We’ll get back to health care tomorrow, but first I have several video clips to share.
Adam Smith is a best-selling author and for 14 years had a weekly show on PBS called Adam Smith’s Money World that won four Emmys and a Peabody Award. He’s a very smart guy. Smith was Tom Wolfe’s editor at Esquire, founded Institutional Investor and New York magazines, and somewhere in there about 25 years ago became a friend of mine. I try to collect heroes and this guy is definitely one of mine.
Smith lives in Princeton, NJ, next-door to Paul Krugman, Princeton professor, New York Times Op-Ed columnist and oh, by-the-way, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics.
I wonder how he invested that money?
On July 8th Smith […]
This is the first of probably three columns on health care. The Obama Administration right now has in Congress legislation for reforming the U.S. health system so that sets my agenda. But the point of these columns isn’t to comment, per se, on the current proposals, but instead to look at what I believe to be my two areas of some strength — Information Technology and understanding complex systems — and see how they can be applied to this problem.
A lot of online behavior is habitual. My e-mail client is Eudora, for example — an orphaned program that hasn’t been updated since 2006. People keep telling me to switch to this or that but I like Eudora and have 17 years of mail stored in it, though I sense an end coming there. I also use Orbitz, primarily, for my travel planning. And it isn’t that Orbitz is particularly better (though not particularly worse since I use Kayak from time to time to compare) but that it holds already in its digital innards a whole succession of my credit cards as well as my five frequent flier numbers. Or it did. 
Thirty years ago I wrote a book about the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. One of the central characters in that book was Jon Ward, a producer for CBS News who ran the network’s coverage of the accident. Ward had actually anticipated such an event, gathering information on all U.S. nuclear plants in case one ever melted-down. My book made Ward a minor celebrity for a millisecond and may have helped his promotion to producer of the CBS Evening News. But the story Ward still likes to tell about that experience was of the waitress at a New York restaurant who asked for his autograph, ignoring completely Ward’s lunch partner, Walter Cronkite, who found […]
After this week’s Google/Microsoft column appeared in the New York Times, I got a message from an old friend, Rohit Khare, that sparked some thinking about our vulnerability as individuals when our data is held in the cloud — somebody else’s cloud. How do we save it, get it back, destroy it? Given the recent case of Facebook hanging-on to old user data 
A couple times per year the New York Times calls me up asking for an Op-Ed column on some technology topic. I don’t know how they found me but I’ve been writing these pieces since 1995. I think they call because I’m good at meeting tight deadlines. Lord knows that if there was a piece I actually wanted to get in the Times (my idea, not theirs) I have no confidence that I could get them to run it. Op-Ed at the Times — at least to me — is a sort of black box.
I had intended to write a post about Google’s Chrome Operating System, but then the New York Times called looking for an Op-Ed piece on exactly that so I gave it to them. 
Headed this week to the Grand Canyon in our old Winnebago RV (now minus mice, we think) Mary Alyce, the boys and I stopped outside Kingman, Arizona at this place, 
