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Wikipedia's amazing success relies on the knowledge and time of millions of users creating and editing articles. A lesser known (nevertheless brilliant) example is what I bumped into recently.

Most of us would have identified distorted images of a word before creating an online account. While the main purpose of that is to differentiate between a human and a rogue program (which can create millions of spam accounts), Luis Von Ahn (a professor from CMU) uses this technique to help digitize books. If you wonder how this process of identifying distorted word images can help digitize books, watch this video

Nolan's report card

I'm tempted to give him "The God" status. Probably too soon for a director with just six movies under his belt. The variety and versatility in his story telling is exciting, even for me, who thinks twice before getting excited.

Chronologically his movies have earned increasing profits and almost resembles an exponential curve, if not for a small dip.

The dip corresponds to "The Prestige", a highly underrated movie, and quite understandably so(American public can be surprisingly unexcited by wonderful movies). On top of it, it had to beat "Batman Begins", well that's a daunting task. However it was compensated by "The Dark Knight". The excessive hype for the movie made it a worldwide blockbuster smashing previous box office records.

Not that, profits is an accurate metric for the quality of the movie. I believe making quality movies which is profitable is an accomplishment. How in the world can somebody pull of a "reverse chronological" screenplay to aptly represent a story revolving around an amnesiac. That's just inconceivable in my world.

Can't wait for "Inception".

Health care II

I have no idea how I keep stumbling upon these long articles on health care. What started as a casual read on the health care got a little bit involved. But as far as health care or financial reform goes, its absolutely impossible to understand or keep track of it from the daily tidbits in the media (for a layperson).

David Leonhardt's recent article on improving the efficiency of health care is informative and insightful. An elaborate discussion on how Intermountain, a health care system in Utah and Idaho, achieved better health care (at a lower cost) by establishing evidence based treatment guidelines for different clinical conditions. It is comforting to know that there is a solution to the health care conundrum. Implementation is a story for another day.

One of the interesting information to emerge from the article is the fact that Medicare has published a wealth of data on the web that compares hospitals based on various parameters (of health care). Check out the website here. I was immediately tempted to check the hospitals close by my locality and was astounded by the staggering amount of information available to people.