Social Networks for the life of the world
Rhetoric is the art of persuading people with words
The US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) national flood insurance program has a non-governmental competitor. Here’s a Times piece about a Brooklyn-based non-governmental outfit called First Street Foundation. They’ve put together an online address lookup scheme called Flood Factor that returns a risk of flood at a property. They claim that FEMA’s rating system, based … Read more
About time! the new Chromium-based Edge browser will show up on Windows 10 machines in this month’s update. For the cancelled Internet Explorer and Legacy Edge project people, I would have more sympathy if their work products hadn’t baffled software developers for a quarter-century. IE and old Edge were in the uncanny valley of compatibility. … Read more
Wow. Authorities finally figured what doctors have been saying for years. EHRs suck time and attention. The primary-care doctor who sees me works for a gigantic health-care conglomerate. He uses his own money to hire young people to sit and type mandatory gibberish into EPIC while he examines patients like me. Everybody knows the purpose … Read more
The US Centers for Disease Control publishes a Field Epidemiology Manual with lots of great material on how to handle epidemics. There’s a great chapter on communications during an epidemic here. (Infosec incident response planners would be wise to read this material; lots of it applies to communicating about data breaches. Back to the topic … Read more
I went to Market Basket this morning to buy groceries. Market Basket, with their crew, is a major civil institution stabilizing life these days. Love ’em. There’s TP (“bog roll” to English and Scottish friends) available again. I guess the people who’ve laid in several decades’ worth of supplies have figured out they don’t need … Read more
My dentist, the competent and honorable Dr. J. P. St. Clair, has been pestering me for more than a year saying, “You snore. I can tell by looking down your mouth. Do something about it!” So I finally did. I took a “home sleep test” and the sleep clinic people said, yes you should do … Read more
I just got an email survey from our local monopoly internet service provider. Will you recommend Comcast to a friend? Yes=10 No=1 This betrays a profound misunderstanding of the usefulness of that kind of survey, called the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. Why is “will you recommend our lightly regulated monopoly to your friends” a … Read more
In this critical moment in our history, we are all struggling with what we can do to make the biggest difference. I’m writing to share with you a unique and powerful response to our political crisis that I learned about in a recent presentation: the Movement Voter Project. The Movement Voter Project (MVP) is a … Read more
I was chatting with a co-worker today, and she said she’d heard “they” were thinking about calling Pluto a “planet” again after it was demoted in 2006. Is Pluto a planet, or a dwarf planet, or a planetoid comet, or a cometoid planet, or what? It’s a wonderful debate. It’s a debate about how to … Read more
These days it seems like I can’t call any business at all to ask a question without getting a survey afterward. I called an insurance company to ask “hey can you look up my policy number?” The agent on the phone did so efficiently and securely. I said “thanks” and I thought we were done. … Read more