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One virtually unknown episode in the last century illustrates how the Philippines became a light in a very dark time. In 2008 German-born author Frank Ephraim published Escape to Manila: From Nazi Tyranny to Japanese Terror, an account of the Jewish refugee experience in World War II. In 1939 Ephraim was one of 1,200 Jews who fled the Nazi genocide in Europe and took sanctuary in the Philippines.
Thanks to the Steven Spielberg movie (and the 1982 Thomas Keneally book it was based on) many of us know that in WWII a German businessman named Oskar Schindler saved over 1,200 Jews from the concentration camps and certain death. What we do not know is that in the late 1930s in Manila, while they were playing poker and smoking cigars, seven men decided to rescue 1,200 Jews from the Nazis.
Documentary filmmaker Russ Hodge, 3 Roads Communications and Frieder Films are in Manila to shoot Rescue in the Philippines, the story of how President Manuel L. Quezon, the US High Commissioner Paul McNutt, Colonel (and future president) Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Frieders, four Jewish businessmen from Ohio who had a cigar business in Manila, overcame the huge bureaucratic and logistical challenges of saving people from the Holocaust.
They did it because it was the right thing to do.
via Quezon’s list: How the Philippines gave sanctuary to Jews fleeing the Holocaust – EMOTIONAL WEATHER REPORT By Jessica Zafra – The Philippine Star » Lifestyle Features » Sunday Life.

Bravo !!

THROUGH the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers have long supported research directed at understanding and treating human disease. Since 2009, the results of that research have been available free of charge on the National Library of Medicine’s Web site, allowing the public patients and physicians, students and teachers to read about the discoveries their tax dollars paid for.But a bill introduced in the House of Representatives last month threatens to cripple this site. The Research Works Act would forbid the N.I.H. to require, as it now does, that its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals to the library. If the bill passes, to read the results of federally funded research, most Americans would have to buy access to individual articles at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.This is the latest salvo in a continuing battle between the publishers of biomedical research journals like Cell, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine, which are seeking to protect a valuable franchise, and researchers, librarians and patient advocacy groups seeking to provide open access to publicly funded research.
via Research Bought, Then Paid For – NYTimes.com.

Uncloaking a Slumlord Conspiracy with Social Network Analysis
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant” – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
A client of ours — a small, not-for-profit, economic justice organization [EJO] — used social network analysis [SNA] to assist their city attorney in convicting a group of “slumlords” of various housing violations that the real estate investors had been side-stepping for years. The housing violations, in multiple buildings, included:
raw sewage leaks
multiple tenant children with high lead levels
eviction of complaining tenants
utility liens of six figures
The EJO had been working with local tenants in run-down properties and soon started to notice some patterns. The EJO began to collect public data on the properties with the most violations. As the collected data grew in size, the EJO examined various ways they could visualize the data making it clear and understandable to all concerned. They tried various mind-mapping and organization-charting software but to no avail — the complex ties they were discovering just made the diagrams hopelessly unreadable. They turned to social network analysis [SNA] to make sense of the complex interconnectivity.
The data I will present below is not the actual data from the criminal case. However, it does accurately reflect the social network analysis they performed. The names and genders of the individuals, as well as the names of real estate holdings [LLC] and other businesses have all been masked. This case will be presented in the sequence the EJO followed, first they looked at the real estate holdings, then the owners of the holdings, and then their connections, which led to other connections, and more people and entities.
via Revealing Economic Terrorists: a Slumlord Conspiracy.

The people who feel this way have always been a minority of the readership, a fact obscured by print bundles, but made painfully visible by paywalls. When a paper abandons the standard paywall strategy, it gives up on selling news as a simple transaction. Instead, it must also appeal to its readers’ non-financial and non-transactional motivations: loyalty, gratitude, dedication to the mission, a sense of identification with the paper, an urge to preserve it as an institution rather than a business.
via Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users « Clay Shirky.

It mostly comes down to a handful of medical specialities that have grown much faster than expected. Some parts of the Medicare system have actually grown slower than expected. All of them, however, would face a double-digit cut in reimbursements if Congress doesn’t appropriate any additional money to the Medicare program.
Harvard health policy researchers Ali Alhassani, Amitabh Chandra and Michael Chernew draw up the above chart to explore how much various medical specialities either overshot or came in under Medicare spending targets. Radiation oncology, for example, overshot what we expected it to cost by just about 300 percent. General surgery, however, has actually cost much lower than expected while opthalmology is just about on target.
There’s a hole between how much we budget for Medicare and how much it costs, because way more medical specialities are to the right of the dotted line here than to the left.
This graph also speaks to the doc-fix as a relatively inelegant policy solution: If Congress passes a pay-patch, all doctors see their salaries remain steady. If they don’t, all face a 27.4 percent reduction in reimbursement, regardless of whether their costs have actually outpaced the Medicare budget. “Across-the-board cuts in fees are too blunt an instrument to restrain the growth of spending on physician services,” the Harvard researchers argue. In other words, it’s hard to push general surgeons to keep costs down — as this chart shows they have — if, at the end of the day, their only reward will be a double-digit pay cut along with everyone else.
via Why Medicare is expensive, in one chart – The Washington Post.

Walking away from “real”
As in, “that’s not a real football team, they don’t play in Division 1” or “That stock isn’t traded on a real exchange” or “Your degree isn’t from a real school.”
Real contains all sorts of normative assumptions and implicit criticisms for those that don’t qualify. Real is just one way to reject the weird.
My problem with the search for the badge of real is that it trades your goals and your happiness for someone else’s.
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via Seth’s Blog: Walking away from “real”.