Joseph's Blog

Children and Health Coverage

2010-09-21T19:32:00.000-07:00

When I think about health coverage, my primary concern is making sure my children have coverage. It seems that I am not alone in thinking this way.

Recently, some insurance companies decided to stop selling "children-only" health insurance policies. They did this because of changes in the law that would require them to accept new clients who had pre-existing conditions before they enrolled.

The lawmakers clearly wanted to make sure children are able to get medical attention, but perhaps, they mis-understood the whole concept of insurance.

The purpose of insurance is to indemnify someone. The idea of insurance is to pay someone (insurance company) money for a guarantee that they will assume some of the risks to you. To make something insurable, it cannot be expected, and definitely not known. Pre-existing conditions clearly are expected. Not covering someone with a pre-existing condition is what you have to do if you are to indemnify them.

Now that we have identified the kludge fix for what it is, we are ready to address the real problem. If you consider averages, children are really the lowest risk for medical expenses. It is the older people that cost the most, and that is usually in the last few years of their life.

The government seems to want to grow as big as it can. If they government wanted to solve this problem, it could simply decide to cover all medical expenses for children under some age. I imagine that more than half of the children in the USA are already qualified for government insurance programs. The ones that do not qualify are the ones that come from families that actually pay taxes, so it makes sense for them to get coverage as well.

It makes sense for the government to cover all medical expenses required for someone to obey the law. Shots are required before a child can enter school, and school is required for children. It makes sense for the government to cover shots, but those could be administered at school (with parental consent). In order for children to do well in school, they need to be able to hear and to see, so it makes sense that if a child is required to go to school, they should also be required to be able to participate. This means that the government should be required to cover basic costs for glasses, hearing aids, wheelchairs, etc. Anything that is required for a child to be able to participate.

Much of the required care could be done on school campuses, with the exception of the infectious diseases and things like that. Children

Now, what does the government not need to cover? It would not make sense for the government to be required to cover anything that is not required. Some elective surgery (plastic surgery, laser eye surgery, implants, etc.) and orthodontic care are not usually required for normal school, so those should not normally be covered. Alternative medicine or more expensive alternatives would also not make sense. Those could be insured, but I would not want tax payers to pay for that.

In my mind, we need to take care of our children, but not by paying insurance companies to do so. I think insurance has a place, but I also believe that that place is for the older population, myself included.

Google Wave

2010-07-14T09:01:00.000-07:00

It has been almost a year since I was first introduced to Google Wave. I first watched the really long YouTube video:

After watching most of that, I was really impressed and wanted to try out Wave as soon as possible. I was able to get an account and invite many of my friends to Google Wave. We started conversations and ever played with the extensions.

The main problem I found with Google Wave is that you have to regularly log into Google Wave to see if anything has changed. There is nothing to draw you back, other than the hopes that someone has posted something. In this sense it is similar to Email, but different in that email has a larger user base.

I still hope to use Google Wave on future projects. Maybe, I will just have to make Google Wave the single source of collaboration on a project to make it happen.

Mario AI

2010-06-23T08:09:00.000-07:00

This is a nice video of Mario being played by artificial intelligence. I am really impressed with all that the AI is able to handle. There are a few moves that the AI makes that would be close to impossible for a normal human player to pull off without getting killed.

It would be nice to have students try doing this sometime in a Java programming course.

Google Buzz

2010-02-10T19:13:00.001-08:00

Okay, I have not written for a while, and that does not bother me. When I opened my gmail today I was greeted with an invitation to try out Google Buzz. I have never been afraid of trying out Google Apps, so I decided to give it a try.

I noticed that Google Buzz is very much like Facebook, but without all of the annoying apps. Since I already had friends using gmail, I was able to collect a list of friends quickly. There are a lot of privacy settings that I have configured using Google apps over the last few years, and I am comfortable with the settings I have set. Google Buzz seems to take all of these settings into account, and I have not seen anything unexpected.

I really like Google Wave, but it has been difficult to use because I never know when someone has started a Wave. I am hoping that Google Buzz integrates some of the features of Google Wave. I really would like to see Google Buzz a little more like Google Wave, but have it maintain the Gmail connection.

Many bloggers have written different things about Google Buzz. The most common thing appears to be their fear of having their privacy exposed. I personally have come to grips with the fact that I no longer live in a world where privacy can be expected anywhere. I know that if I post something, it can and might appear in archives on the Internet for the rest of eternity. So instead of complain about how Google makes it easy to see what you post, I am focusing on what Google Buzz has to offer.

One thing I noticed was that you can decide which Google apps create posts on Google Buzz. Because this blog was an option, I decided to select it and write a blog entry to see how it looks. For some reason, it posted my most recent blog entry, so I deleted it from Google Buzz, and am posting a new entry.

Status Update

2008-11-09T23:21:00.000-08:00

Okay, it has been a while since I last wrote, so I think it is about time go give a little update.

I am no longer in Hawaii. I September of last year I moved out to Oregon to start school at the University of Oregon. Originally I was planning on getting a Ph.D., but I decided that I am not convinced that I want to get a Ph.D. at UO, so now I am working on a Masters degree in Computer Science.

This semester I decided to take Artificial Intelligence, Distributed Systems, and Teaching Effectiveness. I have been enjoying all of the classes, but I have been busy writing a lot of programs. I think the most exciting so far has been my group project in Distributed Systems where I have been working on a network based game. The project is currently being hosted on Sourceforge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/netspacewar/ so that we get extra resources like a Subversion database for version control. It also makes it easier to make decisions about which software libraries to include when you know what the final license is before you release anything other than SVN exports.

In the Artificial Intelligence class I have written a few problem solving programs. Two programs I wrote are agents that play Connect 4. They both use different methods, one is a reflex agent and basically looks for situations where it can win or block the enemy, then places pieces there. The other is more advanced and uses reflex moves for things that make sense, but it also does some searching to see what moves will cause problems in the future. For my term project I plan to write a set of AI agents to play Nine Men's Morris. I think this will be a lot of fun.

In addition to taking classes, I am also teaching two classes at Northwest Christian University. I am teaching a Microsoft Office 2007 class and a Web Design class. Microsoft Office 2007 is interesting because it uses a new format to store data that is much like the Open Document Format that was standardized as ISO/IEC 26300:2006. Not that teaching this class is about file formats, but I just have more interest in office suite file formats. I still have my OpenOffice.org Utility Library project on Sourceforge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/ooolib/ and I enjoy playing with it every once in a while.

The Web Design class is fun, but it is a little bit difficult because I am limited by the syllabus. The syllabus was written by a previous teacher who have to leave suddenly, and I was given the teaching position with the instruction to follow the syllabus. Normally that would not be so bad, but the syllabus moves through the material too slowly and focuses on material that I think is mostly obsolete. I would really like to teach the students more of modern web design based more on things like JavaScript and less on things like frames and deprecated HTML tags, oh well. The class is still fun to teach.

My family is also doing well. We are all getting more used to Eugene, Oregon. Shannon and Latia are enjoying school at Yujin Gakuen, a public Japanese immersion school. Michael and Alexander enjoy playing at home and going to their playgroup. Akiko is excited because recently a fairly well known hula instructor has started teaching here in Eugene. Akiko is once again able to go to practice and enjoy learning.

Heavy Rains in Laie

2006-03-03T23:11:00.000-08:00

Living in Hawaii I guess I should expect a little rain now and then. Since I live in a little town with a University in the middle, the University is the center of many peoples lives here. When the rain starts, one of the first places to really fill up is the large field in the front of the University. Almost instantly, the field starts filling with students who would rather play in a muddy field than at the beach.

While I do not exactly enjoy going out and playing in the mud, it is interesting to watch others get soaked. I expected it to continue raining for a little while longer, but the rain just did not stop. In some reports, there are claims that there were upwards of 22 inches of rain that dropped on this little community in just three days. Most of that was on the last day after the ground was already soaked.

Roads turned to rivers and had to be closed. Since Hawaii is full of anti-development activists, there is only one road around the island. Maybe people are worried that more roads will bring more people from the mainland, and their forests will be lost. What ever the reason, the main road, Kamehameha, was closed in many places.

Of course, it was not just the roads. If the roads were all we had to worry about, that would be fine. We have lost our roads before, it probably happens once a month when someone gets tired or drunk and there is a head on collision. That can close the roads for hours.

No, the waters started coming up, and started to invade the neighboring houses. Fortunately, I live on slightly higher ground, so the waters did not get to my place. I do feel sorry for those who have to get carpet cleaners and power washers to clean out the dirty water.

The community really helped drain the waters from the above house. They started to use the dumpsters to take the water to a nearby ditch and dump it. Pumps also helped. It hours to drop the water level the two feet that appeared in half the time.