Harvard psychologist Dan Kindlon predicts thet spread and rise of the alpha girl. Does this mean we will see more female software hackers and developers soon?

Anyone who knows me, even remotely, knows that I have a huge beef with the American health insurance industry, which was greatly magnified after my own unpleasant run-ins with them over the course of the last two years. But of course while the insurance industry is certainly a ruthless predator and thus deserving much of the blame, they are not the sole culprit in sustaining what is a lousy health care system for Americans. A key player, I think, are American doctors, and I would now like to spread that beef patty of disgust to them, especially since they are now the one’s giving me problems dealing with the final portion of BCBS bill. The story is indicative of lager issues and problems that center on the problematic silence “spoken” by doctors.

To make a long story short, BCBS of NJ was not ponying up some serious cash (at least for me) for 2 mole surgeries because they were claiming it was pre-existing condition. After having the public relations director email me (thanks to that post) and a lot of research and letters etc, it was more or less resolved. Soon after they overturned the pre-existing “bs” (and I am not talking blue shield here), they promptly started to pay all sorts of bills (and I even got money back from doctors I had paid).

But there is one pesky $1600 bill that lingers like a bad smell and the question is why? I am not entirely sure but my interactions with my ex-dermatologists, Affilated Dermatology in NJ, I think reveal some important lessons as to why and how the medical establishment are complicit.

Basically, BCBS is telling me that it looks like they have been double billed because the cost is exactly the same for two procedures that are also exactly the same. I explained that I had did indeed have two surgeries on my scalp (they were really close to each other) and they let me know that the provider needs to call back and send information that clearly shows there were two surgeries. This actually seems somewhat legitimate and potential mistake (and it is not like medical billing is known for their lack of mistakes and integrity either).

So I call Affiliated Dermatology and while I would say they have been patient, in so far as patiently waiting for my money, they have been completely unhelpful in any meaningful sense to help me getting this resolved. Now, given how difficult it is to deal with the health insurance industry, I understand they can’t provide fine-tuned, fine-grained personal attention. The health insurance industry engages in some real hefty politics of foot dragging and well, there are so many foot soldiers at doctor’s offices to keep up with the web of knots that the health insurance constantly entangles us in. With that caveat in place, they can however do two things:

1. Inform you that you can contact the Department of Housing and Insurance and start some sort of formal complain process.

2. Give you some small clue as to whether the doctor has sent any of the additional requested information (they are usually mum, or enigmatic, or totally confusing with regards to that) so you know what the heck is going on.

So a few days ago when I was speaking with health insurance person at the dermatology office, she claimed there was nothing else she could do about this last bill. Every time she calls BCBS, she claims that they claim it is a problem with being a pre-existing condition, and I was like “how can that be when that has been cleared and every other bill, and there were many, has been paid?” And then she also said that there has never been this confusion before where 2 surgeries look like one, blah blah and blah (and in retrospect, I forgot to tell her that my double surgery, according to the doc, was in fact highly unusual, because they would usually do them on two separate days because they were so close to each other. They made an exception because I was literally on my way to Canada and begged them to do so but anyway).

Ok, so there I was bickering with this woman and feeling stuck between a rock and a hard place. Finally I let her know, point blank, that they have been remarkably patient with the billing but totally unhelpful in, well, helping me out. I let her know that they should let people like me know, for example, that they can file a formal complaint against the health insurance company and this would at least get the ball rolling. I then let her know that I had no other option but to file another complaint with the Dept of Banking and Insurance and they would just have to wait for that, at which point, she all of a sudden became more helpful. She suggested that we can do a three way call to resolve this. Well there you go. Why did it take a heated 15 minute conversation topped with a threat to get what I think actually makes perfect sense? Get the 3 parties involved on the phone with each other so as to all get on the same damn page about what needs to be done (not sure if BCBS will agree to this… at which point I will pester the public relations director again and in the end, I think this was resolved because he was sick of my emails).

Now, why why why why why why are doctors and their staff so unhelpful? I think that main answer is they are overwhelmed and don’t have the staff to deal with the enormous amount of foot dragging and coy tactics deployed by the health insurance. That said, there are 2 things worth mentioning that I think don’t paint a very flattering picture of many American doctors.

If you pay attention to your medical bills (and you always should), it is immediately evident that the doctors and hospitals get paid LESS, sometimes a lot less, if the health insurance company foots the bill because of the pre-arranged negotiated rate. So there is an actual incentive on that side of things to get paid via the consumer as opposed to the health insurance company. Now. I am sure that there are health care economic studies and reports justifying this strangeness but that does not make it right either. There is a clear incentive in place to get your green dollars, as opposed to those of the insurance company.

Second and this is a much bigger issue, is that I think that for any meaningful change to happen, we need the active support of a large percentage of the medical community, especially doctors. If they are mum, or actively opposed to health care reform (as was the case when the AMA helped derail the Clinton effort at instituting universal health care in the 1990s), well then it becomes all that much harder for the general populace and the politicians to initiate real change. Doctors are the ones, after all, with the moral weight and capacity to make claims that can STICK. If they are saying this system negatively impacts how we care for the ill, it is a system that is is immoral, well, one should listen to them as they are the ones, after all, who dedicated their LIFE to healing the ill, right? Yes? No? Maybe?

So their silence is nothing short of grave. The good news is that it seems like more doctors are on board than ever before clamoring for change in the right direction, but we need a lot more to come aboard…

A number of years ago, I wanted to write a controversial and critical article that claimed hackers are more ethical than doctors. I thought it would be fun to claim that those who are usually seen as ethical (doctors) are less so than those that are usually portrayed as bad-as* unethical tricksters.

Some people were offended by this because doctors deal with the great burden of life, death, sickness, and thus suffering while geeks and hackers are “just” geeking out on their computers. True. But at least a cadre of hackers have sustained a social realm and a real ethics–free software–in order to guarantee their own autonomy and also create the conditions for what is right for software.

Doctors, on the other hand, do not carry the torch of ethics as they should. While individually I am sure they deal with a oodles of difficult ethical choices and decisions, it is about time they they turn as a collective to the larger structural conditions that seriously cause a lot of harm to millions of Americans, especially the droves of uninsured. They have the moral weight to do something about it and it is about time they carry their weight in this battle and take some burden of suffering off others.

One might think that it is too early to declare the existence of a “classic” work on the Internet given how the Internet as a widely accessible communications networks is barely out of its pre-teen years, But if there is one book that I would say is a classic, it’s Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life. There were plans underway to release it under a libre license but after I ran into Julian at the AAAs in November, I got the scoop that things had come to a screeching halt.

So a few days ago I was surprised to find in my inbox, this nicely crafted announcement that My Tiny Life is more or less (more more than less) free as a free bird. This is good news and his story about the trials and tribulations of getting My Tiny Life out of the noose of copyright, is an interesting one, involving among other things, outsourced Indian Labor. Who knew.

And while I am on the topic, I meant to write about who, among the many authors I assigned this last fall, took the cake among students as their favorite book/article. Somewhat, unsurprisingly, Dibbell’s more recent Play Money was the champion. Most of the comments were relayed in class but here is one of the more amusing comments indicating the love:

Reading Julian Dibbell’s Real Money, Or How I quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot was exceedingly more interesting than I expected.

And then just yesterday, another student wrote me an email telling me he read and re-read the book over his holiday break and wants to get Dibbell inivited to NYU to speak (which would be great, though I admittedly have no idea how to make that happen given my recent arrival here). But clearly, there is another classic in the making.

Thankfully students liked many other readings and I think there were two other clear winners: Carl Elliot’s Better than Well , Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal. and Michael Sandel’s The Case against Perfection. This is of course no surprise to me as I picked these books because I knew they would teach themselves.

When you live in NYC and have a demanding job, you tend to ignore the city (at least I do), that is until guests descend upon your place. And since a Large Family Clan has recently landed in my apt, I have spent the last few days trekking north, south, east, and west, across bridges, in parks, and memorials, eating, drinking, and passing out at night after the constant flurry of activity.

Yesterday we headed pretty much as far north as you can go to pay a visit to the lovely Cloisters sitting high on a cliff. The Cloisters provides stellar views of the Hudson at the same time as it transports you back in time when a lot of energy was put into scribbling religious material on paper in really stunning and ornate ways. I have not paid a visit to the Cloisters since my undergraduate days and after yesterday’s stroll, I am sorry I waited until the frigid winter to do so. It is an *incredibly* serene place, especially the inner courtyard gardens, and if you need serenity (and I think anyone who lives in NYC, needs to counter the low-grade and high-grade exposure to constant noise with some noiseless environments), this is the place to go.

We then made our way to the Columbia area to check out the campus, St. John the Divine (currently under renovation), and so I could pick up a book being held for me at the Book Culture bookstore (which I wish was a lot closer to me than it is)… It was nice to escape the blustering winter conditions and browse the rows of books in a warm and well lit environment. But after purchasing Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Digital Age, parts of which I am hoping to teach next semester, and flipping through the book, my new found serenity was replaced by some serious offense when the only index I could find was an author index. There was no subject index in sight, which at the time left me totally surprised!!

Anyone who is in the business of using books as research tools knows the index is —-> indispensable. And a well indexed book is much appreciated (never mind what a non-existent index does). In fact, I felt like I stumbled on some rare object because I don’t think I have ever seen an academic book published in the last 30 years not sporting this useful tool and I wonder if 1) I have a bunk copy 2) The editors/authors forgot to include it and just pushed out the book anyway 3) This was a willful choice made for reasons hidden to the reader. I think I may have to contact Duke University Press and let me know they momentarily robbed me of my serenity

So I am done teaching my first two classes of 2007 and now I am nearly done with the syllabus for The One (yes one, they give new faculty a course release, thank the powers that be!!) class I am teaching next semester: Topics in Digital Media. Unlike this semester where the name of the syllabus game was a motley collection of chapters/articles, next semester I am concentrating on whole books although we won’t be reading all of them in their entirety so over the next few weeks I have to perform some whittling magic. It is just nice to have it done before I head away South to visit the family.

For those who want to see NYC streets turned into more humane, hospitable and especially bike-friendly places, this blog is for you. I love NYC because of its active street life but there is certainly almost endless room for massive improvement and these folks are pushing just for that.

And for those involved in disability rights activism, Stop Eugenics looks like a good (and important) new blog.

It is hard to believe that I have been blogging for over five years. And what is clear is that being an assistant professor is not all that conducive for blogging and this is materially evident in my sparse posting pattern over the last few months. It has been particularly bad in the last month thanks to a week long international trip, back-to-back sickness over Thanksgiving week, and finally going to Washington D.C. for the AAAs.

But this retreat from blogging as well as teaching on so-called Web 2.0 software, like blogs, has made me rethink the value and limits of the craft of blogging and so I am going to take some time (that I feel like I don’t really have, but oh-well..) to write them down as I am preparing a short piece for on the politics of Web 2.0 and I hope I can transfer some of these ideas there.

So as I have already mentioned, I am an now infrequent blogger. Prior to the era of RSS, this could have meant the death of my blog because if people went to visit my page and there was no new post and then this happened a few more times, they would just stop visiting.

The magic of RSS is that it brings the blog post to you and this alters the landscape of possibilities within the context of what has been nothing short of a seismic explosion of blogs. What I am finding—and this will be no surprise to anyone—is that it is just too difficult to keep up too many of a certain class of blogger—the prolific poster who posts medium to long posts and worse, nearly everyday! To make a point about the effects of this, allow me to tell a story: Two blogs I really like are Joe Reagle’s blog on Open Communities as well as Tenured Radical. Both provide captivating posts but I recently unsubscribed to Radical Tenure and not Joe Reagle’s. Why? My decision was purely pragmatic. Because she posts way too much, I just can’t keep up. If I stop reading her blog for 2 weeks, and then pay a visit via bloglines, I am faced with a blogolanche and I am trying to avoid, at all costs, overwhelming situations. On the other hand, if I stop reading Joe’s blog for 2 weeks, there may be one or two posts so I feel like I can spare the time to continue reading. Ironically, I will now visit Tenured Radical every month, much as I did prior to the RSS era, just to take a quick scan and see if there is anything I must read.

There is another class of blogs, such as Sivacracy, that update their site frequently but the posts are tidy and short and so I can usually keep up and they provide important news for my projects. But the type of blog that provides longer ruminations has proliferated (and I really like reading those) but I suspect that as the blogosphere has expanded, less people can commit to those types of blogs. In other words, today, you may hang on to more readers, if you only blog 1 to 2 times a week instead of 3-5 weekly posts that are medium to long in length.

Now I may be completely OFF the mark with this by generalizing my own experience so I would be interested in hearing people’s experiences or better, if anyone could point me to someone who studies these types of pattern, I would really appreciate it.

On a related note, last week I taught a now famous piece by Cass Sunstein on political balkanization on the Internet that is in part secured by blogging. His core argument, which I think stands to some degree, is that the blogosphere is less an arena where people with different inclinations and views meet to debate, and thus change their views, but is an arena where your pre-existing ideas are reinforced because you are simply reading and debating with people who hold your worldview.

As I mentioned, I think this is true in so far as you don’t see people on the left and right engaging in some debate that substantially transforms their ideas. But the argument is faulty or missing something crucial about the nature of politics, in so far as that the so called left or right or so called liberal and conservative positions are truly not unitary so that if different types of liberals/lefties are engaging with each other to change positions and ideas within that group, well then, the critical function of blogging is in fact well and alive. To state using an example, there are plenty of liberals who, in my opinion, could use a little radicalization and perhaps this is happening in the blogosphere because people come across a spectrum of ideas and positions from within their political pole.

Finally and this point really is not mine but I am poaching it from Jeff Juris who made it last weekend at the AAA meeting during his presentation on activist videos. One of his findings was that activists were the only ones watching video’s documenting protests when hosted on radical political sites like Indymedia. When they were placed on Youtube, the audience expanded considerably: conservatives were also watching them, but they effect was not to make their more sympathetic toward the left and their political points, but simply to reinforce their position, which is evident in the archived comments expressing their great distaste of the left. This is a perfect example of the Balkanization that Sunstein talks about but with an important reversal: it comes from confronting difference not avoiding it!

But Jeff made the excellent point that there is a critical function in preaching to the choir: it ensures that the choir will not stop singing! That is, your political passions are not simply ensured, they must be renewed and given the massive amounts of apathy peppering our population, renewal by confronting what you believe in, is vital.

So my advice is keep producing posts, keep reading even if it tends to be stuff you already believe in BUT please, post less. Less, I think, is really becoming the new more….

In a few years I want to organize a panel for the AAA called “The Liberalism of Anthropology and the Anthropologies of Liberalism” that opens the door to discussing the role of liberalism in the general anthropological project (notably in trying to breed tolerance) and how anthropological work, especially of the last twenty years (although really since its inception) has also worked to critically disturb the liberal project (in many ways, but including debunking the myth of the liberal subject and voicing the limits of liberal tolerance). I want to say more about the ways in which anthropologists have walked this line, but I have to read for tomorrow’s class and more than anything else I wanted to permanently jot this down so as to not forget my title.

So this Sunday I am off to Japan along with a few other members of my department for a week long visit. I am going to attend a conference being hosted by the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. The number of faculty members housed under this initiative is simply impressive and I look forward to meeting many of them and learning how they are conceptualizing and moving forward with the interdisciplinary study of digital society.

I have not had much time to think about the trip outside of 1) how do I get to my hotel 2) preparing for my presentation but I will have a little free time on Tuesday, Thursday morning, Sunday morning and a few evenings to see some sights and see some people.

With the help of Junichi and others, we are organizing a gathering with Debian developers as well as the local and some visiting Creative Commons folks on Wed night, the 14th of November. Do come around if you are there and interested (and you can leave me a comment or email me at biellaATnyuDOTedu too.

While I basically am going to be like-a-lemming and follow my colleagues who have made some plans, if you think there is something Not To Be Missed in Tokyo, do leave a shout out in my comments or ping me via email. I would appreciate it!

It is nice to read the New York Times and get some good news. Nadia Abu El-Haj was granted tenure after a bitter public battle opposing her appointment. As someone who has taken graduate courses with her in Chicago and who was advised by her, I know Columbia and Barnard made the right choice.