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Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Crosscurrents: January 18, 2011
By Chris Hoff
KUSF goes off the airwaves, Jerry Brown's poposed budget solutions, digitizing health records, the online virtual socializing game SFZero, reshaping the aging brain, and local musician The Family Crest.
This article originally appeared on KALWNews.org
| Jan 18 at 06:04 PM
Electronic health records: making medicine better or worse?
By Erica Mu
By Sindya Bhanoo
These days, everything is going digital - music, movies, books. So it's no surprise that hospitals and doctor's offices around the country are converting to electronic medical records. In theory, doing away with all those manila folders filled with patient papers should improve hospital efficiency and care. For those who make the transition, there's money to be had too.
President Obama allocated about $20 billion in the stimulus package to help doctors adopt electronic health records. Here he is in the year after he took office, speaking about his interest in the technology.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I spoke to the chief information officer here at the hospital and he talked about some wonderful ways in which we could potentially gather up electronic medical records and information for every child not just that comes to this hospital but in the entire region, and how much money could be saved and how the health of these kids could be improved. But it requires an investment.
When the president spoke those words in 2009, less than 2% of hospitals met federal government requirements for electronic medical records. Transitioning is a time-consuming and expensive process. Now, there's a new push to make it happen.
On January 3, the federal government re-opened registration for hospitals and individual doctors interested in using federal money for digitizing their records. KALW's Sindya Bhanoo reports.
* * *
SINDYA BHANOO: Meet John Birch:
JOHN BIRCH: I'm a general dentist. I live in Mountain View and I've been in this location for 35 years as a dentist.
Dr. Birch is also a self-professed lover of technology.
BIRCH: I could have easily gone in to computer science or physics or maybe just been a typically EE and done a PhD in electrical engineering.
So he uses a lot of technology in his personal life.
BIRCH: I have a daughter down south, and I figured if anything happened to me, she would need to know where my stuff is. So instead of having it in a drawer I have it all on a website and she has the access code, and that way I've kept it online rather than in a drawer.
But like many practitioners set in their ways, Dr. Birch has resisted moving over to electronic health records. He has his reasons.
BIRCH: Inertia, old school - I've just sort of done it this way. Probably if someone showed me how easy it could be, it were turn key, I'd be open to it. More of it, is just habit.
So even though he's eligible to receive about $44,000 from the federal government to help him transition to electronic health records, Dr. Birch plans to stick to using paper and manila folders for his 500 patients. But around the Bay Area, other practitioners are making the change. Late last year, the City of San Francisco decided to invest $10 million into digitizing health records at San Francisco General Hospital and all of the city's public health clinics. That means the medical information for hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans will be digitized within the next three years - something the city couldn't afford to do before the federal stimulus money became available.
DAVE COUNTER: The majority of our payments come from Medicaid.
Dave Counter is the Chief Information Officer for the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
COUNTER: Medicaid only pays you 60 cents on the dollar. So consequently if 80% of your revenue stream is always being funded by Medicaid, you're always running a deficit. So consequently we never have enough money to even support ongoing operations. I find, I always have to do more with less ... the city's got a $400 million deficit, all my positions are frozen and here's all this stuff we've got to do. The stimulus package allows us to contract with the vendors with the software.
But Counter says installing electronic systems doesn't mean health care in San Francisco is going to get more efficient - yet.
COUNTER: One of the things that you think is that the productivity is going to go with all this computerization, but just the opposite happens. As they're using this stuff online, their productivity drops off, it takes them more time, it will probably be two or three years for us before we can get the productivity stabilized and being able to optimize the use of these systems ... I think that that's one of the challenges.
He says another challenge is just convincing doctors to use them.
COUNTER: There's resistance to it: "I'm the doctor, I find I'm much more productive; I see the patient, I go in there and I just write my doctor's order in the medical record, and then it's the doctor's problem."
ALBERT CHAN: I think it is an ongoing challenge for us, those of us who help implement and support these records.
Dr. Albert Chan works with the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, a large Bay Area health care provider. His organization transitioned to electronic medical records more than a decade ago.
CHAN: These systems are very complex. There is a steep learning curve ... many physicians never achieve more than 20% of facility with the features. It's not as simple as saying, "Let's put in these systems, turn it on and we're done." We're learned over the years that we have to continually go back and educate our physicians about new features and even optimize existing features to make them better users.
Today, the Palo Alto Medical Foundation allows patients to access their private health records from their own computer. Family members can link their records together, view their test results, make appointments and renew prescriptions online.
CHAN: The ability to have that data available to you, the ability to be able to share that with patients so they can be partners in health - that is transformational. Do I think we need to move this way as a nation? I think the answer is yes. Can it enable or even the playing field for patients, patients with health disparities for example? If you can provide transformation health technologies and give those tools to patients, regardless of economic class, I think the answer is yes.
Someday, before he retires, dentist John Birch says he might get around to digitizing records for his 500 patients.
BIRCH: I'm old! (laughs) So I tend to do something the old-fashioned way. But if I want to do something electronically, I'm also an HTML coder. I could probably say, "See you later, dear," and go do it over a weekend and I would own it myself. And I know how to do that - most dentists don't know how to do that.
Of course, to get their data digitized, they don't need to know how to do that. The government will help pay someone else to do it.
In Mountain View, I'm Sindya Bhanoo, for Crosscurrents.
This article originally appeared on KALWNews.org
| Jan 18 at 05:46 PM
SFZero brings real and virtual worlds together
By Erica Mu
By Natalie Jones
Think about this: how much time do you spend online per day? Now, how much is that per month? It's a quiz. What do you think?
Alright: here's the answer: Americans spend an average of about 60 hours a month online. Sixty hours! Almost a quarter of that time is spent "socializing" on sites such as Facebook and Twitter As it gets easier to do things from home, it can get harder to pull ourselves away from computers. Now, an online game that was started in the Bay Area is trying to help people connect their virtual socializing with their real world lives. Reporter Natalie Jones has the story.
* * *
NATALIE JONES: It's a typical Bay Area day: partly cloudy, about 60 degrees, slightly windy. Three friends have come to a waterfront park on the edge of Alameda, in the flight path of the Oakland airport, to accomplish what's called a "task."
DANIELLE PENA: I think over here is where a good pile of driftwood is, right across this ice plant.
They've got two goals. First: build a raft from objects they can find here on the shore. Second: send someone floating off into the Bay.
PENA: Some of these pieces are good, not all of them. This is just kind of what's washed up. I made another pile back that way.
Danielle Pena is here with her friends to gain points in a game called SFZero. SFZero is based online, but it actually tries to get people off their computers and into the real world. Players get a task list: things to do, like hiding 10 objects in 10 trees, dancing in public ... or building a functional raft. The tasks require creativity, exploration and interaction, according to one of the game's creators: SAM LAVIGNE: We want to make something that kind of blends these real world interactions and online interactions,
Lavigne and two housemates launched the idea in 2006, but they didn't know if anyone would actually find the website and do the tasks. So, as another cofounder, Ian Kizu-Blair, recalls, they set up an experiment.
IAN KIZU-BLAIR: We used to have this amazing light that we had in our apartment...
...which would turn on whenever a gamer created a task.
KIZU-BLAIR: So when we went out to get dinner or went out to do anything, whenever we came back it was like, "Is the light going to be on, is the light going to be on?" And that was really exciting, a really exciting time. When we did come back and the light was on and we'd all rush back to our computers to see what someone had done and to see people playing the game was really special. And then at a certain point the light started going off so much that it was always on and we had to unplug it.
Now, thousands of people have signed up to play.
TYLER NGUYEN: I wonder if you can open those things...
ANNA VIGNET: I think you can.
Two of those players are Anna Vignet and Tyler Nguyen. They are wandering the U.C. Berkeley campus in search of things that open, so they can leave written messages in them.
VIGNET: Yeah, you can open those. Ohhh...
NGUYEN: Hey! Look at that. I'll leave it resting in the spiderweb.
They put the first message, which says "go play in the sprinklers," in a sprinkler control valve box on one of the campus's biggest lawns.
NGUYEN: I don't know who's going to open that next.
Vignet and Nguyen say they play SFZero partly because it's collaborative. In fact, even though the two college students go to the same school and study the same subject, they didn't meet until they first played the game at Berkeley. Creator Sam Lavigne says that's part of the plan.
LAVIGNE: It's a game that everyone is creating together. And everyone is having experiences, game experiences, but they're also creating really exciting and interesting experiences for the other participants.
SFZero is like other online adventure games in that you actually participate as a "character." In this case you're using your own body and your own skills. But taking on another role - what's sometimes called an avatar - has a purpose, according to U.C. Berkeley new media professor Greg Niemeyer.
GREG NIEMEYER: Avatars are important because they allow us to populate an imaginary world with an other, not with the self. And if we had to go there with the self we'd be concerned about being represented correctly, that's a problem from real life already.
Niemeyer studies games for a living. He looks for ways that they can be used to help improve our society.
NIEMEYER: If things go badly, I can cast off the avatar and create a new one, if things go badly in real life, I have to work through the consequences. So the avatar makes it possible to introduce our identity into the game without feeling any risk or consequences.
And by the same logic, the theory is that you can take credit for your avatar's good qualities and transfer them back to real life. But for Anna Vignet, the player leaving secret messages around U.C. Berkeley, the philosophy about playing SFZero is pretty simple.
VIGNET: I've seen tasks that have been very personal and um, really deep. But I don't, for me ... tasking's just always been about a different way to see the world or making yourself think differently.
Which is exactly what the creators hope the game does for people who are maybe spending a little too much time gaming in a virtual world.
For Crosscurrents, I'm Natalie Jones.
Natalie Jones is a reporter from the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
This article originally appeared on KALWNews.org
| Jan 18 at 05:39 PM
Reshaping the brain
By Erica Mu
As you get older, you'll probably find that you start forgetting things more often - like people's names or where you left your car keys. We're all familiar with the adage, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." But UCSF Neuroscientist Michael Merzenichsays that's bogus. There's no reason for you to slow down mentally just because you're aging. Using the idea of brain plasticity, that your brain is constantly able to change and modify itself, Merzenich has created a comprehensive brain fitness program to keep your mind sharp regardless of how old you are. KALW's Chris Hoff has more.
* * *
CHRIS HOFF: There's really only a few things in life I'm scared of. Clowns are one of them. I'm convinced that their gaiety and buffoonery mask their evil intentions. But as I get older, one thing truly terrifies me: the prospect of getting dumber.
LISA SIMPSON (from "The Simpsons"): "Dear Log, can it be true? Do all Simpsons go through a process of dumbening? Wait, that's not how you spell "dumbening." Wait, dumbening isn't even a word!"
MICHAEL MERZENICH: And this is commonly what happens in an old life, an old brain. We basically go from an early part of life in which we werecontinually learning and acquiring ability, and then we begin to rest on our laurels and primarily use long-mastered skills.
Michael Merzenich is a professor emeritus of neuroscience at UCSF.
MERZENICH: But in most older lives basically at some point we move from a very active schedule of learning into a relatively passive period of life where there's little learning, And that's where we begin to slide.
Merzenich has proven that people reach their brain fitness peak sometime in their 20s. And - yikes - I'm already 29.
MERZENICH: So you can describe the average 40-year-old as distinctly different from a 20-year-old. A 50-year-old will be worse still; 60-year-old ...in a very predictable way, decade by decade, your ability declines.
So does that mean next year, I'll be dumber-er? Well, yes, according to Merzenich. Especially if I don't challenge myself.
MERZENICH: Anybody, everybody can improve. So you can retrain the brain at any age to become more efficient.
We can do this because at no point in our lives do our brains lose the capacity for change. This idea is known as brain plasticity, and scientists' conception of it has changed over time.
MERZENICH: A religion developed in science that there was an early period in life, the stuff of young childhood, in which the brain was changing itself on a large scale, and ... we now realize that in fact the brain is continuously plastic and every time you acquire an ability, you actually change the brain in detail. You have a new machine, you have a new brain.
Merzenich says the more new abilities or experiences you acquire, the more we're chemically and physically changing our brains, which is what keeps us mentally sharp. That's why young people are so quick on the uptake: they're going through new experiences much faster than somebody who's been around the block a few times.
MERZENICH: I think that anything you do neurologically, that involves your brain that is substantially new. But I mean, new learning in the sense of the real acquisition of skills and abilities, because that exercises the learning machinery of the brain in itself. And it keeps it alive, it keeps it vital...
Dancing is one of the best things you can do for your brain, according to Merzenich. There is so much going on. The music, complex and fast movements, a wide array of visuals and even social behaviors. Researchers have looked at a wide array of activities, but not all of them make your mind stronger.
MERZENICH: They've looked at things like doing crossword puzzles or Sudoku or games like chess and so forth. And actually they struggle to show significant benefits to these relatively routine kinds of exercises.
So Merzenich designed a brain-training program with his company, POSIT SCIENCE. The program guides you through a battery of visual and auditory exercises designed to sharpen your mental activity. In this exercise, you try to tell whether two sounds are rising or falling. As you progress the exercises get a lot harder.
Merzenich says that if the average person does these exercises five or six hours a week he can mentally become younger by over a decade. Presumably that means it's for people over age 12 and up. But seriously, Merzenich says, the program does have potential application for kids with attention problems. It's a more natural solution than Ritalin or Adderall. And Merzenich says, it can be just as helpful for adults who are cognitively impaired.
MERZENICH: You could say it's the first thing to try, that's use this powerful resource to try to drive the correction organically, to have the brain in a sense repair itself. The extent to which that is possible - that represents potentially a very powerful class of medicine. This is basically what we're most interested in, in our own science.
Several other companies, such as Cogmit and CogniFit are using advances in neuroscience to develop brain programs as well. A lot of companies claim to know how to improve your brainpower, but only a handful actually use neuro-scientific research in their products. As far as I know, science has no cure for clown phobia, but if brain exercises can keep me from descending into a state of mental vapidness, I'll take that.
For Crosscurrents, I'm Chris Hoff.
This article originally appeared on KALWNews.org
| Jan 18 at 05:33 PM
Analysts, public pour over Governor Brown's budget
By Erica Mu
Governor Jerry Brown is talking up his proposed budget around the state. It's a compromise proposal, including more than $12 billion in cuts to state-funded programs and an extension of taxes - currently due to expire this summer - that would bring in more than $12 billion in revenue. The governor plans to pass that money on to local governments so they can take on some services that are currently funded by the state, including child welfare and fire prevention.
GOVERNOR JERRY BROWN: And in that way, there'll be greater accountability, transparency and hopefully citizen participation because government will be closer to the people.
But some budget analysts think cuts to the state's social services have already gone far enough in the last several years. Jean Ross is the director of the California Budget Project.
JEAN ROSS: Already, lawmakers have cut more than $20 billion per year out of the budget. And to just put that in real-world terms, that's about what the state spends each year on its entire correctional system and its entire higher education system, combined.
So legislative analysts are dissecting the budget. But they're not the only ones. Turns out, you are pouring over it, too. The public.
The California Department of Finance announced that the Jerry Brown budget website logged about one million hits between 11 a.m. and midnight the day of its release. And, that's a record. The previous record was former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's January 2008 budget, which got 300,000 fewer hits.
This article originally appeared on KALWNews.org
| Jan 18 at 05:30 PM
Dead air for KUSF
By Erica Mu
This morning, San Franciscans tuning in to one of the City's premier university college radio stations, got ... dead air. KUSF 90.3FM went off the air early this morning. The University of San Francisco's 48-year-old station shut down its radio operation and says it is moving to an online-only format, focusing on student-based educational programming. USF says the license for 90.3 will be assigned to Classical Public Radio Network. DJs say they came to work to find the station doors locked. KALW's Hana Baba called up USF spokesman Gary McDonald earlier today to explain.
GARY MCDONALD: Well, we at the university decided that we can use the proceeds from the sale for important university projects - millions of dollars that we can use. But we can also continue to deliver a valuable learning experience for our students in media production through kusf.org. At the university, we're interested first and foremost about our student, and so we made the decision that it is most in line with our mission and most in line with our students.
This article originally appeared on KALWNews.org
| Jan 18 at 05:23 PM
Cuentos Inmigrantes: January 18, 2011
By Erica Mu
Cuentos Inmigrantes is a weekly collection of immigration news and views from there to here and back
John Ross, prolific journalist, poet, and activist died Monday in the village of Tepizo, in the western state of Michoacan, Mexico where he lived on and off for the past 50 years in between his stays in San Francisco. As Frank Bardake detailed in his homage to Ross in Counterpunch, he "wrote the very best accounts in English (no one is even a close second) of the tumultuous adventures of Mexican politics." He was a national award winning author of ten books, including the gritty "El Monstruo: True Tales of Dread & Redemption in Mexico City." He was among the first journalists to report on the indigenous Mexican Zapatista uprising and wrote extensively about their movement. Ross was 72, was a victim of liver cancer. You can read more of his work and learn more about him on his unfinished webpage.
State Assemblyman Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) has introduceda bill to give undocumented students access to financial aid. He's reviving another bill that passed the state Senate and Assembly but was vetoed three times by former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Cedillo is hoping he'll have better luck with new Governor Jerry Brown.
A California lawmaker has been appointedaschair of the Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement. Rep. Elton Gallegly, who represents most of Ventura and inland Santa Barbara counties, was a surprise appointment. Congressional watchers expected Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) to get the appointment, who instead, was named vice chairman. While Gallegly has been a quiet legislator his record is worth noting and atleastonemuckracker is interested in looking into his background and donations into his campaign. Gallegly has a history of trying to change the 14th amendment since his first introduction of the bill in 1991.
Allison Benavides lost her mother, Ruth Mejia, and sister, Ivonne Benavides, in an East Oakland house fire December 30. Guillermo Reyna-Flores, who tried to rescue them, also died. Allison's father, Nelson Benavides, was in custody of immigration officials when the fire occurred. He's is scheduled tobe deported back to El Salvador after the funeral services. So the question is: what will happen to Allison? No word from immigration officials as of yet, but according to Sylvia Soublet, media relations officer for the Alameda County Social Services Agency, the agency is looking into several placement options for the girl including family, relatives and non-biologically related relatives such as godparents. "A final decision has not been made on where she will be placed but we are taking into consideration all available options," said Soublet.
A group of Republican state legislators is meeting to discuss reinterpreting the 14th Amendment, which states that all persons born in the U.S. automatically become citizens of both the country and the states where they live. The group of legislators is looking to essentially dismantle the amendment and the birthright of U.S. citizenship for children of undocumented immigrant parents. The Chair of the House Immigration Subcommittee, Congressman Steve King (R-IA) has also introduced a bill to end constitutional citizenship.
This article originally appeared on KALWNews.org
| Jan 18 at 05:05 PM
The Family Crest
By Max Jacobs
The music you're hearing is by the Bay Area orchestral indie rock collective known as The Family Crest. They're celebrating the release of their first CD this Saturday (01.22) at Cafe du Nord on Market Street in San Francisco.
This article originally appeared on KALWNews.org
| Jan 18 at 11:36 AM
Connecting the dots: top news stories for January 18
By Max Jacobs
John Ross, former beat poet and journalist, passed away in Mexico yesterday from liver cancer. Ross, who was 72, was also an outspoken activist during the Vietnam War, and most recently protested the Iraq War...
In Sacramento, a contentious decades-old battle continues: ferret legalization. Much like those involved in the other legalization debate, ferret proponents argue that the state is missing out on much-needed tax revenue by keeping its ban in place...
In San Francisco, the heated Board of Supervisors race is over, but the battle to redistrict is just beginning...
In Oakland, residents were shocked to learn that their relatively new police chief Anthony Batts applied for the same job in San Jose. No word yet on whether or not he got the position...
In her first days on the job, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan has focused on her local volunteer program. Roughly a hundred volunteers turned out on Saturday morning in East Oakland to help clean up the area...
In Richmond, the public library is helping to improve its community by taking on adult literacy, sponsoring a tech-based plan called LEAP (Literacy for Every Adult Program)...
And if you're looking for something to read, you might check out the new book "Angel Island: Gateway to America." Authors Erika Lee and Judy Yung look at the experience of various immigrant groups who passed through the island on their way to the United States.
Connecting the dots brings the day's news together.
This article originally appeared on KALWNews.org
| Jan 18 at 11:12 AM
Monday, January 17, 2011
African immigrants appreciate, celebrate MLK, Jr.
By Erica Mu
The American Civil Rights Movement may have been a struggle fought by, and for, descendents of African slaves wanting their basic human and civil rights in society, but in reality, that movement helped another population as well: African immigrants.
When my parents came to the U.S. in the 1970s from Sudan, they found a post-civil rights era America. The Civil Rights Act was in place, African Americans were called "black," not "colored," and gone were the "Whites only" signs, as segregation was so "last decade." Both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X had been assassinated. They found an America that had just emerged from an identity transformation. And while they weren't a part of that change, they benefitted firsthand from it.
Such was the case of the thousands of African immigrants to the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s. African countries were recently decolonized, and some of the more educated and able sought opportunity - education and employment - abroad. There was a large influx of Africans in Europe and the UK, and then to the U.S. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 effectively encouraged immigrants from developing nations to come to the U.S., particularly from Africa and Asia. And, they did. They tended to head for the big American cities, or wherever they were accepted for university degrees or jobs. And the numbers steadily increased over the decades. The 2000 census estimated the number of African-born people in the U.S. was 881,300. By 2008, that number increased to 1,436,000.
They came, they worked, learned, built communities and businesses - flourishing as black people in America. So today, as America celebrates Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his struggle for racial equality, I would like African immigrants and the children of African immigrants - a group that includes our president - to reflect on what would have been their situation had a visionary like Dr. King not struggle and succeeded. After reflection, comes appreciation.
I, for one, will be taking my children to one of the many MLK events here in the Bay Area, so that they, too, can understand what it took for them to live freely in America today.
Thank you, Dr. King.
This article originally appeared on KALWNews.org
| Jan 17 at 07:57 PM
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