MeReadYouRead

I recently published a piece on "The Health Care Blog", a fairly well-respected source of health information in the US. Anyhow, I write about how China's health care reforms are being undermined by the bad habits that have fueled its growth.

The piece is here.

I welcome response, which I will respond to. And if you like it, I wouldn't be opposed to either a facebook share or a tweet since it would help me with landing future writing gigs at the site.

hey guys

super interesting take on religion. A personal interest that turned into a movie and a Ted Talk about the process by the creator.

take a look, i think it resonates well with a generation that seems to be more and more cynical about religion(s). 

Here is the trailer of the movie:  Kumare:True Story of A false prophet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBmXSN_LxsU  and here is the Vikram Ghandi's (the film maker)Ted Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3BJ23H5yBQ&playnext=1&list=PL3461A090D6305D4B

Vanity Fair put together an oral history of Pulp Fiction which is fantastic (the script was written 20 year ago). 

Check out the article and the photos from the set in 1993

The role of Jules Winnfield proved difficult to cast, mainly because Samuel L. Jackson was under the impression the part was his, until he found out he was in danger of losing the role to Paul Calderon. Jackson flew out to L.A. for a last-ditch audition with Tarantino. “I sort of was angry, pissed, tired,” Jackson recalls. He was also hungry, so he bought a takeout burger on his way to the studio, only to find nobody there to greet him. “When they came back, a line producer or somebody who was with them said, ‘I love your work, Mr. Fishburne,’” says Jackson. “It was like a slow burn. He doesn’t know who I am? I was kind of like, Fuck it. At that point I really didn’t care.” Gladstein remembers Jackson’s audition: “In comes Sam with a burger in his hand and a drink in the other hand and stinking like fast food. Me and Quentin and Lawrence were sitting on the couch, and he walked in and just started sipping that shake and biting that burger and looking at all of us. I was scared shitless. I thought that this guy was going to shoot a gun right through my head. His eyes were popping out of his head. And he just stole the part.” Lawrence Bender adds, “He was the guy you see in the movie. He said, ‘Do you think you’re going to give this part to somebody else? I’m going to blow you motherfuckers away.’

Fuck you.

[via]

An interesting and likely correct application of current “fighting words” law, from In re E.O., 2013 WL 1339930 (Kan. Ct. App. Mar. 29, 2013) (nonprecedential):

Although the phrase “fuck you” is offensive and profane, when it is said once by a juvenile to an adult, police officer or not, who is 150 feet away, while the juvenile is walking away and the phrase is unaccompanied by any threatening motions, the phrase does not rise to the level of words which “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite the listener to an immediate breach of the peace.” Thus, even considering the evidence presented in the light most favorable to the prosecution, the evidence failed to show that E.O.’s speech constituted fighting words.

The Court has held that face-to-face personal insults that have a tendency to cause an imminent fight can be punished as fighting words. Lower courts have concluded that such insults aren’t fighting words when sent in an e-mail or a letter, because no imminent fight is likely. This case involves something in between, and is thus an interesting data point (though not a binding precedent).

How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the United States http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/magazine/raymond-davis-pakistan.html?pagewanted=1&pagewanted=all&_r=0

jose antonio vargas must be so proud of zuckerberg!

www.defineamerican.com

Zuckerberg introduces FWD.us via his op-ed in the WaPo:

MK

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Immigration and the knowledge economy

By Mark Zuckerberg, Published: April 10

Mark Zuckerberg is founder and chief executive of Facebook and co-founder of Fwd.us.

Earlier this year I started teaching a class on entrepreneurship at an after-school program in my community. The middle-school students put together business plans, made their products and even got an opportunity to sell them.

One day I asked my students what they thought about going to college. One of my top aspiring entrepreneurs told me he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to go to college because he’s undocumented. His family is from Mexico, and they moved here when he was a baby. Many students in my community are in the same situation; they moved to the United States so early in their lives that they have no memories of living anywhere else.

These students are smart and hardworking, and they should be part of our future.

This is, after all, the American story. My great-grandparents came through Ellis Island. My grandfathers were a mailman and a police officer. My parents are doctors. I started a company. None of this could have happened without a welcoming immigration policy, a great education system and the world’s leading scientific community that created the Internet.

Today’s students should have the same opportunities — but our current system blocks them.

We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants. And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.

The economy of the last century was primarily based on natural resources, industrial machines and manual labor. Many of these resources were zero-sum and controlled by companies. If someone else had an oil field, then you did not. There were only so many oil fields, and only so much wealth could be created from them.

Today’s economy is very different. It is based primarily on knowledge and ideas — resources that are renewable and available to everyone. Unlike oil fields, someone else knowing something doesn’t prevent you from knowing it, too. In fact, the more people who know something, the better educated and trained we all are, the more productive we become, and the better off everyone in our nation can be.

This can change everything. In a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country. A knowledge economy can scale further, create better jobs and provide a higher quality of living for everyone in our nation.

To lead the world in this new economy, we need the most talented and hardest-working people. We need to train and attract the best. We need those middle-school students to be tomorrow’s leaders.

Given all this, why do we kick out the more than 40 percent of math and science graduate students who are not U.S. citizens after educating them? Why do we offer so few H-1B visas for talented specialists that the supply runs out within days of becoming available each year, even though we know each of these jobs will create two or three more American jobs in return? Why don’t we let entrepreneurs move here when they have what it takes to start companies that will create even more jobs?

We need a new approach, including:

●Comprehensive immigration reform that begins with effective border security, allows a path to citizenship and lets us attract the most talented and hardest-working people, no matter where they were born.

●Higher standards and accountability in schools, support for good teachers and a much greater focus on learning about science, technology, engineering and math.

●Investment in breakthrough discoveries in scientific research and assurance that the benefits of the inventions belong to the public and not just to the few.

Changes like these won’t happen on their own.

That’s why I am proud to announce FWD.us, a new organization founded by leaders of our nation’s technology community to focus on these issues and advocate a bipartisan policy agenda to build the knowledge economy the United States needs to ensure more jobs, innovation and investment.

These leaders, who reflect the breadth and depth of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture, include Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer, Drew Houston, Ron Conway, Chamath Palihapitiya, Joe Green, Jim Breyer, Matt Cohler, John Doerr, Paul Graham, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi.

As leaders of an industry that has benefited from this economic shift, we believe that we have a responsibility to work together to ensure that all members of our society gain from the rewards of the modern knowledge economy.

We will work with members of Congress from both parties, the administration and state and local officials. We will use online and offline advocacy tools to build support for policy changes, and we will strongly support those willing to take the tough stands necessary to promote these policies in Washington.

Hyperlapse: the coolest thing from Google Maps since streeview. 

Watch this: http://vimeo.com/63653873

and

read this explanation :  

So beautiful!!

Wearable Video Cameras for Police Officers

Interesting experiment:

"The Rialto study began in February 2012 and will run until this July. The results from the first 12 months are striking. Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study, to 3 from 24.

Rialto’s police officers also used force nearly 60 percent less often — in 25 instances, compared with 61. When force was used, it was twice as likely to have been applied by the officers who weren’t wearing cameras during that shift, the study found. And, lest skeptics think that the officers with cameras are selective about which encounters they record, Mr. Farrar noted that those officers who apply force while wearing a camera have always captured the incident on video."

www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/business/wearable-video-cameras-for-police-officers.html?_r=0

"The Very Best Ads of the 60s". This is awesome.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/the-very-best-ads-from-the-mad-men-era

Happy Sunday everyybody,

MRYR National Poetry Month is my favorite! Starting my contribution off with some super modern poetry, Google Poetics: http://www.googlepoetics.com/

Knopf has a great (and free!) poem a day service for April! http://aaknopf.tumblr.com/private/46512716650/tumblr_mkdp5lPUZ71qbxxua?Ref=Email_KDD_4/1/2013

SIGN UP FOR A FREE POEM-A-DAY FROM KNOPF! 

It’s as simple as entering your email address into the form you see in the left sidebar of our tumblr theme. If you’re having trouble finding the entry form here on our Tumblr, visit our newsletter center at KnopfDoubleday.com, check off “Knopf Poetry” (and any other newsletters you’d like to sign up for), and enter your email address. 

Please note it may take one to two days for our system to update itself and for you to begin receiving Knopf Poem-a-Day emails. 

Its April again which means that (1) we just enjoyed the beauty of april's fools day and (2) its national poetry month again!!

  Share any of your favorite things that are poetic in nature.

  I'll start with the NYT's Haiku website. Its awesome.

http://haiku.nytimes.com/

    APRIL IS AWESOME!

MM

I watched Majora Carter's Ted Talk in 2007 and was totally, completely inspired. I still tear up when I watch it.  The woman is a powerful speaker and presenter and her message is a hard one to find fault with - poor people in the Bronx get the crap end of a lot of industry, waste removal, transportation, and general city maintenance priorities of New York as a whole, and the environmental impacts of years of neglect help continue a cycle of poor health, poverty, and low expectations. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/majora_carter_s_tale_of_urban_renewal.html

So the New York Times' lead story this morning is really disheartening.  The author clearly has an angle and finds Ms. Carter as controversial as some of the more "grass roots" organizations that she interviewed for the piece.  I think Majora Carter's story raises interesting questions about gracefully handling success while continuing to rep your roots and your cause. This article certainly doesn't seem to think she's handling it well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/nyregion/a-hero-of-the-bronx-majora-carter-is-now-accused-of-betraying-it.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hp

Historic fast food strike draws lessons from MLK’s last campaign

Ironically, the 45th anniversary of Dr. King's 45th assassination..fast food workers strike back

http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/04/04/historic-fast-food-strike-draws-lessons-from-mlks-last-campaign/

“In the case of sanitation workers, 40% of them were actually getting welfare benefits while they were working full-time jobs because they were so poorly paid,” he told MSNBC. Today, the fast food industry provides an annual mean wage of $18,600, lower than any other industry in the United States.

“To live in New York City, $15 an hour will get you by if you work full-time, and we’re getting less than that,” said Tall. “[Sanitation workers] had a home, but that’s pretty much all they had: housing and food.”

This one is for Señor Y:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/04/04/176259100/pew-majority-of-americans-now-favor-legalizing-marijuana

It includes one of his favorite things and one of his least favorite things (I'll let you figure out which is which):

1) Research on the legalization of weed. 

2) The concept of generations

Susan Patton's controversial op-ed in the Daily Princetonian:

http://thedailyprincetonian.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/opinion-letter-to-the-editor-march-29-2013/