Grab bag: Unsolicited personal data access

  • AirPrint Hacktivator Automatically Enables iOS Air Printing
    Interesting hack. I don’t know how imminent iOS 4.2 is, but this might be useful.
    (tags: ios airprint)
  • Scripting News: The tech industry is a virus
    “…the obvious (in hindsight) answer: They looked in my iPhone’s address book. I never said they could. What else did they do with my contacts? Send a copy to their server for safe-keeping? Foolish me, but I thought that was my iPhone and my contact list. I paid huge money for the iPhone, so it’s not like it could be anyone’s “business model” to use that data. But now, as far as I know, some unknown startup in California has all my data.”
    (tags: mobile iphone)

North Carolina oral history…from my uncle

My uncle got a pretty good distinction yesterday–he has his own page in the Special Collections Library website for UNC-Asheville. The page hosts oral history information from him about the family, and western North Carolina generally, along with photos.

The first piece to go up is an interview with Uncle Forrest that my sister conducted back in 2006, which has now been transcribed and illustrated. It’s a pretty great read, covering the Chunn house legend and local family history, including the first story that I ever learned about the family, about how my great-great-grandfather was almost shot for deserting from the Confederacy:

And then there was Obadiah, the great-grandfather. He lived over on the Blowhole Road and the Civil War had come along and he had already married Polly O’Dell and they didn’t have any slaves. Their hearts were not in the War. And the Confederates had already come along and took all their stock – left ‘em one old mare that didn’t have any teeth. And they had to grind the corn to make a crop with. He had a big family of children. Obadiah would desert in the spring of every year and come home to put in a crop.

…And Polly would set at the end of the field and act like she was knitting or crocheting, and she would watch while Obadiah plowed the corn and cut the wheat and all. She would wave whatever she was crocheting or sewing on if she saw the Confederates coming to capture him. He’d run for the brush. There was caves in the brush, one big cave still…the reason the road was named Blowhole Road, they called it the Blowhole Cave. I’ve been there many a time. Put milk in it in the summertime, the cool air comes out and we’d be down there fishing.

But anyway, he would run for the caves, and get away! But the third time, they knew his tricks, and so they surrounded the field. He took off for the bluff, and there was a Confederate soldier, he had his rifle laying up on the rail fence. He spotted him along and were fixing to kill him. So Obadiah, great-grandpa Obadiah, he threw up his hands and surrendered. They was a whole bunch of western North Carolina boys…the Redmons, and the Paynes, and the Jarretts, and whoever else…the Buckners…and they had all deserted and they had all been captured and they were all in the penitentiary waiting to be shot off their caskets in Raleigh.

And Gov. Zebulon B. Vance was the Governor of North Carolina at that time. He was from Western NC. He went down to see the Western NC boys who were in the penitentiary for desertion. And he said, “What can I do for you boys?”

And they said, “Give us a 90-day stay, and let us live for 90 more days.”

And the Redmon boys, and maybe some more of them, said, “Aahhh, they’re gonna kill us anyway, just go ahead and shoot us.”

And they set the Redmon boys up on their caskets and shot ’em off their caskets for desertion.

Well, before the 90 days was up, the Civil War looks as it’s going…drawing to a close in the south, and the Confederacy, they see that they are defeated. They put out instructions not to kill anybody else. So, lo and behold, Obadiah is released some little time after that, and in about 12, 13 months, Zebulon B. Vance Jarrett is born. Our grandfather.

I took a picture at the entrance to Blowhole Road a few summers ago, and we drove down it once, but without a guide it’s not really possible to find the old cave any more. A shame.

At any rate, not only is Uncle Forrest’s oral history now accessible online, but the Asheville Citizen-Times has done a nice feature on him too.

Grab bag: GOP tax plans, and other signs of the Antichrist

Grab bag: From Rugby Road to … Minecraft 8-bit CPUs

RIP, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki

One of the great composers of the late 20th century passed away today. Like many others, I discovered Górecki’s music through his Symphony No. 3, and turned quite a few other people on to him the same way. I will always remember an afternoon in late spring 1994, a few weeks before I graduated from the University of Virginia, sitting in the middle of the Lawn across from the open door of my room, listening to Dawn Upshaw’s voice at maximum volume with Craig Fennell and Diane Workman and deciding that this Polish composer had a lot to say.

I went on to sing a few of his works, particularly as part of a concert of 20th century choral music with the Cathedral Choral Society, but also during a program with the Cascadian Chorale. As a singer, it was fascinating how so few notes, so few suspensions, could carry so much emotional content and be so impossibly challenging to sing.

As I write this, Górecki’s “Amen” just came up on my iPhone, as if to say: as with all composers, what’s important is still with us.

Other obituaries: The Rambler.

Grab bag: Felten at FTC

Grab bag: Back to business

Grab bag: midterm election edition

Obama: undoing the death spiral

Going into today’s election, even if there is a massive jerk of the electoral knee and all the wackos — witches, Aqua Buddhists, whatever — get elected tonight, I’m grateful for the last two years under Obama.

Not because he’s lived up to his hype. The second coming of Jesus couldn’t have lived up to the expectations placed on his shoulders. But because he’s the only politician in a generation to have looked at our current problems–rising costs to employers, burdens on the individual, impossible budgetary challenges to state and local governments–and have the courage to confront some of the real causes rather than just bemoaning the effects.

I’m talking about health care reform. Spiraling health care costs are used by systems dynamics textbooks as classic examples of reinforcing feedback loops, where over time the cost of coverage rises higher and higher in an accelerating fashion. Sterman’s book says that this explains the failure of the so-called “medigap” coverage plans that covered the difference between what Medicare would pay and the actual cost of health care plans:

…In the late 1980s… underwriters had to raise premiums, including the premiums for medigap and Medex. In response, some of the elderly were forced to drop their medigap coverage. Others found they could get lower rates with other carriers or by signing up for plans offering fewer benefits or which capped benefits for items such as prescriptions. However, only the healthiest seniors were eligible for those other, cheaper plans. The sickest of the elderly…those with so-called pre-existing conditions…were not eligible for less expensive coverage or HMOs and had no choice but to stay with medigap…. As medigap losses mounted, premiums grew…[forcing] still more of the comparatively healthy elderly to opt out of medigap… Those remaining with the plan were, on average, sicker and costlier, forcing premiums up further. (Sterman, 176)

What Sterman describes in the context of a case study from the 1980s and 1990s is what is technically called a death spiral–a case where market failures (the inability of the market to provide coverage at reasonable costs) resulted in the destruction of all the health plans that were there to meet that coverage (“by 1997 only Medex remained.”) The same sort of death spiral was in effect for the broader market, with secondary effects that included precipitous increases in the cost of health care coverage for businesses and governments, with no market force in site to stop it.

Obama’s health care plan put together a set of measures to ensure that the size of the pool remained stable, including eliminating the pre-existing coverage denial that caused seniors to flee their medigap plans in the first place. There are certainly flaws in the plan, but by and large it is the first serious attempt to get the insurance market under control and reverse some of the insane cost spiral that affects every American business and every American.

Did the Republicans in Congress attempt to propose a credible counter policy to address the crisis? Did they hell. They trotted out lying rhetoric about “death panels” and demonstrated the shortest path to Godwin’s Law.

So tonight when reactionary commentators are cheering about the rolling back of progressive initiatives, think of this: at least the progressives, for all their flaws, saw with clear eyes a real threat to America’s competitiveness and tried to fix it.

Grab bag: Private Jedeye