Foreign Policy wonks & observers would do well to keep up with William Lind. His latest looks at non-state entities and the flow of drugs.
LA Mayor releases a report on gaps in broadband coverage. We're still working on getting rolling in Madison. When on travel, I continue to be pleasantly at the amount of free wifi available around the country.
Interesting reading, Bob Lutz talks about his recent visit to China and their growth prospects.
Fascinating and timely article from the Economist on health care & IT
The inability, and reluctance, of doctors and hospitals to use information technology more widely is killing thousands of peopleIT is strategic - when used wisely.
THE NO-COMPUTER VIRUS
Apr 28th 2005
The inability, and reluctance, of doctors and hospitals to use
information technology more widely is killing thousands of people
"WHETHER or not a treating doctor has Alex's full medical record
available can literally mean life or death," says Cynthia Solomon of
Sonoma, California. Her son Alex, now in his 20s, grew up with
hydrocephalus, a rare and life-threatening condition in which fluid
accumulates in the brain and needs to be drained through special
shunts. So Ms Solomon had no choice but to become a walking filing
cabinet of records on allergies, pituitary-gland problems, brain scans
and "every piece of paper a doctor ever wrote about Alex's case." She
worried constantly. There were close calls, such as the time that Alex
went on a trip and ended up, unconscious, in some distant hospital. Ms
Solomon could not get his paper records to the new doctor and had to
pray that Alex would not get the wrong antibiotics or be laid on his
back, which might have killed him.
To Ms Solomon the information problem with health care today is so
glaring that she eventually took matters into her own hands, as best
she could. She took out a second mortgage, hired software programmers
and developed a computer system, called FollowMe, for online medical
records that any doctor can, in theory, access anywhere and anytime.
FollowMe will not fix the world's health-care industry--only about 400
families now use it--but Ms Solomon has correctly identified the
woeful, even scandalous, failure of the health-care industry worldwide
to adopt modern information technology (IT).
The solution seems obvious: to get all the information about patients
out of paper files and into electronic databases that--and this is the
crucial point--can connect to one another so that any doctor can access
all the information that he needs to help any given patient at any time
in any place. In other words, the solution is not merely to use
computers, but to link the systems of doctors, hospitals, laboratories,
pharmacies and insurers, thus making them, in the jargon,
"interoperable".
This may be obvious, but today it is also a very distant goal.
According to David Bates, the head of general medicine at Boston's
Brigham and Women's Hospital and an expert on the use of IT in health
care, the industry invests only about 2% of its revenues in IT,
compared with 10% for other information-intensive industries.
Superficially, there are big differences between countries. In Britain,
98% of general practitioners have computers somewhere in their offices,
and 30% claim to be "paperless", whereas in America 95% of small
practices use only pen and paper. But, says Mr Bates, this obscures the
larger point, which is that even the IT systems that do exist cannot
talk to those of other providers, and so are not all that useful.
It shows. People on the right side of the digital divide increasingly
take for granted that they can go online to track their FedEx package,
to trade shares, file taxes and renew drivers' licences, and to do
almost anything else--unless, of course, it involves their own health.
That information, crumpled and yellowing, is spread among any number of
hanging folders at all the clinics they have ever visited, and probably
long since forgotten about. The most intimate information is, in
effect, locked away from its owners in a black box.
Many IT bosses find this baffling. John Chambers, the chief executive
of Cisco Systems, the world's largest computer-networking company, says
that health care is down there with mining as the most technophobic
industry. Jeff Miller, a manager at Hewlett-Packard, a large
computer-maker, calls health care "one of the slowest-adopting
industries", which is especially surreal because hospitals often
splurge on the latest CAT-scan or MRI equipment, but are stingy with
their back-office systems. It is, he says, like "Detroit putting out
futuristic hydrogen cars but using paper processing and manual labour
for the manufacturing."
This has perverse consequences. According to the Institute of Medicine,
a non-governmental organisation in Washington, DC, preventable medical
errors--from unplanned drug interactions, say--kill between 44,000 and
98,000 people each year in America alone. This makes medical snafus the
eighth leading cause of death, ahead of car accidents, breast cancer
and AIDS. "It's like crashing two 747s a day," says Mark Blatt, who was
a family doctor for 20 years before he joined Intel, the world's
largest semiconductor-maker, to manage its health-care strategy. There
should, he says, be more outrage.
RICH PICKINGS
Improving computer systems, of course, would not eliminate all medical
errors. But most researchers believe that they would reduce them
dramatically. One study in America estimates that IT could prevent 2m
adverse drug interactions and 190,000 hospitalisations a year. Another
study reckons that electronic ordering of drugs can reduce medication
errors by 86%. By contrast, research published in March in the JOURNAL
OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION warns that IT, if the software is
badly designed, could actually increase errors. But almost everybody
agrees that well-designed IT is essential to improving quality in
health care.
The same goes for its cost, an increasing burden to ageing societies in
the rich world and even in poor countries such as China. HP's Mr Miller
reckons that redundancy and inefficiency account for between 25% and
40% of the $3.3 trillion the world spends on health care every year,
and could be eliminated with proper IT. A study from a clinical
research centre at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire reaches a similar
conclusion, estimating that a third of America's $1.6 trillion in
annual health-care spending (as of 2003) goes to procedures that
duplicate one another or are inappropriate.
Estimating how much IT could save, after taking account of the
considerable cost of applying it widely, is not easy. Writing in HEALTH
AFFAIRS, an American journal, in January, Jan Walker and five
colleagues (including Mr Bates) at the Centre for Information
Technology Leadership in Boston concluded that a fully interoperable
network of electronic health records would yield $77.8 billion a year
in net benefits, or 5% of America's annual health-care spending. This
includes savings from faster referrals between doctors, fewer delays in
ordering tests and getting results, fewer errors in oral or
hand-written reporting, fewer redundant tests, and automatic ordering
and re-fills of drugs. It does not include, however, perhaps the
biggest potential benefit: better statistics that would allow faster
recognition of disease outbreaks (such as SARS or avian flu).
The key word in all such estimates is always "interoperable", says Mr
Bates, pointing to the differences between two pilot programmes in
America. In one, the Californian city of Santa Barbara set up a
city-wide peer-to-peer network (in which the computers of different
practices and clinics can talk directly to one another). This allows
doctors, say, to pull up portable-document-format (PDF) files from one
another. But the information in them--text, with numbers buried in
it--is "unstructured" and so not very useful. It is the equivalent of
faster faxing, and not what people mean by interoperability.
The other American pilot, located in Indianapolis and managed by the
Regenstrief Institute, a non-profit medical-research organisation,
comes closer. It has created a city-wide network in which physicians
can, with the patient's permission, log on to a complete medical
history that includes all previous care at the 11 participating
hospitals. Already, the database contains 3m patient records, 35m
radiology images, 1.5 gigabytes of diagnoses, 20m order-entries by
physicians, and so forth. The key difference is that, wherever
possible, the data is entered in a structured and formatted form. Test
results are in neat rows and columns and tagged in a way that every
other computer can recognise and compare against other appropriate
numbers. This is the sort of IT solution that not only cuts waste and
errors, but also helps physicians to make better decisions.
What, then, would the ideal IT architecture of health care in future
look like? It would start, says Intel's Mr Blatt, with wireless data
entry by nurses and doctors. Practices and clinics would have secure
"Wi-Fi hotspots"--using a radio technology called 802.11--and staff
would walk around with small handheld devices that transmit all inputs
to the database in the back office. Another source of input might be
tiny radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips that are attached to
patients and send basic information when they come in range of a radio
field. Patients could also add inputs themselves. A firm called Health
Hero, for instance, makes a cute little device called a Health Buddy
that patients take home and plug into their telephone lines. A couple
of times a day, it asks them basic questions or takes their heart rate,
and sends the data to the doctor.
Behind the scenes, all this data would be formatted and stored
according to recognised standards. Contrary to widespread concerns,
this does not require a single central repository or any other
particular hardware architecture. Instead, it relies on common software
protocols and formats so that individual computer applications can find
and talk to one another across the internet. Most of these standards,
such as XML, SOAP and WSDL, already exist and are used by many
industries. Others, such as HL7, LOINC or NCPDP (spelling them out
makes them sound no less obscure) are unique to the health-care
industry and govern data interchange between hospitals, laboratories
and pharmacies. On top of these, there need to be hacker-proof layers
of authentication and password protection so that only the right people
get access.
There is still some work to do to refine these technologies. In
January, eight of the world's largest IT companies--Microsoft, Oracle,
IBM, HP, Intel, Cisco, Accenture, and Computer Sciences--teamed up to
form an "interoperability consortium" for that very purpose. In
general, however, "the technology is very, very ready," says Robert
Suh, the technology boss at Accenture, a consultancy that is helping
Britain's National Health Service (NHS) and regional governments in
Australia and Spain to implement electronic health records.
In fact, Britain's--or rather England's--NHS is among the pioneers
worldwide. This year, it will begin rolling out a GBP6.2 billion ($12
billion) project in which five regions in England will form networked
IT"clusters" so that 18,000 NHS sites, including all family doctors and
acute-care hospitals, can share standardised information on patients.
These clusters will eventually be linked through a "spine" (called the
N3 and run by BT) with huge bandwidth to create, in effect, one
national network. Scheduled to be completed by 2010, the plan, like
most IT projects, has had some early hiccoughs and has been greeted
with cynicism by some doctors. But other countries will be looking to
it as a model.
Another pioneer is Denmark, which began rolling out a similar network
for the region around Copenhagen in 2001 and expects to complete it by
2007, before covering the rest of Denmark. Torben Stentoft, the boss of
Hvidovre Hospital in Copenhagen and the head of the city's network,
says that his main concern is the nitty-gritty of dealing with all of
his legacy computers which need to be tweaked or replaced. But he feels
that he has his society's full support. "Nobody is against this.
Everybody is asking for it," he says. In particular, the Danes find
nothing terribly controversial in the idea of a national health
identification number, which they already have, and spend little time
worrying about how to fund the new systems, since their tax kroner are
doing that.
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
Mr Stentoft is in an enviable situation, especially if viewed from
America, which has the world's largest and costliest health-care
system. America is as enthusiastic as any country about electronic
health records. President George Bush has embraced the idea, and he
spoke about it publicly some 50 times last year. He has even appointed
a "national co-ordinator for health information technology" to create a
fully interoperable, nationwide network within ten years. But America's
health-care system is so different from others that it faces some
special complications.
The first big difference is that, whereas most other rich countries
have "single-payer" (ie, government-run) health-care systems, America
has a highly fragmented industry with many private providers and
insurers doing business alongside large government programmes (such as
Medicare, for old people). This means that in funding a new IT
infrastructure "the financial incentives are not exactly aligned," says
Mr Bates. In single-payer systems, the expenditures come out of the
same pocket--the taxpayer's--that the savings go into. But in America,
he estimates, the practices and hospitals that pay for the IT only get
11% of the cost savings, with the rest going to insurers and employers
(who buy the insurance). The resulting mismatched incentives, says Mr
Bates, could derail the entire project: "It's a situation where America
could end up far behind."
This calls for some combination of government subsidies and
private-sector financial incentives, argues the Markle Foundation, a
charity in New York that is dedicated to the proper use of IT in health
care and national security. Over half of all doctors in America work in
small practices. And, say Markle's researchers, a typical practice
(defined as five doctors handling 4,000 patient-visits a year) would
make losses if it had to pay the estimated $15,000 a year for three
years that it costs to install an interoperable IT system and to learn
how to use it.
The practices, Markle concludes, therefore need incentives of $3 to $6
per patient-visit, or $12,000 to $24,000 a year, which comes to $7
billion-14 billion a year for three years, or between 1.2% and 2.4% of
total ambulatory-care revenues. The trickier question is how to
administer this largesse, whether it is provided by insurers and
employers or the government. The money could be disbursed directly and
specifically for the IT systems. Or it could be given indirectly in
some sort of pay-for-performance arrangement.
The other big difference between America and countries such as Denmark
is public perception of the robustness of privacy laws. The European
Union has stricter privacy laws than America, and Europeans have
relatively more confidence in them. For information sharing, "ours is a
much more porous environment," says Alan Westin, a professor at
Columbia University who has written several books on privacy issues.
This is not primarily an IT issue, although the internet does seem to
raise the stakes. In February, one database broker, ChoicePoint, had to
inform some 140,000 people that it had accidentally sold sensitive
information about them. Also in February, a statistician of the health
department in Palm Beach County, Florida, inadvertently e-mailed a list
of more than 6,000 HIV carriers to all employees of the department.
This makes many Americans suspicious of plans that involve sharing
sensitive health information. Although opinion polls in Europe show
overwhelming support for interoperable medical databases as long as
these are properly regulated, a February poll by Harris Interactive
found that Americans are currently evenly split, with 48% saying that
the benefits outweigh the privacy risks, and 47% saying the opposite.
Some 70% of Americans in the poll worried that sensitive data (on
sexually transmitted diseases, say) might leak.
This is unfortunate, says Michael Callahan, a health-care lawyer at
Katten Muchin Zavis Rosenman, a law firm in Chicago, since a weighty
tome of legislation was passed in 1996 precisely to prevent such leaks.
Called HIPAA (short for "health insurance portability and
accountability act"), the law defines strict codes for sharing medical
data and takes effect in stages, with a large chunk of compliance
falling due this month. HIPAA creates a national "floor", says Mr
Callahan, with some states following even stricter statutes, and
involves the federal government in enforcement and prosecution. HIPAA
is not quite as strong as equivalent laws in Europe, he thinks, but
strong enough.
Mr Westin disagrees. The HIPAA rules are "not at all adequate" for
shared medical records, he says. So the only way to sell such records
to the American public, he says, is to design the whole system with
privacy as a priority. This rules out any form of medical
identification card, to which Americans would be hostile (even though
they think little of giving their social-security numbers, a de facto
ID, when renting DVDs). It also means avoiding a central database that
could be hacked. The best approach, says Mr Westin, is to emulate the
"locators" used by American police. Cops in California who arrest a New
Yorker cannot access information about that person directly, but can
view a directory of such information and request it from the
authorities in New York. Finally, rather than allowing sceptics to opt
out of the new system, says Mr Westin, the system should from the start
require patients actively to opt in.
As the Markle Foundation puts it, the technology must be designed in
such a way that "decisions about linking and sharing are made at the
edges of the network" by patients in consultation with their doctors,
and never inside the network. This goes to the very heart of the
matter. For even though it is fine to start hoping for the day when
interoperable electronic health records create vast pools of medical
information that could be used to find new cures and battle epidemics
in real time, their ultimate purpose is to make one simple and
shockingly overdue change: to enable individuals, at last, to have
access to, and possession of, information about their own health.
See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3909439
The idea behind DayJet is a lot simpler than the technology it takes to make it happen. Many regional travelers are spending whole days going to airports, sitting in airports, flying to hubs, changing planes, and sitting in more airports that they could almost drive faster to their final destination. By going point-to-point when the passenger wants to fly, DayJet replicates that driving experience, but with a chauffer and at over 400 mph.
The difference between DayJet and a traditional aircraft charter is that all you'll be chartering is the seat you are sitting in. That means if you take a friend it costs twice as much, but it doesn't mean that you are paying for seats you don't use. And unlike a charter, DayJet won't charge for sending the plane to pick you up -- only for when you are actually in that seat.
Only time will tell if this concept is successful. I'm for it. Imagine skipping security lines and regional hubs and going right where you want to go.
David Cullen (D-Milwaukee) plans to introduce legislation that would lower the state gas tax by 0.05 per gallon for the summer.
This seems unwise...
At some point, there will be too many (I'm not all that much of a fan). Ryan Masse dives in:
Noah’s Ark water park in Wisconsin Dells currently lies in a state of hibernation, a fact of life for any outdoor attraction residing in the upper Midwest.When the park reopens next month, it will be greeted by new competition — although not in the Dells. Instead, the challenge will come from Six Flags Inc., which will unveil its brand new Hurricane Harbor water park on the grounds of its Great America Theme Park in Gurnee, Ill.
There appears to be an anomaly in the relative market valuations of SBC and Verizon due to differences in how they report wireless results.
I am challenging anyone to account for the 25% premium enjoyed by Verizon shares over SBC.
Everyone seems to think Verizon is the larger company, but SBC is larger by revenues and customer counts for celluar, LD, DSL, and Data. The two report the same number of total access lines. SBC has somewhat better overall margins.
In a move that could rankle privacy advocates, Microsoft said Monday that it is adding the PC equivalent of a flight data recorder to the next version of Windows, in an effort to better understand and prevent computer crashes.
The tool will build on the existing Watson error-reporting tool in Windows but will provide Microsoft with much deeper information, including what programs were running at the time of the error and even the contents of documents that were being created. Businesses will also choose whether they want their own technology managers to receive such data when an employee's machine crashes.
I remember the first day of my Milwaukee Sentinel paper route. It was March, 5:00A.M. The 32 papers were dropped on a corner near my home. I drove my bike, picked up and counted the papers, placed them in my paper "bag" and slid up the hill while it was snowing that cold morning years ago.
I delivered them, biked home and enjoyed a warm breakfast.
I also remember my dad driving me around once each week (early!) with the extra large Sunday edition packed high in our station wagon's back seat. 132 copies on Sunday.
I also learned about selling newspaper subscriptions and collecting money. The subscription game was, in hindsight rather classic. Give some young kids a prize ("whomever sells the most at tonight's sales rally, gets a football"). The memory of that evening is clear. I won the football. I had to sell rather hard to get that last sale - the local sales manager drove me to a friend of my grandparents to make that last sale. It's interesting to think about these things today, 30 years later, in 2005, the internet era.
At the time, I did not grasp the far reaching implications of that last minute sale that gave me a football. Paid circulation was everything. The football was a cheap bonus to motivate the kids in the field. Today, the newspapers offer deals via direct mail, if at all. They've lost the family ties (I don't know how to get it back and I don't think it's coming back).
Years later, it seems that few young kids are delivering papers any longer. That income earning opportunity may have left years ago, gone to those old enough to drive cars (and cover a larger area faster than a kid on a bike). I wonder if this loss of a classic early job with its family/community ties (Sunday's heavy paper required a parent's support via a car) was one of the many 1000 cuts that is laying the newspaper gently down to die, as Jay Rosen says.
Paper Route links at clusty. Paper Boy Blues The Tipping Point
Jim Greer sent along a followup to my link to David Hackworth's comments on Desert One. Greer suggests reading "The Crisis" - views of the rise of militant islam in Iran from the Carter Administration.
Glenn Fleishman discusses bluetooth (short range wireless networking) on this Macworld podcast. MP3 Audio
Talk of the nation covers municipal networking. This was a useful show - very pro consumer/municipal broadband.
Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk surely had her eye on Herb Kohl's U.S. Senate seat until Kohl indicated he'll seek re-election next year.If I were Kathleen, and I'm not, I would run for Governor.
Now Falk may be contemplating a bid for attorney general -- even if incumbent Peg Lautenschlager wants to keep the job.
When I asked Falk recently if she might challenge Lautenschlager, she paused for a few moments. Then she carefully responded: "Wherever I go, people are encouraging me to run."
April 24 and 25 marked the 25th anniversary of “Operation Eagle Claw,” Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated attempt to salvage his presidency by rescuing 53 Americans held hostage in Tehran by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. It’s also the date of one of the U.S. military's worst self-inflicted public humiliations.Hackworth also discloses the apparent "real" reason the mission was aborted.
By the time the joint mission was canceled, eight American warriors – five from the Air Force, three from the Marines – had been killed, and dozens were wounded.
His new disc will be produced using new dual-disc technology, and he's about to hit the road on a solo tour. The rock legend performs "Jesus Was an Only Son"itunes
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its figures for the fastest-growing large counties in terms of job growth last week, and Rutherford County, Tennessee came in on top at 9.2 percent.
Small businesses' hiring habits played no small role in the number of jobs created and lost, according to Brian Headd, economist at the Small Business Administration.
“"hen a large company lays off thousands of employees it is national news, but in fact, the rise and fall of small businesses has a much greater effect on job growth than most people realize," said Headd.
Major Donald E. Vandergriff, US Army:
Sean Naylor has just published one of the best battle narratives ever written, but more than that, he has written a powerful story of the people behind the decisions and of those charged with their execution. The book is Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda (Berkley Books, March 2005), and it is now reaching the larger bookstores.
Danial Duane on seven climbers trapped in a storm on Yosemite's El Capitan last fall for six nights.
At the highest level (at least), spreadsheets should be treated as a corporate resource. For example, if you use spreadsheets for planning then you need to do everything you can to eliminate the possibility of error. And what do you do with corporate resources? You give them to the IT department which can implement proper testing and control procedures.
The real problem, of course, is that business managers don't know that there is a problem (actually, lots of problems) with spreadsheets, while IT regards spreadsheets as falling outside its jurisdiction. So spreadsheet management falls down a hole in the middle.
Enron made me very angry. We are all paying a tremendous price for the screw-up.Davis's Wisconsin based Alliant Energy has been in some hot water over investments in Brazil and a Mexican resort. Interesting to see this in the NY Times. I wonder if this piece was "placed" by a pr firm?
These are powerful positions we executives hold. I have $8 billion at my disposal. We don't have that many checks and balances on us. You can lose perspective and start to think you're royalty. I think of these guys with their $10,000 shower curtains and I say to myself: "I could understand how they could do that." But I also understand why you shouldn't.
If you lose track of where you came from - and surprisingly, a lot of these people came from humble beginnings - you lose track of your moral compass, what work means to the average employee.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher said he would ask federal regulators Friday to approve the first clinical trial injecting special stem cells into the spinal cords of people with the degenerative nerve ailment called Lou Gehrig's disease.
The trial would test whether a technique anatomy professor Clive Svendsen has pioneered on rats afflicted with the disease is safe to use on people. If successful, Svendsen said a much larger clinical trial aimed at treating the disease could be under way in two or three years. ..... The research does not involve human embryonic stem cells, the blank-slate cells derived from human embryos that can be molded into any type of tissue cell in the body.
The circulation of daily U.S. newspapers is 55.2 million, down from 62.3 million in 1990. The percentages of adults who say they read a paper "yesterday" are ominous:Americans ages 8 to 18 spend an average of 6 hours and 21 minutes a day with media of all sorts but just 43 minutes with print media.
- 65 and older -- 60 percent.
- 50-64 -- 52 percent.
- 30-49 -- 39 percent.
- 18-29 -- 23 percent
The combined viewership of the network evening newscasts is 28.8 million, down from 52.1 million in 1980. The median age of viewers is 60. Hence the sponsorship of news programming by Metamucil and Fixodent. Perhaps we are entering what David T.Z. Mindich, formerly of CNN, calls "a post-journalism age."
It's an interesting experience: You get to hone a topic to 90 seconds, memorize it, and talk into a camera in an isolated room. Plus, they send a limo for you. (It's possible they pay, but I forgot to ask.) They're nice people and were happy with the two pieces I did for them. But...
They want reports on what moderate left and right wing bloggers — "Nothing out of the mainstream," the producer told me yesterday — say about a "major" topic. What the hell does that have to do with blogging? And when two of the producers yesterday independently suggested that I report on the blogosphere's reaction to a Vietnam veteran spitting on Jane Fonda, I blurted out — because the flu had lowered my normal Walls of Timidity — that this wasn't a job I'm comfortable with.
This is the Urban Madison web site. It is a home for informations and discussions about preserving the unique urban environment that we have in Madison.
It is for people that live in, work in, shop in, or do just about anything in urban Madison.
Our efforts to Save the Woman's Building is what brought us together to discuss issues like this. We look forward to your participation in our neighborhoods and discussions.
"I'm a short, fat guy who runs every day," Dr. Blair said in a recent phone interview. "I've run tens of thousands of miles over the past 40 years, and in that time I've gained 30 pounds."
This doesn't exactly please Dr. Blair. (People who are skinny and never exercise "are going straight to hell," he said, "because they're living in paradise now.") But he was using himself, he said, to illustrate why the federal government's new physical activity recommendations, which are clearly aimed at the alarming rise in obesity in America, are misleading. Even though he has been doing what the guidelines advise for decades, it hasn't controlled his weight.
Frank Hayes offers some useful comments on the perils of CEM (Customer Elimination Management using CRM - Customer Relationship Management Software):
Siebel was built, inside and out, on CRM. Siebel was all about automating CRM as a business process.Trouble is, customer relationship management isn't primarily a business process that can be automated. Real management of customer relationships is a culture, a strategy, a way of doing business.
And too many organizations use CRM in a way that marketing guru Herschell Gordon Lewis has dubbed CEM -- customer elimination management.
They don't use CRM software to help good salesmen do a great job. Instead, they feed customers into the CRM sausage machine, a mechanical data-grinder that combines a phony familiarity -- strangers in a call center who know everything about the customer -- with a relentless, robotized drive to sell, sell, sell.
He says, "As a pastor I have a very real sense of the importance of local dailies and even crappy ol' free weeklies to build community, or foment division if that's what clarity brings. Some regular platform for cueing the 20 percent of any town, village, or city that actually get things done as to what needs doing, or stopping, is incredibly important. I can't figure out what that would look like in Midwestern communities without a newspaper, but I'm afraid that folks who are concerned about big-C Community had better start imagining, fast."
“I BELIEVE too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers, ”Rupert Murdoch, the boss of News Corporation, one of the world's largest media companies, told the American Society of Newspaper Editors last week. No wonder that people, and in particular the young, are ditching their newspapers. Today's teens, twenty- and thirty-somethings “don't want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what's important,” Mr Murdoch said, “and they certainly don't want news presented as gospel.” And yet, he went on, “as an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably, complacent.”Download Murdoch's speech for free from audible.com
Adam L. Penenberg comments on the two firms similarities.
It would be a tragic mistake to underestimate the potential market power Skype is accumulating. According to Skype’s own figures from VON Canada, they’re sustaining a growth rate of 1000% a year. Just another 2 years of this growth and they would have over 200 million concurrent users online. This is not beyond plausibility given how Skype and broadband are symbiotically driving adoption of one-another; the addressable market is exploding too.
That means even if you’re a mega-telco — a Verizon or a Vodafone — you’re screwed. You can create your own Private Voice Application, and start marketing it to your early-adopter users, but who ya gonna call? Ain’t nobody but Skypers out there. Want some Skype presence in your Vodafone-branded VoIP app? Gonna cost ya!
In the coming weeks, the city of San Francisco will request proposals for a plan for a community broadband network -- a network that can provide the people of San Francisco a blisteringly fast connection to the Internet at a fraction of the cost of Comcast and SBC.
That's the good news: The technology is here, it's cheap and cities across the country are doing it already.
But here's the bad news: During the next year of planning, you're going to be bombarded with messages about how the incompetent, bloated city bureaucracy is going to chase businesses from our town and waste millions of dollars on a fool's quest. It's not surprising; the cable and phone companies have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a wired infrastructure that the people of San Francisco can leapfrog for a fraction of the cost.
Some great Milwaukee photos, here.
Larry Magid interviews Gordon Moore (mp3) on "moore's law".
Citizens of the Dane County area gathered at the Senior Center in Madison Saturday morning as U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, and Congressman Rush Holt, D-New Jersey, discussed the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005.“[Promotion of voter security is] personal and something that I feel very strongly about,” Baldwin said.
Teams from Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis and in between participated in this weekend's spring soccer tournament at Reddan.
The fast-food franchise has now been around for half a century, and has 30,000 outlets. The original store in Illinois sold burgers for 15 cents. The company says it now serves 50 million people a day.One must also listen to Marc Knopfler's "Boom Like That", which quotes McDonald's founder Ray Kroc extensively. And, read - Fast Food Nation.
This benefit - the ability to plug your iPod or other portable audio device, into a car stereo seems trivial. Unfortunately, it's a rarity. GM deserves credit for opening up - that is, allowing any audio device to plug into their car systems.....
David Kirkpatrick & Philip Shenon take a fascinating look at former Christian Coalition head, current lobbyist and lietenant governor (Georgia) candidate Ralph Reed:
In Washington, federal investigations of Mr. Abramoff, a close ally of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, have revealed that Mr. Abramoff paid Mr. Reed's consulting firm more than $4 million to help organize Christian opposition to Indian casinos in Texas and Louisiana - money that came from other Indians with rival casinos.Ralph Reed Clusty SearchMr. Reed declined to comment for this article; he has said publicly that he did not know that casino owners were paying for his services and that he has never deviated from his moral opposition to gambling. But the episode is a new blemish on the boyish face that once personified the rise of evangelical Christians to political power in America.
The Economist provides several useful tax simplification pointers. I wonder if I'll live to see the day that we have a rational, sensible tax system...
The United States, which last simplified its tax code in 1986, and which spent the next two decades feverishly unsimplifying it, may soon be coming to a point of renewed fiscal catharsis. Other rich countries, with a tolerance for tax-code sclerosis even greater than America's, may not be so far behind. Revenue must be raised, of course. But is there no realistic alternative to tax codes which, as they discharge that sad but necessary function, squander resources on an epic scale and grind the spirit of the helpless taxpayer as well?more here
The head of the country's largest phone company ridiculed San Francisco's interest in building a municipal Wi-Fi network that is designed to offer cheap or free Internet service throughout the city.I might agree with Seidenberg IF the incumbent telco's provided true broadband, which they don't (we're stuck at very slow, costly speeds compared with Japan & Korea).
"That could be one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard,'' said Ivan Seidenberg, chief executive officer of Verizon Communications, during a meeting with Chronicle editors and writers on Friday. "It sounds like a good thing, but the trouble is someone will have to design it, someone will have to upgrade it, someone will have to maintain it and someone will have to run it."
Colleges and training programs aren't keeping up with the demand for skilled workers in a variety of industries, the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development has found. Rough state projections show Wisconsin needs 2,430 registered nurses to enter the work force each year until 2012. But in 2004, only 1,755 nursing graduates took the state exam to become registered nurses.Meanwhile, Joel Dresang writes in the Milwuakee Journal-Sentinel that we don't have enough jobs for graduates.
Wisconsin's construction industry needs a projected 1,020 new carpenters a year, but only 340 carpentry graduates are coming out of the state's apprenticeship and tech college programs.
"In many cases, the jobs aren't here," says Karen Stauffacher, assistant dean and director of the Business Career Center at UW-Madison.
As of last week, more than a third of the job offers accepted by the business school's spring graduates were with companies based in Minneapolis (18% of the accepted offers) and Chicago (17%).
Only 31% of accepted offers were from Wisconsin employers, mostly in Madison (13%) and Milwaukee (8%). On average, the Chicago employers offered salaries $10,000 higher than in Madison, and Minneapolis companies offered about $7,000 more.
Jules Verne died 100 years ago this spring. We'll talk about his legacy to literature and science, and take a look at two research projects he might have appreciated: drilling to the center of the Earth and finding the right place to live on the Moon.audio
From Taxprof.
We have Big Media to thank for saving Americans from themselves. Just as the notion of affordable broadband for all was beginning to take hold in towns and cities across the country, the patriots at Verizon, Qwest, Comcast, Bell South and SBC Communications have created legislation that will stop the “red menace” of community internet before it invades our homes.Slashdot discussionAnd to think that Americans might want to receive high-speed access at costs below the monopoly rates set by these few Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
"It's just another example of smoke and mirrors," said Paul S. Wickert, owner of Acc-U-Rite Tax & Financial Services Inc., a tax preparation firm on Milwaukee's south side. "They show you a 20 percent rate with one hand while their other hand is in your back pocket" grabbing more. The AMT tax rate varies from 26% to 28% of earned income, while regular tax brackets go from 10% to 35%.
The impact is especially great for large, middle-class families in states with high income and property taxes, such as Wisconsin. The AMT disallows deductions for local taxes, and does not take into account all of the personal exemptions allowed under the regular tax law.
A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of inflation. Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that "people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.
The Walker is one of the country's liveliest and most personable museums. It has been collecting shrewdly and imaginatively for the better part of a century. Of the several hundred works from its permanent holdings that make up its reopening suite of seven inaugural shows, many are being shown for the first time, and very few strike me as expendable. And now there is room for more.
Lesson No. 2 from Election ’05: Yes, whether I like it or not, chat rooms and community Web sites will be a factor in politics and may even set the agenda. But it will always be the mainstream press that will be the unbiased fact checker. [emphasis added]We certainly have no shortage of fact checking examples from the mainstream media. My view is that the true fact checkers are an engaged public working in combination with writers, whether internet only or from the legacy media.
A little background on tractor Pulls. They began with farmers gathering on Sundays to see who had the best tractor. Farmers took turns pulling a flat stoneboat or sled onto which men jumped as it was pulled down a dirt track. When the weight was too much and the tractor stopped, the distance was measured. Tractor pulls took off as a sport with the advent of the modern "sled," which gradually adds downforce weight.
The Wileman brothers started a small tractor pull in Edgerton in 1995, Kraig says. "Kurt and I built the track and ran it for a few years."
When the 140-cow dairy herd of Crazy Acres was sold in 1998, the Wileman brothers got serious about tractor pulling.
A year later the boys were competing in local and statewide events with the Badger State Tractor Pullers Association. Their big boost came when they began using better engines.
And then you ultimately come up with the 1.5 million-word Internal Revenue Code that we have today, with six volumes of regulations.Lots more - check this out. There's also a useful discussion on the dreaded AMT. This is great:
Kathryn Keane: In the industry, we call tax simplification the tax professionals' retirement plan, because every attempt to simplify it has just made it more and more deadly.
A rather illuminating chart from Defense & the National Interest. PDF Version.
Did you know that we are spending as much on defense as we did during the height of the Cold War? Yet many of our military leaders tell us they don't have enough money and that we need to buy more modern and expensive weapons to assure our national security.Time to rethink...
Machines don't fight wars. People do, and they use their minds. - Col John R. BoydMilitary action is important to the nation—it is the ground of death and life, the path of survival and destruction, so it is imperative to examine it. - Sun Tzu, The Art of War
An investigation by the firm's Anglo-Dutch parent Reed Elsevier determined that its databases had been fraudulently breached 59 times using stolen passwords, leading to the possible theft of personal information such as addresses and Social Security numbers.
There is an enormous difference between Jim Doyle, the candidate for Governor in 2002, and Jim Doyle, the Governor. As a candidate, no one spoke more forcefully or more often about the need to restore integrity to Wisconsin's state government through campaign finance reform. As governor, no one has put more distance between his campaign rhetoric and his actual performance on this issue.
"What is all the money going for?" the 60-year-old translator wondered last week. "I'm not seeing it in better services. Homeowners are becoming cash cows."Judging by the number of "Madison Property Taxes" inbound searches recently, this is a topic on many local homeowner's minds.
The spectacular boom in Washington area real estate prices over the last five years has been accompanied by staggering increases in home tax bills as many local governments have spurned significant tax cuts in favor of reaping billions more from homeowners.
The tale begins in 1881, when a Barcelona native stopped in Santa Fe on his way to settle in Colorado's San Juan Valley. Locals told him about something called a homestead opportunity. Finding the scenery and people of Santa Fe agreeable, he never completed the journey north to Colorado.
"Very smart, but not educated", the immigrant settled and built a business in his garden. Growing and selling jalapenos, carrots ("this big!"), corn, peppers and more, he married and raised five sons. The boys carried water to the garden from a nearby river seven (7!) times per day. Buyers quickly snapped up his two annual vegetable crops.
One of his sons (the shuttle driver) served our country in the marines from 1949 to 1969, starting at Camp Pendleton, moving to El Toro, Korea, Vietnam and Okinawa, becoming a DI (Sargeant). He served in Korea in 1950 and Vietnam from 1960 to 1965. It was "hell". "I have nine lives". A traveller asked what was the favorite part of his military service, "there must be one": "Furlough - getting out of hell, I could see my family".
Today, this 75 year old veteran spends his time driving a few shuttles each day from Santa Fe to Albquerque's Sunport, fly fishing (catch & release) near Taos, making an annual visit to relatives in Spain and checking up on his daughter and grandchildren.
As I left the early morning shuttle, he proudly mentioned that he starts the day with 100 pushups and shows off to younger guys by doing 25 one arm pullups.
 | Joe Palca:Fifty years ago, on April 12, 1955, the world heard one of the most eagerly anticipated announcements in medical history: Dr. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine worked. The vaccine turned a disease that once horrified America into a memory. |
Many years ago, one mustard dominated the supermarket shelves: French's. It came in a plastic bottle. People used it on hot dogs and bologna. It was a yellow mustard, made from ground white mustard seed with turmeric and vinegar, which gave it a mild, slightly metallic taste. If you looked hard in the grocery store, you might find something in the specialty-foods section called Grey Poupon, which was Dijon mustard, made from the more pungent brown mustard seed. In the early seventies, Grey Poupon was no more than a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year business. Few people knew what it was or how it tasted, or had any particular desire for an alternative to French's or the runner-up, Gulden's. Then one day the Heublein Company, which owned Grey Poupon, discovered something remarkable: if you gave people a mustard taste test, a significant number had only to try Grey Poupon once to switch from yellow mustard. In the food world that almost never happens; even among the most successful food brands, only about one in a hundred have that kind of conversion rate. Grey Poupon was magic.
"Medicine tolerates behavior that in any other industry would be unacceptable," said Lucian Leape, a physician and expert on patient safety who teaches at the Harvard School of Public Health. "There are patients' lives at stake . . . and that's more important than a doctor's career."Part 2
"I was sort of disappointed after the election because my friends in Wisconsin had their spirits down," Bush campaign manager Karl Rove said Saturday night. "You seem to think you came up short, and you did in the Electoral College. But without your effort here, we wouldn't have won. You don't fight someone just in one place, you fight them all along the line and make them spread their resources. You scared the heck out of [Kerry]."In front of a GOP-packed audience at the Waukesha County Lincoln Day Dinner, the former top Bush campaign manager and current White House deputy chief of staff spoke candidly about the campaign, his relationship to President Bush, and his pride in the people of Waukesha County.
Spivak & Bice harvest email from a dental claims provider:
"It's clear to me that (Jim) Doyle is going to win. . . . McCallum is a stiff," wrote Borca, the multimillionaire founder of a slew of Milwaukee-area companies. "I'm having dinner at a friend's house tonight (Jack Goodsitt) who is a good buddy of Doyle . . . there will only be four of us, and he set it up so I could get to talk with Doyle.Doyle has raised more money at a faster rate than former Governor Tommy Thompson."I'm giving Doyle ten grand with the same understanding of our personal meeting about Medicaid. . . . I hate giving money to a democrat, but we sent 50 grand to NJ, and will now win the dental carve-out. I'm hoping you will help offset my Doyle expense to the tune of 2 grand . . . if you don't want to, I'm still going to do it, as I did mccallum . . . let me know."
Laura Rich:
As James Surowiecki writes in the April 11, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, innovation has fallen almost entirely upon the shoulders of small businesses; big companies can't manage it anymore. They're still spending money on research and development, but those budgets have shrunk dramatically in most cases, and many are outsourcing R&D or forming R&D alliances with other big companies.Yet another reason why our politicians need to pull their head out and make true high speed networks a reality in Wisconsin...Surowiecki focuses on the decline of an innovation culture at Sony, which hasn't really been able to corner any market since the Walkman. While some may bemoan the disintegration of innovation out of such giants, it's really not so sad. New ideas that come from smaller businesses are often more exciting and groundbreaking (just look at many of the ideas that come from the Inc. 500), and, as small businesses make up three-quarters of all businesses, perhaps even more essential to the health of the economy.
In Cleveland, thousands of confidential hospital records went flying when they fell off the back of a truck. The Cleveland Clinic says it will try to contact all who may have been affected by the lost documents.Audio
Fascinating set of speakers at UW Stevens Point's April 18, 2005 Youth Leadership Day, including Colin Powell, Shirley Abramson and many others. Via Wispolitics.
Philadelphia has officially released the business plan for "Wireless Philadelphia", the citywide wireless broadband network, and the RFP. They are using the Cooperative Wholesale model (similar to the model used by UTOPIA in Utah). You can also go to www.phila.gov/wireless to view these documents. There will be a web conference today at 15:00 Eastern time - details for joining the conference are here.via wifi net news
Dave Cieslewicz is hosting a fundraiser on 4.21.2005 @ the Overture Center starting at 5:30p.m. More info. Dave's ongoing campaign website.
CYNICS have long predicted that the Bush administration, plagued by budget deficits, will eventually start raising taxes. But now it is becoming clear how it would do so: the alternative minimum tax.Baffling in its complexity and often bizarre in its impact, the alternative minimum tax is a giant undeclared tax increase that will ensnare tens of millions of moderate-income families in the next several years.
 | I chanced upon a rather extraordinary afternoon recently at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The Museum is currently featuring a Degas sculpture exhibition, including Little Dancer. Interestingly, several ballerinas from the Milwaukee Ballet were present. Children could sketch and participate. I took a few photos and added some music. The result is this movie. Enjoy! |
The tickets for the event Thursday sold out in five minutes on the Internet, and on the evening itself the lines stretched down the block. The reverent young fans might as well have been holding cellphones aloft as totems of their fealty.Audio archive is available on Wilco's web site.
Then again, this was the New York Public Library, a place of very high ceilings and even higher cultural aspirations, so the rock concert vibe created some dissonance. Inside, things became clearer as two high priests of very different tribes came together to address the question of "Who Owns Culture?" - a discussion of digital file-sharing sponsored by Wired magazine, part of a library series called "Live From the NYPL."
Both Jeff Tweedy, the leader of the fervently followed rock band Wilco, and Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor who has opposed criminalizing file sharing, seemed to agree that just about anybody who owns a modem also owns - or at least has every right to download - culture products.
Most of the debate involves a handful of the new powers, such as government access to personal records from medical offices, libraries and businesses.Sensenbrenner suggested that most of the 16 temporary powers could be made permanent, but that a few would remain subject to a sunset, or expiration date.
"I think it's evident . . . there's not going to be a repeal of the sunset," Sensenbrenner said, referring to the fact that even some Republicans on his committee oppose making all the expiring provisions permanent.
Two major data brokers, a California elementary school and Google's Gmail service are leading contenders for the Big Brother Awards -- a dubious prize spotlighting organizations with egregious privacy practices.Award recipients will receive a statue of a golden boot stomping on a human head.
The nominees were among those on a list made public Wednesday by Privacy International, the British watchdog group that runs the annual U.S. Big Brother Awards. The group plans to announce winners on April 14.
The very special Milwaukee Art Museum currently features a Degas Sculptures exhibit. Several ballerinas from the Milwaukee Ballet performed a bit during this exhibit. The photo above was taken on a Saturday afternoon. Well worth the drive to.
Steve Wozniak passes along a story about how some folks deal with the unfamiliar.
Useful links & commentary on the state budget "process"....
"$310 million - we could buy a boat for everyone in the state to get across the river.”
-- JFC Co-Chair Scott Fitzgerald on the cost of the proposed Stillwater Bridge spanning the St. Croix River between Wisconsin and Minnesota in northwest Wisconsin.“This is a very technical Web site. This is not just Mapquest.”
-- DOT Secretary Frank Busalacchi defending the cost of a $650,000 interactive site for the Marquette Interchange.
United Airlines "was trying to put the squeeze on Air Wisconsin" when it put that business up for bid, said Michael Boyd, president of Boyd Group Inc., an aviation industry consulting firm in Evergreen, Colo.I think United might, perhaps be squeezing too hard (perhaps they have no choice). Having recently flown through Chicago, it seems that American's regional jet operation is less chaotic.....He said United's executives probably figured they could force Air Wisconsin to cut the prices it charges United Airlines to keep that business.
"Air Wisconsin ruined that little game" when it reached the agreement to provide financing to US Airways in return for getting a piece of its regional carrier business, Boyd said.
Herron put no money down for her tidy one-bedroom, borrowing the entire purchase price of $211,000. To keep her monthly payments as low as possible, she got an adjustable-rate mortgage that won't require her to pay any principal for three years.Thanks to her "interest-only" loan, the 911 police dispatcher was able to afford, barely, her first home. She now has a stake in California's sizzling real estate market. As her home increases in value, she plans to use some of that equity to pay down her credit cards.
GROWING numbers of policy analysts and politicians are saying that it may finally be time to consider a value-added tax as part of our federal revenue system. In years past, I would have been in the forefront of those denouncing the idea. But now, reluctantly, I have joined the pro-V.A.T. side. Here's why.There are many arguments against a value-added tax, which is essentially a sales tax that applies at each stage of production. It is costly to put into effect, and it hits the poor and the elderly hardest because they spend a higher percentage of their income.
When you look back, what products have inspired you to say, "Wow, that's a beautiful piece of work?"
Moore: Well, the ones I think of as landmarks were not necessarily beautiful pieces of work, but they turned out to be economically viable. The first dynamic RAM we made at Intel is with that category--the old 1103. It was a 1K DRAM and that was our first really big-revenue product. I guess I have to put the first microprocessor in that category too. It was very slow, but it did the job that it was designed to do. There've been a lot of things since that have been very important economically. I tend to think of them as more evolutionary products.
The Department of Homeland Security's privacy board chose as its chairman Paul Rosenzweig, a conservative lawyer best known in technology circles for his defense of the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness project. Bowing to privacy concerns, Congress pulled the plug on the program two years ago. Nuala O'Connor Kelly, the department's chief privacy officer, nominated Rosenzweig for the job during the group's first meeting in a downtown hotel here. Rosenzweig is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former Justice Department trial attorney.
Finally, Thompson voiced his regret just one day after Medicare's trustees announced that the drug benefit by itself has an unfunded liability 60 percent larger than that of the entire Social Security program. (The unfunded liability for all of Medicare is nearly six times that of Social Security.) Medicare's financial outlook has grown so dire that its two public trustees broke with the trustees who are members of Bush's Cabinet to say that it is in far worse shape that Social Security.
Mark Cuban on the death of the music cd.
The Dane County Clerk's website includes election results from races around the county. Wispolitics has statewide results here.
"My initial job was getting IP on everything," Cerf said. That's been done by now. IP is on every device from the smallest handheld to the largest supercomputer."Now we need IP under everything," he added. By this he meant that now that the computers are all connected, we need to make sure that every device can use and access any service or product available to any one device.
John Riley posted a very nice Quicktime VR Scene from Cartago, Costa Rica.
U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, whose name has become synonymous with campaign finance reform, is raising both his profile and thousands of dollars with his new leadership political action committee.Feingold, D-Wis., is using the PAC to fund political travel, like his high-profile trip to Alabama last week, and to make contributions to fellow Democrats as he tries to help the party regain the Senate next year.
Stuart E. Eizenstat, former U.S. ambassador to the European Union, will give a pair of talks on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus on Tuesday, April 12.Eizenstat will discuss his book, "Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor and the Unfinished Business of World War II," in Room 7200 at the UW Law School at 1:30 p.m.
Then, at 3 p.m., he will speak on "Transatlantic Relations in the Second Bush Term," at the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St. Eizenstat's talks, which are free and open to the public, are sponsored by the UW-Madison's European Union Center, in collaboration with the Office of the Dean of International Studies.
Aelera Corp. CEO Dustin Crane traveled to China, India and Armenia in a quest to buy or start up an offshore IT services company. After six months of searching, he returned to the U.S. and set up operations in the coastal city of Savannah and the smaller town of Fitzgerald, Ga., population 8,758.Two fantastic examples of what's possible. Unfortunatetly, it seems Wisconsin's political leaders aren't interested in laying the groundwork for the true high speed networks necessary for these type of opportunities to land here.....McKesson Corp. CIO Cheryl T. Smith estimates that the $8 billion pharmaceutical distributor is saving $10 million annually in salary costs—a percentage of which is reinvested in IT innovation—after relocating its primary data center and about 75 IT jobs from San Francisco to Dubuque, Iowa.
These 30 aircraft will fly on some routes previously operated for United by Air Wisconsin Airlines. As the company indicated in an announcement to employees late last month, United also is considering reductions in the United Express fleet to further reduce spending on U.S. domestic capacity, given high fuel prices and the current fare levels.Air Wisconsin is based in Appleton and recently invested in US Airways as part of a deal to redeploy aircraft.
Ben Moga stays on top of his Alder race with Robbie Weber via his blog at www.votemoga.com
an Antonio considers municipal broadband network: A non-profit is working on a plan to offer low-cost Internet access to poorer residents of San Antonio and wants to work with the city to offer free wireless hotspots. The Texas house bill that prohibits municipal networks would disallow this kind of cooperation.
Ron Gremban and Felix Kramer have modified a Toyota Prius so it can be plugged into a wall outlet.This does not make Toyota happy. The company has spent millions of dollars persuading people that hybrid electric cars like the Prius never need to be plugged in and work just like normal cars. So has Honda, which even ran a commercial that showed a guy wandering around his Civic hybrid fruitlessly searching for a plug.
But the idea of making hybrid cars that have the option of being plugged in is supported by a diverse group of interests, from neoconservatives who support greater fuel efficiency to utilities salivating at the chance to supplant oil with electricity. If you were able to plug a hybrid in overnight, you could potentially use a lot less gas by cruising for long stretches on battery power only. But unlike purely electric cars, which take hours to charge and need frequent recharging, you would not have to plug in if you did not want to.
Lights made by Orion generate less heat and consume 50% less power than standard industrial lighting. Even more significant: Orion lights require fewer fixtures, and while factories and warehouses that use them are brighter, they use less electricity. That's a big deal for manufacturers always looking to cut costs to stay competitive.
Guess what, folks? As you were checking out the Easter bonnets, our warriors were still paying the ultimate price in Iraq. Yes, America, the war in Iraq is still on the boil. We’re approaching 1,600 dead plus approximately 15,000 battle-wounded, along with thousands upon thousands of nonbattle casualties – a deeply guarded Pentagon secret – from accidents, sickness or stress disorders.Lest we forget the sacrifices young men and women are making daily on our nation’s behalf, here's one e-mail from the barrage we and Soldiers for the Truth (SFTT.org) receive weekly, a father sharing a letter from his son “who is helping run the port in Kuwait where young heroes arrive in the war zone and depart from months later.” As Dad puts it, “If this doesn't bring a tear to your eye, nothing will.”
So haul out your hankies and read on for some serious über-reality:
By analyzing new-car sales, surveying car owners and keeping count of political bumper stickers, they are identifying the differences between Democratic cars and Republican ones.Among their findings: buyers of American cars tend to be Republican - except, for some reason, those who buy Pontiacs, who tend to be Democrats. Foreign-brand compact cars are usually bought by Democrats - but not Mini Coopers, which are bought by almost equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. And Volvos may not actually represent quite what you think.
Murray Chass takes an interesting look at the ongoing feud between former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent and ex-Milwaukee Brewer Owner and current Commissioner Bud Selig.
Designed by Albert Kahn, opened to the public in 1904. The Belle Isle Aquarium is North America's oldest continuously operating public aquarium. The aquarium is the home of 146 species, many of these are native Michigan fish. The building itself is a one of kind. The interior is a classic example of early 20th century architecture.
