Future scientists?
ITRINEWs
One of the things that concerns me about the future (fret, fret!) is where the science resources to retain US leadership in the world is going to come from. Evidently the matter has gotten the attention of Congress. A report accompanying an energy bill says…
Info: slip-slidin' away
Here’s an article about a conference in Vienna on open source—software and other-ware—as a form of social reform. It echoes the Internet’s original mantra: “Information wants to be free.” The ethos of the meeting evidently endorses share and share-alike collectivism, and the author questions it.
Forget the retro-socialist rhetoric. The old capitalism/socialism debate seems pretty anachronistic these days. However, what seems to me crucial going forward is that we have not worked out the economics of the information economy.
Bureaucratic waste and health care
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine prepared by a Harvard researchers and the Canadian Inst. for Health Info. says that $.31 of every $1 for health care in the US goes for administrative costs, nearly twice that of Canada. Some $.17 goes for insurance company underwriting and advertising.
The punch line seems to be:
Researchers who prepared the comparison said on Wednesday that the United States wastes more money on health bureaucracy than it would cost to provide health care to the tens of millions of uninsured Americans.
On the other hand, someone from the Brookings Inst. says that the authors probably have exaggerated the figures by about 24%.
Hello! I help Non Profits and people for a living. I do that with Lights.Camera.Help and Ridgewood PR. I am a Teacher, Speaker, Blogger, Network Weaver, and Social Media Scientist. How can I help you? 