It’s been an age since I last updated this blog. The changing nature of my work and the increased opportunities for adventures with my family have taken the time I used to spend on writing articles and posts. With our kids heading off to college in the Fall, I would like to return to communicating more if only because writing for a public audience has a tendency to improve your own thinking and also others have sometimes found what I write to be of use.

One big investment I’ve been making over the past weeks is starting to make significant shifts in where I spend my time and money online towards emerging technologies like Substack and Bluesky and away from Amazon, Meta, and Musk-owned brands in particular. I’m taking a pragmatic approach, keeping those products that are hard to do without for now but existing those that are secondary to my day to day life. For example I cancelled Instagram and Threads, but am keeping Facebook for now but choosing not to log in and deleting the apps and notifications from my phone.

We’re also looking at making changes in where we shop, where we get medical care, etc. This is not just responding to the poor behavior of the people who run these properties, but also to the decline in quality of experience that monetization efforts have driven. In particular, while I have some concerns about Google as an enterprise, the SEO and placed ads in Google results swamp most useful content, making the internet like a highway covered in billboards through which you can no longer enjoy the landscape. I’ve been trying Duck Duck Go as my primary search engine and finding that it’s good enough for my purposes, does not have the same SEO-heavy biases, and that I don’t really miss Google much anymore.

I’ll be writing more about how to diversify your online footprint and what some good alternatives are in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I’m sending my best wishes to everyone who is being negatively impacted by the current social and political changes.

Heather Kaplan of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, with a little help from the rest of us, published a highlight of the state of our work on the Personalized Learning System via HBS’s online blog.  The article emphasizes the patient-physician collaboration model we’ve been working on and that I teased at MedicineX last week.

http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/10/a-personalized-learning-system-for-improving-patient-physician-collaboration/

The juxtaposition of verdicts in the Zimmerman and Alexander cases, and the unapologetic, non-reflective response of most of our political leadership leaves me wondering what I, as a concerned citizen I can do in the face of a pervasive national moral cowardice. As a citizen of a republic, I could choose to move to Florida or Mississippi and cast my vote against the representatives of injustice, misogyny, ignorance and racism who seem to frequent the media. But would that really have an impact proportionate to the personal sacrifice involved? Unlikely.

Continue reading “What can a concerned citizen do in the face of injustice?” →

Four days ago I stopped getting mail from my academic mail account on my iPhone and Mac Mail. I was in a bit of a crunch so didn’t really pay attention since I still got some mail on my business and non-profit accounts in a unified Inbox.  Imagine my surprise Monday when I realized I hadn’t received new and important e-mail since Thursday!

Apparently Gmail engineers fixed some bugs in the last month or two and when those changes propogated to my account, it changed the behavior of certain filters that were not, er, perfectly well defined.  If you had filter (such as before:2011/01/01) to cause all messages before a certain date to skip the Inbox (which is useful when migrating from old accounts), then this may have happened to you.  The Gmail Inbox feeds through Imap to the iPhone and Mac Mail clients, so they would no longer see new mail.  The mail is still there, just under “All Mail” instead.  Fix the filters, and life goes back to normal.