...being the blog of Aaron Hefel...

via

hefel — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:40:39 +0000

Yes, I have chosen to title this post “via,” as it will consist entirely of links that I have ripped off from other bloggers. OK; here we go:

via BoingBoing

show and tell with the nobel laureate
it’s not worth what someone will pay for it, it’s worth what my quants tell me…(pout, pout)
- Paulson 419, subvia TheNation: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/jstreet/363133/bailout_satire

via Bob Sutton

McKinsey Quarterly on IHI.org’s 100,000 lives campaign …in other words…they did it. 100,000!
Direct link: http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/files/the_ergonomics_of_innovation.pdf

via Google (does that count as a ripoff?)

the financial clusterf*ck noted above is happening at exactly the same time as the art market is bubbling up like never before. consider the following:

Before: Damien Hirst’s Next Sensation: Thinking Outside the Dealer
After: After the Roar of the Crowd, an Auction Post-Mortem
Images of the a few of the works sold
Summary: Over $200 million in two days of auctions (for some paintings, small sculptures, and gold-implanted preserved animal carcasses). That is so totally reasonable.
via NYTimes.com via AP via Sang Tan

Daytrippers

hefel — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:52:52 +0000

…to Galena, IL. Good food. Good coffee. Bad weather.

Photo gallery below.

I just realized I LOVE the audioscrobbler logo

hefel — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 03:25:11 +0000

…it’s beautiful way up there in the menu bar, beside the applescript, displays, and bluetooth menus…

…that is all.

Michael Yamashita’s “Daisetsuzan”

hefel — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:37:58 +0000

Michael Yamashita (ok, so it's not the most recent photo.)

I stumbled upon a really nice set of photos in Michael Yamashita’s “Daisetsuzan” in the August 2008 issue of National Geographic (pp. 92-108).

I read here that he prefers Fuji Velvia (although this source is dated, so I don’t know if it’s still true). I don’t know if this article was shot on film or not, but the feel of the photos is so gorgeous that I want to believe it’s true. If it’s digital, I want to know what sensor it is so I can buy a similar camera asap.

Marketing pure desire

hefel — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:19:32 +0000

Here’s mine…now, try your own.

Submit a photo and adjust it to your preferences: http://www.porsche.com/all/usa/ican/

via gizmodo.com

OH. MY. GOD.

hefel — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:38:16 +0000

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/john_walker_re_creates_great_performances.html

more here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10439850

2 fine, fine posts from David Byrne

hefel — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 03:04:48 +0000

Well, first this new album:

http://everythingthathappens.com/

…then these posts:

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2008/07/07312008-securi.html

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2008/07/07092008-modern.html

I have to meet this guy before I die!

P.S. This is my 100th post, yo. Hooray for me!

found

hefel — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:40:22 +0000

A couple of pictures from the drive home

hefel — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 15:50:17 +0000

I ran into way too much supergreat stuff today…

hefel — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:16:46 +0000

Also these:

The diver’s view from the 10-meter platform in Beijing

The best firefox add-ons

Songbird, a free music organizer

Ryan Adams’ success secret, via lifehacker

Say what you will about Apple products…

hefel — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:56:08 +0000

…and some of it may be painfully true, but I still love ‘em.

Update: This is interesting: Apple Corporate Gifting and Rewards.

The last update before the start of classes?

hefel — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:15:22 +0000

it's the thought that counts

from a beach house south of discovery park

..and again...

: SeaTac, post-TSA

The suspension of the glass curtain at SeaTac

...and back at home, a work in progress

Management musings from BMW

hefel — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 03:04:01 +0000

(image from )

Why should we care? Evidence here: Annual Report to Shareholders, 2007
Creative networking environment: Facilities Design
“Flexible” working hours: BMW Leipzig work time models
Sustainable value: Report
Globalized production: A flexible, efficient, innovative network

Ambition

hefel — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:35:27 +0000

basquiat?...anyway, found in a city park

A few more from Seattle…

hefel — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 07:17:25 +0000

A few more from Seattle:

Photos from Summer 2008 at Puget Sound

hefel — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 04:51:45 +0000

…from a Nikon pointandshoot and a phone, so quality is bleh.

I’ve been impressed by the VA

hefel — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:06:42 +0000

So, I have to admit that I’ve been really surprised by the VA hospital experience!

Prep yourself by reading a brief article here: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html

…which pretty well sums it up: the VA provides better than private sector care at lower cost and does it while existing within the context of a giant, ponderous bureaucracy subject to stiff cost controls and scrutiny.

This raises some questions for me. Not so much about how the VA is able to do what they do so well (it’s the people, stupid!) but about what exactly it is that the private sector is doing wrong; I suspect the list of reasons could be very long.

I don’t think it’s fair to say that it’s the people in this case. Yes, it’s true that humans make mistakes, and certainly always will (consider that even with years of education and experience and the resources of what is probably one of the best medical centers in the world, BIDMC, very bad things happen all of the time). Still, it seems clear to me that the majority of people in the industry are trying very hard to work to very tight tolerances within the limits of a complex system…which leaves the question open: what exactly is the private sector doing so wrong that, in spite of fierce competition and massive incentives to perform at the limits of human endurance, it can’t even outperform the government—and an old, lumbering sloth of a government at that?

A recent post from HBS Working Knowledge series, available gratis at http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5979.html, discusses the topic:

Authors: Michael E. Porter, Elizabeth O. Teisberg, and Scott Wallace

What we are doing in healthcare administration is making the united states competitive again:

“In every other aspect of their business, employers are attuned to quality and value. But health care has been treated as a commodity and cost reduction has been the dominant approach.

Employers have gone to their vendors, health plans, or third-party administrators in the case of self insured plans, and tried to bargain the maximum discounts. They have switched plans frequently in search of a better deal, which has meant that their employees needed to switch as well. They have tried to pare back covered services, thrown up barriers to expensive drugs and treatments, and recently, begun to pass more and more costs on to employees.

Yet health benefit costs have continued to go up. Most employers do not even measure the costs of poor health among their employees. If they did, however, they would discover that many of the steps they have taken to reduce benefit costs have actually made the costs of poor health even greater. For example, studies have shown that co-pays and deductibles on essential medications for chronic conditions can reduce adherence to therapy, leading to expensive hospitalizations, complications, and the like. Here, so-called consumer-driven health plans not only failed to benefit the consumer, but they hurt employers as well.

First, the best way truly to reduce health care cost is to improve its quality—better diagnoses, more timely treatment, less invasive methods, getting the right treatment to the right patient, fewer complications, and so on. Quality, defined in terms of outcomes, is the secret to success in health care.

Second, high-value care is delivered by integrated practice units including all the needed specialties that care for the patient’s medical condition over the full cycle of care, not the current model organized and paid for by specialty and discrete interventions.

Third, prevention and screening can dramatically improve value, as does ongoing disease management to prevent recurrences and setbacks.

Fourth, the only way truly to drive value is to measure patient outcomes for each medical condition, and get patients to providers who have the scale, experience, teams and facilities to achieve excellent results.”

VA does all of these things because it can. Private industry has not seen the reality of incentives to do any of these very well, so it hasn’t yet committed to any of them. VA medical centers are almost always intensely academic learning institutions, with practice modalities and service lines that are tightly integrated (both geographically and conceptually!). Preventive medicine is practiced uniformly as the patient mix doesn’t really change and patients tend to stay enrolled, and the multiplicity of oversight bodies guarantee continual monitoring of essentially everything that can be measured. Again, the VA does EVERYTHING that was mentioned in that article, and it has PAID OFF!

I’m in no way suggesting that this model must work universally; I’m simply trying to rebuff all of the comments that I’ve heard suggesting that we should just shut down the VA, privatize the care, etc!

See these articles as well:

first, from Knowledge@Wharton, at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1665&CFID=72228547&CFTOKEN=45809480&jsessionid=a830a16fd042261f5f3b:

Power by the Hour: Can Paying for Performance Redefine the way Products are sold and serviced?

and, second, at http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5369.html…

Using competition to reform healthcare, by Michael E. Porter and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg

My latest health care executive dashboard project…

hefel — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:33:59 +0000

…is nearing completion. Here’s a sample image. (You can have a copy of the real thing, sans data and formatting, for…umm…how about $40k. This was a tremendous amount of work!)

Click it to see a larger version (about 220kb).

JPEG compression has not treated it well; the real thing is much prettier. I tried to adopt all of the best practices for display of quantitative information, per my interpretation of Tufte. My goal was to allow the numbers to tell a story, and with only a basic background regarding the clinic in question, the story is very apparent. Progress has been made!

It’s been designed with the intent of both electronic and print viewing, unlike many other dashboards that I have encountered; as such, it fits 1:1 on legal paper, with no distortion or scaling. It’s all viewable all at once on any one of the many HD widescreen displays in the conference rooms across campus(es)…and the real kicker?

It’s an excel document. That’s right. Viewable (and editable!) on 97.3% of computers manufactured in the last 10 years! Heavily modified, tons of VBA macros and conditional formatting, etc…lots of work.

Here are some of the resources I’ve consulted:

…among many others!

Finally tried coffee from the Clover machine!

hefel — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:19:00 +0000

…beans were Ethiopia Sidamo at a Starbucks in Madison Park.

At $3 for a larger cup (16 oz? grande? whatever. i always forget the starbucks names), it was worth it. Starbucks coffee sucks so hard to begin with…so I’m totally willing to pay an extra $1 or whatever after tax for coffee that actually tastes good. It’s the better value.

Yeah, clearly I don’t typically want to spend that much on a cup of dirty water, but I’d heard that other places were charging like $10 or more for a cup, so I had to check it out. Oh, the cheap glories of horizontal integration… Anyway:

See details on the fantabulously expensive and rare (only 250 worldwide!) brewing machine here: Clover 1s

Review: Definitely not a lot of difference from a standard french press cup…less sediment being the biggest difference, I guess. Very much like a hybrid of french press coffee and vaccuum pot coffee, like from my cona “D,” which I am absolutely in love with but use approximately once every 14 months. Very aromatic stuff! (About the Cona D: I’m terrified I’ll break it! I’ve already done it once…and, at $50 just for a new glass bowl, it hurts to do that..)
The company has recently been acquired by Starbucks. That’s OK with me if they start putting these things in all of the stores that they aren’t shuttering. Better coffee on every street corner is a good thing, even if you have to sell (what probably amounts to only a tiny fraction of) your soul to acquire it.

Here’s a video of the process. When you’re in the shop, it’s kinda noisy, long, and fun:

Radiohead’s House of Cards in Google Code

hefel — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:57:26 +0000

You’ve all read about it already.

LIDAR.

Geometric informatics, point cloud, whatever.

I guess it’s all old tech, but it’s still generating very cool visuals. What gets me is how the Google Code viewer doesn’t let you get “behind” the face. Psychiatrists feel free to chime in on what it means, but obviously the first thing I wanted to do was look outward through his irises, like the point cloud is a mask.

When you try, It’s like it automatically resets and swings around from the other side, almost imperceptibly. Eyes blend to eyes, nose to nose, etc.

Try it. You can’t get behind the face!

http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/viewer.html

Off topic a bit, but I still think some of the coolest visuals come from really old computer generated or inspired animation, like in the sci-pimp “the andromeda strain” (opening titles which scared the shit out of me as a kid here, more footage of comp-gen 3d here, also tragically remixed audio here and here), also tron, etc. It’s scary.