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Message Digest
Volume 28 : Issue 162 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Medicine in the Age of Twitter
Re: parity of service, was ANI vs. Caller ID
Re: parity of service, was ANI vs. Caller ID
Re: Cal State Fullerton Area Code Changing to 657
Re: Cal State Fullerton Area Code Changing to 657
"International Telephone Hacking Conspiracy Busted", terror link ...
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Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 10:30:09 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Medicine in the Age of Twitter
Message-ID: <p06240897c65a4b6ad0b1@[10.0.1.3]>
Doctor and Patient
Medicine in the Age of Twitter
By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.
The New York Times
June 11, 2009
I blog, I tweet and I use Facebook. And as I recently told a medical
colleague, social media has been an enormously useful tool in my work.
"I can barely keep up with e-mail," he snorted back. "I'm not about
to open up that black box."
About 15 years ago, during my residency and just as the first blogs
were starting up, I took care of a patient in his mid-40s whom I'll
call Eddie. In a waiting room filled with elderly patients crippled
by vascular disease, Eddie looked out of place. Until you looked
closer at his fingers and toes. Parts of them had been amputated.
Eddie suffered from Buerger's disease, or thromboangiitis obliterans,
an illness that causes clotting and inflammation of the blood vessels
of the hands and feet. Considered an "orphan" disease because of its
relative rarity, Buerger's disease compromises the blood supply to a
patient's fingers and toes. Eventually these patients, who are
usually men in their 20s to 40s who smoke, develop excruciating pain,
severe ulcerations and gangrene. And more often than not, they must
undergo progressively higher amputations.
There is no cure for Buerger's disease; the only way to slow the
process is to quit smoking. Therein lies the tragedy. For unknown
reasons, patients who suffer from Buerger's disease are profoundly
addicted to tobacco, far more so than most smokers. It is nearly
impossible for them to quit.
Eddie wanted desperately to quit. Over the two years that I cared for
him, he tried at least a dozen times. But his already challenging
task was made even more difficult by his isolation. Eddie lived
alone, estranged from his family, with friends and co-workers who
grew increasingly unsympathetic to his plight. "They don't understand
why I keep smoking if I keep losing fingers," he said to me one
afternoon. "They just don't understand how hard it is for me."
Moreover, because his disease was so rare, he had no community of
fellow patients to turn to in his town or at our hospital.
But his visits to the clinic always seemed to cheer him up. He
responded, it seemed, to my encouragement, and each time he left, he
renewed his vow to quit smoking. But weeks would pass and his
enthusiasm would wane. If I contacted him by phone, his momentum
might continue another few days, but finding a mutually convenient,
quiet moment to talk on a regular basis was exceedingly difficult. I
tried scheduling frequent follow-up appointments, but Eddie lived
over an hour away from our hospital and could not afford to keep
missing work.
Eventually, Eddie lost another two fingers, the front half of his
left foot and his entire right foot. The youngest man in my waiting
room soon became confined to a wheelchair. At the end of our last
visit, I stood in the clinic hall watching him inch away from me in
that chair, pushing off the ground with the remaining stump of his
left foot and grasping at the wheels with hands that had become mitts.
I thought about Eddie and other patients I have cared for who might
have benefited from more frequent contact when I spoke with my
colleague about social media and the patient-doctor relationship. I
wondered if Eddie would have felt a little less isolated and perhaps
been able to quit smoking if I had, for example, texted a word of
encouragement to him every few days, interacted through blog
comments, or directed him to an online community of people who were
dealing with the exact same disease.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/health/11chen.html
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 10:48:29 EDT
From: Wesrock@aol.com
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: parity of service, was ANI vs. Caller ID
Message-ID: <c50.5012fc1e.376667bd@aol.com>
In a message dated 6/13/2009 6:24:52 PM Central Daylight Time,
hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com writes:
> Some years ago it was proposed to put faxes and wireless devices in
> the new area codes where a 10 digit number is not a disadvantage,
> but apparently this wasn't done very much.
A large number of small businesses, and probably some fairly large
ones, too, share their fax on the same line as their phone. A 10-digit number
would be a serious disadvantage.
Several small businesses use cell phones as their business number for
the public and their customers to call, and they, too would be at a serious
disadvantage.
--
Wes Leatherock
wesrock@aol.com
wleathus@yahoo.com
------------------------------
Date: 14 Jun 2009 15:12:08 -0000
From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: parity of service, was ANI vs. Caller ID
Message-ID: <20090614151208.2090.qmail@simone.iecc.com>
>BUT the reason we need those new area codes, IMHO, was _largely_ due
>to new entrants, not actual growth.
Like I said, there was a burst of poor allocation giving an entire NXX
to each entrant. That's over. Now the allocations are quite
efficient, and when they add overlays, it's due to real growth.
>Some years ago it was proposed to put faxes and wireless devices in
>the new area codes where a 10 digit number is not a disadvantage, but
>apparently this wasn't done very much.
That was an experiment in area code 917. The experiment failed, since
917 filled up, too.
>Let's be clear that number portability represented a significant cost--
Perhaps.
>which is a line item right on my bill.
Which is a gift from the regulators, unrelated to the actual cost.
> If the newcomers were truly offering a superior service or better
> price, they could well afford the cost of number portability.
Aw, come on. If the ILEC wasn't required to provide portability,
the costs of switching would be impossible, since it would include
changing one's phone number.
> However, the books I referred to in an earlier discussion said the
> newcomers offered nothing better.
Putting nonsense in a book doesn't make it true. Early on the CLECs
prevented a disaster by providing the inbound modem lines for BBS and
dialup ISPs that the Bells were too myopic to do. (Their response was
to lobby for the "modem tax" and hope they went away.) These days,
compare the ILEC offerings to those from cablecos and wireless, and
you can see why the number of ILEC lines is shrinking every year.
>As to "one black phone", that sounds like a strawman. The old Bell
>System offered a large variety of services and equipment well beyond
>"one black phone" for decades. Of course, the difference to today is
>that all of us must subsidize those with premium services --such as
>the portability fee and mandated 10 digit dialing--whereas in the past
>those with premium services paid their own way.
Oh, man, I don't know where to start. Back in the old regulated days,
everything was priced by its "value" rather than its cost, which is
why rural service was priced lower than urban due to fewer people in
the local calling area, even though it cost and still costs far more
to provide. Residential POTS was priced below cost, long distance was
overpriced to subsidize it, and the maze of cross subsidies was
impenetrable. Fred Goldstein knows this history way better than I do.
R's,
John
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 10:02:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: "harold@hallikainen.com" <harold@hallikainen.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Cal State Fullerton Area Code Changing to 657
Message-ID: <767b77cc-83ad-4478-ac2b-5e0d1186b2a4@s38g2000prg.googlegroups.com>
Drifting off topic a bit, and it appears Cal State Fullerton does not
do this, a fair number of campuses have SIP based telephone access. I
don't know if all the phones are SIP based with a bridge to POTS or if
it's the other way around. But, some campuses doing this are listed at
http://www.sipphone.com/numbers/ .
Harold
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:25:03 -0700
From: Sam Spade <sam@coldmail.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Cal State Fullerton Area Code Changing to 657
Message-ID: <0NeZl.9369$gz5.4236@newsfe07.iad>
Neal McLain wrote:
>
> Some authors (notably former TD contributor Mark Cuccia) have noted that
> this change violates an underlying argument in favor of overlays:
> "nobody has to change area codes." Well, that's true, but it doesn't
> preclude Universities and similar bulk number users from voluntarily
> switching to the overlay area code.
>
> Neal McLain
>
Seems like a terrible waste of an area code unless it will be used as an
overlay for the entire 714 NPA.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:19:52 -0400
From: danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: "International Telephone Hacking Conspiracy Busted", terror link ...
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0906141618550.1774@panix3.panix.com>
[us doj press release]
International Telephone Hacking Conspiracy Busted; Indictment in the
United States, Arrests and Searches in Italy, and Continued Operations in
the Philippines
NEWARK, N.J. - An Indictment was unsealed today against three individuals who
allegedly hacked into the telephone systems of large corporations and entities
in the United States and abroad and sold information about the compromised
telephone systems to Pakistani nationals residing in Italy, Acting U.S.
Attorney Ralph J. Marra, Jr. announced.
In conjunction with the unsealing of the Indictment, Italian law enforcement
conducted searches of approximately 10 locations in four regions of Italy and
arrested the financiers of the hacking activity. Those financiers allegedly
used the information to transmit over 12 million minutes of telephone calls
valued at more than $55 million over the hacked networks of victim corporations
in the United States alone.
......
http://newark.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/2009/nk061209.htm
----------------------
- the WSJ story adds in claims about, yep, a link to terror...
Alleged Hacking-Terror Effort Thwarted
U.S. and Italian authorities said Friday they arrested a group of hackers and
conspirators who allegedly stole from phone companies around the world. The
illegal profits funded terrorist activities, Italian officials alleged
...
Philippines authorities have alleged that Mr. Nusier, a Jordanian citizen, has
ties to al Qaeda.
...
rest:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124485009253011435.html
------------------------------
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