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Another illuminating New York Times article (December 30, 2006) entitled The Spine as Profit Center. The article raises questions about how many of the 500,000 spine operations performed each year actually benefit the patients, and whether the surgeons performing the procedures are influenced by financial conflicts of interest.

It turns out that not only are the surgeons well paid to perform the operations but that many of them are also investor/owners of the companies that provide the expensive hardware used in these operations… The article states that patients and their insurers are charged around $1,000 for a single screw… Which actually costs less than $100 to manufacture. Note that the surgeons decide where the hardware is purchased, not the hospital. In fact, the surgeon-owned companies frequently do not actually make the hardware at all. In many cases they simply buy a screw from industry supplier for $65 to $100 and mark it up to $1,000 before it is “sold” to the surgeon’s patient.

It should be emphasized that a typical back operation needs a lot more than one screw. In one example provided in the article a complete “set” of hardware for the procedure would cost the patient $7,800.

Another example of “soft corruption”… Pretty “hard”, of course, if it is your back that was “screwed” up in an unnecessary and expensive procedure.

I read a brief article… buried in the back of today’s Wall Street Journal (Thursday, December 28, 2006) about our recently resigned Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton.

I am sure she’s done nothing illegal… After all she is a lawyer and a Washington political appointee… But reading the article did make me a bit queasy.

The reason for the article is that Royal Dutch Shell just announced that they had hired her as their general counsel, presumably for the sort of munificent salary that goes with that sort of job these days.

Now call me cynical but do you think that job offer was in any way related to her role as Secretary of the Interior?

Or the fact that during her tenure the Department of Interior, erh, omitted to bill the oil industry for royalties they owed the US taxpayer? To the tune of, some minor amount…. Oh yes, there it is… $10 billion (according to the General Accounting Office). And yes, Martha, Royal Dutch Shell was one of the biggest beneficiaries.

The general counsel job is, I gather, the Big Oil equivalent of stuffing a few twenties down her cleavage after the lap dance.

This is the sort of “soft corruption” I see as endemic in our government and business elite. Nobody handed Ms. Norton an attache case of hundred dollar bills, they may not have explicitly offered her a job… But she knew she would be “taken care of” after she left office.

UPDATE: In the New York Times (Dec. 30, 2006) Business section there is an article U.S. Official Overseeing Oil Program Faces Inquiry. This is all about, you guessed it, the Department of the Interior again. The Department of Justice is investigating whether the director of the multi-billion dollar oil trading program was being paid by oil companies hoping for contracts under the program. (So maybe the attache cases of cash aren’t so far fetched.)

The director of the program, Gregory W. Smith, and three subordinates are suspected of steering huge oil trading contracts to favored companies. As the article states… If the allegations prove correct, they would constitute a major new blot on the Interior Department’s much-criticized effort to properly collect royalties on vast amounts of oil and gas produced on US land or coastal waters. In other words, once again, the taxpayers are being ripped off and GW’s appointees and the oil industry are benefiting.

The NYT article then goes on to point out that the Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service is now the target of multiple investigations by Congress and the Department’s own inspector general.

This is an apolitical public service announcement for everybody that is sick and tire of listening to these automated customer service phone systems (I suspect the irritation transcends all political, religious, ethnic, and racial bounderies!).

Most of us have been confronted by these automated phone systems asking us to press a particular number on the phone keypad depending on which category of disgruntled customer we are. And one frequently finds that your particular beef does not correspond to one of their automated bins… And you really, really want to talk to an actual human being even if he is in some third world country and barely speaks English…. But you have to wade through interminable layers of “Press 5″, “Press 2″, etc. to actually get to a live person.

Somebody has set up a website GetHuman.com which tells you the secret key combinations that allow you to get to speak to an actual person at a lot of large organizations. Actually, that is a little too optimistic… First you will probably hear “We are sorry but all of our associates are assisting other customers at this time but your call is important to us so you just sit there while we play you some elevator music…”

But at least GetHuman.com will help you skip the thicket of keypad options.

Since this is the first award we are giving out, a little explanation about the Anal Leakage Award is in order.

This award has been created for technologies that are sufficiently frustrating, obnoxious, or evil that we would all really prefer that the inventors had “puckered up” and kept it to themselves. It is named in honor of a certain undigestible fat used in many diet foods.

This particular award goes to Royal Philips Electronics. A recent New York Times article (May 7, 2006) entitled Someone Has to Pay for TV. But Who? And How? by Randall Stross describes a recent patent filing by RPE for a TV remote control which will lock the channel during commercials. And there is apparently a companion design concept for a video recorder which will not allow the user to fast forward through commercials.

This is a really brilliant use of technology and I am sure the engineers responsible for designing these devices are truly proud of their work. But, really, why stop there? Why not patent a device which locks the refrigerator during the commercials?… Or heck, how about the bathroom?

Google still seems to be the darling of Wallstreet but I wonder…

If I was invested in Google stock my recent experiences with Google would be rather sobering.

Google Adwords

I have been having a lot of problems with Google Adwords. The basic idea is that you bid on a list of keyword phrases… If a Google end user searchs for one of the phrases you have bid on… He gets the regular Google search results on the left hand side of his browser page and your sponsored link will appear on the right hand side. How prominently your ad will be placed depends on whether your bid (say $0.25 per click) for the search phrase is higher or lower than your competition.

We are marketing Boston Christmas cards… So one of my Google Ad phrases is “Boston Christmas Cards” but it does not show up… Originally I had set an option in Google Adwords that said that I wanted my sponsored link to be “regional” i.e. it should only show up if the person searching was connected to the internet in the Boston region. And since I live and work in the Boston area, my sponsored link should show up when I Google for “Boston Christmas Cards”. But it doesn’t. The reason being that Google Adwords thinks I am browsing from Alabama. The Google Adwords diagnostic tool identifies my location (based on my Verizon.net ISP connection IP address) as follows:

Domain: www.google.com
Language: English (US)
User Location: Alabama, United States

But if I go to a publicly available tool at dnsstuff.com it easily finds my correct location:

Your IP is 141.154.254.246.
Welcome visitor from [City: Boston, Massachusetts] United States.

This is just one example of the sort of technical glitsches I am encountering with Google Adwords. Even when presented with this sort of “smoking gun” evidence of a problem, the Google CS folks just say everything is working fine.

Google Print

I have a customer who has published a book. He wanted to have the book made available on Google Print. We submitted all the necessary PDF files well over a month ago and the book still is not available on line. When we check the book’s status we find that it is listed twice as “pending”. This was called to Google Prints support folks attention a number of weeks ago but the book is still double listed and is still listed as “pending.”

Google “Sandbox” phenomenon

Finally, the heart and soul of Google, their basic search capability seems to be slipping. If you do a search on “Google Sandbox” (heck try it in Google) you will find numerous references to a phenomenon whereby new sites are ranked much lower than sites that were created and indexed earlier. The general consensus amoung the people specializing in Search Engine optimization is that the date threshold for being ranked lower is currently sometime in early 2004.

Now Google is perfectly entitled to use any search criteria they want but, if it ends up producing search results that are of less utility to the end user, they do so at their peril.

As you will find in the various articles on the “Google Sandbox Effect”, one way of identifying if a site is being “sandboxed” is to search using a relevent search string in Google, MSN, and Yahoo. If the target site is well ranked in MSN and Yahoo but doesn’t show up in Google then there is a possibility it is being “sandboxed”. The actual criteria are more complicated than that. My point is that, in many cases, the “un-sandboxed” results of MSN and Yahoo are much more useful to the end user than Google’s results are.

Conclusion

It is certainly too early to tell if Google is going to be displaced as the king of the search world but I see some disturbing trends. They seem to be diversifying faster than their technology can be implemented reliably, their CS can be best described as complacent, and they are being targeted by competitors with considerable resources and capabilities. At this point Google is synonymous with searching it may end up being metaphor along the lines of the Titanic.