Yearly Archives: 2005

Your DNA or Else! (Feingold & Kohl are on this Senate Comittee)

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Declan McCullagh:

The Violence Against Women Act may be about to do violence to Americans’ right to privacy.
A U.S. Senate committee (Judiciary, which includes both Wisconsin Senators: Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl – contact them on this issue!) has adopted an amendment to the VAWA legislation that would add the DNA of anyone detained by the cops to a federal DNA database called “CODIS.”
Note that it doesn’t require that you’re convicted of a crime or even formally arrested on suspicion of committing one. Mere detention — might a routine traffic stop eventually qualify? — will be sufficient for CODISification. (Current law only authorizes blood or saliva swabs and entry into CODIS for people convicted of a crime.)

Senator Kohl is up for re-election in 2006. I think Kathleen Falk would make an excellent candidate!

Anthropologists Help Explain Consumer Behavior

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Instead of poking around tribal villages in Papua New Guinea or Amazonian rain forests, cultural anthropologists are invading suburbs and cities to find out how people use products while eating meals, working in the office, and even while driving. “We live in a culture where knowing your customers one by one as individuals is more important than ever before,” said Ross Goldstein, a researcher with the BRS Group. “Large mass demographic trends are no longer as predictive as they once were because the marketplace is too diversified.”

Healthia: Comparison Shopping, Online, for Health Insurance

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This looks like a useful idea. California only, for now.

At Healthia, we are tremendous believers in the consumer driven healthcare movement sweeping America. Our goal is to provide America’s first comparison shopping and research portal for consumer driven healthcare, enabling businesses and their employees to choose health plans and ancillary health benefits objectively and transparently.
At our beta launch today (2005-Aug-11), we serve the California market with a strong emphasis on HSA compatible plans. We also enable any user across the nation to compare over 50 leading HSA products.

David Cowan has a useful summary of the movement behind this: “Consumer Directed Healthcare” or CDH. Cowan also references this CDH study.

The Power and Politics of Blogs

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Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell (PDF):

Weblogs occupy an increasingly important place in American politics. Their influence presents a puzzle: given the disparity in resources and organization vis-à-vis other actors, how can a collection of decentralized, nonprofit, contrarian, and discordant websites exercise any influence over political and policy outputs? This paper answers that question by focusing on two important aspects of the “blogosphere”: the distribution of readers across the array of blogs, and the interactions between significant blogs and traditional media outlets. Under specific circumstances – when key weblogs focus on a new or neglected issue – blogs can socially construct an agenda or interpretive frame that acts as a focal point for mainstream media, shaping and constraining the larger political debate.

Via Robin Good

Shopping for Auto Insurance

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Ron Lieber:

Geico, however, lived up to its marketing. Its slick Web site was easy to use and returned a quote of $711.90 for six months. USAA, which covers only current and former members of the U.S. military and their families (that’s us), came in at about $10 more when we called. But the rep noted USAA offers a $50 rebate to customers who buy child car seats. Plus, he told us, it pays an annual dividend averaging 7% to all policyholders depending on how the company performed that year. USAA also had a high J.D. Power ranking.

GE Buys Epic Systems Competitor IDX

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Ross Sneyd:

GE said the IDX acquisition would significantly its health care offerings and aid in its drive to accelerate the transition to electronic health records. IDX’s administrative, clinical and imaging products will complement GE’s Centricity-brand applications, the company said.

“GE and IDX have a shared vision on how to accelerate the adoption of electronic health records across the globe,” Joe Hogan, president and CEO of GE Healthcare, said in a statement.

Grand Rapids Tests Downtown WiFi

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Glenn Fleishman:

The seven vendors who built test hotzones for Grand Rapids, Mich., all showed they had the right stuff: The local paper reports that the city was very satisfied with the results of their vendor face-off. The next goal is figuring out how to set up a no-taxpayer-dollar network, as is the charter of all new municipal efforts. They’re looking at a public/private partnership with a plan ready to bid by December. The town is eyeing local and federal legislation that might restrict their ability to deploy.