from fellow withdrawal-suffering bloggers, I heard some predictable rumblings about switching to Wordpress. A 19-hour outage certainly is enough to drive consideration of substitute products.

In my book, head to head, Blogger still beats Wordpress with an easier, cleaner, and faster publishing interface and much less spam in the comments.

And in five years of using this product, I have never encountered a Blogger outage of comparable magnitude. I'm still not convinced migrating to a full hosting account at MadvilleTimes.com would be any better—how many times has Dakota War College reported in the past five years? With free Blogger.com, users get what they pay for and then some.

Nonetheless, I apologize, dear readers, for any inconvenience you experienced in not being able to enjoy the latest Madville Times news and commentary over breakfast. Big primary tomorrow, so stay tuned!

U.S. 26th Worldwide, South Dakota 15th Nationwide in Download Speed

• Today's global download speed average: 7.71 Mbps.
  
• My breakfast download speed in the heart of America: 0.98 Mbps.

Ookla releases data on broadband speeds worldwide, derived from its SpeedTest.net service. The ten countries with the fastest Internet (speeds in Mbps):

1. South Korea (34.18)
2. Latvia (24.43)
3. Moldova (21.76)
4. Japan (20.56)
5. Sweden (20.09)
6. Åland Islands (19.85—real place! citizenship requirement: add cool accent marks to your name)
7. Romania (18.63)
8. Lithuania (18.04)
9. Bulgaria (17.67)
10. Netherlands (17.25)

What, no U.S.A.? We're 27th, at 10.16 Mbps. how is it we invent the Internet only to see 25 countries make better, faster use of it?

Now the gap isn't just because we're such a big country with hard to reach places. Rural states do drag the average down: Web is slowest in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. But our fastest city, San José, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, is 17th among metros worldwide, with a speed of 15.17 Mbps. Even where we'd expect serious American zoom-zoom Internet, we still lag places like Seoul, Hamburg, Bucharest, and Sofia.

South Dakota does beat the national average: our average download speed is 10.67 Mbps (I'm getting a tenth of that). Ranking 15th nationwide, we beat the pants off North Dakota, which pulls files in at 7.66 Mbps, and oh-so-urbane Iowa at 7.45. Minnesota is the only neighbor that gets files faster, at 11.56 Mbps.

Some critics have pointed out Ookla's data is not scientific: Ookla takes averages from SpeedTest.net users. Those users are all voluntary, so it's not a random or representative sample of all users in each region. That self-selected sample may skew the average higher: SpeedTest.net users may tend to be techies who know about the service and are interested enough in computer's Web performance to test it.

Naked and Nuked: Airport Scanners May Increase Cancer Risk

Conservative friends, Gordon Howie followers, and other wingnuts, if you want to foment anti-government paranoia, then froth up over this one: the Transportation Security Administration may be giving you cancer. It's bad enough the federal government wants to electronically strip you naked at the airport; now scientists at university of California San Francisco say full-body scanners may hit travelers with enough X-rays to "increase the risk of cancer and other health problems, particularly among older travelers, pregnant women and people with weak immune systems."

But why worry? Homeland Security's chief medical officer Alexander Garza says he feels perfectly comfortable nuking his family in the scanners, so so should you, right?

Of course, TSA and other experts will tell you that you get the same dose of radiation from a full-body scanner as you do from two minutes up in the air. (And what do you think that phone in your pocket is doing to your groinal region all day?) But you choose to nuke yourself by flying. The full-body scanners are the government choosing to nuke you against your will, and that's not right, right?

Come on, Tea Party, this could be your next big issue, one that could really get traction, like fears of vaccines causing autism. Latch on, fight the scanners!

Obama Administration Saving Money with Cloud Computing

The Obama Administration is saving you money with cloud computing. The White House announced yesterday that it will move the stimulus website, Recovery.gov, to "hardware and services [that] are shared, and not owned by the government."

As Nicholas Carr explains in The Big Switch, cloud computing is to information technology what the power grid is to electrical service. When electrical equipment first came about, each factory built and maintained its own electrical generators, just as factories previously had to generate their own mechanical power with onsite water wheels and steam engines. Then manufacturers realized they could outsource power generation to a big utility that generated oodles of power in a coal-fired plant or hydroelectric dam while the manufacturers concentrated on the widget-making they were good at.

Similarly with information technology: as computers developed over the last 50 years, businesses had to create their own IT departments to install and mainatain all of their own mainframes and servers and software. Cloud computing says, "Hey! You're not a computer company! You're a widget maker (or, in this case, the federal government). Focus on your core competency. Let us generate your computing power and manage your software." Instead of having your own bank of high-powered computers with expensive software, you just plug your vanilla computer into the Web, switch on your browser, and access software and processing power from a central utility.

The Office of Management and Budget says switching Recovery.gov to cloud computing will save $750,000 this year alone. Switch a million (oops! 1.15 million) more programs, and we'll have the stimulus paid for!

Smart Meters Require Smarter Installers and Customers

...probably ran those smart meters in Windows Vista...

O.K., o.k., the smart grid isn't perfect. As one of my readers exuberantly contended in a phone call several weeks ago, smart meters have been drawing complaints from customers seeing inexplicable price spikes.

Now Pacific Gas & Electric admits 23,000 customers may have gotten bad billing from the new gizmos. Releasing a whole batch of reports on its smart meters yesterday, PG&E says it has "identified 'issues' related to wireless communication, data storage, meter installation, and accuracy." Says PG&E VP Helen Burt:

Presented in detail, the information here reaffirms the facts we previously outlined for customers: that more than 99 percent of the SmartMeter™ devices we have installed are performing exactly as designed. This is a success rate that represents a significant advance over traditional meter technology, delivering more accurate bills to our customers along with more detailed information about their energy use [PG&E press release, 2010.05.10].

Smart meters may perform more reliably than the old metal spinner screwed to your house, but the inaccuracy in old meters is more often like the inaccuracy of old watches: they run slow, meaning the inaccuracy is in the customer's favor.

As is often the case with computers, smart meter glitches may be PEBMAT: Problem Exists Between Meter And Truck. Texas utility Oncor has installed nearly 800,000 smart meters, and in March it acknowledged that 7600 were installed incorrectly.

Customers and companies can resolve inaccurate billings and installation screw-ups. A bigger problem, notes CNET, comes when we install smart meters but don't give customers the tools to take advantage of them. A smart meter isn't just a new black box that we tack on the back of the house and mostly ignore. The real advantage comes when homeowners and businesses get the software to monitor and act on all the information the smart meter can provide about electric usage and rates.

But hey: we mostly traded horses for Model T's; we'll likely trade mechanical meters for smart meters. We'll figure out the problems, we'll create the customer service rules... and maybe we'll save a little energy.

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p.s.: Midwest ISO is installing synchrophasors to turn the whole Midwestern transmission system into a smart grid. The synchrophasors will, among other things, make it easier for the grid to handle variable power sources like wind power.

pp.s.: Nuts! Microsoft is getting into smart meters. Get ready for the blue screen of death... on your microwave!

Are Bloggers Journalists? Test Case A-Comin'?

Eager reader alert: Did you hear about the Apple software engineer who took an unreleased iPhone prototype home... and forgot it at a bar? The tech bloggers at Gizmodo got hold of the little techno-gem and scooped everyone.

Now police (not just any police, but California's cyber-SWAT team!) have seized Gizmodo writer Jason Chen's computers from his home on a search warrant claiming to be investigating a felony related to sale of the iPhone prototype.

Gizmodo's company, Gawker, already has on its war face. Says Gawker chief Gaby Darbyshire in a letter to the police:

...under both state and federal law, a search warrant may not be validly issued to confiscate the property of a journalist....

Jason is a journalist who works full time for our company. Abundant examples of his work are available o the web. He works from home, which is his de facto newsroom, and all equipment used by him there is used for the purposes of his employment with us.

...In the circumstances, we expect the immediate return of the materials confiscated from Mr. Chen [see full letter at Gizmodo.com].

...and that letter is subscribed with those yummy words, Copies to counsel.

Says Gawker founder and prez Nick Denton, "Are bloggers journalists? I guess we'll find out."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is on board, too, saying the warrant was patently illegal. But Business Insider Henry Blodget points out that the California cops may be ready to duck any such very interesting argument and concomitant charges that they violated California's shield law. The warrants speaks of a felony, but they do not specify that they are seeking the sources Chen used ot get the story. The focus of the investigation may be on whether the iPhone was stolen and whether any money that changed hands around it constituted an illegal transaction.

Now the original Gizmodo story of its acquisition of the phone sure doesn't sound like theft. They say the guy who found the phone in the bar waited to see if the owner would return, then took it home. Next day, the finder called Apple repeatedly and got no help. Weeks later, Gizmodo paid the guy $5000 and broke the story.

Besides, EFF is ready to argue that the iPhone isn't typical property; it falls under the definition of protected "information or materials" that journalists gather.

Theft? Journalism? Violation of anyone's rights? I can't wait for the resolution of this legal question.

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Update 12:33 CDT: Read more from Simon Owens, who talks to some big-time blog editors about what the Chen search and seizure means for blogging and journalism.