Health careless still, Olympic science, how to convert: The Obama administration's health care summit of yesterday (Thursday) is history, although the analysis will doubtless go on and on and on.
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HEALTH CARELESS YET AGAIN. The Obama administration's health care summit of yesterday (Thursday) is history, although the analysis will doubtless go on and on and on. Find a complete transcript at the indispensable Kaiser Health News.
The New York Times's Prescriptions blog is carrying a 4-minute video encapsulation of the day's events. It's nowhere near as funny as the Second City video cited below. Indeed, the fact that a session lasting nearly 7 hours can be compressed into so brief a summary is not funny at all. It suggests a certain, ah, lack of content. Or that the discussion, and its outcome, were pre-scripted. The opposing parties agreed on little, as forecast, and the Democrats vowed to press on with their proposals, as forecast.
But, writing mostly while the thing was in real time, I unearthed blog posts that, while perhaps not quite evergreen, give promise of still being relevant today (Friday.) Herewith:
Ezra Klein blogs indefatigably for the Washington Post despite writing real articles for the paper paper too. He also leverages his output, clever fellow, by doing roundups of links to his previous posts. Here's a particularly meaty one; see especially his analysis of Republican strategy and the Viewer's Guide. As a reward for your studiousness, you have permission to watch the brilliant video from the Second City troupe at the post's end. Many good comments, too.
Laurie Goodstein at Prescriptions writes about the coalition of dozens of religious groups that have urged passage of health care reform. I don't recall seeing this anywhere else, even though it strikes me as a fairly big deal. The groups represent evangelicals, most mainline Protestant denominations, Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Quakers and Mennonites.
At the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog, James A. White describes the "modest," scaled-down (and perhaps piecemeal) plan that the White House will announce when (if?) Obama's big plan fails. Klein says that's nonsense, there is no Plan B.
Lest you think we are neglecting science with all this policy gabble, here's a dab or two, admittedly of the social sort. First, Klein applies negotiation theory to the politics of health care reform. His conclusion: "This is the most important fact to understand about the modern legislative environment: The minority does not prefer a negotiated success to making the majority look like an unmitigated failure."
More social science, Department of Cognitive Dissonance: Kaiser Health News describes yet another poll showing that the citizenry still hates the health care reform legislation Congress has come up with but still loves its individual provisions and still wants lawmakers to keep working at it.
SPEAKING OF SUMMITS, OLYMPIC SCIENCE. Last week I couldn't find much about the science of Olympic winter sports, but this week Scientific American has come through with a whole section that includes not just blogging but videos and podcasts too. Topics include the physics of figure skating, wind resistance in skeleton, how the medals are made of e-waste, and the always-amusing Steve Mirsky on curling. Inevitable. Why does curling strike us all as funny? Is it because it seems to be the only winter sport that doesn't invite life-threatening injury?
Not sport, but just as stunning as Kim Yu-na: Betsy Mason has assembled 10 pages worth of knockout satellite images of Olympic venues--past, present, and future--at Wired Science. Go.
BECOME A PDF CONVERT. PDF (portable document format) files have the virtue of reproducing a printed page exactly, graphics and all--a boon to writers, and perhaps especially science writers. We need those graphs and tables and maps, and the micrographs and fMRIs and DNA chips are pretty too. But PDFs are also an irritant. Unless you own Adobe's expensive proprietary Acrobat software, PDFs resist the sort of manipulation that is normal for other word-processing formats.
Case in point: Earlier this week I sought to convert a PDF copy of one of my pieces into an editable format. I tried with a (free) online PDF-to-Word converting service I've used before, but it was no longer working. Rats.
Multi-blogger David Bradley may have solved that problem for me. (David is best-known for Sciencebase, but this came from another of his blogs, Sciencetext.) Like David, I mostly use the free Foxit reader for PDFs, in my case because it's much faster than the free Adobe Reader. But, like David, I have found that when you copy and paste a chunk of a Foxit-borne PDF into another application, the reader runswordstogetherinwhatIassumeisanefforttogetyoutobuythepaidversionofFoxit. I resist purchasing because I need this function infrequently. Also, I've found a fairly non-kludgy workaround: Instead of Foxit, I open the PDF in Adobe Reader, which lets me copy and paste with no wordsquash (although only one column at a time.)
That's OK if you're trying to copy small bits of text, but if what you want is free conversion into a Word file, as I did, other measures are required. Now I learn from David about Nuance's PDF Reader 6.0. He says, "If you want to convert a PDF file to Word, Excel, RTF or WordPerfect, it can do that for you 'in the cloud'. NuancePDF.com lets you turn PDF files into fully formatted Word and Excel files."
David provides a link to a Seth Rosenblatt post at CNET's Download Blog, where I learn that Nuance has just released a free version of this converter.
Ooooooo. I'm a longtime user of Nuance's very good speech-recognition program, Dragon Naturally Speaking, so I'm optimistic that the Nuance PDF converter will solve my problem with PDFs. Just as soon as I get a minute. Meantime, I pass it on to you with no guarantees, but with hope in my heart.
