Welcome to Health Reform Watch, Sarah Kliff's regular look at how the Affordable Care Act is changing the American health-care system — and being changed by it. You can reach Sarah with questions, comments and suggestions here. Check back every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon for the latest edition, and read previous columns here.
If you've been trying to buy health insurance coverage on the Obamacare marketplace, you're probably quite familiar with the screen above. It asks potential shoppers to hang on a moment because there are "a lot of visitors on the site."
This screen has been a big part of the Affordable Care Act's launch so far: There are lots of people who, in Obamacare's first 36 hours, have had trouble signing into the new marketplaces. And even if they've gotten in, they've found it difficult to move past the first few screens of the application, where drop-down menus for security questions wouldn't load.
The wait times aren't ideal. Some people who wanted to sign up for Obamacare on launch day couldn't. But though I spent most of Tuesday on the phone with people who were struggling to use the Web site, I don't tend to think these initial glitches will have a significant impact on the law's success.
Everyone I spoke with, even those who couldn't sign up, took nearly the same attitude: I guess I'll come back and try again later.
"I went on at 9 a.m. [Tuesday] morning, and it said it was too busy, to check back later," Steve Martin, a self-employed consultant in Herndon, Va., told me on Tuesday. "I'll try again tomorrow. I'm just super curious, since we're part of the federal exchange, what the rates will be. I have no real sense of that."
"I'll probably check back in a couple of days," Dylan Cole, a 28-year-old stand-up comedian in Idaho, said later in the day. "I'm a geek, so I'm used to trying to buy the new thing on the first day. I guess I'm going to have to wait on this one."
I asked Cole whether the first day's tech glitches would deter him from signing up for the program. "Absolutely not," he said. "It's something I've been looking forward to. It doesn't work the way I want it to today, but that's how brand-new services work online. Unless they're so unpopular that no one wants to use them. They're easy as pie."
The White House says that most of the delays have been a product of overwhelming traffic. The main Web site for the federal marketplace, HealthCare.Gov, has tallied more than 4.7 million visits in the first 24 hours of open enrollment.
Some of the Web developers I've spoken with who have walked me through some of the back-end error messages on the site generally agree that system overload is the big problem for those trying to sign up right now.
"My opinion is that its probably 99 percent capacity right now and not glitches," Dan Katz, vice president for technology at contracting firm Inadev, and a former lead web developer at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. "Typically when you're doing capacity you're basing models on previous usage data. For the health insurance exchange, that doesn't exist."
In one example, many applicants have had trouble getting the security questions to load after filling in a username and a password. The drop-down menu to pick a security question shows up as a blank box. On the back end, apparently, the Web site is sending out a request for more information -- but not getting a response back.
"It probably means those systems are not able to handle all the traffic they get, so they crash," says Niek Dekker, one of the Web developers I spoke with. "It's not so much a programming error but a problem with the size of the system."
The federal government says it's fixing this problem, adding more capacity for HealthCare.Gov by the hour. Outside experts estimate that increasing capacity for a project like this should take hours or days, but not necessarily weeks. If we get into mid-October and this slowdown is still a problem, that could spell trouble for the Affordable Care Act.
Other glitches will likely start showing up, too. Some health plan officials told me Wednesday that the federal marketplace is still having trouble calculating the premium tax credits that low- and middle income Americans could receive. Though, right now, a lot of people aren't even getting that far in the process to notice the issue.
Jon Tucci was far and away the most frustrated person who I spoke with Tuesday about the online glitches with the marketplace. He's a 60-year-old supporter President Obama who tried twice to sign up on launch day, once at midnight and again at 6 a.m., before going to work. He couldn't get through.
"I'm pretty fluent on the Internet," said Tucci, who is self-employed in the oil and gas industry. "I've applied for a lot of things, and there are always glitches. But this was totally disappointing. I'm just really frustrated."
I asked Tucci what he would do next. Would he apply for coverage later, when the site might work better? Or just give up on the whole project?
"I might try later, when I get home from work," he told me. "I may call them again and see what's going on there."
KLIFF NOTES: Top health policy reads from around the Web.
Some insurance companies have not had any people enroll on the marketplaces. "Louisiana's leading health insurance company reports that not one person has yet successfully enrolled in a new health care plan offered through the Affordable Care Act. Since the marketplaces opened to much fanfare Tuesday (Oct. 1), many of the state's potential customers have been stalled on the website, unable to move past the portion of HealthCare.gov that instructs them how to set up their profile. Rebecca Catalanello in the New Orleans Times Picayune.
New York's marketplace had especially heavy opening day traffic. "By late afternoon in the East, state exchanges reported much heavier traffic than expected to their Web sites. New York said that 10 million attempts had been made to reach its site, although with many people making multiple tries, it was not clear how many individuals that represented. And officials said the figure was so far beyond anything they had considered plausible that they were investigating the cause." Abby Goodnough, Robert Pear and Richard Perez-Pena in the New York Times.
For the first time in the last 13 years, the biggest brand in the world isn't Coca-Cola, according to the Interbrand Best Global Brands survey. It's Apple.
More impressive, Apple's profits (or 2012 net income) are greater than the next three most powerful global brands—Google, Coca-Cola, and IBM—combined. Net income is not a perfectly clear way to measure corporate health and profit, but it's standard, and by this standard Apple's position atop the pyramid of global brands is all the more amazing considering that, unlike most of the names in the chart above, it's selling a luxury product.
Take Samsung, the biggest smartphone maker in the world by sales. Samsung's revenue inched ahead of Apple last year, but its margins are much lower. In fact, Apple profits are just about equal to Samsung's profits ... plus the profits of Google, Coca-Cola, and McDonald's, three of the world's most famous brands.
It's no wonder then, with Apple collecting such a bounty with each iPhone and iPad sale, that the company is sitting on $147 billion in cash. How much is $147 billion? It's more than the market cap of Amazon. It's 10 percent of all non-financial corporate cash and growing, as Quartz reported.
Apple might turn into the next decade's Microsoft: a massive money machine that specializes in tweaking one or two products and stops making new successful things, to the disappointment of investors and consumers alike. But today? What a massive money machine it is.
Apple may have rolled out the fingerprint sensor on its iPhone 5s to great reviews, with talk of it being applied to mobile payments soon, but an Android-run device in South Korea has jumped the gun and is getting what is apparently the world’s first fingerprint-based mobile payment service.
The Korea Herald reports that mobile payment service provider Danal has rolled out the world’s first such system today in partnership with fingerprint technology firm Crucialtec, which is landing first on domestic handset maker Pantech’s LTE-Advanced VEGA smartphone.
Users can download an application called BarTong to use their smartphones just like cash — and instead of entering a password, they simply scan their fingerprint via the smartphone.
A Danal official told The Korea Herald that it will eventually bring BarTong to overseas markets including the US and China.
A race to incorporate fingerprinting into mobile payments is likely to start now that Apple has introduced its Touch ID for the general consumer, and as users are still concerned over the security of e-commerce transactions via their smartphones. Being able to use a fingerprint for access will likely help greatly to ease such worries — and could mark the beginning of a more sophisticated mobile payment system other than what is on the market right now.
After midnight on Tuesday, one by one, government websites winked out. Ruled “inessential,” their number included the Library of Congress, NASA, and PandaCam.
But one turned on: Healthcare.Gov. The website, a key component of the Affordable Care Act, guides people through the process of buying health insurance. As commentators have pointed out, the site’s design is clean, humane, and conversational — and because many will use it while purchasing health insurance for their family, it may be the first website to have a non-neglible effect on public debate.
And, as of around 5 p.m. today, 2.8 million people had visited it.
It’s a big number. It’s also hard to figure out the scale of. 49.9 million Americans were uninsured and non-elderly in 2011, according to the Department of Health and Human Services — but, obviously, not all visitors today were American, non-elderly, or uninsured.
We may get a better sense of the program’s reach through its non-digital numbers, in fact. 81,000 have called the ACA’s toll-free number; some 6,000 have requested live chats, according to a statement from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid.
That 2.8 million number, though, which is surely higher now, nearly an hour later: It gives us a sense of what government (and bureaucracy) look like in 2013. It gives us a sense of the scale of civic information dispersal available through the web. When Medicare launched in 1965, for instance, the U.S. population stood at about 194 million people. Imagine about 1 percent of those people examining the same pamphlet, being guided through the same process, at the same time.
Vitamins design studio in London has created an ingenious wall mounted time planner that’s built entirely from LEGO bricks and can be synced digitally with your Google Calendar account using a smartphone camera.
Horizontal panels represent the coming months and are split vertically to show individual days. Staff pick a LEGO minifigure to sit alongside their allocated row, then add different colored bricks to represent the projects they’ll be working on.
Vitamins then wrote some software so that whenever someone shot a picture of the calendar and sent it to a specific email address, the changes were synced with the team’s shared digital calendar. An email then notifies the user that the changes have gone live.
It’s a novel idea that combines the visual, tactile nature of a physical wall planner with the digital calendars that most of us now use daily on our smartphones.
Last night the television series Breaking Bad came to an end, and the numbers prove the show had become a true cultural phenomenon in its last months. According to network AMC, 10.3 million viewers tuned in to watch the end of Walter White's story, a record high for the program, and an increase of more than 300 percent over the season finale last year. "Breaking Bad is simply unique," AMC president Charlie Collier said in a statement. "It all starts with Vince Gilligan who really only ever asked for one thing — the opportunity to end the show on his own terms."
Better than 'Dexter,' shy of 'The Sopranos'
It's a staggering number that demonstrates just how much momentum the show has gained. By way of comparison, only 6.1 million...
The latest edition of an influential annual report sees technology companies further staking their claim to some of the world's most important brands. Interbrand now names Apple as the most valuable brand in the world, with Google in second place; Coca-Cola, which took the top spot in all 13 previous reports, must settle for third. IBM and Microsoft round out the top five, and Samsung switched places with Intel to come in eighth. Facebook is the biggest riser in 2013, jumping to 52nd place from last year's 69th.
"Tech brands continue to dominate Interbrand's Best Global Brands report," the consultancy firm said in a press release, "underscoring the fundamental and invaluable role they play in consumers' lives."
"Creative Technologist" Natalia Rojas has mapped the profile photos of Facebook's 1,267,191,915 (and counting) users on just one web page. "The Faces of Facebook" is organized from top left to bottom right by the date each user joined Facebook, and in total creates a glitchy, vibrant, and awe-inspiring image. By clicking the location symbol and plugging in your Facebook credentials, you can pinpoint your place in the colorful mess, as well as the place of all your Facebook friends.
Rojas doesn't offer much of an artist statement about her latest project, aside from one observation reminiscent of Carl Sagan's thoughts on seeing "Pale Blue Dot," a famous image of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 probe. She writes, "There we are, all mixed up:...
Earlier today, President Obama and the Iranian president Hassan Rouhani had a phone call. The discussion was, it seems, substantial: Among its topics was Iran's nuclear program. But the content of the conversation was only one thing that made the call a big deal; even more significant was the fact that any conversation took place at all. The talk marked the first direct communication between a U.S. president and an Iranian president since 1979, when the Islamic Republic was installed and the Shah ousted and the diplomatic relations between the two countries all but severed. The talk itself -- the gesture of it, the meaning of it -- was, in other words, big news.
Which was why President Obama, a few minutes ago, called a press conference to announce the conversation to the media. "Just now I spoke on the phone with President Rouhani," Obama told convened reporters. The call, he added, "underscores the deep mistrust between our countries, but also indicates the prospect of moving on that difficult history."
Again: big news! Except that the call was not news to many of the people who were gathered to hear it. Minutes before Obama began his speech, today at 3:35 pm Eastern time, Hassan Rouhani, via his (unverified) English-language Twitter account, tweeted the following (screen-shotted by Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski):
Six small words, one huge announcement. But the image here is a screenshot because, moments after posting it, the Iranian president deleted the tweet. (Or, perhaps more accurately, the person manning the Iranian president's unverified Twitter account deleted the tweet.)
But it was too late. The tweet, its tweeter having been followed by many members of the American media in the lead up to this week's will-they-shake-hands-at-the-UN-or-won't-they discussions, filled the feeds of reporters around the country. Retweets were posted, exclamations offered, screenshots produced. Did Rouhani just scoop the American president? Did the expected handshake come as a phone call, and did the phone call get announced via a tweet?
Seems that way, yes. Which is a nice little lesson in contemporary diplomacy: Even world leaders can get twitchy fingers. And, as a result, news of a conversation that's been 33 years in the making can be scooped in a second.
In a piece on octopus farming, Katherine Harmon mentions a fascinating fact — octopuses don't have an adaptive immune system, the handy-dandy network of different immune-response cells that allow us vertebrates to more easily fight off infections our bodies have encountered before.
That's a problem if you're trying to raise a bunch of invertebrates in close quarters (as per a farm) because you can't immunize them against pathogens that could easily spread from one octopus to another. As a random biological tidbit, though, it's just damned fascinating. Check out this doctoral thesis for more information on how the octopus immune system does work. You should also read this story that looks at the evolution of the adaptive immune system and asks a key question — does having immune "memory" really make us that much better off than the animals that don't have it?
Do all your awesome dance-troupe videos keep getting pulled from YouTube for copyright violation? If so, there's finally an answer. The video-sharing site has just announced the launch of a new audio library, with 150 royalty-free music tracks for use on your videos. You can browse the library direct from your video manager page, and sounds can be sorted by genre, mood, instrument and so on. YouTube's even making a call out to musicians that would be interested in having their work added to the list. Those moves of yours? The world's not ready for them yet.
In February of 2013, programmer Nick Poulden got hooked on the idea of giving up food. He’d found the blog of Rob Rhinehart, a creator of a meal substitute called Soylent. Meant to provide a full dose of calories and nutrients in a single, cheap powder, Soylent was positioned as not just a better kind of protein powder or an Ensure substitute, but a revolution. "Free your body," proclaims the site’s crowdfunding page. "What if you never had to worry about food again?" Some tossed around the notion that Soylent could solve world hunger, optimistically overlooking decades of work on malnutrition-fighting food like Plumpy’nut and complex socioeconomic problems that can foil the most sophisticated plans. Early versions of Soylent left...
A company that makes a “smart” thermostat wants developers to hack together your connected home. Nest,“ The Learning Thermostat,” yesterday announced a new developer program and Web API that will connect Nest with other items in your home like lighting, home appliances and home automation.
Nest has become one of the poster children of the burgeoning connected home and Internet of Things industries. Its smart thermostat learns your schedule and programs itself to raise or drop your temperature if you are you home or away. It can also be set remotely through smartphone app or your computer.
The Nest Developer Program will officially launch in early 2014. Developers can register for the program now. Nest says that it will partner with anybody that wants to help create the future of the smart home, from indie developers with individual apps to large corporations that are building connected home platforms.
Nest’s first partner is Control4, a home automation company that creates products like the Wireless Music Bridge that provides audio listening to an entire house and smart lighting products.
The goal for a company like Nest is to make its Thermostat the hub of everything connected in the home. Nest says that it will “provide a near real-time Web API that allows control of the Nest Thermostat and display of its current configuration.”
What if Auto-Away could turn off your lights? What if your dryer knew not to run when energy prices were high? What if your robot vacuum knew when you were gone and cleaned up before you got home?
The connected home is more than just about the ability to control your house or apartment remotely through your smartphone or computer. The smart homes of the future will run more efficiently, save energy costs and anticipate their occupants wants and needs. Nest wants to be the company that is on the forefront of the next generation of homes and its new developer program is likely just the start.
In an effort to dissuade drivers from using the cellphones while driving, a total of 91 "text stops" have been installed across major highways in New York State where motorists can stop the car to send their text messages. The new accommodations come off the heels of a recent crackdown on texting drivers by the law enforcement, which has resulted in over 365% increase in the number of summons and tickets issued since last summer. During a press conference announcing the rest areas, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo added that the state would do everything in its power to combat the threat of distracted drivers, citing heightened penalties and new detection techniques.
Do you remember Second Life? Set up by developer Linden Lab in 2003, it was the faithful replication of our modern world where whoring, drinking, and fighting were acceptable. It was the place where big brands moved in as neighbors and hawked you their wares online. For many, it was the future — our lives were going to be lived online, as avatars represented us in nightclubs, bedrooms, and banks made of pixels and code.
In the mid-2000s, every self-respecting media outlet sent reporters to the Second Life world to cover the parallel-universe beat. The BBC, (now Bloomberg) Businessweek, and NBC Nightly News all devoted time and coverage to the phenomenon. Amazon, American Apparel, and Disney set up shop in Second Life, aiming to...
Apple today announced it has sold nine million new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c models in the first three days after their launch. This performance is illustrated in the following graph:
Note that the data is normalized to units/day.
The launch countries this year differed from last year in that they include all of China whereas last year only Hong Kong was included.[1]
The absolute number of 5x devices sold (not just shipped) seems to be an 80% increase from the 5 launch (9 million vs. 5) but accounting for China the increase is a more modest 29%. ((The China launch event last year may have had a different dynamic as it occurred later and nearer to holiday season, but I’ll go with the unqualified data.))
However, perhaps the more relevant comparison is between different “S” generations of phones.
The data shows that the 3GS was 3x more rapidly purchased on launch than the original iPhone. The 4S was 4x more rapidly purchased on launch than the 3GS and now the latest 5s/c are 2.3x more rapidly purchased than the 4S.
The growth is certainly lower but from a much higher base. This should not be surprising.
UPDATE: Galaxy S 4 launch data is updated to show weekend performance. Previous graph showed performance over the first 27 days.
Notes:
I am assuming that this year China includes Hong Kong. It would be good to confirm this.
"People can only read as fast as they can speak," say the makers behind Velocity, a new $2.99 speed-reading app for iOS 7. "Through silencing your inner voice," they say, you can effectively read much faster, and perhaps even raise your reading speed from 200 words per minute to a whopping 1,000 words per minute. The app flashes words in front of your eyes, and sure enough, before you know it, you've finished a 2,000-word "longread" that you would have ordinarily glazed over as you scrolled through your Instapaper or Pocket queue.
As the final episode of Breaking Bad draws ever closer, Sony Pictures has put hundreds of props from the show on auction. Bids start at $10 for trinkets like Jesse Pinkman's DEA mug, all the way up to $5,000 for Hector Salamanca's wheelchair, but expect the winning bids on the items to be far, far higher. After perusing the props on offer, the stars of the show seem to be Walter White's Pontiac Aztek (starting at $1,000) and an inscribed copy of Leaves of Grass($3,000).
Perhaps surprisingly, the iconic items aren't being auctioned for charity, but rather for profit. They're available on Screenbid, an auction site set up to help studios profit from unwanted props. Sony Pictures Entertainment, which produces Breaking Bad, has also...
David Fincher's Fight Club has become a modern classic, and if you're in the United States you'll have a chance to see it again in theaters over the coming week. Variety reports that the movie will be screening in selected theaters as part of theater chain Cinemark's "Classic Series." It's a recurring event that the chain puts on, picking a handful of classic films and showing them at theaters across the country. Pulp Fiction and The French Connection have already screened as part of this latest run.
Originally released in 1999, Fight Club stars Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, and was based on Chuck Palahniuk's novel of the same name. It will be playing this Sunday, September 22nd, at 2PM, and then twice again on Wednesday, September 25th....
.jpg)
