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Ranking 37th — Measuring the Performance of the U.S. Health Care System Evidence that other countries perform better than the United States in ensuring the health of their populations is a sure prod to the reformist impulse. The World Health Report 2000, Health Systems: Improving Performance, ranked the U.S. health care system 37th in the world1 — a result that has been discussed frequently during the current debate on U.S. health care reform. The conceptual framework underlying the rankings2 proposed that health systems should be assessed by comparing the extent to which investments in public health and medical care were contributing to critical social objectives: improving health, reducing health disparities, protecting households from impoverishment due to medical expenses, and providing responsive services that respect the dignity of patients.
How to Ask Candidates Questions that Make a Difference by Fran Korten Tips for spreading your ideas without getting the runaround. posted Feb 24, 2012 The Occupy movement has changed the political conversation. But will it make a difference in what politicians actually do? Signals Intelligence What IS SIGINT? SIGINT is intelligence derived from electronic signals and systems used by foreign targets, such as communications systems, radars, and weapons systems. SIGINT provides a vital window for our nation into foreign adversaries' capabilities, actions, and intentions. Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street Today Wall Street is ruled by thousands of little algorithms, and they've created a new market—volatile, unpredictable, and impossible for humans to comprehend.Photo: Mauricio Alejo Last spring, Dow Jones launched a new service called Lexicon, which sends real-time financial news to professional investors. This in itself is not surprising.
CQ Roll Call Site Will Help Users Contact Legislators There are Web sites that cover the actions and inactions of Congress. And there are Web sites that let voters contact their members of Congress and comment. CQ Roll Call wants to bridge the two. This week, the media company is revamping one of its Web sites, Congress.org, with an eye toward what one of its executives, Peter Anthony, calls “informed action.”
All of our data journalism in one spreadsheet Data journalism and visualisation from the Guardian Illustration: Lisa Villani for the Guardian Today we have a list of all the data journalism produced here on the Guardian datablog. You can see what's been popular and get easy access to the data we have curated as this list shows each datablog post's associated spreadsheets, authors, the number of comments and retweets. By sorting the blog posts by the number of retweets, we can see that Iraq War Logs formed the base of our most retweeted post, followed by a recent post from David McCandless on fish stocks. Sorting by comments shows that the Fukushima nuclear power plant updates were the subject of the greatest discussion, closely followed by Every Doctor Who villain since 1963. The list shows that in two years we have covered a huge range of data sets.
The Science of Complexity: Understanding the Global Financial Crisis May 16 – 18, 2012 George Mason University Arlington, Virginia Register now for the Science of Complexity symposium The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University and the Santa Fe Institute are jointly offering a three day symposium entitled “The Science of Complexity: Understanding the Global Financial Crisis” May 16-18, 2012. The event will take place at the new Founders Hall facility on the GMU Arlington campus. Through the lenses of finance, economics, complex systems, neuroeconomics, and computational social science, the symposium will explore the structure and dynamics of the 2008 financial crisis and its reverberations through time, including the current Eurozone crisis.
Corruption Perceptions Index: Transparency International Public outcry at corruption, impunity and economic instability sent shockwaves around the world in 2011. Protests in many countries quickly spread to unite people from all parts of society. Their backgrounds may be diverse, but their message is the same: more transparency and accountability is needed from our leaders. The 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index shows that public frustration is well founded. No region or country in the world is immune to the damages of corruption, the vast majority of the 183 countries and territories assessed score below five on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (very clean.)
Need To Know Please sign in using one of our supported services to begin saving your favorite programs and videos. We have updated our registration process. Please sign in using one of our supported services to bookmark your favorite programs and videos. If you have a PBS account, your stored favorites and viewing history will be safely migrated. Sunlight Foundation Projects 180 Degrees description retired Identify attendees of influential hearings and events. Ad Hawk mobile description retired Identify political TV and radio ads. Call on Congress description retired Toll-free service to learn about and call Congress. Capitol Words description Explore and compare what Congress says. Checking Influence description retired See the political activity behind your everyday spending. Churnalism US description retired Detect similarities between articles, press releases and more.
The Palestine Papers Attack on S Sudan UN base may be 'war crime'#link# of abducted girls freed in Nigeria#link# Korea divers see bodies inside sunken ferry#link# delays Keystone XL pipeline decision#link# leaders propose constitutional change#link# Francis leads Good Friday procession#link# bomb blast kills policeman#link# Korea arrests captain of sunken ferry#link# signs law blocking Iran's envoy to UN#link# urges Israel to reverse West Bank moves#link# ailing president wins fourth term#link# Sudan deploys army to guard UN base#link# earthquake rattles Mexico#link# Ukraine's political crisis#link# Korea ferry tragedy death toll rises#link#
Silberzahn & Jones The difficulty of anticipating strategic surprises is often ascribed to a ‘signal-to-noise’ problem, i.e. to the inability to pick up so-called ‘weak signals’ that foretell such surprises. In fact, monitoring of weak signals has become a staple of competitive intelligence. This is all the more so since the development of information technology that allows the accumulation and quasi-automatic processing of massive amount of data. The idea is that the identification of weak signals will enable an organization to detect a problem (or an opportunity) early and, hence, to react more quickly and more appropriately. For instance, a firm can detect a change in attitude of consumer behavior by spending time with the most advanced of them, as Nokia did in the early 1990s, a move that enabled the firm to realize that the mobile phone was becoming a fashion item. Of course, there are other issues raised by the weak signals approach.
Jack Abramoff: The lobbyist's playbook (CBS News) Jack Abramoff, the notorious former lobbyist at the center of Washington's biggest corruption scandal in decades, spent more than three years in prison for his crimes. Now a free man, he reveals how he was able to influence politicians and their staffers through generous gifts and job offers. He tells Lesley Stahl the reforms instituted in the wake of his scandal have had little effect. The following is a script of "The Lobbyist's Playbook" which originally aired on Nov. 6, 2011 and was rebroadcast on July 8, 2012. Lesley Stahl is the correspondent.
The 70 Online Databases that Define Our Planet Back in April, we looked at an ambitious European plan to simulate the entire planet. The idea is to exploit the huge amounts of data generated by financial markets, health records, social media and climate monitoring to model the planet’s climate, societies and economy. The vision is that a system like this can help to understand and predict crises before they occur so that governments can take appropriate measures in advance. There are numerous challenges here. Nobody yet has the computing power necessary for such a task, neither are there models that will can accurately model even much smaller systems.