More signs in the Athens of America
Back to our occasional review of signage seen in public places. The infrastructure geek in me likes to evaluate them for efficacy. The one above is from the Kennedy School at Harvard. Really terrible jokes and scenarios come to mind. And here is part of a very clever ad for a restaurant search engine, seen [...]
Twelve Hour Health IT "Glitch" at Allegheny General Hospital – But Patients Unaffected, Of Course…
At “Transplant Team at Univ. of Pittsburgh Medical Center Missed Hepatitis Result” I wrote about a kidney transplant gone bad at UPMC that may have been due to a computer “glitch.” Now Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh has suffered a “glitch” that shut down their entire health IT system for approximately 12 hours: Allegheny General [...]
Twice-told tale
Back in 2008, Charlie Baker, then CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and I, then head of a hospital, claimed that the market power displayed by the dominant provider system in the state and supported by the state′s largest insurer resulted in a large disparity in health care payments. We argued that this disparity contributed [...]
Conversion to open access
Stevan Harnad is arguing again that conversion of journals to open access is a distraction to self-archiving, which he believes will more quickly and broadly deliver open access. He suggests that publishers face a ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ in converting from toll access to open access. The prisoner’s dilemma is when two prisoners are being interrogated. If [...]
On e-books
The Economist has a pair of stories on the state of publishing and brick-and-mortar bookstores. An interesting case study on pricing. As I understand it, until recently Amazon paid a “wholesale″ price to publishers for e-books, and then Amazon set the retail price. Using a two-part pricing model, Amazon charged a low price for e-books [...]
