Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
“Reading is human contact, and the range of our human contacts is what makes us what we are. Just imagine you live the life of a long-distance trucker. The books that you read are like the travellers you take into your cab. If you give lifts to people who are cultured and profound, you’ll learn…
Until their most recent quality stumbles, Toyota’s production techniques were the darlings of the management consulting world. The Toyota process is embodied by the concept of kaizen, a Japanese notion of continuous improvement. The latest gurus have even applied the production techniques to the health care arena (see Designed to Adapt). A Health Affairs article…
The book The Boids and the Bees by A.H. Jones and Jerry Bozeman can be summarized in one acronym: CASY. This stands for Complex Adaptive Systems. The point of the book is that CASYs are more complex than we think and that most of life is make up of CASYs. Let us take the example…
“It is sometimes called the Great Swine Flu epidemic and sometimes the Great Spanish Flu epidemic, but in either case it was ferocious. World War I killed twenty-one million people in four years; swine flu did the same in its first four months. Almost 80 percent of American causalities in the First World War came…
I just finished reading Three Cups of Tea, an interesting book chronicling of an amazing man dedicated towards bringing schools to rural areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The book describes Greg Mortenson’s single minded purpose and reinforces the saying that the pen is mighter than the sword. In fact, according to one Pakistani Brigadier General,…
Harvard Professor Robert Dardon has a fascinating piece on books, college libraries, copyrights, and what’s Google’s drive to digitize the world’s books means to society. Some excerpts from the original New York Review of Books article are below. One of my colleagues is a quiet, diminutive lady, who might call up the notion of Marion the Librarian.…
Let us say you have 10 observations of 2 different variables. How do you determine which of the observations to use? Should you throw out the outliers? Should you only include the most similar values? Does more observations increase or decrease the amount of measurement error? These problems can be answered by the discipline of Statistics.…
Percent of books published in each country that were translated works: South Korea: 29% Spain: 25% Italy: 22% China: 4% U.S. (adult fiction): 3.5% U.S. (total): 3% Kushner, Aviya (2009) “McCulture” Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2009, 33(1):22-29.
A new book by Dr. Michael Ozner takes on the cardiovascular surgery industry head-on. The aptly titled Great American Heart Hoax claims that although insurers pay $60 billion per year invasive cardiovascular surgery, 70%-90% of these procedures are unnecessary. The book has three major themes: What is heart disease? Why is heart surgery a…
“Adequate credit is to trade what altitude is to aircraft; without it, the odds of coming to grief over preilous commercial terrain are great. All merchant enterprises sooner or later lose cargoes or encounter soft markets. Without ample capital reserves and the ability to borrow at low rates of interest, bankruptcy is inevitable.” ~ William…