Links for 2010-04-30

"Science fiction was right on top of this new development and even foresaw it. In 1898, H. G. Wells introduced an invisible but powerful heat ray as the weapon of choice for invading Martians in his story The War of the Worlds. Today, that would be an infrared CO2 laser. In the 1930s, space swashbucklers Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon used hand-held ray weapons in their movie serials. In the 1950s, The Day the Earth Stood Still and the film version of The War of the Worlds also featured weapons that used beams of light.

After the laser was invented, films were even quicker to use its dramatic possibilities and sometimes predicted its potential."

"Why don't doctors do a better job of matching the right patients with the right procedures for treatable problems like asthma? Observers tend to blame this mess on our "fee-for-service" payment system. The more doctors do, the more they are paid; rather than rewarding quality, insurers pay for quantity. If a hospital's doctors do a terrible job, necessitating longer and more frequent hospitalizations for a child, they get rewarded with more money. That's why many reformers believe the solution is to "bundle" payments: Insurers would pay a fixed, up-front cost for each particular health problem--like asthma--and let the hospital and caregivers determine the best way to use the money to deliver quality care. Bundling could save money, improve care, and encourage innovation by health providers."

"So, to recap: Emo as a descriptor has been misappropriated into meaninglessness; no good bands ever associate themselves with it; and the ones that do are generally awful. Why dig through all of that dirt to find the diamonds? Well, because they're diamonds--even a genre as maligned as emo has produced its share."

A comprehensive round-up of stories on the latest fake relics.

"The shame of PowerPoint is that -- unlike webinars -- it doesn't have to suck. PowerPoint can make sense for information that ought to be visual, like maps or charts. It makes a world of sense in, say, art history or architecture classes.

But bullet points are not inherently visual. Text is not inherently visual. And treating text as picture doesn't do justice to either."