Entries from May 2003 ↓

That’s the way the Blue Cross/Blue Shield parent organization sees it anyway. See, after a failed attempt to convert from a not-for-profit healthcare organization to another greedy for-profit group, CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield just had its Blue badge removed by the national organization. During the fractious fight over the conversion and sale to WellPoint Health Services — a US$1.3 billion deal which would have handed US$119 million in bonuses and merger incentives to the company’s top executives — the Maryland State Legislature passed a bill to restructure the private company. One of the bill’s major provisions required the Governor to appoint 10 members to the company’s 21-member board.

While 10 out of 21 isn’t a majority, it certainly lowers the bar for Maryland’s state government to strongly influence the outcome of any of the company’s actions. If any of the company’s by-laws require a super-majority, the boys in Annapolis have de facto veto power over this supposedly private corporation. Not too terrible when you have a governor who leans libertarian on social issues, but disastrous if/when the Holy Rollers take over the Statehouse.

And that power, according to the national Blue organization, amounts to a state takeover of CareFirst, violating the affiliation agreement which allows CareFirst’s 3.1 million subscribers access to their plan benefits outside their home area. The organization, which considers its independence from political influence an important asset, views the signing of this bill an immediate termination of the comapny’s affiliation, and if it had not been ordered to stay any such action by a Federal judge, they would have already demanded that CareFirst remove the blue logos from its identity.

Meanwhile, we subscribers to CareFirst are left in limbo. This is not the state-run healthcare system I envisioned.

Just a couple of program sponsors or underwriters which caught my attention recently on my local NPR affiliate station, WYPR:

Marketplace is sponsored by Bank One Corp., issuer of “more than 1200″ different credit cards! Many of these cards are co-branded, bearing logos and benefits from groups as diverse as Kampgrounds of America, your favorite college or university, stores, airlines, ASPCA, Disney and Starbucks. They have interest rates ranging from 7.15% to 14.24%, and annual fees ranging from US$0 to US$79 per year. (Actually, these numbers are taken from Cardoffers.com‘s survey of just 173 of Bank One’s cards.) Bank One is the 3rd largest issuer of credit cards in the US, but is this by volume or variety? Is there a company which issues more than 1200 different credit cards? Yikes!

The local programming on WYPR is sponsored in part by the Open Society Institute, one of George Soros‘ foundations. OSI has established a branch in Baltimore, dealing with “…critical national urban issues as they are expressed locally…” It’s a great program, but I just get a cynical grin when I hear the WYPR announcer say, “The Open Society Institute, committed to bringing the idea of democracy to” — this is where I smile — “Baltimore.” Gee, I wonder if they’ve thought of opening a branch a little further south. They could use some democracy down in DC…

…are the two things to have handy when you read this MeFi post and its links. As if the sufferers of fistula aren’t victimized enough, the Bush Administration’s cut of US$34 million in funding to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) only serves to increase their misery. In order to appease his rabid right-wing masters, the President’s funding cuts forced the UNFPA to reduce assistance to fistula programs in Africa, as well as causing them to

While researching my earlier piece related to women’s issues in South Asia, I came across the link to the 34 Million Friends program and donated immediately. I’ve also donated directly to the Fistula Hospital through Network for Good.

Coincidentally, my mother asked me the other day what she should to fight boredom when she finally retires. I just sent her the Salon article on the founders of the 34 Million Friends campaign.

Somehow, I wound up with a subscription to Business 2.0 magazine several years ago; I’ve kept the subscription going because it usually offers more thoughtful articles than the typical “Great Men — and Carly Fiorina — of Business” drivel one usually finds in such CEO-lebrity glossies as Fortune, Forbes, and Inc.

Biz2 always seemed a little smarter than that: it was the place I first encountered the terrific information graphics produced by Xplane — I think it was a pretty successful symbiotic relationship for the two companies. But then, after a lot of financial troubles, Business 2.0 was purchased by Time Warner/AOL, the publisher of Inc., and Fortune…

So, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was more than a little disappointed to read this month’s cover hagiography of Intuit‘s Steve Bennett, entitled, “The Hottest CEO in Tech“. The author spends most of his 3400 words describing how Bennett has made Intuit a much more successful company than it had been. That success is measured in increased profitability, market segmentation, cost-cutting, and — of course — the blessing of Wall Street. All valid indicators of success, but far from the only indicators.

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Nisha Sharma, a 21-year-old Indian bride-to-be, cancelled her wedding in the middle of the festivities and had her fiancee arrested for strong-arming her father for an extra dowry payment. Despite India’s 40-year-old ban on dowries, Miss Sharma’s dad had already come up with televisions, computers, refrigerators, a car and other household goods to give the couple — and an identical lot for the bridegroom’s brother(!) — when, just before the wedding, the groom’s family and friends started roughing her father up for an extra wad of cash.

Miss Sharma’s actions in calling off the marriage are so rare in India that she’s become an instant celebrity. And while it sounds to Western ears that this is a quaint story about nascent feminism in a backwards country, Miss Sharma’s actions take on much more weight when you realize the dangers faced by female children and brides in this country of 1 billion people.

There is a classic Hindu saying, still used today: “…the death of an ox is a misfortune but the death of a girl is a piece of good luck.”

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So, I didn’t watch the first season when it was first broadcast… does that make me a bad person? I’ve watched it pretty damned regularly since then, enjoying the smart writing, the sometimes-smart acting, and — I confess — especially the lesbian storylines. (Hey, if I can’t have Willow, I’m glad she’s not shacking up with any other guy!) And… I even made it through the dismal 6th season.

The final ep was an excellent sendoff… a dense, well-written and -plotted episode, with some terrific, non-gratuitous twists. When it was over, I was amazed that only an hour had gone by — and I mean that in a good way! So, now all the academics can get to work on their final theses and conferences about the show, since it is an officially “closed” text.

Me, I’m waiting for next fall, when my friend Randall says there’s gonna be a spinoff with Dawn and Willow, which, he claims, is going to be called “The Whiner, The Witch and Their Wardrobes.”

Supposedly, this Radio Userland thingie, will enable me to post my entries to my Radio weblog AND to my Movable Type weblog. This post means nothing in itself, but if it posts to both places, that’d be sweeeet.

…Jenn found this tiny little bird nest. The nest is conical and the 4 eggs are very light blue at one end, speckling down to a rusty brown at the other. They’re each about an inch in legth and we have no clue as to what kind of bird they belong to. Meanwhile, I figured I’d try the “My Pictures” tool of Radio to see how it works.

Been using Movable Type for the past year for my regular weblog — a clever sheep — and the collaborative weblog Guy and I maintain — participo. But for an exploratory project for work, Guy thinks Radio might be more appropriate. So…

…and The Register is just another weblog, despite Orlowski’s rants about blogs being nothing but idle chatter. After all, one of the most basic definitions of a weblog comes from Rebecca Blood‘s oft-referenced essay, “Weblogs: A history and Perspective“, where she defines a weblog as “a website that is updated frequently, with new material posted at the top of the page.” Sounds like a description of The Reg’s front page to me…

Orlowski also complains about the poor quality of information found in most weblogs, but he’s got blinders on when he’s looking at his own columns and his home publication, since his own writing is full of fantasies and misstatements. It’s sometimes claimed that one of the big differences between weblogs and “real” journalism is the absence of editors in weblogs. Well, if there’s an editor going over Andy’s work, she should think about another profession.

For instance, a real journalist — not a fantasist like Jayson Blair, or a third-rate pop-culture ranter/Dennis Miller wannabe like Orlowski — wouldn’t put quotation marks around an inflammatory statement by Professor Larry Lessig if Lessig had never made that statement. A real journalist wouldn’t then go on to title and build his entire article around that misquote. Typical Orlowski straw man tactics.

This latest straw man is just like his previous rant about the “blog noise problem”, which sprang from a wishful interpretation of a statement by Google’s CEO. Andy bases his baseless comments on such eminent sources as “Chris Roddy, a politics and linguistics undergraduate at the University of Emory” (if you’d run this claptrap past an editor, you’d find out that it’s actually “Emory University“, Andy) who was writing on Slashdot, a site I love, but one which is hardly known as a bastion of objective reporting. (Another minor quibble, Andy: Mr. Roddy’s post contained no capitalization, so when correcting it for an article, a real journalist would have noted the alterations.)

The straw man for this article is in this statement:

First of all, why assume there are one million bloggers? I can’t seem to find any reliable source for this number, although Blogger reported it had exceeded 1,000,000 registered users in January; LiveJournal reports more than a million registered users, with nearly a half-million “active” users; other weblogging packages, such as Movable Type, GreyMatter, b2 and Radio Userland don’t make their numbers as readily available. So, I guess “one million” was just a nice big number for Andy to use — one which can’t be proven and can’t be refuted.

Second of all, why “generously” assume 100 pages per blog? I’m hardly the longest-term or most prolific weblogger, and I’ve managed to put together 187 entries in my just-shy-of-a-year writing this weblog, each of which has its own page, as well as being represented on monthly pages, category pages, comment pages and trackback pages. Some webloggers certainly have fewer pages and there are many who have far more pages, but if asked how many pages are on the average webloggers site, a real journalist wouldn’t pull a number out of his ass like Orlowski does.

Third of all, if you are going to make up numbers, at least check your mathematics when you operate on them: 1 million bloggers x 100 pages each = 100 million pages; 100,000,000 ass-pulled weblog pages divided by the 3,083,324,652 total pages in Google’s index doesn’t work out to “0.032 per cent of web content indexed by Google.” It works out to 3.2 percent of web content. 2 orders of magnitude, Andy! That’d be like taking his US$50,000 per year salary (just a guess) and reducing it to US$500 per year. (He’d still be overpaid.) If we use his numbers, that means that 1 out of every 33 pages on the web belongs to a weblog. With that kind of penetration, it doesn’t take any anomalies in Google’s PageRank to account for the (claimed) prevalence of weblog pages in search results.

But the biggest lie in the paragraph results from Orlowski’s shameless misquoting of a Pew Internet & American Life Project study entitled The Internet and the Iraq war. The study says nothing about blog writers, and its mention of blog readers, which Orlowski grabs onto, is more complex than his simple-minded quotation. Here’s the full quote:

Notice the phrase “early data” and the absence of the quoted phrase, “statistically insignficant”. Unlike Mr. Orlowski, the Pew folks understand that “statistically insignificant” indicates a conclusion, while claiming that it is “not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions” indicates the inability to draw a conclusion. That’s because, in their methodology, the Pew researchers report that their survey indicates a “margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.” Meaning that, instead of being insignificant, it’s indeterminate.

Sorry for the extensive entry, but pompous morons with axes to grind really piss me off. I know several other webloggers (Fred at Ochsenshirt.com, and Andrew Ó Baoill at funferal.com, for instance) have commented on Orlowski’s fantasies, but I haven’t seen any analysis of his math skills. I know The Reg prides itself on “biting the hand that feeds IT”, but as long as they give Andy a platform, they just bite.