The state of U.S. manufacturing

Here's a fascinating article about how and why Apple moved their manufacturing from the U.S. to Asia... and about the future of the U.S. economy. Well worth a read.

The refrigerator on top of your television

All I can say is, "Wow."

There are 160 million so-called set-top boxes in the United States, one for every two people, and that number is rising. Many homes now have one or more basic cable boxes as well as add-on DVRs, or digital video recorders, which use 40 percent more power than the set-top box.

One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year, about 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot energy-efficient refrigerator, a recent study found.

These set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are generally running full tilt, or nearly so, 24 hours a day, even when not in active use. The recent study, by the Natural Resources Defense Council, concluded that the boxes consumed $3 billion in electricity per year in the United States — and that 66 percent of that power is wasted when no one is watching and shows are not being recorded. That is more power than the state of Maryland uses over 12 months.

Full story from the New York Times.

And then there's this from a few months ago, also from the Times:

In California, where about 400,000 people are licensed to grow marijuana for personal medical use or to sell to dispensaries, indoor cultivation is responsible for a whopping 8 percent of household electricity usage, costing about $3 billion yearly and producing the annual carbon emission of a million average cars.

Quote for the day

"No Americans are in harm's way. It's just flying robots killing Libyans. You know, peace."

-- Stephen Colbert, last night on The Colbert Report

Another "what's wrong with our healthcare system" story

Double CT scans:

Performing two scans in succession is rarely necessary, radiologists say, yet some hospitals were doing that more than 80 percent of the time for their Medicare chest patients, according to Medicare outpatient claims from 2008, the most recent year available....

In 2008, about 75,000 patients received double scans, one using iodine contrast to check blood flow, and one that did not. “If you do both, you bill for both,” Dr. Pentecost said.

Radiologists say one scan or the other is needed depending on the patient’s condition, but rarely both. Double scanning is also common among privately insured patients who tend to be younger.

Double scans expose patients to extra radiation while heaping millions of dollars in extra costs on an already overburdened Medicare program. A single CT scan of the chest is equal to about 350 standard chest X-rays, so two scans are twice that amount

The New York Times has an ongoing series of investigative reports about the overuse and misuse of radiation for medical purposes in America.

Brilliant

Courtesy of a co-worker:

(Click for larger image)

Voicemail is so 20th century

I just left someone a voicemail, and given how rarely I do that these days, it felt a bit awkward.

The New York Times had a good article yesterday about how the culture has turned its back on voice calls. I immediately forwarded the link to Bette who once remarked, "I just need a phone to make, and occasionally receive, calls." :-)

The latest on the Japan nuclear plant situation

From the Los Angeles Times:

U.S. government nuclear experts believe a spent fuel pool at Japan's crippled Fukushima reactor complex has a breach in the wall or floor, a situation that creates a major obstacle to refilling the pool with cooling water and keeping dangerous levels of radiation from escaping.

That assessment by U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials is based on the sequence of events since the earthquake and information provided by key American contractors who were in the plant at the time, said government officials familiar with the evaluation. It was compelling evidence, they said, that the wall of the No. 4 reactor pool has a significant hole or crack.

If they're unable to keep these still-hot fuel assemblies covered with water, the uranium in them will continue to release radioactivity and make it more difficult to handle the ongoing problems at the other five reactors on the site.

The BBC has a helpful "What Went Wrong?" infographic here (scroll to the bottom of the story).

Internet security, esp. at public wi-fi hotspots

If you use public wi-fi networks at places like coffee shops, libraries, or airports, beware... it's gotten a lot more dangerous out there.

I wish I had read this article sooner, because I think I've been snared by this hack before: wi-fi "evil twins." Basically, these are fake, "free" internet hotspots set up in locations where you expect to find service, like airports. And in connecting to them you may be giving someone access to your online or financial identity.

And since being released on the net last fall, a new tool called Firesheep has been downloaded heavily all around the world. Once installed on a hacker's system, it allows them to steal your logon credentials to sites like Facebook when you access them via public wi-fi locations.

Either of these methods may be in use by that cute college kid sitting two seats away from you...

To protect yourself:

• confirm that the SSID of the wireless network you are connecting to is the right one (this means ask someone who should know if it's not posted!)
• log on to websites with https (rather than http) whenever it's supported (I'm switching from Yahoo! Mail to Gmail because the latter supports https as the default; it's not an option with Yahoo!)
  
• and to be completely safe, subscribe to a virtual private network (VPN) service; three are reviewed here (I use HotSpotVPN)
  

Katrina... Japan... and then?

Watching the latest coverage from Japan, I can't help thinking about what a similar disaster would be like here in Portland.

We saw what happened in Katrina. And now Japan, one of the world's most advanced nations, is struggling with everything from the "simple" act of getting food and fuel to those who lost their homes to the complexity of preventing further catastrophe at the six Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors.

Scary.

Live TV : Ustream

(Video link)

Oscars: Best Picture nominees

This year I've managed to see all of the movies that the Academy has nominated for Best Picture. I won't venture a prediction, but here are my thoughts on all ten of them, in the order I saw them (as best as I can remember).

The Kids Are All Right *****

This was the only one of the bunch to which I gave five stars (with a couple of exceptions, I rated all of the movies on my Netflix account within 24 hours of seeing the movie, and I used those ratings in this post). Still, it's not my top pick...

While watching it, the Julianne Morore-Mark Ruffalo story line made me angry, angry enough to want to get up and walk out. But even in the moment I sensed that that emotional involvement was a good thing.

I thought Annette Benning was perfect in her role, as good as she's ever been, and I'd be happy to see her win Best Actress.

Overall, I loved it.

Inception **

I walked out wondering, "Why do they think they have to try so hard?" I wasn't impressed, and it seemed like yet another movie that attempts to achieve something by going way over the top. Style over substance. Yes, very intricate. But I just didn't care about the Leonardo DiCaprio character or his relationship with his wife, so who cares? Yawn.

The Social Network ***

I wasn't a fan of Mark Zuckerberg when I walked in, and I cared even less for him when I walked out. But the movie was great; I loved the pace, the relentless progress forward. Web-time, indeed. And I agreed with an article I read about the movie when it came out (sorry, can't find the link): the movie serves as a generational litmus test. To some people, the Zuckerberg character in the movie is a clod and a jerk, entirely annoying. To younger folk, he has more of a "heroic" quality because of his accomplishments. Unfortunately, this apparently makes me "old" despite working in Silicon Valley all those years...

With regard to the real Facebook, which like Apple has become less and less appealing with time, my attitude shifted a bit after listening to a CNN interview with Google marketing exec Wael Ghonim who volunteered that "this [Egyptian] revolution started on Facebook."

Black Swan ****

I haven't been much of a Natalie Portman fan (Padmé Amidala, ugh), but she was totally convincing in Black Swan. Like most of my favorites on this list, this was a difficult movie to watch (crazy how self-mutilation as minor as ripping off a tiny patch of skin can twist me up in contortions in my theater seat). The movie had a lot of cohesive layers; overall, it just worked for me. Creepy, unflinching, and ultimately... completely, poetically satisfying. It breathed new life into Swan Lake the way Rent did for La Bohème.

This was the first of the movies I saw and said afterwards, "This gets my vote."

Toy Story 3 ***

I cried. And yes, it speaks to the challenges of aging. But as someone who is aging, it didn't move me all that much. I sort of had a, "Well, yes, it's more Toy Story" reaction.

The King's Speech ****

I cried. Awesome performances from Geoffrey Rush, Colin Firth, and Helena Bonham Carter. Really moving. But I wouldn't name it Best Picture, though it's the odds-on favorite.

Winter's Bone ***

As a native of a small midwestern town, there was a wee bit too much familiarity in this one. It left me glad that I hadn't lived through anything quite as desperate as the story portrayed in the movie. Well done. But again, just didn't feel like a Best Picture to me.

True Grit ****

After seeing this, I changed my Best Picture vote from Black Swan. Hailee Steinfeld was brilliant and left me wanting more... as in, "Please don't flame out like so many actors who start young!"

Everything that happened after the rattlesnake bite was "heavy"... not emotionally so but a demontration of gravity. In other words, it left me with the sense that there was just no other course that Mattie Ross' life could have taken (I didn't know the story from the book or earlier movie.)

And yes, I cried.

127 Hours ****

I changed my vote for a second time after seeing James Franco's awesome performance in that chasm. I knew the story well from listening to a long interview with the real life Aron Ralston, and I'm an EMT who was trained to deal with the gory... both of which probably made it more difficult to sit still in my chair than it otherwise might have been. Talk about feeling dread and anxiety.

This gets my vote for Best Picture because it's a movie that takes you somewhere where you've never been... and will probably never go. I couldn't help but imagine myself in his situation...

The Fighter ****

I can't resist Mark Wahlberg in anything, which goes without saying. :-) But his whole Ward family in the movie... Jesuchristo, scary! Christian Bale was utterly spot on... his winning the Best Supporting Actor is my only non-negotiable in the acting categories, lol.

No tears but I couldn't help but cheer at the end.

ALL IN ALL, it was a great year of movies. I'd recommend all of the above except Inception. Enjoy. :-)

Big Brother meets Mad Men

The Wall Street Journal looked into online tracking tools that major U.S. websites download onto your computer (my emphasis):

The state of the art is growing increasingly intrusive, the Journal found. Some tracking files can record a person's keystrokes online and then transmit the text to a data-gathering company that analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person's social connections. Other tracking files can re-spawn trackers that a person may have deleted.

To measure the sensitivity of the data gathered by tracking companies, the Journal created an "exposure index" for the top 50 sites. Dictionary.com ranked highest in exposing users to potentially aggressive surveillance: It installed 168 tracking tools that didn't let users decline to be tracked, and 121 tools that, according to their privacy statements, don't rule out collecting financial or health data. Dictionary.com attributed the number of tools to its use of many different ad networks, each of which puts tools on its site.

Some of the tracking files identified by the Journal were so detailed that they verged on being anonymous in name only. They enabled data-gathering companies to build personal profiles that could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.

The ad industry says tracking doesn't violate anyone's privacy because the data sold doesn't identify people by name, and the tracking activity is disclosed in privacy policies. And while many companies are involved in collecting, analyzing and selling the data, they provide a useful service by raising the chance Internet users see ads and information relevant to them personally.

I just love how these people, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg (interviewed here on NPR), think that we users are just thrilled to be getting all of these "relevant" ads.

Some sites, like Google and Microsoft, provide ways of opting out of their tracking tools.

You can also clear all the cookies on your computer, or do what I just did: go through them and selectively remove all the ones that you don't recognize.

Apple is the new Microsoft

I've been thinking that Apple is becoming the new Microsoft for awhile, with their heavy-handed rules about how developers can build iPhone/iPad applications and where they can sell them (even if an app is rejected by the App Store, the developer isn't allowed to sell it anywhere else!). I also find their veto power over what is sold in the App Store to be offensive.

Apparently the government is thinking the same thing: the Justice Department is investigating Apple's control of online music distribution (where they have 69% of the market).

What happened to the old Apple?

(Video link)

More on the recent cyber attack on Google

Actually, not just on Google... Google was just the most candid about what happened.

New details on the sophistication of the attack and what was stolen:

But a person with direct knowledge of the investigation now says that the losses included one of Google’s crown jewels, a password system that controls access by millions of users worldwide to almost all of the company’s Web services, including e-mail and business applications....

In Google’s case, the intruders seemed to have precise intelligence about the names of the Gaia software developers, and they first tried to access their work computers and then used a set of sophisticated techniques to gain access to the repositories where the source code for the program was stored.

They then transferred the stolen software to computers owned by Rackspace, a Texas company that offers Web-hosting services, which had no knowledge of the transaction. It is not known where the software was sent from there. The intruders had access to an internal Google corporate directory known as Moma, which holds information about the work activities of each Google employee, and they may have used it to find specific employees.

How to think about healthcare spending

Here's an interesting article by Victor R. Fuchs, Ph.D, in the New England Journal of Medicine. It looks at future healthcare spending costs; here's what it has to say about advances in medical technology:

Equally important, and equally difficult to predict, are advances in medicine, or in economic terms, changes in medical technology. New drugs, new devices, new imaging techniques, and new surgical procedures have had a huge impact on health care expenditures in the past and probably will in the future as well.

Those who create biomedical innovations usually claim that they reduce costs by detecting or treating diseases more effectively than existing interventions. Most health economists believe that biomedical innovations increase health care expenditures. Both can be correct. Some interventions, such as antihypertensive drugs and cardiovascular surgery, have been found to be cost-effective — that is, the value of their beneficial effects, in terms of lives saved, has been judged to exceed their costs. But because these interventions are used in many more patients than they were in the past, their effect is to increase total expenditures. The scale has tipped particularly far in the case of new interventions for cancer and other diseases that have resulted in only modest improvements in health despite large increases in expenditures....

The role of new medical technology deserves special attention in thinking about future health care spending because biomedical innovations as a whole have been the primary source of both improvements in health and increasing expenditures. On the one hand, it is fiscally irresponsible to continue to accept innovations regardless of cost, even if they pass tests of safety and efficacy — and it is particularly irresponsible when the interventions are provided at public expense. On the other hand, we must avoid an innovation policy that cuts off new interventions prematurely. Some interventions that are not cost-effective at first may prove to be so over time and with greater experience in implementing them.

Fuchs also looks at how a public/private paradigm for determining how much we should spend on healthcare helps to frame the question in a useful way. Full article here.

Mechanical Mozart

A Daily Dish reader writes in with an interesting response to a post on David Cope's computer-generated music:

I've wondered myself, too many times to count, why it is that this or that piece of music stirs me so much. I think, I'm being communicated with by a deep soul. Here is Mozart or Mahler or Beethoven speaking to me in a voice that I recognize, and it seems so clear that it must have some meaning. But if it is only notes, then there may not really be anything profound there at all, only my own projections. That's a very lonely thought.

Haven't you ever tried to share a piece of music with someone and felt frustrated by the experience? I have. I've given away CDs and dragged people to concerts, given little parlor lectures explaining how sonata form works, tried to transfer my enthusiasm about particular works to people so they would hear something the way I heard it. And yet, they usually don't. How can they react this way when I feel like I'm in the presence of God just listening to this music? And the answer is, the music itself is wonderful, but the feelings that I experience ARE my own projections. Most people may hear something sad and sweet when they listen to Mozart's Sinfonia K.364 second movement (youtube it [listen below]) but they can't possibly hear it the way I hear it. We are trapped in our own private bubbles projecting feelings and meanings onto patterns of notes and sounds that remind us of things, that trigger feelings.

Music is like a Rorschach test, although a somewhat more reliable, perhaps, in that we assume the composer wanted to convey something that we might have picked up. Cope's programs have no assumption of such intent. That creates a problem for us. And when that music sounds just like something we are used to thinking of as the voice of God, wooWEE, it's cognitive dissonance salad time. You have to give Cope credit for this, whether you care for his music or not.

And here is the second movement of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante K. 364 which was mentioned above:

(Video link)

Cognoscor Ergo Sum

Stephen Colbert comments on Twitter, Blippy (see pic below, shoot me now), and every other new social networking tool for proclaiming, "We exist!" :-)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Cognoscor Ergo Sum
http://www.colbertnation.com/
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Skate Expectations

(Video link)

And here's an example of the riveting ticker over at Blippy, the "fun and easy way to see and discuss the things people are buying":

Good listening

I heard these programs on NPR yesterday, they're worth a listen:

• James Fallows was interviewed on Radio Times about his recent article in The Atlantic which examined America's troubled political culture:

  America still has the means to address nearly any of its structural weaknesses. Yes, the problems are intellectually and politically complicated: energy use, medical costs, the right educational and occupational mix to rebuild a robust middle class. But they are no worse than others the nation has faced in more than 200 years, and today no other country comes close to the United States in having the surplus money, technology, and attention to apply to the tasks. (China? Remember, most people there still live on subsistence farms.) First with Iraq and now with Afghanistan, the U.S. has in the past decade committed $1 trillion to the cause of entirely remaking a society. We know that such an investment could happen here—but we also know that it won’t.
  
  That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” ... And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.
  
  The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation. If Henry Adams were whooshed from his Washington of a century ago to our Washington of today, he would find it shockingly changed, except for the institutions of government. Same two political parties, same number of members of the House (since 1913, despite more than a threefold increase in population), essentially same rules of debate in the Senate. Thomas Jefferson’s famed wish for “a little rebellion now and then” as a “medicine necessary for the sound health of government” is a nice slogan for organizing rallies, but is not how his country has actually operated.
  
  Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state. In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson’s analysis and called this enfeebling pattern “demosclerosis,” in a book of that name. He defined the problem as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt,” a process “like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.”

• Fresh Air's Terry Gross interviewed James Lewis about cybersecurity and America's vulnerability to cyberattack. It's not just about hacking into Gmail accounts; Lewis discusses, for instance, that the U.S. Central Command headquarters was infiltrated by someone who simply left a bunch of USB drives in the parking lot. Someone picked one up, plugged it into their office PC, and bam, software was installed on the network that gave the infiltrators access. And a tidbit I didn't know: the Internet was originally designed as a system that would allow military communications to take place even in the midst of a nuclear war, a scenario in which a number of U.S. cities (and the telephone switches in them) would be destroyed.

My Google story

My friend Jack sent me this Super Bowl ad (which is as close as I got to the game :-). The ad showcases Google but reminded me of how dependent we've become on the search engine. Which then took me back to a funny experience I had a few years ago...

I was at my old office in Beaverton, and a co-worker asked me if I had a certain computer cable. I knew I did but wasn't sure where I had stored it. So I sat down at my computer and started to type the name of the cable into Google. Then I remembered that I was looking for a physical item in the real world! I had gotten so used to using Google to find things that I had over-generalized its use.

(Video link)

This post, in turn, has reminded me of an article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal that I read not long after moving there. Unfortunately their online archives only appear to go back to January 2008, so I can't link to it. The article focused on how the casinos had seen a shift in their revenues, with most money now coming from slot machines rather than table games. And the change was no accident: the people who make the machines had worked hard to make them an increasingly immersive experience, one that people can't easily walk away from. The money quote in the article came from one avid slot player who told the reporter that she really didn't like to win anymore because it interfered with the flow of her game!

Computers + radiation therapy = a potentially deadly combination

Wow, I just read a frightening article in the New York Times about a rash of computer programming errors that have led many patients undergoing high-tech radiation therapy for cancer to be massively--sometimes fatally--overdosed.

One example:

Shortly after 11 a.m., as Ms. Kalach [a medical physicist at St. Vincent's hospital in New York City] was trying to save her work, the computer began seizing up, displaying an error message. The hospital would later say that similar system crashes “are not uncommon with the Varian software, and these issues have been communicated to Varian on numerous occasions.”

An error message asked Ms. Kalach if she wanted to save her changes before the program aborted. She answered yes. At 12:24 p.m., Dr. Berson approved the new plan.

Meanwhile, two therapists were prepping Mr. Jerome-Parks for his procedure, placing a molded mask over his face to immobilize his head.

Then the room was sealed, with only Mr. Jerome-Parks inside.

At 12:57 p.m. — six minutes after yet another computer crash — the first of several radioactive beams was turned on.

The next day, there was a second round of radiation.

A friend from church, Paul Bibbo, stopped by the hospital after the second treatment to see how things were going.

Mr. Bibbo did not like what he saw. Walking into a darkened hospital room, he recalled blurting out: “ ‘My goodness, look at him.’ His head and his whole neck were swollen.”

Anne Leonard, another friend, saw it, too, on a later visit. “I was shocked because his head was just so blown up,” Ms. Leonard said. “He was in the bed, and he was writhing from side to side and moaning.”

Concerned about the problem, the medical physicist checked the system's treatment program for the patient:

On the afternoon of March 16, several hours after Mr. Jerome-Parks received his third treatment under the modified plan, Ms. Kalach decided to see if he was being radiated correctly.

So at 6:29 p.m., she ran a test to verify that the treatment plan was carried out as prescribed. What she saw was horrifying: the multileaf collimator, which was supposed to focus the beam precisely on his tumor, was wide open.

A little more than a half-hour later, she tried again. Same result.

Finally, at 8:15 p.m., Ms. Kalach ran a third test. It was consistent with the first two. A frightful mistake had been made: the patient’s entire neck, from the base of his skull to his larynx, had been exposed.

Early the next afternoon, as Mr. Jerome-Parks and his wife were waiting with friends for his fourth modified treatment, Dr. Berson unexpectedly appeared in the hospital room. There was something he had to tell them. For privacy, he took Mr. Jerome-Parks and his wife to a lounge on the 16th floor, where he explained that there would be no more radiation.

Mr. Jerome-Parks had been seriously overdosed, they were told, and because of the mistake, his prognosis was dire.

Stunned and distraught, Ms. Jerome-Parks left the hospital and went to their church, a few blocks away. “She didn’t know where else to go,” recalled Ms. Leonard, their friend.

The next day, Ms. Jerome-Parks asked two other friends, Nancy Lorence and Linda Giuliano, a social worker, to sit in on a meeting with Dr. Berson and other hospital officials.

During the meeting, the medical team took responsibility for what happened but could only speculate about the patient’s fate. They knew the short-term effects of acute radiation toxicity: burned skin, nausea, dry mouth, difficulty swallowing, loss of taste, swelling of the tongue, ear pain and hair loss. Beyond that, it was anyone’s guess when the more serious life-threatening symptoms would emerge.

“They were really holding their breath because it was the brain stem and he could end up a paraplegic and on a respirator,” Ms. Giuliano said.

Ms. Lorence added: “I don’t really think they expected Scott to live more than two months or three months.”

In the end, he died two years later. While there were problems with the computer software designed by Varian to control the system, operators missed a variety of warning that should have alerted them to problems:

When the computer kept crashing, Ms. Kalach, the medical physicist, did not realize that her instructions for the collimator had not been saved, state records show. She proceeded as though the problem had been fixed.

“We were just stunned that a company could make technology that could administer that amount of radiation — that extreme amount of radiation — without some fail-safe mechanism,” said Ms. Weir-Bryan, Ms. Jerome-Parks’s friend from Toronto. “It’s always something we keep harkening back to: How could this happen? What accountability do these companies have to create something safe?”

Disturbingly:

Even with this special protection, the strongest in the country, many radiation accidents go unreported in New York City and around the state. After The Times began asking about radiation accidents, the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reminded hospitals in July of their reporting obligation under the law. Studies of radiotherapy accidents, the city pointed out, “appear to be several orders of magnitude higher than what is being reported in New York City, indicating serious underreporting of these events.”

The Times collected summaries of radiation accidents that were reported to government regulators, along with some that were not. Those records show that inadequate staffing and training, failing to follow a good quality-assurance plan and software glitches have contributed to mistakes that affected patients of varying ages and ailments....

Fines or license revocations are rarely used to enforce safety rules. Over the previous eight years, despite hundreds of mistakes, the state issued just three fines against radiotherapy centers, the largest of which was $8,000.

Stephen M. Gavitt, who directs the state’s radiation division, said if mistakes did not involve violations of state law, fines were not proper. The state does require radiotherapy centers to identify the underlying causes of accidents and make appropriate changes to their quality-assurance programs. And state officials said New York had taken a leadership role in requiring that each facility undergo an external audit by a professional not connected to the institution.

I always wanted to take up falconry... (bonus: smart dolphins and dogs)

New ultralight cameras now provide an eagle-eye view from the air.

(Video link)

AND ON THE TOPIC OF THE WONDERS OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, here's video of a pod of dolphin's that's learned to catch fish in a unique way:

(Video link)

And a story about stray dogs that have learned to use the Moscow subway to get around!

Thanks to The Daily Dish for all of these links...