from Harvard Gazette: Overworked interns prone to medical errors

"On the traditional schedule, interns were on duty an average of 85 hours per week, including two extended shifts lasting 30 consecutive hours or more. Then they switched to so-called intervention schedules, where they enjoyed 20 hours a week less work, about six hours a week more sleep, and continuous shifts of "only" 16 hours.

The result was dramatic.

"Interns made 36 percent more serious medical errors during a traditional work schedule than during an intervention schedule that eliminated extended work shifts," notes Charles Czeisler, Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine. "These included 21 percent more serious medication errors and 5.6 times as many serious diagnostic errors.""

Including an intern trying to put a tube in the wrong lung. What the heck? Why does this ridiculous practice continue? What coudl be dumber... wait, I know. an ex-start-up thinking it's employees need to continue working 16 hour days despite the fact their workforce is reaching parenthood age, and retention is at an all-time low. hmmm.

Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives
It's too late to order this and get it before the election-- and honestly, it wouldn't matter if you could. Tuesday is too soon to change much. But you should still buy this book right now and read it, because the conversations you have over the next four years could shape the next one.

George Lakoff has been talking about framing since '96, but only now has it started taking hold in the progressive imagination as a way to take back American values -- liberty, equality, freedom-- from the conservative stronghold that distorts those values into liberty to invade anyone who we don't like, equality for the rich to manipulate the system to get richer and avoid responsibility to the very system that provides the infrastructure that allowed them to become rich, and freedom to destroy the future of the country by endangering American industry through an uneducated workforce by providing education only to those who can pay for it.

The mind is full of shortcuts that normally make us more efficient in our daily lives, but can be also exploited: one example is frames. Frames are short phrases that stand for a body of thinking. Conservatives use them them when they speak of "tort reform" "tax relief" "voter revolt." It's all about language-- when "tax evasion" is reframed by conservatives as "tax relief" there is no way a progressive can argue against "relief." But we can talk about responsibility, we can talk about repaying our debts, we can talk about fairness. We can talk about the fact that thriving companies thrive on what taxes have bought for them. Lakoff writes:

Corporations, businessmen, and investors benefit from taxpayer investments most of all. Taxpayers have paid for our financial institutions: the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, our national banks, and the courts, 90 percent of which are used for corporate law. If you want to start a business, you don't have to build highways, invent computer science, construct the Internet, train your scientists, build a banking system, build and maintain a court system. The taxpayers have done all that for you.

You see, there are no self-made men. If you make a bundle in business, it was made possible by taxpayer investments. The rich have gotten more dividends; they should pay for the investments that make their businesses possible. It's only fair.

If we can talk about our values in a way that is open, honest and clear with frames that evoke our values, we can begin to help people shape a vision of a better America in which every citizen is a citizen, entitled to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." I know that sounds old, but really that is the basis of American values. And if one citizen is deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness because we have failed to make sure people are earning a living wage, have healthcare and education, and have opportunities to work, earn and grow into productive citizens we have failed not only America but ourselves.

I used to be afraid to blog on politics, because I was afraid of the debate. I'd feel so angry and so helpless. But now I know why it was so hard to argue-- I didn't have the right language, and I was making the same mistakes many progressives make: I was arguing within conservatives' frames. But now it's time for me to stand up for what I believe with not only the conviction of those beliefs, but the language of them.
Read an excerpt

I'm in New York, with spotty connectivity, and a severe cold. But I voted! There is always time for the important things in life.

and good luck with the Florida Election Ballot

All watched over by machines of loving graceis Adam Greenfield's brilliant take on the future of our profession, and what it means for all of us as designers. I'm glad he's writing even if I cannot these days.

I'm in Michigan right now, but if I were home, I'd go see PARC Forum Series on Innovation | October 28, 2004

"It is fashionable, but premature to write off the future of the US info tech sector. The dot.bomb collapse and offshoring are quite real, but hints of the path forward are hidden in the history of Silicon Valley and the tech sector. And the secret is this: innovation advances from failure to failure, not from success to success. The time has come to understand and embrace this hidden source of the US' technological dynamism, lest we end up like Venice in it's last century, trapped by old habits and sinking beneath the sea that once sustained it's economic and innovation miracle."

Life has been busy lately as you might have guessed by the utter lack of blogging. Right now I'm in New Yrok, on a gig. Ate at Nook Restaurant last night and it was wonderful!

So I was having breakfast yesterday with the design manager for Maps and local at Yahoo! and he told me a story.

A part of a plane fell off and landed somewhere near Chicago. The reporters were scrabbling to get to the scene to interview the affected, and went to Yahoo Maps to map the way there. They saw the new business finder and were able to use it to phone up locals to get their reactions, and thus were able to scoop their competition.

I like this story because it reminds us with our personas and our user research and so on that the tools we build will be used a hundred ways we didn't expect and could never expect. And that makes me kinda happy.

If you haven't seen it, BetaVote.com is a pretty interesting expirament. This, like "Hot or Not" are just beautiful uses of the core nature of the internet: Global, interactive, simple. An idea, not a showcase for technology, that lets human interaction come forward.

thanks javier for the heads up

Kerry has a plan, Bush has a strategy, I have a lingering sense of unease. This is an orwellian sense of doublespeak.

From MSNBC - Women snuggle up with 'Boyfriend's Arm'
"A new product on the Japanese market has been designed for the single girl in need of some manly comfort while she sleeps."

Actually I suspect the real audience is girlfriend/wives of travelling men, who need the status quo to nod off. Single gals need a extention to the bed where they can place visitors so they can return their spread-eagle-diagonal-take-up the-entire-bed-through-sheer-force-of-cold-feet.

Happy friday!

Be sure to take the time to flip through Beyond the Page (Atomiq)

Gene describes it as "Some thoughts about the page, its place in IA literature and tools, and the need to move past the page metaphor to better methods of architecting online information."

I think that the page as a metaphor and as a agreed on construct for veiwing data will live on, but that for us desinging pages it will become increasingly irrelevent. Or rather, we will see it as fluid and not fixed. In a world where I compare prices on Amazon on my Treo while standing in a book store, and where Bizrate autogenerates a page for every misspellign of a given product, the idea of a page as an entity with a unqiue purpose, contents, size and shape is over. And the sooner we desingers move to the new way of thinking, the better off each and every user will be, not to mention the busineses that hire us.

But if you actually want to laugh out loud, check out ELITE DESIGNERS AGAINST IKEA
(thanks victor!)

According to Michael Porter, there are essentially two ways to compete: cost and differentiation. A Dry Cleaning Story explains how one small company choose the trickier course of differentiation and suceeded.

"A local dry cleaning company has taken the leg up on competition, and I've happily given them all my business. Not only that - they convinced me to pay more money than I was paying at the previous cleaner I had used for 3 years."

This weekend I was at the Future of Information Architecture retreat. I'm still sleepy, as when IA's get together they work each other into a frenzy of ideas that tends to last until 3 a.m. but starts up again at 8. Whew. The summits run that way also. If you are an insomniac, I suggest you check it out-- your night-time will be full of ideas.

This event was a huge pleasure for many reasons. For me it was not just the people (smart and diverse!) not just the location (gorgeous and wild!) not just the format (interactive and participatory!) but the chance to discuss topics out of the ordinary. Honestly, I'm tired of "how to use metadata to improve ROI" and "optimize your site with flash" and so on. It was good to discuss offshoring of design, career paths for senior designers, enabling organizational change and the death of the page.
I'm sure notes will start appearing, and hopefully someone will get enough sleep to write up their notes as a B&A article. But for now I'd like to leave you with a little exercise.

Write down your last five jobs.
Now write down your next five jobs.
Now write down how you are going to get to the next two.

You don't have to hold yourself to these, but thinking about them leads to interesting questions. For example, one participant was CEO of his own small technology company. Asked what his next job was, he shrugged and said "do you mean if my company fails?"

But another participant (who had been CEO of a couple firms before that) clearified the question by asking him if he wanted to stay CEO as his company grew, or would he step aside and become CTO, or be chair, or hire a CEO....

In our world, there is always a next step. Success or failure leads to the next success or failure. It's good to think of what that could be, and prepare for when the future arrives. The future always shows up sooner than expected.