Later On

Hmm. Worth it? Probably not. The best way to reduce malpractice insurance premiums is not to take on tort reform, but to reduce malpractice. Most malpractice is done by very few incompetent doctors, who continue to practice because they keep their license to practice—and to malpractice. Recurrent offenders drive up the price. If the profession would rid itself of incompetents, then malpractice would drop and so would malpractice insurance.

The anesthesiologists once faced serious malpractice insurance premiums, but that specialty started working on root cause analysis and determined how to prevent problems. Anesthesiology today is very different as a result—and their malpractice premiums are way down.

Now the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan research service, has looked at the issue of tort reform. Mike Lillis in the Washington Independent:

Enacting a comprehensive set of medical malpractice reforms would reduce nationwide health care spending by 0.2 percent, according to a report released today by the Congressional Budget Office. Over 10 years, the changes would reduce federal deficits by $54 billion.

Estimating that providers will spend about $35 billion this year in liability costs — including insurance premiums, settlements and administrative expenses — CBO found that tort reform would cut that figure by 10 percent. The estimate “reflects the fact that many states have already enacted at least some of the proposed reforms,” CBO said.

For example, about one-third of the states have implemented caps on noneconomic damages, and about two-thirds have reformed their rules regarding joint-and-several liability.

The estimate is based on changes “similar” to the following taking hold:

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Very interesting post at Lifehacker.com on the Pomodoro technique. They include a link to a free PDF book on the technique, but also give the essential idea:

1. Choose a task to be accomplished
2. Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes (the Pomodoro is the timer)
3. Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper
4. Take a short break (5 minutes is OK)
5. Every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break

Read the whole post.

Oklahoma’s two US Senators, Coburn and Inhofe, are pretty much hopeless clowns, but they do a lot of damage. Paul Krugman blogs about Coburn’s latest hissy-fit:

Oh, boy. Senator Tom Coburn has introduced an amendment to prevent the National Science Foundation from supporting research in political science. This was brought to my attention because among the reasons he gives for cutting off this support is the fact that once upon a time the NSF supported … me.

Um, I’m not a political scientist. Also, I can’t quite remember when I last received NSF support, but it has to be at least 20 years ago — and it was, of course, for work on international trade, work that, you know, won me a Clark Medal and that other prize. So the standard seems to be that if anyone ever supported by the NSF expresses liberal political opinions decades later, that discredits the program.

But much worse is the way Coburn singles out support for the American National Election Studies as a boondoggle. As I said, I’m not a political scientist — but I’ve done enough data-surveying to know that the ANES is a treasure trove of information that can’t be found anywhere else — certainly not, as Coburn suggests, on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. Of course, it’s obvious from what Coburn says that neither he nor anyone on his staff even bothered to look at what the ANES does.

Now, Coburn is not, you might say, the most rational member of the Senate. Still, this is worrying: social science research is important, and doesn’t need to face these kinds of know-nothing attacks.

Update: My memory turns out to be slightly off: I received a continuing grant from the NSF in 1991, on the subject of economic geography. So it hasn’t been decades — just 18 years. I think my point stands.

Interesting:

Any child can tell you that a magnet has a "north" and a "south" pole, and that if you break it into two pieces, you invariably get two smaller magnets with two poles of their own. But scientists have spent the better part of the last eight decades trying to find, in essence, a magnet with only one pole. A team working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found one.* In 1931, Paul Dirac, one of the rock stars of the physics world, made the somewhat startling prediction that "magnetic monopoles," or particles possessing only a single pole—either north or south—should exist. His conclusion stemmed from examining a famous set of equations that explains the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Maxwell’s equations apply to long-known electric monopole particles, such as negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons; but despite Dirac’s prediction, no one has found magnetic monopole particles.

Now, a research team working at NIST’s Center for Neutron Research (NCNR), led by Hiroaki Kadowaki of Tokyo Metropolitan University, has found the next best thing. By creating a compound that under certain conditions forms large, molecule-sized monopoles that behave exactly as the predicted particles should, the team has found a way to explore magnetic monopoles in the laboratory, not just on the chalkboard. (Another research team, working simultaneously, published similar findings in Science last month.**)

"These are not the monopole particles Dirac predicted—ours are huge in comparison—but they behave like them in every way," says Jeff Lynn, a NIST physicist. "Their properties will allow us to test how theoretical monopole particles should behave and interact."

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Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

The National Defense Authorization Act, passed yesterday by the House of Representatives, includes a largely overlooked provision that modifies the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allows the government to try certain terror suspects — now called “unprivileged enemy belligerents” instead of the Bush-era term, “unlawful enemy combatants” — in military proceedings rather than Article III federal courts. The purpose of using a special court is primarily to deny defendants some of the protections that federal courts provide, such as the right to exclude coerced testimony and hearsay.

As I’ve noted before, the vast majority of legal experts, including leading defense lawyers and many former prosecutors, appear to believe that suspected terrorists can be tried more successfully in regular civilian federal courts — which have prosecuted hundreds such cases since the 9/11 terror attacks, as opposed to just three convictions in eight years of military commissions. Still, the Obama administration and Congress have refused to let the commissions go. And while yesterday’s bill appears to make some improvements to their rules — such as ensuring that the military commissions actually have defense lawyers qualified to handle death-penalty cases, which they didn’t before — the commissions would still allow the admission of hearsay and coerced testimony so long as the judge thinks it’s reliable. It also allows for military trials of children.

Human rights advocates maintain that the whole process of trying people outside the normal justice system is illegitimate and counterproductive. As Human Rights Watch Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program director Joanne Mariner said yesterday: “Tinkering with the discredited military commissions system is not enough. Although the pending military commissions legislation makes important improvements on the Bush administration’s system, the commissions remain a substandard system of justice.”

Chris Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel for the ACLU, put it this way: …

Continue reading.

Good for him:

I’ve had some coffee now. Reading through all the reactions, compiled by Chris and Patrick, there are two obvious points: this is premature and this is thoroughly deserved.

Both are right. I don’t think Americans fully absorbed the depths to which this country’s reputation had sunk under the Cheney era. That’s understandable. And so they also haven’t fully absorbed the turn-around in the world’s view of America that Obama and the American people have accomplished. Of course, this has yet to bear real fruit. But you can begin to see how it could; and I hope more see both the peaceful intentions and the steely resolve of this man to persevere.

This president has done a huge amount to bring race relations in this country to a different place, which is why the far right has become so vicious in attacking him and lying about him. They know he threatens their politics of division and rule. He has also directly addressed the Muslim world, telling some hard truths, and played a small role in evoking a similar movement of hope and change in Iran, and finally told the Israelis to stop cutting their nose off to spite their face.

I like Shimon Peres’ statement, reprinted in a useful compendium of world reaction at the Lede:

“Very few leaders if at all were able to change the mood of the entire world in such a short while with such a profound impact. You provided the entire humanity with fresh hope, with intellectual determination, and a feeling that there is a lord in heaven and believers on earth.” Mr. Peres, who won the peace prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat in 1994 following the Oslo Accords, added: “Under your leadership, peace became a real and original agenda. And from Jerusalem, I am sure all the bells of engagement and understanding will ring again. You gave us a license to dream and act in a noble direction.”

Right now, we do not know where that direction will ultimately lead. We do know that we were facing a spiral of conflict that, unchecked, could have taken the world to the abyss. I see this prize as an endorsement of his extraordinary reorientation of world politics, and as an encouragement to see it through. In the midst of our domestic battles, and their ill-temper (from which I have not been immune lately), this is an attempt to tell us: look up for a moment, see how far we’ve come in pivoting away from global conflict, and give this man a break for his efforts and the massive burden he now bears.

And, in the darkness that still threatens, know hope.

Their words:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges."

Oslo, October 9, 2009

Strong words, richly deserved:

"The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists – the Taliban and Hamas this morning – in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize," DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse told POLITICO. "Republicans cheered when America failed to land the Olympics and now they are criticizing the President of the United States for receiving the Nobel Peace prize – an award he did not seek but that is nonetheless an honor in which every American can take great pride – unless of course you are the Republican Party.

"The 2009 version of the Republican Party has no boundaries, has no shame and has proved that they will put politics above patriotism at every turn. It’s no wonder only 20 percent of Americans admit to being Republicans anymore – it’s an embarrassing label to claim," Woodhouse said.

The Right of today seems to hate America: they cheered when the US lost its Olympics bid, they mock the US President for being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (which he did not seek, of course), and they are talking seriously now of leaving the US via secession. Maybe they’ve never liked the American ideals, but their hatred is now overt.

I’m pleased to see that so far only 1 case in Monterey. (It’s not me.) (or The Wife). Take a look.

Good arrow to keep in your quiver.

I like this guy:

Interesting article by Maggie Fergusson in Intelligent Life magazine:

When Colin Eliot, four years into a 15-year sentence, stuck a bird’s-eye diagram of HMP Wandsworth, London, to the wall of his cell on the high-security wing, the screws were straight on to him. Escapes do happen: it was from Wandsworth, in 1965, that Ronnie Biggs gave the authorities the slip, scaling a 30ft wall during afternoon exercise. And Colin, who was a successful architect on the outside, is crafty. As the diagram was confiscated, he protested—with the cheeky-chappy, butter-wouldn’t-quite-melt expression that makes him rather unnerving company—that he was simply working on a design for a patchwork quilt. In vain.

In fact, this was nothing but the truth. The quilt he was dreaming up was no idle fantasy to while away the hours (18 out of 24) that he spends banged up in his 12ft x 6ft shared cell, but a commission from the Victoria & Albert Museum and the charity Fine Cell Work.

The quilt is now nearing completion. At 2 o’clock on a warm July afternoon, when the cells on K Wing are unlocked, eight men—aged 25 to 70—go straight to a small, bright, Victorian classroom, spread the quilt on a table, thread their needles and start stitching.

The corridor outside is dim and bleak. Low cell doors stretch away to left and right, reaching up three storeys, with nets suspended bet­ween floors; put there to catch prisoners who might try to jump to their deaths, they’ve caught a few crisp packets and tissues instead. There is a smell of disinfectant, the jangle of keys and the occasional clash of heavy doors. Prisoners in coarse, green trousers drift about, pale and panda-eyed from too little fresh air and too much sleep. They look like a shoal of ghosts.

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Interesting:

The intense exchanges that human mothers share with their newborn infants may have some pretty deep roots, suggests a study of rhesus macaques reported online on October 8th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. The new findings show that mother macaques and their infants have interactions in the first month of life that the researchers say look a lot like what humans tend to do.

"What does a mother or father do when looking at their own baby?" asked Pier Francesco Ferrari of the Università di Parma in Italy. "They smile at them and exaggerate their gestures, modify their voice pitch—the so-called "motherese"—and kiss them. What we found in mother macaques is very similar: they exaggerate their gestures, "kiss" their baby, and have sustained mutual gaze."

In humans, those communicative interactions go both ways, research in the last three decades has shown. Newborns are sensitive to their mother’s expressions, movements, and voice, and they also mutually engage their mothers and are capable of emotional exchange.

"For years, these capacities were considered to be basically unique to humans," the researchers said, "although perhaps shared to some extent with chimpanzees." The new findings extend those social skills to macaques, suggesting that the infant monkeys may "have a rich internal world" that we are only now beginning to see.

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Bad news, reported in the LA Times by Kim Murphy:

An oxygen-depleted "dead zone" the size of New Jersey is starving sea life off the coast of Oregon and Washington and will probably appear there each summer as a result of climate change, an Oregon State University researcher said Thursday.

The huge area is one of 400 dead zones around the world, most of them caused by fertilizer and sewage dumped into the oceans in river runoff.

But the dead zone off the Northwest is one of the few in the world — and possibly the only one in North America — that could be impossible to reverse. That is because evolving wind conditions likely brought on by a changing climate, rather than pollution, are responsible, said Jack Barth, professor of physical oceanography at OSU.

"I really think we’re in a new pattern, a new rhythm, offshore now. And I would expect [the low-oxygen zone] to show up every year now," Barth said at a news conference.

Thursday’s briefing coincided with the release of a National Science Foundation multimedia report that said the number of dead zones worldwide was doubling every decade.

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Megs is now totally off kibble. This morning I took a small piece of raw chicken thigh meat and cut it into little pieces using a pair of scissors (following Dr. Pierson’s suggestion), and then mixed those in with her canned food. I sprinkled a little FortiFlora on the top and watched with satisfaction as she ate with some enthusiasm. I was particularly thrilled to see her actually chewing, clearly a piece of the chicken thigh. Getting her to chew food like that will help keep her teeth clean.

The supplements for her homemade food (taurine, vitamin E, vitamin B complex) have arrived, so I await only the meat grinder. We’re excited.

Amanda Terkel on the latest Oklahoma madness:

On Nov. 1, a law in Oklahoma will go into effect that will collect personal details about every single abortion performed in the state and post them on a public website. Implementing the measure will “cost $281,285 the first year and $256,285 each subsequent year.” Here are the first eight questions that women will have to reveal:

1. Date of abortion
2. County in which abortion performed
3. Age of mother
4. Marital status of mother (married, divorced, separated, widowed, or never married)
5. Race of mother
6. Years of education of mother (specify highest year completed)
7. State or foreign country of residence of mother
8. Total number of previous pregnancies of the mother:
Live Births
Miscarriages
Induced Abortions

Although the questionnaire does not ask for name, address, or “any information specifically identifying the patient,” as Feminists for Choice points out, these eight questions could easily be used to identify a woman in a small community. “They’re really just trying to frighten women out of having abortions,” Keri Parks, director of external affairs at Planned Parenthood of Central Oklahoma, said. The Center for Reproductive Rights is challenging the law, arguing that “it violates the Oklahoma Constitution because it ‘covers more than one subject’ — a challenge that previously worked to strike down an abortion ultrasound law.”

A state that does not recognize the right to personal privacy is a horrifying state.

If you read the Committee’s statement, Obama’s work against nuclear proliferation was important, as well as his statements supporting international cooperation and his actions supporting those statements. My thought is that the Nobel Committee’s hope is that the prize will provide Obama additional leverage in working to achieve breakthroughs in cooperation.

Nonetheless, it does seem surprising. The focus is Obama’s foreign policy, in which he has shown more progressive thought than in his various terrible domestic decisions that in effect continue Bush-era policies. But even his foreign policy includes a war in Afghanistan, a war with many civilian casualties.

Glenn Greenwald has an interesting column today on the prize, in which he looks at a kind of trap that encloses Obama: our entire nation and much of its industry is focused on making war and selling arms. It will be interesting to see whether Obama can set the nation on a more peaceful course.

Joe Conason has a good column on how some media figures are starting to confess:

"Better late than never" isn’t always true, but public candor from people and institutions that have misled us for many years can be refreshing — and sometimes even liberating.

Prodded by recent events — including publication of "The Clinton Tapes," historian Taylor Branch’s fascinating account of his contemporaneous private conversations with President Bill Clinton; the unwholesome reappearance of healthcare reform nemesis Betsy McCaughey; and perhaps even the death of retired New York Times Op-Ed columnist William Safire — certain media myth-makers of the Clinton era have suddenly uttered startling acknowledgments and even a grudging confession or two.

At this late date, it is scarcely radical to suggest that Whitewater and all the other "scandals" deployed by the Washington press corps to besiege the Clinton White House (before the Lewinsky affair) were without substance. In the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, which created and promoted those stories, even such media mandarins as Thomas Friedman and Evan Thomas now casually assure us that they were overblown, even "bogus." And former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan today admits that the famous takedown of the Clinton healthcare reforms he published in 1994, Betsy McCaughey’s "No Exit," was essentially a fake too.

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Worry generally is discomforting and quite frequently turns out to be pointless: the thing worried about turns out to be no big deal. But if one has a habit of worry, it can be hard to turn it off. Dumb Little Man has a good post on the topic, including these five pointers:

1. The 1 year rule
   If you ask yourself ‘is this going to matter this time next year’, it helps you to come at your worry from another angle.
2. Allocate yourself worry time
   This may sound a strange thing to do however if you allocate 30 minutes per day to worry about all your worries, you can spend less time during the day worrying. When a worrying thought comes into your head say to yourself ‘I’ll worry about that in my worry time.’
3. Banish the ‘uncontrollable’ worries
   Uncontrollable worries serve no purpose whatsoever and should be eliminated from your mind. These are worries such as worrying about the weather, or worrying about exam results. You cannot events such as this so make sure you have something constructive to do when these worries pop into your head. If you are a constant worrier then this might be difficult, however with practice you can eliminate the ‘uncontrollable’ worries altogether.
4. Working through your worries
   Look at each worry you have, and even better write them down in a book. Go through each worry and decide if you will be able to do something about each one.
   If there is nothing you can do, then use distraction to eliminate that particular worry from your mind.
   Take steps to reduce your anxiety and worry, for example if you are worrying about debt, make calls to the debtors to work out a plan, this way you reduce the worry.
5. Distracting yourself
   As we have seen there are some worries which help us to take action and some worries which we cannot take action on. For the worries we cannot take action on we need to find a way to distract ourselves. Here are a few things we can do:
   • Exercise – even if it’s going for a walk and listening to music on your MP3 player.
   • Mental games – Crosswords, Sudoku, reading, etc.
   • Call a friend or family member
   • Do the housework

The only times we should be using the distraction techniques above are if there is no way we can do something about out worries. Do not use these techniques as a way of avoiding your worries.

Read the entire post.

I don’t know how people can continue to deny the scientific evidence that the earth today is in a very bad way, and it’s due to human activity. Take this, for example:

You would have to go back at least 15 million years to find carbon dioxide levels on Earth as high as they are today, a UCLA scientist and colleagues report Oct. 8 in the online edition of the journal Science. "The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland," said the paper’s lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

"Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas, and geological observations that we now have for the last 20 million years lend strong support to the idea that carbon dioxide is an important agent for driving climate change throughout Earth’s history," she said.

By analyzing the chemistry of bubbles of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists have been able to determine the composition of Earth’s atmosphere going back as far as 800,000 years, and they have developed a good understanding of how carbon dioxide levels have varied in the atmosphere since that time. But there has been little agreement before this study on how to reconstruct carbon dioxide levels prior to 800,000 years ago.

Tripati, before joining UCLA’s faculty, was part of a research team at England’s University of Cambridge that developed a new technique to assess carbon dioxide levels in the much more distant past — by studying the ratio of the chemical element boron to calcium in the shells of ancient single-celled marine algae. Tripati has now used this method to determine the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere as far back as 20 million years ago.

"We are able, for the first time, to accurately reproduce the ice-core record for the last 800,000 years — the record of atmospheric C02 based on measurements of carbon dioxide in gas bubbles in ice," Tripati said. "This suggests that the technique we are using is valid.

"We then applied this technique to study the history of carbon dioxide from 800,000 years ago to 20 million years ago," she said. "We report evidence for a very close coupling between carbon dioxide levels and climate. When there is evidence for the growth of a large ice sheet on Antarctica or on Greenland or the growth of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, we see evidence for a dramatic change in carbon dioxide levels over the last 20 million years.

"A slightly shocking finding," Tripati said, "is that the only time in the last 20 million years that we find evidence for carbon dioxide levels similar to the modern level of 387 parts per million was 15 to 20 million years ago, when the planet was dramatically different."

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