Haunted by the Utopia It Never Quite Became
***The Real Future Fair is coming to San Francisco, November 6-7. The event is literally this newsletter incarnate! Cop tickets.***
1. Why and how are electronic medical records still such a mess?
"But instead of ushering in a new age of secure and easily accessible medical files, Epic has helped create a fragmented system that leaves doctors unable to trade information across practices or hospitals. That hurts patients who can't be assured that their records—drug allergies, test results, X-rays—will be available to the doctors who need to see them. This is especially important for patients with lengthy and complicated health histories. But it also means we're all missing out on the kind of system-wide savings that President Barack Obama predicted nearly seven years ago, when the federal government poured billions of dollars into digitizing the country's medical records... Unfortunately, in some ways, our medical records aren't in any better shape today than they were before."
2. A card game about making up futures called The Thing From the Future.
"A single deck of The Thing From The Future cards may be used for play by individuals or by groups of two to six members. For larger gatherings (such as in a classroom or workshop), the game may be played by parallel groups with one deck per group and a central facilitator to orchestrate the timing of each round. Four players is an ideal group size. There are four types of cards in The Thing From The Future: Arc, Terrain, Object, and Mood. Each round, players will generate a four-card creative prompt containing one of each kind of card. Based on this prompt, players will imagine a thing from the future."
3. Most ants are bums, basically.
"However, a recent study has demonstrated that the majority of ants are in fact sluggards. The study reports, 'Out of the ‘workers’, 71.9% were inactive at least half the time, and 25.1% were never seen working. A small fraction of the ants, just 2.6%, were always active during observation.' The report appeared last month in science mag Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology. Previous studies have postulated that inactivity might be temporary, with ants working in shifts dictated by circadian rhythm. But the new results show that the lazy workers stay lazy no matter the time of day. According to the team, this suggests that inactivity isn’t merely a break between tasks, but might be an important part of the ants’ division of labour. - See more at:
4. Russian novel in one hand, Google in the right.
"Seeing these images helped me understand what Ismailov is doing with his novel; the novel is not nostalgic for the Soviet era, not exactly, but both Ismailov and his protagonist are haunted by the utopia it never quite became. If you look closely at these stations—if you look for the iconography and the staged progression of Soviet glories—you can find the vision of manly glory and the march of Mother Russia."
"My first attempt at recording bats - two of them flying between around 3m - 10m above my microphones. Slowed down to 10% of original speed to make their ultrasonic chirps audible. The chirps show up on a spectrograph at around 35-40khz."
On Fusion: For some kinds of stories, robot journalism is kind of awesome, actually.
1. motherjones.com 2. situationlab.org | @futuryst 3. theidler.com | @djp1974 4. lithub.com 5. soundcloud.com | @yannseznec
Haunted by the Utopia It Never Quite Became