Is your real name Jeffrey Dahmer?

Because I heard he was dead. (But not eaten.)

Expensive hotels do a lot of business for people on expense accounts who often don't have much choice about where they stay. Cheap hotels tend to cater to people who are spending their own money, and get to choose where they stay.

The people who run hotels and motels know this or, if they don't, still act as though they do.

ANSI X12 healthcare-related formats (837, 835, 277U, 277CA, etc.) are oriented around insurance claims, but some include actual medical information (diagnosis codes, dates of service, etc.). The diagnosis codes were to change from ICD-9 to the somewhat less antiquated ICD-10 on October 1, 2014.

Supposedly, one of the benefits of ICD-10 will be that more automation of acceptance/rejection decisions will be possible. ICD-10 codes are more granular, with a hierarchical taxonomy, and the subfield of the codes are more orthogonal. A possibly inaccurate example: the broken limb code is short, followed by one or more subfields that indicate left/right, upper (arm)/lower (leg), proximal/distal. And for those subfields, "unspecified" is an option. The subfields aren't necessarily about location, but also might include severity, apparent cause, chronic/temporary, etc.

How granular and orthogonal? There's a code for "burns suffered while operating a personal watercraft", for instance. When I heard that, I was skeptical, so I went looking. Google found it. Also, one for an injury resulting from stepping on a turtle, or something like that. And so on.

Naturally, there's no automatic conversion of codes from ICD-9 to ICD-10, or the other way. There are "crosswalk tables" that will list for a code the possible equivalents in the other, with a short textual description to help figure out which one is the best match.

The mandated switchover from ICD-9 to ICD-10 was delayed a year by an amendment attached to the annual "boy did we screw up Medicare reimbursement decades ago" fix. Apparently a lot of folks in health care and supporting industries who will be negatively impacted wanted more time to prepare: update software, install updated software, train claim coders the bazillion new and different codes in ICD-10, arrange a line of credit to cover the temporary loss of revenue as claim rejections rise during the first months of the switch-over, etc.

Line of credit? Yep. A previous ANSI X12 change caused a lot of payments to be delayed while providers corrected a larger-than-normal number of claim rejections. Or punted, because the effort of correcting and resubmitting smaller claims wasn't worth the effort. ICD-10 will have a similar effect on doctors, hospitals, dentists, chiropractors, ambulance services, etc.

Expect ICD-10 to be required in October 2015. (Unless it gets delayed again.)

Sounds reasonable. My employer, long before I hired on, did much the same thing.

They split off one part of the business as a separate company, since the one company's customers were customers of the other company. This meant that the customers of the spun-off company's competitors were at a disadvantage. Or were perceived to be.

Post-spinoff, Company S's customers wouldn't be locked in to using Company E. And customers of companies competing with Company S wouldn't feel like they were getting less attention than customers of Company S, if they chose to go with Company E.

Nor can I.

Blaming or crediting presidents for a situation is rarely justified. They are not kings, not dictators.

We're seeing that change, as each new administration invents new powers for the presidency, and gets away with it.

"The problem is that there are a lot of nutjobs who think that killing one person will somehow solve the world's problems"

And even more who think that electing one person will.

And sad to say, they vote.

There may be some safety concerns with using "junkyard parts" (or not), but if so, they aren't as important when a vehicle carries two orders of magnitude fewer people.

Now to await 2 or 3 angry responses from people who totally missed the point, because they lose their ability to think clearly when lives are on the line.

Academics gotta publish. Novel results are more publishable than confirmations of previous research. "If you torture the data enough, it will confess." Even honest researchers will mistake randomness for a pattern, especially if they like the result for ideological, personal, or professional reasons.

Combine these and other things, and you get the reason for this paper: " Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124

This was from 2005. I wonder if since then any published research findings confirm his conclusions?

One appalling aspect of the Spanish Flu epidemic is that, due to wartime censorship, information about the disease was suppressed, including information about where it was, and how to avoid it.

Not in Spain, though. The disease was in a lot of places, including Spain. Spain wasn't in WW 1, so wartime censorship did not apply there.

Information about it was in Spanish newspapers, and that's how it got the name -- even though it apparently started in Kansas, and spread through overcrowded US military barracks and troop ships.

As was stated in a podcast -- http://www.econtalk.org/archiv... -- failure to finish doesn't mean much.

If you can get what you came for after a few hours, or after doing 90% of the course, why bother to go on? You got value from it.

And if you quit after a quick look, is that a bug or a feature? Do people always attend every university they visit? Does people ever drop a class when they realize after a session or two that it isn't going to work for them?

There may not be a "right" metaphor for this, but if there is, it's probably not related to academia.

A MOOC is more like a library book than a college class. You're not obligated to complete what you start, and it's silly to suggest that not completing it is some kind of "failure".

"On August 6, U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga ordered the Executive Branch ..."

One of my pet peeves: the journalistic practice of pretending that the federal judiciary is not part of the federal government.

Sounds even stupider when I put it into words.

Well, if 95+% of the elected, appointed and hired people in the federal government are busy being punished -- presumably by arrest, prosecution and imprisonment, but I'd settle for hickory switches methodically administered in a measured number of strokes for each infraction, by the nearest available taxpayer -- who's going to run the government?

I dunno, but wouldn't it be nice to find out?

It didn't quit being evil just because it ended. History is chock-full of examples of things that worked out badly. It's important to remember them.

I'd offer some obvious examples, but I'm trying to avoid Godwin's Law.