Staying Alive Staying Alive

(Source: thedailywhat)

Illegal Advertising Replaced With Public Art

Were trying to make a point here that the public should be the ones using a public space, and not commercial or corporate interest.

Meanwhile back in the states. The only cursive taught in schools is now potentially only found on the soda cans.

Cursive gets ditched

szymon:

Text while you’re driving and you’re 23 times more likely to have an accident
Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, London, UK for Tower Hamlets

denverpost:

New Dietary Guidelines

-The Post’s Mike Keefe, June 12, 2011

A physician owns a laboratory in addition to his office and refers you for blood work there. Is this ethical? How about a large regional hospital that refers within itself? Or a surgeon who thinks you need a surgery and does it himself? Isn’t this the concept of a medical home?

Of course there is the potential for unnecessary procedures or lab tests, but at a point we have to trust our professionals’ clinical judgment.

Regardless the ultimate goal is continuity of care and accessibility. The argument against is a a concern for collusion to artificially increase costs. The solution then is price transparency… or what we have now: A redundant system of a profit sucking insurance industry (that claims to control cost by denying care) in addition to anti-trust regulatory oversight that can’t make its mind up regarding ACO policy (see below). Time for health care to simplify.

jayparkinsonmd:

Part of Obamacare is this concept called Accountable Care Ogranizations:

An ACO is a network of doctors and hospitals that shares responsibility for providing care to patients. In the new law, an ACO would agree to manage all of the health care needs of a minimum of 5,000 Medicare beneficiaries for at least three years.

The goal of these is to essentially get a dedicated group of healthcare providers in a given area to work together and deliver care to a group of people for a fixed cost, ultimately driving down the cost of care. 

However, for the past few decades the federal government has been slowly and steadily making this kind of activity illegal due to anti-trust laws. The issue being that there were doctors and hospital groups in a local area getting so large that they were only referring to each other and therefore generating revenue only for themselves and artificially increasing costs.

But now the government has made an about face and is actually encouraging this kind of activity. The feds are even fighting internally to decide who gets to investigate the anti-trust concerns.

Sex trends on OkCupid. Check your undergrad to see where they stand.

jayparkinsonmd:

This is super fascinating. The medical world would have spent millions of dollars and many years trying to get this data. Ok Cupid takes a different approach:

• Design a fun and useful site
• Occasionally poll their million+ readers
• Look for interesting results
• Publish them in an engaging way

Reason #98 why the medical community is increasingly losing touch with real people. Of course, their are “limitations” to this kind of study. But there are “limitations” to all kinds of studies, even the government-funded studies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Make sure and click through to view all the charts. Good stuff…

(via 10 Charts About Sex « OkTrends)

(Source: hewhocannotbenamed)

Food stamps keep climbing

Food stamps now cost the government $5.6 billion per month, as more and more people sign up for the benefit.

In July, an additional 560,873 new recipients were added to the food stamps program, an increase of 16.69% on a year-over-year basis, while household participation increased 19.53%.