Minor Thoughts from me to you

Amazon introduced the Kindle DX at a press event this morning. It's the big screen Kindle everyone's been waiting for, but it comes with a big screen price: $489.00.

What do you get for that? Well, it's two inches taller and two inches wider than the normal Kindle, making it about an inch smaller than an 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper. This is important because it's the first Kindle to offer a native PDF viewer that displays full-size PDF pages without any modifications or unsightly wrapping. It's being pitched at anyone who wants to read rich, dense information: textbooks, scientific texts, computer manuals, etc. To make this even easier, it now supports auto-rotation. It will automatically sense whether you're holding the device in portrait mode or landscape mode and rotate the page to match.

What else do you get for your money? Well, it's pretty much the same as the small Kindle in all other respects. Same Whispernet wireless access, samme text-to-speech, same overall design. It does have enough memory for 3500 books, up from 1500 books. But the display is still 16 shades of gray (no color).

What do I think? I think this is one expensive gadget. The small Kindle, at $359, is pushing my willingness to spend. The DX, at $489, is way beyond it. Granted, it's a huge device. And I do think that size would allow me to read many books I'm unwilling to read on my small Kindle. But I'm not going to spend $500 for the privilege. Hopefully, for Amazon's sake, somebody else is.

Amazon to Launch Kindle for Textbooks - WSJ.com:

Amazon.com Inc. on Wednesday plans to unveil a new version of its Kindle e-book reader with a larger screen and other features designed to appeal to periodical and academic textbook publishers, according to people familiar with the matter.

... A larger-screen Kindle would enable textbook publishers to better display the charts and graphs that aren't particularly well suited to the current device, which has a screen that measures just six inches diagonally. But digitizing academic books could also hurt the thriving market for used textbooks on college campuses.

I think the schools consider that a feature not a bug. I also think the Kindle DRM will likely discourage a lot of students from buying digital textbooks. They'll almost surely cost more than the used books online and they can't be given away or resold at the end of the year. Sure, it'll save weight in backpacks, but it comes at the cost of a $359 device.

Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind after reading the full details of tomorrow's debut.

Update: I haven't changed my mind. The new Kindle DX is nearly $500. Several universities will be piloting them as textbooks, with the textbooks preloaded. That's a good deal for those students. But I'm not sure it's a good deal for other students who will have to buy both the Kindle and their textbooks.

Mr. HIStalk recently did a great interview with Dr. Jordan Shlain, founder of Current Health. It was a fantastic read. Here's a sample:

I want to give you a softball question here, because I've seen your answer elsewhere, but I think it bears repeating. What's wrong with the average patient-physician-insurance company relationship that's common today?

All the incentives are all wrong. The insurance companies have an incentive to not pay the doc because its more money to them.

The fundamental problem is the patient walks into a doctor's office, kind of with someone else's credit card, and says, "I want this, this, and this". They're not paying for it. They are not accountable for it. "I want an MRI, doctor. I want a fancy blood test. I want all these things, but I don't want to pay for it. I want somebody else to pay for it."

So the fundamental problem right now is that there's no price transparency, so nobody knows what anything costs, really, number one. Number two is there's no accountability on the patient's part to bear some of the cost of what they either consume or use. I fundamentally believe that insurance, as a construct and a principal, is a financial instrument. It's not a healthcare instrument. Health insurance is no different than car insurance or life insurance. You put money in, and if something really bad happens to your car, your house, or your life, there's money on the other side of that.

Health insurance was never intended for, if you look at the old model, a sprained ankle or an eye exam or a physical exam or for minor surgery. You paid that by yourself, and if you hit your $5,000 or $10,000 deductible, you were covered. Therefore, car and home and health insurance should be and is personal bankruptcy protection. That's what's it's supposed to be. It's to protect you in the case of unforeseen catastrophic loss. ...

Go and read the full thing. You'll learn a lot.

A genetic mutation may hold an AIDS cure.

The startling case of an AIDS patient who underwent a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia is stirring new hope that gene-therapy strategies on the far edges of AIDS research might someday cure the disease.

The patient, a 42-year-old American living in Berlin, is still recovering from his leukemia therapy, but he appears to have won his battle with AIDS. Doctors have not been able to detect the virus in his blood for more than 600 days, despite his having ceased all conventional AIDS medication. Normally when a patient stops taking AIDS drugs, the virus stampedes through the body within weeks, or days.

"I was very surprised," said the doctor, Gero Hutter.

The breakthrough appears to be that Dr. Hutter, a soft-spoken hematologist who isn't an AIDS specialist, deliberately replaced the patient's bone marrow cells with those from a donor who has a naturally occurring genetic mutation that renders his cells immune to almost all strains of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Caveats are legion. If enough time passes, the extraordinarily protean HIV might evolve to overcome the mutant cells' invulnerability. Blocking CCR5 might have side effects: A study suggests that people with the mutation are more likely to die from West Nile virus. Most worrisome: The transplant treatment itself, given only to late-stage cancer patients, kills up to 30% of patients. While scientists are drawing up research protocols to try this approach on other leukemia and lymphoma patients, they know it will never be widely used to treat AIDS because of the mortality risk.

A free market economy is always generating new ideas, finding new ways to use people and materials, finding new ways to cut waste and improve lives. For today's example, look no further than the grass on next Sunday's football games. In most cases, that's not grass that's FieldTurf. It's not just a clever product. It's a product that was unimaginable a generation ago. It's a product that FDR's bright boys never would have dreamed up, but that many organizations wouldn't want to do without.

What is FieldTurf?

FieldTurf's inventors were sportsmen - not carpet makers. Former players and coaches, not turf salesmen. They approached the challenge from a completely different perspective. They wanted to develop a synthetic system that offered the beneficial biomechanical properties of natural grass, combined with the best attributes of a durable synthetic system: all-weather playability, low maintenance, and unlimited playing time.

The idea was simple. Looks Like Grass... Feels Like Grass... Plays Like Grass. But the technology to make it happen was not simple at all. After several years of hard work, after trials, tests, consultations with players, coaches, trainers and doctors, sample plots, equipment modifications, and countless formulations, FieldTurf was born.

FieldTurf is fundamentally different from all others. Stable, firm not spongy, non-abrasive and uniform in traction, FieldTurf is engineered to play and feel like natural grass. On FieldTurf, players perform with confidence - and never experience the accelerated fatigue and muscle / joint stress associated with lightweight, rubber- filled systems. Like blades of natural grass, FieldTurf's fibers are soft and easy to slide on. They are surrounded and stabilized by FieldTurf's patented, heavy fill - the «artificial earth» that so clearly sets FieldTurf apart. Composed of smooth, rounded silica sand and cryogenically frozen and smashed rubber particles, FieldTurf's patented infill is engineered to stay «in suspension» providing years of proper biomechanics, shock absorbency and durability. A patented process of precision layering ensures infill uniformity. The result is a stable, resilient, predictable place to play - grass-like performance of the highest quality.

FieldTurf revolutionized the turf industry, and in many ways, the entire world of sport.

Why is FieldTurf so vital to so many organizations?

Installation of a FieldTurf field eliminates the use of harmful pesticides, fertilizers and herbicides, while at the same time, removes over 40,000 tires from landfill sites.

FieldTurf requires no mowing, fertilizing, reseeding or watering. A typical soccer / football field can use between 2.5 million and 3.5 million gallons of water per year.

FieldTurf saves a billion gallons of fresh water every year. Coupled with reduced labor costs related to maintenance, equipment and elimination of costs for supplies such as fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, many of our clients report a reduction in maintenance costs of as much as $30,000 to $60,000 per field, per year.

"The safety of athletes and communities is, and always has been, the number one priority at FieldTurf," said FieldTurf Tarkett CEO Joe Fields. "Our commitment to the environment ensures that our products are constantly being tested to ensure safety. The FieldTurf system has worked wonders for organizations all over the world as a product that reduces water consumption and pollution caused by chemical use, while increasing playing time, reducing injuries and promoting a healthy lifestyle." The installation of FieldTurf eliminates the use of harmful pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides and fungicides, while at the same time removes thousands of tires from landfill sites. FieldTurf requires no mowing, fertilizing, reseeding or watering. FieldTurf helps organizations earn the necessary points needed for U.S. Green Building Council LEED certification. FieldTurf's reused rubber content and water use reduction, among other factors, can contribute up to 10 points towards LEED certification.

I love this! It allow organizations to cut down on the usage of lawn mowers -- and all of the gasoline and pollution that go along with them. It allows organizations to cut down on fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. This not only saves wear and tear on the environment, it also saves money. Not only that, it allows athletes to play sports in the desert. This is important for everyone in the deserts of California, Nevada, and Utah, where water is scarce.

What about that rubber content? Well, check out the rubber re-use.

The FieldTurf infill contains three times more material than any of our competitors. That's 560,000 lbs. more infill per field! ... Our infill is layered to deliver perfect biomechanical performance. A stabilizing ballast of silica sand enhances vertical drainage. Multiple layers of sand and cryogenic rubber follow, which provide energy restitution, proper cleat penetration with quick twist and release and improved Gmax. A final top layer of larger sized cryogenic rubber granules completes the system.

FieldTurf is taking tons of tire out of landfills every year and putting it into American sports facilities. What a great country.

I imagine the FieldTurf company is getting filthy rich off of their product. And why shouldn't they? Their engineers have designed a product that's better -- and more environmentally friendly! -- than real grass. Whodathunkit? It's worth repeating that this entire industry would have been unimaginable 100 years ago. While we're busy worrying about today's economy, somebody somewhere is thinking up the next great idea. Whatever it is, it's something that we can't imagine.

This is cool. It's amazing how far and fast medical technology is developing. I can't wait to see what will be available by the time I need serious medical help.

In 2001, the FDA approved the use of capsule endoscopy, which uses a capsule size camera [1.2 inches long by 0.4 inches in diameter]. These are passive systems. There is work to make smaller robotic systems and systems that can perform more of the capabilities of regular endoscopes. These capabilities include therapeutic and diagnostic operations such as ultrasound, electrocautery, biopsy, laser, and heat with a retractable arm.

Scientists at the Technion University, teamed with a researcher from the College of Judea and Samaria, have developed a miniature robot that can move within the bloodstream.

The miniature robot has been planned and constructed (2007), that has the unique ability to crawl within the human body's veins and arteries," said Dr. Nir Shvalb of the College of Judea and Samaria. The Israeli robot's diameter is one millimeter.

The researchers stress that the project is an "interesting development, but it has a long way to go before it is used in medicine." Solomon says that the tiny robot could be controlled for an unlimited amount of time to carry out any necessary medical procedure. The power source is an external magnetic field created near the patient that does not cause any harm to humans but supplies an endless supply of power for it to function. The robot's special structure enables it to move while being controlled by the operator using the magnetic field.

Next Big Future: Pill-size to bacteria sized robots for surgery and in-body therapies:

Meet some high school students that are working their way through school:

Almost every weekday, 14-year-old Tiffany Adams rises before 6 a.m. in the Newark, New Jersey, home she shares with her grandmother and sisters. She dons her school uniform and catches two New Jersey Transit buses across the city, arriving at Christ the King Preparatory School, a Catholic high school that opened in September 2007, at 8. Most days she goes to the standard ninth-grade classes: algebra, Spanish, Western Civ. By all accounts, she excels at them. She is ranked first in her class. Her favorite subject is math, she says, "because it challenges me."

But five school days a month, Adams skips the uniform and dons business attire. On those days, after a morning assembly, she bypasses the classrooms and hops instead into a van bound for Essex County College. There Adams works in the human resources department from 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. or so, scheduling résumé appointments, doing clerical work, and generally keeping the place functioning. Far from being a distraction, this opportunity to work while going to school is what drew Adams to Christ the King in the first place. "I thought it would be a good school for me to learn about business," she says. "I would like to be an entrepreneur."

Few teenagers are so concretely focused on their future careers. But Adams' attitude is not unusual for the 89 freshmen at Christ the King Prep, part of a recently formed national network of Catholic schools that combine school and work. In the process, these "Cristo Rey" (Spanish for "Christ the King") schools have stumbled on a new business model for private urban education -- one that asks students like Adams to largely pay their own way.

At the 19 schools in the network (three new ones are opening this fall in Brooklyn, Detroit, and the west side of Chicago), four-student teams share entry-level clerical jobs at area employers. In exchange, these companies pay the schools $20,000 to $30,000 for each team. The subsidy of $5,000 to $7,500 per student keeps tuition low enough (usually around $2,500) that a prep school education becomes feasible for poor families.

This business model was born of necessity. But as the Cristo Rey Network has discovered in the 12 years since the first school opened in Chicago, the benefits go beyond financial sustainability. Introducing inner-city children to corporate America shows them the jobs they can have if they study hard and go to college. And that's what the vast majority of Cristo Rey's predominantly Hispanic and African-American graduates do.

Once these students have a chance to work, employers love them:

But soon employers were calling to compliment the Jesuits on the most eager temps they’d ever seen. "No one quite expected that the kids could perform to the level they were performing in the work world," Thielman says. "We found tremendous talent and tremendous potential among young people in that neighborhood."

These programs also appear to do a fantastic job of preparing students for college:

These start-ups are all committed to enrolling only low-income kids; network-wide, 72 percent of students qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program. The schools are also committed to sending the vast majority of their graduates to college; of the 318 students who graduated from Cristo Rey Network schools in 2007, 316 were accepted to a two- or four-year college. That’s better than 99 percent. (Nationwide, just 67 percent of students who graduate from high school start college shortly thereafter, and in big cities that figure can be much lower. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley held a press conference last spring to boast that the Chicago public schools had sent almost half of the class of 2007 to two- or four-year colleges.)

And these schools aren't cherry-picking the smart students either:

Many of Christ the King's 89 students arrived unprepared for high school work. James Cochran, a social studies teacher, assigned an essay about ancient Mesopotamia around the third week of school. "I got kids who gave me Wikipedia articles printed out," he says. "They didn't make any effort to conceal the fact that it was a Wikipedia article. It's not like they were plagiarizing and trying to hide it. They just thought that was how you did a report." They didn't understand that they were supposed to generate original thoughts and analysis. "They didn’t know how to think," Cochran says. "I had to teach them how to think." By April, though, his ninth-graders were debating whether Emperor Augustus was better for Rome than the previous republican set-up. (Interestingly, most thought he was.)

This article really gets me excited. (Please do read the entire thing.) It's new. It's creative. It's innovative. Most importantly -- it works. This is change from the old ideas of the past. More please. Much more.

I've been wanting to get back into shape. These new pills could be the perfect solution.

In a series of startling experiments in mice, the drugs improved the ability of cells to burn fat and retain muscle mass, and they substantially prolonged endurance during exercise. Using one of the compounds for just a month, even sedentary, couch-potato mice improved their endurance running by a staggering 44%. Some mice that combined a month of exercise with the other drug bolstered their long-distance running by about 70% over untreated mice.

One of the drugs is already in late-stage human trials for other purposes, and the mouse experiments raise hopes for new strategies to protect people against obesity, diabetes and muscle-wasting diseases such as muscular dystrophy.

Anabolic steroids, often abused by athletes, enhance the performance of fast-twitch muscle cells -- those that provide power and speed. The two drugs being researched are among the first compounds shown clearly to improve the slow-twitch muscle cells used in endurance activities. Whereas fast-twitch muscle cells burn sugar, slow-twitch cells primarily burn fat, which means they could help combat obesity.

Now I'm just waiting until I can buy me a 90-day supply.

Beth Hanley, I weep for thee.

Armed with a Georgetown University diploma, Beth Hanley embarked in her 20s on a path hoping to become a professional world-saver. First she worked at nonprofit Bread for the World. Then she taught middle school English in central Africa with the Peace Corps. Finally, to certify her idealism, she graduated last spring with a master's degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins University.

... Hanley, a think tank temp who dreams of aiding the impoverished and reducing gender discrimination in developing countries, is stuck. ... Numerous young Washingtonians bemoan the improvisational and protracted career track of the area's public interest profession. They say the high competition for comparatively low-paying jobs saps their sense of adulthood, forcing them to spend their 20s or early 30s moving from college to work to graduate school and back to work that might or might not be temporary.

No, wait. I don't weep for you.

dispatches from TJICistan: Little Miss Perky Nose and Silk Blouse is not making mad benjamins

You know, somewhere there's a guy, toiling in a cube, who just spent six weeks working out a way to make toilet paper with 1% less energy input, thus cutting the cost of goods sold by 0.25%, while keeping the TP just as soft and smooth as it was before.

...and that man has added more to the sum total of human happiness and productivity over those six weeks than little-Miss-altruist Beth Hanley has in her decade of getting elite degrees, wasting time in the Peace Corps, and getting her masters degree in international relations.

I'm not saying that Mr-TP-improvement is a hero ("because what's a hero?").

And I'm not saying that little-miss-perky-nose-and-silk-blouse is a bad person.

But, aside from her own sense of self worth, what has she accomplished in the last decade?

Pretty much zero.

Transterrestrial Musing: Get Out the Hankies

Who is more of a humanitarian, a Norman Borlaug, who through his technological efforts saved untold millions from hunger, and even starvation, and was reasonably compensated for it, or an Albert Schweitzer or Mother Theresa, who labored to help a relatively few poor and ill, while living in relative poverty? Obviously the latter derived personal satisfaction from their hands-on retail efforts, but I don't think that they ever whined about their lifestyle.

These people do in fact need to grow up, and understand that there are other ways to help people than forming non-profits and NGOs, or working for a government bureaucracy. People are helped most by technological advances that make essential items--food, transportation, communication, shelter--more affordable and accessible to them, not by those who provide them with handouts and sympathy, and keep them in a state of perpetual dependency.

Exactly.

I cheer globalization, even when American workers lose their jobs to non-Americans. Why? Because the world's poor are always made better off. To be blunt, I feel far, far more sympthathy for the poor of the world than I do for America's newly unemployed. One group of people gets to enjoy fresh food year round, air conditioning, heating, clean drinking water. The other group -- doesn't. So when the have-nots get an opportunity to become the haves, I cheer.

Why do I bring it up? Well, I read a story in the New York Times that demonstrates, again, how things are improving in India: In India, Poverty Inspires Technology Workers to Altruism:

"Babajob seeks to bring the social-networking revolution popularized by Facebook and MySpace to people who do not even have computers -- the world's poor. And the start-up is just one example of an unanticipated byproduct of the outsourcing boom: many of the hundreds of multinationals and hundreds of thousands of technology workers who are working here are turning their talents to fighting the grinding poverty that surrounds them.

"In Redmond, you don't see 7-year-olds begging on the street," said Sean Blagsvedt, Babajob's founder, referring to Microsoft's headquarters in Washington State, where he once worked. "In India, you can't escape the feeling that you're really lucky. So you ask, What are you going to do about all the stuff around you? How are you going to use all these skills?"

The best-known networking sites in the industry connect computer-savvy elites to one another. Babajob, by contrast, connects India's elites to the poor at their doorsteps, people who need jobs but lack the connections to find them. Job seekers advertise skills, employers advertise jobs and matches are made through social networks.

For example, if Rajeev and Sanjay are friends, and Sanjay needs a chauffeur, he can view Rajeev's page, travel to the page of Rajeev's chauffeur and see which of the chauffeur's friends are looking for similar work.

Woohoo!

From the New York Times, this is kind of innovative idea that gets me excited:

Mr. Agassi is not planning to make cars, but instead wants to deploy an infrastructure of battery-charging stations in the United States, Europe and the developing world.

The new system will sell electric fuel on a subscription basis and will subsidize vehicle costs through leases and credits.

"We're basically saying this is just like the cellular phone model," he said. "If you think of Tesla as the iPhone, we're AT&T.;"

He said his approach was a radical departure from other electric-car ventures that relied on advances in battery technology, which have come slowly.

Instead, he plans to extend the existing electric-power grids with a wide network of intelligent recharging stations in urban areas and supplementing it with a smaller number of automated battery-replacement stations.

The economics will be more compelling in Europe, where gasoline is roughly twice as expensive as in the United States, he said. Assuming a life span of 1,500 battery recharges, he said that the energy cost of all-electric cars would be about 7 cents a mile. That would be less than a third of the cost of driving a gasoline-powered car today.

"It's much easier to transport electrons than octane molecules," he said. "We've already got a grid that goes around the entire world; all we have to do is extend it."

Mr. Agassi envisions tens of thousands of recharging spots that will adjust for both cost and use patterns. For example, a group of parking-lot chargers at a workplace might recharge a visitor's car before a regular employee's car parked for the entire day.

The system will also supplement recharging stations that require about one minute of recharge time for every minute of driving, with a smaller number of car-wash-style stations for swapping batteries. This would make it possible for a driver to go to a station rather than wait to recharge a battery, he said.

I have no idea if this will work out or not. Still, I pay around $250 month for gasoline, so I wouldn't be opposed to paying a monthly subscription fee if it came out the same, or less, per month. It's an intriguing idea and I do so like seeing ideas that are "outside the box".

Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus - New York Times

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office's famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of "comparable" magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" (Knopf, 2007).

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn't it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal "food pyramid" telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group's members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.

In the Battle Against Cancer, Researchers Find Hope in a Toxic Wasteland - New York Times

Death sits on the east side of this city, a 40-billion-gallon pit filled with corrosive water the color of a scab. On the opposite side sits the small laboratory of Don and Andrea Stierle, whose stacks of plastic Petri dishes are smeared with organisms pulled from the pit. Early tests indicate that some of those organisms may help produce the next generation of cancer drugs.

For decades, scientists assumed that nothing could live in the Berkeley Pit, a hole 1,780 feet deep and a mile and a half wide that was one of the world's largest copper mines until 1982, when the Atlantic Richfield Company suspended work there. The pit filled with water that turned as acidic as vinegar, laced with high concentrations of arsenic, aluminum, cadmium and zinc.

Today it is one of the harshest environments in the country. When residents speak of the pit, they often recall the day in 1995 when hundreds of geese landed on the water and promptly died.

But the pit itself is far from dead. Over the last decade, Mr. Stierle said, the couple have found 142 organisms living in it and have "isolated 80 chemical compounds that exist nowhere else."

Panel Sees Problems in Ethanol Production - New York Times

Greater cultivation of crops to produce ethanol could harm water quality and leave some regions of the country with water shortages, a panel of experts is reporting. And corn, the most widely grown fuel crop in the United States, might cause more damage per unit of energy than other plants, especially switchgrass and native grasses, the panel said.

The report noted that additional use of fertilizers and pesticides could pollute water supplies and contribute to the overgrowth of aquatic plant life that produces "dead zones" like those in the Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere.

Book now for the flight to nowhere - Times Online

An Indian entrepreneur has given a new twist to the concept of low-cost airlines. The passengers boarding his Airbus 300 in Delhi do not expect to go anywhere because it never takes off.

In a country where 99% of the population have never experienced air travel, the "virtual journeys" of Bahadur Chand Gupta, a retired Indian Airlines engineer, have proved a roaring success.

"Some of my passengers have crossed the country to get on this plane," says Gupta, who charges about £2 each for passengers taking the "journey".

The Odyssey Years - New York Times

People who were born before 1964 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments -- moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family.

In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same.

Overlawyered: Welcome to West Virginia: Joe Meadows v. Go-Mart

Joe Meadows was drunk. Very drunk. 0.296 percent blood-alcohol content drunk, 12 or 13 beers worth. Fortunately, he didn't drive in that state. Unfortunately, he chose to sleep it off by resting under a parked 18-wheel truck. More unfortunately, the driver, Doug Rader, who didn't check to see whether there might be drunks lying under his truck at 1:40 a.m., ran over Meadows. Rader had EMT training, and was able to save Meadows's life, but Meadows lost a leg, and sued both the truck company and the store that owned the parking lot. A Kanawha County jury decided that Meadows was only a third responsible for his injury, which means he "only" gets two thirds of the three million dollars they awarded.

What is Orthodoxy? (Part 1, Part 2)

What is the "orthodoxy" in our "humble orthodoxy" anyway? What do we mean when we say "orthodoxy?" "What must we agree upon? What are the basics, what are the essentials?"

Now this is a dangerous question. And we have to proceed very carefully here, because if you take this wrong, this question can sound a little like the teenager in the youth group asking, "How far can I go? What's the least I have to believe and still be considered a Christian? What can I get away with?" Friends, that is not the spirit in which I'm posing this question. You want to pursue truth in every single matter about which God has revealed Himself in His word. If He's gone to the trouble of revealing Himself, you should care as a Christian, you should want to understand it, so that you can know more about who this God is that you're worshiping.

Part of what we need for doctrinal discernment is to understand what must be agreed upon and how serious errors are. Because you know not all errors are created equal--they're not all the same. We need to understand the significance of the doctrine that is in question.

... So God, the Bible, the gospel.

Those are the things that we must agree upon to have meaningful cooperation as Christians. True Christian fellowship cannot be had with someone who disagrees with us on these matters. These are the essential of the essentials.

Finally, for Adam, Pastor John Piper's view of Ayn Rand's philosophy. Several years ago, after I read Adam's copy of Atlas Shrugged, I disagreed with her view of altruism. But I couldn't put my feelings into words. Now I find that John Piper has.

Atlas Shrugged Fifty Years Later :: Desiring God

My Ayn Rand craze was in the late seventies when I was a professor of Biblical Studies at Bethel College. I read most of what she wrote both fiction and non-fiction. I was attracted and repulsed. I admired and cried. I was blown away with powerful statements of what I believed, and angered that she shut herself up in what Jonathan Edwards called the infinite provincialism of atheism. Her brand of hedonism was so close to my Christian Hedonism and yet so far--like a satellite that comes close to the gravitational pull of truth and then flings off into the darkness of outer space.

Sentences like these made me want to scream. No. No. No. Altruism (treating someone better than he deserves) does not have to involve "betraying your values" or "sacrificing a greater value to a lesser one." In other words, I agreed with her that we should never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one. But I disagreed that mercy (returning good for evil) always involved doing that.

Various teaching methods intrigue me. What makes a good teacher or a bad teacher? What makes a kid learn or sleep through class? How can we best prepare the next generation to face an increasingly complex world?

I tend to largely agree with Alex Tabarrok: Heroes are not Replicable.

You know the plot. Young, idealistic teacher goes to inner-city high school. Said idealistic teacher is shocked by students who don't know the basics and who are too preoccupied with the burdens of violence, poverty and indifference to want to learn. But the hero perseveres and at great personal sacrifice wins over the students using innovative teaching methods and heart. The kids go on to win the state spelling/chess/mathematics championship. c.f. Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds etc.

We are supposed to be uplifted by these stories but they depress me. If it takes a hero to save an inner city school then there is no hope. Heroes are not replicable.

He talks about an instruction method called "Direct Instruction" (overview from the Washington Times or a slightly more technical overview) that was tested in a research study from 1967 through 1995. The study cost $1 billion and involved more than 20,000 students. It was judged to be a huge success, more so than any other method studied. The other methods are popular ones in use today, including the Learning Center Model, Open Education Model, and Self Esteem model. DI trounced all of them.

There's a catch though. DI involved giving teachers a script and having them follow it. Apparently, teachers don't take kindly to the suggestion that they'd do better following a script than they would following their own initiative. So, nothing much has come of DI yet.

What I found more interesting, however, was the comment section at Marginal Revolution. I saw three broad themes: 1) you should fire all of the econ profs at GMU and teach economics this way, 2) how boring: rote instruction from a script, 3) I did a scripted training class at work and it was worthless.

I find #1 and #3 interesting, because the entire method is about teaching young children. Why anyone would think that that automatically applies to teaching adults is beyond me. I'm intrigued by the idea of DI, but I'd need a lot of convincing to use it as a method for college or corporate instruction.

I find #2 interesting because the more technical overview specifically states:

In poorly designed phonics programs, young children are expected to sit through hours of dull repetition. This is unfortunate, since it is possible to turn drill into a highly engaging, exciting group activity through the use of Direct Instruction.

It appears that most of the commentors didn't really read through the material -- either that or they reject the entire idea without even seeing what the scripts look like. Neither option speaks well of their intelligence.

Given how utterly failed most of America's big-city public schools are, I think a switch to DI could hardly make things worse. Isn't it worth a shot?

UPDATE: In fact, the reaction in the Marginal Revolution comments section reminds me of this post from Scott Adams and The Dilbert Blog. Might these commentors be suffering from cognitive dissonance?

Bubbles are good for you. Not the bubbles kids play with or the bubbles in your bubble bath, but the bigger, flashier kind. You know -- the tech bubble, the housing bubble, etc. At least, that's what Daniel Gross says.

Well, the conventional wisdom holds that bubbles are bad. Economists don't like them because they represent irrational behavior. A lot of people get hurt. They invest at the top, they lose their money. It's a misallocation of resources. My argument is that the pop of the bubble is only half the story.

Well, the way that new infrastructures get built in this country is frequently through investor enthusiasm. The government may help roll out new technologies, but we don't have the government putting up telegraph lines or stringing fiber optic cable that connects people's homes to the internet.

These activities don't proceed in a rational, easy-going way. They move in fits and starts. It's the bubbles that lead to this very rapid roll out of a new commercial infrastructure, one that businesses can plug into and use, like the telegraph or the railroad or the internet.

So bubbles create platforms for growth and innovation that help propel the economy forward.

I like his argument. It's the same one, basically, that Tom Friedman makes in The World is Flat. During the .com boom, telecommunications companies were convinced that the boom would go on forever and that they all needed their own fiber optic cables. So, they spent wildly and laid thousands of miles of fiber.

They were wrong. They didn't all need their own fiber. One by one, they went bankrupt. But the fiber remained. Now, it's been bought up on the cheap by new companies and they're using it to deliver YouTube, Google Apps for Your Domain, Facebook, online video of the NCAA basketball tournament, etc.

Right now, we're reaping the benefits of the irrational exuberance of the .com bubble. Gross thinks that we'll be reaping the benefits of the housing bubble within a few years, and that we're just in the beginning phases of an alternative energy bubble.

I hope he's right -- both for my long-term housing values and because I want to see what we can invent next.

Telecommuting -- the next generation. This is how I need to work from home.

Programmer Ivan Bowman spends his days at iAnywhere Solutions Inc. in much the same way his colleagues do.

He writes code, exchanges notes in other developers' offices, attends meetings and, on occasion, hangs out in the kitchen or lounge over coffee and snacks.

About the only thing he can't do is drink the coffee or eat the snacks -- or touch anything, for that matter.

It's not that Bowman doesn't have hands or a mouth; they're just in Halifax, along with the rest of his body.

In fact, it's not really Bowman in the Waterloo office at all. It's IvanAnywhere, a robot Bowman uses to interact with his colleagues in Waterloo from his home office 1,350 kilometres away.

Silicon nanoparticles enhance performance of solar cells

Placing a film of silicon nanoparticles onto a silicon solar cell can boost power, reduce heat and prolong the cell's life, researchers now report.

To make their improved solar cells, the researchers began by first converting bulk silicon into discrete, nano-sized particles using a patented process they developed. Depending on their size, the nanoparticles will fluoresce in distinct colors.

Nanoparticles of the desired size were then dispersed in isopropyl alcohol and dispensed onto the face of the solar cell. As the alcohol evaporated, a film of closely packed nanoparticles was left firmly fastened to the solar cell.

Solar cells coated with a film of 1 nanometer, blue luminescent particles showed a power enhancement of about 60 percent in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum, but less than 3 percent in the visible range, the researchers report.

The process of coating solar cells with silicon nanoparticles could be easily incorporated into the manufacturing process with little additional cost, Nayfeh said.

One of the great things about the division of labor -- having each person do one job and do it well -- is the lengths to which complete strangers will go to make each others' lives better.

Take, for example, road signs. We drive by thousands of them each year. Have you ever thought about what it would take to make a better road sign? I haven't. But Don Meeker has.

The Road to Clarity - New York Times

In 1989, after his success with the waterways project, the State of Oregon approached Meeker with a commission to think up a roadside sign system for scenic-tour routes. The problem sounded modest enough: Add more information to the state's road signs without adding clutter or increasing the physical size of the sign itself. But with the existing family of federally approved highway fonts -- a chubby, idiosyncratic and ultimately clumsy typeface colloquially known as Highway Gothic -- there was little you could add before the signs became visually bloated and even more unreadable than they already were. ""I knew the highway signs were a mess, but I didn't know exactly why," Meeker recalled.

Around the same time Meeker and his team were thinking about how to solve the problem of information clutter in Oregon, the Federal Highway Administration was concerned with another problem. Issues of readability were becoming increasingly important, especially at night, when the shine of bright headlights on highly reflective material can turn text into a glowing, blurry mess. Highway engineers call this phenomenon halation and elderly drivers, now estimated to represent nearly a fifth of all Americans on the road, are most susceptible to the effect.

"When the white gets hit, it explodes, it blooms," Meeker, who has the air of a scruffy academic, went on to say.

And, he spent the next fifteen years coming up with a new font for road signs and getting it approved by the Federal Highway Administration. Isn't that fantastic?

Only an economic system that frees people from subsistence living can give people enough freedom and flexibility to spend 15 years designing a better road sign.

Or, take the story of UPS.

U.P.S. Embraces High-Tech Delivery Methods - New York Times

But increasingly, it is the researchers at its Atlanta headquarters, its technology center in Mahwah, N.J., and its huge four-million-square-foot Louisville hub who are asking the questions that will drive the company's future.

What if the package contains medicine that could turn from palliative to poison if the temperature wavers? What if it is moving from Bangkok to Bangor and back to Bangkok, and if customs rules differ on each end? And what if the package is going to a big company that insists on receiving all its packages, no matter who ships them, at the same time each day?

Increasingly, it is the search for high-tech answers to such questions that is occupying the entire package delivery industry. U.P.S. and FedEx are each pumping more than $1 billion a year into research, while also looking for new ways to cut costs.

Customers of both FedEx and U.P.S. can now print out shipping labels that are easily scannable by computers. Meteorologists at both companies routinely outguess official Weather Service forecasts. And both are working with the Federal Aviation Administration to improve air safety and scheduling.

The research at U.P.S. is paying off. Last year, it cut 28 million miles from truck routes "” saving roughly three million gallons of fuel "” in good part by mapping routes that minimize left turns. This year, U.P.S. began offering customers a self-service system for redirecting packages that are en route.

And now the U.P.S. researchers are working on sensors that can track temperatures of packages, on software that can make customs checks more uniform worldwide and on scheduling processes that accommodate the needs of recipients as well as shippers.

Absolutely incredible. UPS and FedEx are spending a combined $1 billion -- just to find a way to get a package to your door faster, cheaper, safer. Their researchers don't know me and they'll probably never meet me, but they're intensely focused on making my life better.

Only the profit motive produces that kind of incentive. (When was the last time a motor vehicle or postal employee cared about your time or happiness?) Only the division of labor allows that kind of single-focused effort.

Capitalism may not be a perfect economic system, but it's the only one I ever want to live in.

UW eye doctor gives world better vision

"In the past 25 years, the cases of avoidable blindness have doubled to 35 million presently. At this rate, by 2020 the number will double again to 70 million," he explains. But in the face of those statistics, he finds great hope: Aided by recent improvements in lens manufacturing and surgical techniques, 90 percent are curable with simple cataract surgery that costs $20 and takes 20 minutes of surgery.

There have been roadblocks along the way, however. Cataract surgery removes the clouded eye lens and replaces it with a synthetic intraocular lens. When CBF started the eye camps, these lenses cost about $300, making them "unaffordable" for the program.

...

In 1992, CBF and its partners helped create Aurolab, an intraocluar lens and suture factory in Madurai, India. The factory produces high quality lenses and sutures at a low cost, making the surgery available to poor people throughout the world. At $2.50 per lens and $1.00 per suture, Aurolab distributes the supplies to not-for-profit organizations in 120 countries.

Now that's the kind of charity -- and innovation -- I can get behind. Way to go Dr. Suresh Chandra!

This post is a random grab bag of what I found interesting this weekend.

A Long Line for a Shorter Wait at the Supermarket. A search for higher customer satisfaction (and higher profits) led Whole Foods to revamp their checkout lines.

Lines can also hurt retailers. Starbucks spooked investors last summer when it said long lines for its cold beverages scared off customers. Wal-Mart, too, has said that slow checkouts have turned off many.

And they are easily turned off. Research has shown that consumers routinely perceive the wait to be far longer than it actually is.

Whole Foods executives spent months drawing up designs for a new line system in New York that would be unlike anything in their suburban stores, where shoppers form one line in front of each register.

The result is one of the fastest grocery store lines in the city. An admittedly unscientific survey by this reporter found that at peak shopping times "” Sunday, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. "” a line at Whole Foods checked out a person every 4.5 seconds, compared with 19.6 seconds for a line at Trader Joe's.

Put Kieran on a poster. A student in Saskatchewan, Canada learned that independent learning is a quick route to the principal's office.

King, who is in Grade 10 at a high school in tiny Wawota, Sask., started researching marijuana after he and his fellow students were given an audiovisual presentation about drugs earlier in the year. The presentation, from his entirely believable description, was typical of its kind: short on background facts and long on horror stories.

On May 30, Kieran, who is described as "research-obsessed" by his mother, was chatting with friends around the school lunch table and telling them about what he'd discovered, largely from scholarly and government sources. He argued that marijuana carries a near-zero risk of overdose, that it has been approved by Health Canada for medical use and that it kills an infinitesimal fraction of the people that alcohol and tobacco do every week -- claims so uncontroversial you'd have to be high on something much stronger than pot to dispute them.

But one of the students who'd witnessed the conversation apparently finked to the warden. (From this day forward I'm going to avoid the use of the term "principal." If schools are going to be run like prisons, let's adopt the appropriate lingo.) Boss bull Susan Wilson ordered Kieran to stop talking about marijuana on school premises -- even though he had been outside the classroom, where school officials have to meet a justifiably high standard before interfering with a student's freedom of speech -- and later she called his mother to warn her that "promoting drug use" would not be tolerated. According to the education director of the school division, she was also told "if there were any drugs brought into the school, the police could be involved."

Next up, robots may make arguments over illegal immigrants moot. Farms Fund Robots to Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers

Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season.

The robotic work has been funded entirely by agricultural associations, and pushed forward by the uncertainty surrounding the migrant labor force. Farmers are "very, very nervous about the availability and cost of labor in the near future," says Vision Robotics CEO Derek Morikawa.

Once again, we see an example of political uncertainty leading companies to make investments and decisions that they wouldn't ordinarily make. Something to keep in mind anytime Congress starts debating something -- the debate itself can affect the real world.

Finally, many men are so afraid of child molestation accusations that they're no longer volunteering for any position that would put them near children. See Daily Pundit » Where Are The Big Brothers?.

The article sets out a number of possible reasons men don't volunteer at Big Brothers-Big Sisters in greater numbers "“ but the fact that the rate at BB-BS is less than the overall average for volunteer-based organizations moves me to throw out an undiscussed possibility: men are afraid of having their lives destroyed by a false accusation, and fear the BB-BS will protect itself by throwing its resources behind the accuser.

In Arizona, almost 60 percent of grade school principals and nearly 90 percent of teachers are women. Six years ago, the majority of principals were men. Some schools have no men, meaning kids may not have a male teacher or principal until middle or high school. It's the same picture nationally.

... Scottsdale's Serna said the fear of being accused of inappropriate touching or abuse has made lots of educators uncomfortable. Many administrators and teachers leave the profession out of fear of lawsuits or false accusations.

Alzheimer's is one of the diseases that scares me the most. I absolutely hate the idea of losing my memory and being completely unable to function -- or even remember who my family and friends are. That's why I was thrilled to read about an upcoming Alzheimer's vaccine.

A revolutionary drug that stops Alzheimer's disease in its tracks could be available within a few years.

It could prevent people from reaching the devastating final stages of the illness, in which sufferers lose the ability to walk, talk and even swallow, and end up totally dependent on others.

The jab, which is now being tested on patients, could be in widespread use in as little as six years.

Existing drugs can delay the progress of the symptoms, but their effect wears off relatively quickly, allowing the disease to take its devastating course. In contrast, the new vaccine may be able to hold the disease at bay indefinitely.

Early tests showed the vaccine is highly effective at breaking up the sticky protein that clogs the brain in Alzheimer's, destroying vital connections between brain cells.

When the jab was given to mice suffering from a disease similar to Alzheimer's, 80 per cent of the patches of amyloid protein were broken up.

If this pans out, it would be absolutely fantastic news.