Bill Cosby to visit Milwaukee’s North High School

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Georgia Pabst on Bill Cosby’s visit to Milwaukee North on October 20, 2004 (6 to 9p.m.); 1101 W. Center St.

The gathering was announced Friday by Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who worked with the Metropolitan Milwaukee Alliance of Black School Educators and the Wisconsin Black Media Association to bring about the Cosby appearance.
Barrett said he hoped the discussion would deal with the importance of education and how the community can tackle and develop solutions to educational disparities and other challenges.
Cosby first raised a national storm in May during a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring an end to school segregation. He decried the lack of emphasis on education in the black community and challenged parents to greater accountability. Though he earned rebukes from some commentators, others praised him for speaking out.

Debra Dickerson covers Cosby…

Google Conforms to Chinese Censorship

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Michael Liedtke:

Google Inc.’s recently launched news service in China doesn’t display results from Web sites blocked by that country’s authorities, raising prickly questions for an online search engine that has famously promised to “do no evil.”
Dynamic Internet Technology Inc., a research firm striving to defeat online censorship, conducted tests that found Google omits results from the government-banned sites if search requests are made through computers connecting to the Internet in China.
Steered by an identical search request, computers with a United States connection retrieved results from the sites blocked by China.
“That’s a problem because the Chinese people need to know there are alternative opinions from the Chinese government and there are many things being covered up by the government,” said Bill Xia, Dynamic’s chief executive. “Users expect Google to return anything on the Internet. That’s what a search engine does.”

Let Google know how you feel about their support of Chinese censorship: press@google.com

Bonuses for Good Doctors

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1. Over the last year, six California health plans have been monitoring the performance of 45,000 doctors. The top performers will split a bonus pool of $40 to $60 million

2. 35 health plans, covering some 30 million patients, now tie doctor bonuses to performance. Preventive care and measure to encourage “patient follow-up” receive special rewards.

3. Bonus-based coverage is expected to double in size over the next year.

4. Some experts predict that pay-for-performance eventually will account for 20% to 30% of what the federal government pays health care providers.

The insurance companies feel that better doctor performance will lower their long-run costs. Many doctors don’t like these incentives. Their financial risk is increased, and they cannot always control how well the patient sticks to the prescribed regimen. Still, if greater medical skill does not show up in the numbers, over a reasonably large sample of patients, why do we spend so much time and money educating doctors?

I predict that as information technology progresses, and performance becomes easier to measure, the American economy will resort to many more bonuses of this type, across many professions.

Here is the story, WSJ subscription and password required.

By the way, regular MR readers will not be surprised to learn who first wrote up the idea of rewarding doctors for superior performance: our ever-inventive colleague Robin Hanson. More recently Harvard economist David Cutler has promoted the idea as well.

For those who care: Here is a thorough AEI estimate of the cost impacts of the Kerry and Bush health care plans. If you are concerned about our fiscal future, this makes for scary reading.

Tyler Cowan

Taxpayers get to pay Twice?

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A number of government agencies are circumventing open public records access via fees or “National Security. The result is that we get to pay twice, or more (collection and management of information along with overlapping distribution costs). Here are some examples:

  • “subscription”: Access Dane
  • The state’s highest court will now decide a landmark public records case involving access to aerial reconnaissance photographs and maps of Greenwich, CT. The town maintains the images in a tightly kept database known as a geographic information system, which a judge declared to be public records last December. The Connecticut Supreme Court announced Monday that it will hear the town’s appeal of that ruling, expediting the case by leap-frogging the state Appellate Court. The move virtually coincides with the third anniversary of the initial complaint in the case, which Greenwich resident and computer consultant Stephen Whitaker filed with the state Freedom Information Commission after the town denied his request for an electronic copy of the entire database for security and privacy reasons.”

The Greenwich case is absurd. We (taxpayers) pay for all of this…. Via Slashdot.
Email Mayor Dave (mayor at madison dot com ) and County Exec Kathleen Falk (falk at co.dane.wi.us) and let them know your thoughts on taxpayer funded public records access.
Most importantly, support the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Protect your electronic rights.

True Broadband & Economic Development

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James Carlini:

Horse-and-Buggy Infrastructures:
More politicians will eventually wake up and smell the fiber.
There was at least one speaker who put it squarely on the shoulders of local and state politicians ?who just don?t get it? when it comes to understanding what?s needed to keep this country viable. It was refreshing to hear a politically accurate statement come out of D.C.
In Iowa where 80 percent of the state is rural, they built the Iowa Communications Network (ICN), which was the nation?s first fiber-optic network owned and administered by the state. Its original intent was so rural students would have the same access and advantages that students had in urban Iowa.
The first locations were lit in 1993. By 1997, the ICN logged 182,386 hours. In 1999, there were more than 800 sites with session hours at more than 400,000. This network has improved the infrastructure of Iowa and they have increased the applications to telemedicine and other capabilities.

The Longevity Gene

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Lisa Scanlon:

n his laptop computer, biology professor Leonard Guarente plays a video clip of 29-month-old mice hobbling around a cedar-chip-filled cage. They?re scruffy, fat, slow moving, and over the hill by rodent standards. Then he plays a clip of another group of 29-month-old mice. They?re svelte, frisky, and scrambling around like adolescents. What?s their secret? These mice have eaten about two-thirds as many calories as their portly peers. Not only does the meager diet seem to keep them light in the limbs, but they tend to live 30 percent longer than their well-fed friends and are less likely to contract age-related diseases, such as diabetes and cancer.

Dartmouth pushes broadband – hard

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Alex Goldman:

Hanover, N.H.-based Dartmouth College is well-known in wireless circles for being one of the first colleges to embrace Wi-Fi technology. Recently, the college went through a network upgrade.
The original network, says Brad Noblet, Dartmouth director of technical services, cost $1.2 million. That covered 200 access points (APs) and the wiring they required. “Now we want to go to 1,500 APs.”
But that’s not all. The original Cisco APs were 802.11b only, and now the college wants to serve 802.11a, b, and g, using Aruba 52 APs.
Of course, the college doesn’t sell wireless, so that’s not the problem. “People on the campus love wireless. The challenge is capacity,” explains Noblet.
These are heavy users. Students do language lab classes from their own room using video over IP, for example, and Noblet admits that heavy use of video on the network presents a real capacity challenge.

Wisconsin: Squeezing the taxpayer….

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Steven Walters summarizes a variety of viewpoints on the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute’s recent study on state government spending (7.7% above the national average). The real crunch (and why the spending battles continue at the local and state level): Wisconsin’s income is 2.8% below the national average. [75K PDF]
This problem will not improve until our economy is increasingly based on high growth, valued added businesses. Wisconsin’s above average government spending was supported for decades by the state’s now declining manufacturing base. This change, which will take many years, requires an open mind, a willingness to avoid coddling and subsidizing declining industries, rethinking government spending (consolidating services and making sure the services we provide make sense in the 21st century) and doing everything we can to encourage business formation. It also requires economic and political leadership, which is, in my view, is generally lacking. (see this national example where the NAB has successfully kept public spectrum for TV stations). Note that TV viewer numbers are declining…..
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s latest budget caps the property tax increase @ 2%

Jayson Blair on Rathergate

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Jayson Blair, who brought down the NY Times Howell Raines comments on Rathergate:

It?s really sad to see what?s happening to Dan Rather and CBS, and no one knows like me what its like to lose their credibility. I would give anything to have it back. If I could turn back time, I would.

The fact that no members of the Main Stream Media (MSM) contacted Blair for comments speaks volumes.