I'm running out the door--to Spain. But just wanted to post a link to this BusinessWeek article about a health care initiative in Brazil. It describes research carried about by New Cities Foundation and General Electric. Eleven health care workers climbed into the remote favela of Santa Marta and monitored the elderly there for the most common chronic diseases, including hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease. As you might expect, providing these people care on site proved to be much more efficient, in saving lives and money, than waiting for them to feel sick and go to the emergency room.

One wrinkle. The medical kits these people carried into Santa Marta included high-tech equipment worth $42,000. What I'm wondering is whether the same team carrying traditional tools, perhaps costing $100 or $200, would have achieved similar results. The key, after all, is getting care to people who need it. And there have been all sorts of low-cost breakthroughs, many of them involving cell phones. Frontline SMS, a start-up hatched at Stanford, is a prime example.

The point is that billions of people on earth, including many in rich countries, would benefit greatly from the kind of outreach described in the BW article. It doesn't require doctors. Medics can do much of the testing, counseling and follow up. And while I'm sure G.E.'s high tech devices are cool, health workers can do fabulous work with much more basic tools. The world already spends some $6.5 trillion a year in health care--nearly $1,000 per person. It would save money and lives to devote a small share of that to help billions of chronically ill people in their homes. But it'll never happen if each worker requires a $42,000 knapsack. 

This is essentially what Matt Labash did, but he targeted Twitter. He came up with numerous examples of idiocy, hot air, and group think. His hunt took him from his computer screen all the way to the tweeting capital of techdom, South by Southwest, in Austin. There he expanded his focus to include the BS, jargon and self-promotion of social media insiders. Plenty of rich material.

But did Labash come across any surprising or intelligent insights on Twitter or at SxSW? I imagine he did. However, he only gave us the dumb stuff, which isn't quite fair. After all, most human communication comes across as meaningless, or worse, especially to outsiders. The challenge, whether you're sitting down at a bar or finding people to follow on Twitter, is to tune into the smart and fun stuff. There's plenty of it on Twitter. In fact, I found Labash's article through a Twitter link from Michael Dougherty  author of the baseball newsletter I subscribe to, The Slurve.

Whether you're judging a technology platform like Twitter or a singer, I would argue that each should be judged by successes, not failures. If you want to pan Bob Dylan, for example, don't just pick out a few bad songs. Bring down his best. Tell us how A Hard Rain, Like a Rolling Stone or Visions of Johanna fall short. Same with Twitter. I think Labash should have contacted prominent Twitter users like Jeff Jarvis or Fred Wilson, or newer ones like Elias Isquith, and asked them for examples of Twitter value--insights and links they've gained from it. Who are the best people they follow?

That would have set up a stronger article with a more compelling line. The important question about Twitter and social media, which LaBash touches upon toward the end of his long story, is whether they entice us to spend too many hours in an inferior online world, one in which we sacrifice the random and chaotic richness of the analog realm for staring at screens, large and small. Do we see too little of our friends, and settle instead for their updates?

If that's the case, and I think it is, the answer is not to demonize Facebook and Twitter (and their millions of users), but to keep these tools in their place--looking at them for only a few minutes a day. Imagine, for example, that you die and then are given one more hour to come back to life on earth. Would you spend it looking at a screen? I try to keep this in mind. For me, it means paying attention to my time, remembering to keep my phone in my pocket during spare minutes (and hours), and to look around, to soak up the world of light, sound, vibrations and fellow animals.

Anyway... The article was a feature by Tris McCall on why 10 years after the emergence of iTunes (and almost 15 since Napster burst on the scene), people still buy albums. It seemed for a while that the single would prevail. Fans could pick and choose, put them into their own song lists, and skip the boring and tedious tracks on an album (Think the Beatles' Revolution #9). But McCall argues that albums remain the organizing principal for many bands, and listeners. If I were editing his story, I would have asked for some data to back this up. Still, he interviews musicians about it, and notes that albums are the "backbone" of the Spotify service. (I tried Spotify for about 10 minutes, until I saw that the music I clicked was showing up on Facebook...)

I find that after the celebration of playing favorites a decade ago, I'm returning to albums. I buy complete digital LPs, and I listen to them that way. Working out at the Y the other day, I listened to the NJ band Thomas Wesley Stern, non-stop. My last purchases on iTunes are the naked version of the Beatles Let it Be and one of my favorite Brazilian records, which I had on tape in the '80s, Milton Nascimento's live album, Ao Vivo.

Which brings me back to the Nascimento album. I hadn't heard it in 20 years. I remembered the big hits, like Dos Bailes da Vida. But there was one song I barely remembered, which I now cannot get out of my head. It's called Cuitelinho, a secondary name for hummingbird. The first is beijaflor, or kissflower.) Here's a vinyl version of it on YouTube. I love its languor, its slow, disjointed melody, and the nostalgia it evokes, both as a song and a memory of my own from hearing it on my Walkman in Caracas (with tiny speakers) in the '80s. But it might take you a few dozen, or hundred, listens to learn to love it. 

This story reminds me of one of my favorite books, L'Adversaire, by Emmanuel Carrere. It tells the story of Jean-Claude Romand, a Frenchman who lived an utterly fictitious life for 17 years, lying to everyone he knew--his wife, neighbors, children, parents--about how he spent his days and came by his money. The story didn't end well.

I have a theory about these decade-long dramas. It has to do with inertia. The way I imagine it, a person makes a quick decision to do something drastic. In Romand's case, he simply stayed in bed on the day of his first-year medical exam, and later told people that he had passed the test. I would imagine that he figured that one day, probably very soon, he would have some sort of reckoning, and it would be awkward. So he put it off. He lied more. Every day he was faced with a decision: Do I end this farce today, or do I wait? And every day, for 17 years, he waited, stitching together ever more complicated webs of lies to sustain the fantasy. 

All I know about the Maine hermit is what I've read in the article above. But I would imagine that he took off in 1986 thinking that his stay in the woods would be brief, probably not lasting until winter. But he had to steal food to survive. And as soon as he began to do that, he adapted his life to his environment and circumstances. He went so far as to gain weight in fall, so that he wouldn't have to steal as much food in winter, when tracks in the snow might lead to his capture. It turns out, he used immense intelligence and planning to lead a solitary life of a thieving hermit. I can't wait to read the next chapter.

It comes down to what you can buy in this world. You can buy $10,000 bottles of wine, and chateaux with exquisite views, you can buy politicians and the allegiance of thousands of workers. It's the free treasures--love, faith, friendship, a peaceful night's sleep, among others--that are in fact priceless. 

Anyway, the news about Rupert reminded me of Tony Soprano, who went to a psychiatrist when the business of violent crime began to mess with his head. The doctor faced an impossible job. And this led me to wonder what sort of therapies other moguls, war lords and cretins might pursue.

Bashar Assad, for instance. The Syrian leader must be at least as stressed as Rupert. I wonder if he's considered a three-day get-away, perhaps to the Mii Amo Spa in Sedona, AZ. Just imagine if he could delegate the war to a capo and sign up for a Jojoba Butter Massage, an Herbal Detox and perhaps spend an hour in the desert doing Tai Chi. Certain risks exist, even at a spa. The Bio Aquatic Cranial could awaken unwelcome associations, and the Circle of Power would no doubt deliver Bashar--in mind, if not body--right back to his palace in Damascus. My concerns, though, are less with the Bashar than the other guests at the spa. Imagine, you spend all that money to relax in the Sononan Desert, and next thing you know this guy arrives with his mustache and his entourage--and suddenly everything feels... toxic.

A catnap in Olinda, Pernambuco, Brazil

I think it would have seemed strange to me back then to imagine that I would have drifted so far from that beat. We moved back to the U.S., for a number of reasons, in 1992. I worked in Pittsburgh, covering industry. As the dot.com boom heated up, the magazine lost interest in stories on steel and aluminum, and I began to dip my toe into technology, writing about software and robots at Carnegie Mellon. That led to the European technology job in Paris for four years, then back into technology in the States, which finally led to The Numerati and Final Jeopardy. And now my beat is data and AI, with Latin America and France as distant footnotes. (I did manage to get some Latin America into my dystopian novel, The Boost, which is coming out next year. )

It's a nice thing about journalism that you can create new chapters in your life. But the current chapter tends to dominate. It took a trip to Brazil a couple of weeks ago to bring me back to my Latin America side, which has been buried for years. I loved the sunshine and the smells (even some of the bad ones brought back good memories), the food, the people, their music and their language. I spoke Portuguese down there. It wasn't great, but I enjoyed every minute of it. Portuguese for me is like trying to speak Spanish in pig Latin, a never-ending game. 

Here's a slideshow from photos my wife and I took at Praia dos Carneiros, Olinda and Recife. Incidentally, we got the idea to take this trip last October when we bought a Brazilian print by Jose Barbosa at an antique shop in West Chester County. (my blog post about it here.) We made a point of visiting the artist (below), who welcomed us into his beautiful house/studio, served us coffee and a pastry called "the mother-in-law's tongue" or Lingua da Sogra. 

The challenge for me (and for all of us, really) is to incorporate more of the things I love into my work. For me, this might mean more about Latin America, and about French, and baseball, and novels. It might muddy the brand. But if it engages and excites me, better things will come from it. Incidentally, my next book, which I'm busy working on, is about health care. More muddying. I'll write more about that in a future post.

One broadening move I made this morning: I subscribed to The Slurve, a baseball newsletter.

There is, however, an explanation for such secrecy. Picture a patient walking into an exam. The doctor takes notes. Among other details, he or she writes (or types): "Obese. Bruises on neck and shoulders. Abuse issues?" These are important notes for the doctor. Some are only notes to self and are not edited for the public. Is it any surprise that doctors aren't eager to share such data?

This is one of the problems of so-called transparency. Some notes are private, and if they must become public, doctors will have to censure themselves--or find another channel for their most personal observations.

This would not be a problem if we, as a society, weren't so hypersentive to "hurtful" words, and eager to sue in cases of errors. Our tender feelings interfere with communication at almost every level. In an age of open data, a doctor might refrain from writing "obese" and simply write "weight issues" or "heavyset." In such a case, the patient would be less likely to be offended, perhaps at the price of not learning an important truth.

If we want the data, we should be ready to see and accept it, even when offensive. This openness would pay off richly. For example, we'd be much more likely to spot mistakes in our records, and clear them up. This would eliminate loads of medical errors and misdiagnoses.

Paul Barsch, a marketer at Teradata, makes this point in a blog post. He writes:

The truth is that some companies are having wild success reporting, analyzing, and predicting on terabytes and in some cases petabytes of Big Data. But for every eBay, Google, or Amazon or Razorfishthere are thousands of companies stumbling, bumbling and fumbling through the process of Big Data analytics with little to show for it.

Sadly, success in Big Data doesn't lend itself, at least at this juncture, to statistical analysis. Customers and vendors keep their failures to themselves. And we usually only hear about them (as anecdotes) after someone gets fired. This leaves it to the successes (and the liars) to trumpet their greatness. The Big Data narrative is built on anecdotes.

This has led to charges that BusinessWeek is racist, and is buying into the narrative that poor people, many of them racial and ethnic minorities, "caused" the housing crisis by borrowing irresponsibly. In any case, I'm for moving on.

There's so much attention these days on whether words or images are appropriate, or true, or fair, or "hurtful." And the upshot is that people can get into trouble, or even wreck their careers, by saying or publishing something stupid. This leads to caution, self-censorship, boredom. BusinessWeek's editor, Josh Tyrangiel, has taken lots of chances in the last couple of years. Many of them have worked. The magazine is lively and very good (even though I'm not crazy about the design). He, like the rest of us, should to be free to commit misjudgments with something close to impunity.