Explaining the ‘Any’ Key

“Verisign’s controversial new SiteFinder service replaces ‘Cannot find server or DNS error’ for missing domain names with results that may point to Verisign partners and now it has spawned a lawsuit by a competitor who alleges that the results could give Verisign and its partners an unfair advantage.

So while the litigation gets going is there no way for you to return your system to its former self. Will every ‘domain not found’ now result in a SiteFinder page? Maybe not. PC Magazine editors sat down this morning and hashed out an interim ‘fix’. All that’s required is a few simple adjustments to your system.”

“For years, health insurers have occasionally demanded a look at psychotherapists’ notes of their sessions with patients, to ensure that the care they were paying for was appropriate, or that it actually took place.

But now one insurer, Oxford Health Plans, is saying that in many cases, the notes are not enough evidence that the patients received what Oxford paid for. Oxford has audited hundreds of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers in the New York metropolitan area, deemed their notes inadequate documentation of the sessions, and demanded repayment of thousands of dollars from each provider — in some cases, more than $100,000.

The therapists and their professional associations paint Oxford’s actions as another skirmish in a decade-long campaign by insurers to save money by denying coverage — but one that sets a new standard for aggressiveness. They say that no other insurance company has denied payment because session notes were not detailed enough or long enough…” NY Times

Let’s face facts: health insurers will do anything they can to deny coverage and save money. The only thing surprising about this maneuver is that it hasn’t been tried until now. You know that the rest of the industry will follow suit if this works. While psychiatry visit notes relating to the patient’s use of medications have to be detailed enough to show a thorough evaluation of medical factors, it is customary for a ‘talk therapist’s’ session notes to go no further than documenting that the patient was there, which billing category the visit fell under, and what diagnosis the patient carries (for insurance purposes; don’t get me started on the problems with this ‘pigeonholing’…). Anything more will have a chilling effect on the patient’s candor in the psychotherapy and set the therapist up in an open-ended fashion for an ethical violation of thier client’s privilege.

The modafinil saga continues: “An advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration endorsed yesterday new uses for a stimulant that keeps people awake with fewer side effects than caffeine or amphetamines.

The panel said the drug, Provigil, now approved only for narcolepsy, could also be used to fight sleepiness in workers who cannot adjust to night shift jobs and in people who do not sleep well because of a breathing disorder known as obstructive sleep apnea.

But with some members expressing concern that the drug might be overprescribed, the committee did not endorse the request by the drug’s manufacturer, Cephalon, that it be approved for all sleep disorders.” NY Times

A Calculus of Violence: “…(O)ver the last decade and a half, Mr. Vollmann, 44, has pumped out thousands of pages of dark, difficult, scatological prose rife with all manner of violence and degradation. Thanks to books like Whores for Gloria, The Rainbow Stories and nearly a dozen other titles, he has earned a cult following and comparisons to both Thomas Pynchon and Céline.

His fascination with prostitutes, pimps, drug addicts and skinheads is legendary. As are his research methods. His quest for authenticity has led him to prowl war zones and bad neighborhoods, to sleep with streetwalkers, to smoke crack with junkies and to endure grueling physical ordeals. …(H)is enthusiasm for guns, it turns out, owes more to moral conviction than literary curiosity. It is a direct result, Mr. Vollmann says, of the research he undertook for his latest work: Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,000-page meditation on the ethics of violence.

The book, which will be published in seven volumes by McSweeney’s in October (and in abridged form by Ecco next year), took him 23 years to write. A dense, meandering, amalgam of historical analysis, contemporary case studies, anecdotes, essays, theory, charts, graphs, photographs and drawings, it is Mr. Vollmann’s attempt to bring definitive resolution to a conundrum that has preoccupied generations of thinkers: under what conditions can violence be justified?

As he writes on page 291, when he finally gets around to explaining his intentions: ‘My own aim in beginning this book was to create a simple and practical moral calculus which would make it clear when it was acceptable to kill, how many could be killed and so forth.'” NY Times

French card deck names ‘most dangerous’ U.S. leaders: “The ace of spades? Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gets the honor in a new French deck of cards. President Bush is the king of diamonds and Osama bin Laden the joker.” CNN

“Head of a baseball club and director of Salem bin Laden’s oil company (brother of Osama). Designated President of the United States by friends of his father at the Supreme Court before the vote count showed that he lost the elections.”

“Despite high gasoline prices and social pressure to drive more efficient cars, the best-selling vehicles in the United States this year are trucks by Ford, Chevy, and Dodge, all of which are being made larger, often with four doors, and marketed to families as lifestyle vehicles.” Boston Globe

And: The Pickup, A Love Story:

“If you sit behind the wheel of a 2004 pickup, it’s pretty hard to find the way back to that truck of yesteryear — with the plywood floors, the two-piece windshield and the hand-crank windows — the one that America first fell in love with. Dealer lots all over the country twinkle with full-size pickups that taunt us with awesome power that we will, very likely, never need and assuage us with deep pile carpet, countless cup holders, GPS guidance systems and power sunroofs. Truth be told, we would all find a long ride in the ancestral pickup less than enjoyable. But that doesn’t mean the roots of the pickup aren’t important. In fact, the history is essential to understanding how the pickup has come to represent a perfect marriage of our desire for frontier-style freedom and suburban-style comfort.” NY Times

Polymath Scholar Dies at 67: “He was an exemplar of American multiculturalism, at home both in Arabic and English, but, as he once put it, ‘a man who lived two quite separate lives,’ one as an American university professor, the other as a fierce critic of American and Israeli policies and an equally fierce proponent of the Palestinian cause.

Though a defender of Islamic civilization, Dr. Said (pronounced sah-EED) was an Episcopalian married to a Quaker. He was also an excellent pianist who for several years wrote music criticism for The Nation. From 1977 to 1991 he was an unaffiliated member of the Palestine National Council, a parliament in exile. Most of the council’s members belong to one of the main Palestinian organizations, most importantly to Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, but some belonged to smaller organizations believed responsible for terrorist operations against Israelis and Americans, such as George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” NY Times