I was reluctant to enter this media frenzy about H1N1 flu (or whatever we end up calling it…), but only 8% of telephone respondents are “not concerned at all” about these events, so I thought I’d say something more than nothing.
Information technology’s main contribution so far has been the rapid spread of misinformation: for [...]
Entries from April 2009
April 29, 2009
Computers and the Flu
April 22, 2009
Earth Day and Auctions
Here’s a half-baked post that I started months ago. I decided to rush it to press for Earth Day, which is today.
The first U.S. auction for carbon emission pollution rights occurred in December of 2008. It raised over $38.5B, which will go to six states in New England. From ScienceNOW Daily News:
The [...]
April 20, 2009
California foreclosures, mosquitoes, and skate punks
Do you remember last summer’s health scare around the housing market collapse? There was a theory that all the swimming pools in all the foreclosed houses in California would become major mosquito breeding grounds, leading to major crops of mosquitoes, leading to West Nile virus or maybe even the reintroduction of malaria in [...]
April 18, 2009
Mysterious Question: Differences in Health Care Costs
Health Economist Jonathan Skinner gave a talk at IHME about a week and a half ago. He told us about his work on the Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare, and showed us some of the numbers he’s crunched on the variation of Medicare costs by region. He has found this mysterious, 2.5x variation between [...]
April 14, 2009
@healthyalgo is twittering
I guess I’m one to follow the latest fads. I have a blog, right?
I held off even considering “Twitter” for a long time, however. Who cares what I’m doing, right now, in 140 characters?
But that’s not actually what twitter is about (at least its not all that twitter is about). It’s more like [...]
April 6, 2009
Welcome to National Public Health Week
Since 1995, presidential decree has designated the first full week of April to be National Public Health Week in the United States. The American Public Health Association is kicking things off with an online “viral video” campaign. Public health has much more experience trying to stop the spread of viruses, so this campaign [...]
