paul schreiber

Health Beat has a terrific roundup of health care new:

Physicians and hospital leaders in Cedar Rapids began by counting how many CAT scans they were doing, only to find that in just one year 52,000 scans were done in a community of 300,000 people. “I was embarrassed for us,” confides Jim Levett, a cardiac surgeon and the head of a large physician group in Cedar Rapids. It’s just not likely that 1/6 of the population needed a CAT scan in a given year.

Via Mark Hurst: Garrison Keillor on golf:

The socially redeeming aspect of golf lies in the vast number of lawyers and bankers and managers who play it, and when you think of the damage they would do if they were at the job instead, you can see why golf courses are a wise investment for any municipality.

There are seven continents. But who’s counting?

I’ve proposed a panel for SXSW Interactive: Abort? Retry? Failwhale? Making Error Messages Suck Less.

Here’s how I described it:

An unknown error occurred. Call your system administrator. Abort/retry/fail? Bad errors are everywhere. Sure, complain on twitter. But how do we fix them? Through hilarious examples, we’ll explore the 12 ways errors fail us. Then, we’ll teach you to write lucid messages that won’t make you (or your users) cringe.

Please vote for my panel:

This year’s SXSW Music festival has joined the 21st century — they now have an interactive panel picker. That means you can vote for my panel Why Your Tour Needs House Concerts.

Here’s the official description:

Find out why house concerts make sense for your next tour. Learn how to successfully approach established house concert series, book and promote shows. Discover the key differences between a house concert and a club gig. We’ll show you what it takes to make each house concert a memorable experience.

I’ve been playing with the prerelease version of Chrome for Mac OS X and found a rather amusing bug: