iPad and Interface Single Tasking

Geeks of the world went through a collective wave of anticipation and lament yesterday at the unveling of the Apple iPad. If there was a single most missed feature, it was probably the lack of multitasking. I'm going to say something contrarian here. The iPad doesn't need multitasking now, and possibly not ever.

With the iPad, Apple is taking a step down the path where separation between interface and application (or Model from the View and Controller if you prefer) is not just a convenient software architecture boundary, but is an actual physical interface boundary. As much as you might wish it, humans are, at best, serial-taskers when it comes to interfacing to a computer system. Notice I said system. The next logical step after the iPad is to seamlessly connect it to other higher horsepower devices; devices on the net, or devices in a cloud. Personally, the link net devices are fairly mature over the browser, but I'd like to start maturing the link to my personal, home computing devices, the cloud can come later.

If the iPad is just an interface device with just enough computing power to ease local controls processing, you can then multitask to your hearts desire by giving server type devices tasks to go off and perform. Basically, as long as you can push images onto the iPad and control commands back to a server, and do lightweight processing for compromises between those two extremes, you can think of the iPad as a physical manifestation of a application gui window on your desktop computer.
The only thing you need is a multi-event notification system, which iPhone already has a least laid a foundation.

There are some short-term, established ways to pursue this link, the X window system is a prime example. For more recent examples, you could look at VNC/Remote Desktops type applications to extend your interface device. Ironically, the VNC/Remote desktop applications are less rich than the X system. And of course, browsers are increasingly delivering reasonably responsive application over web technologies. This should only get easier with the rise of HTML5. However, Apple has always dabbled in interesting interface and display technologies. I'm hoping that Apple has it's sights set on a longer term view of this path and is preparing some newly rethought method of linking server side power to an exportable iPad interface that may blow the doors off of all these paradigms.

Healthcare Soda: Predictably Broken Competitive Markets

Interesting data on health care by Umair Haque at the Harvard Business Review in this article. (he actually has a lot of interesting articles in HBR.) I've been thinking that the private healthcare industry as a competitive market is pretty broken in the US. It's not really surprising to me that a competitive market works very poorly with its characteristics. For a market to work best, a purchase should have verifiable quality and needs to be repeatable or reversible, meaning you make that purchase decision again and again, or if you find a choice was bad, you can change the choice or reverse it. For example, that may mean giving back the product, or discarding it for another, or selling to someone else. Here's an example:

Suppose you buy a soda, then take a sip, and find that you hate the taste. No big deal - if its really that bad, you could stop drinking it partway through and toss it. Choose another brand next time.

Healthcare doesn't work that way. Now imagine if the only way to shop for soda is to buy a can every month and put it in the garage. If you open that soda you have to keep that can, finish the drink, finish what's in the garage, and keep buying it for a while. That's what happens if you get seriously ill and really need to lean on that health insurance. You might know how an insurer handles routine care, but you really don't know the quality of your health provider until you're in dire straits. At that point, you can't switch.

In these circumstances, is it any wonder that there is a fundamental disconnect between the profit of health insurance companies they quality they deliver. In California, there's been an ongoing fight about insurance companies cancelling policies when when serious care is needed (search for "California lawsuit health insurance cancellation" or click here. Some of insurance companies even paid employees bonuses to cancel policies of very sick people based on technicalities on their initial applications (sometimes years back). Settlements in some of those cases after the fact must be very bittersweet I'm sure that some of those patients received worse care, or suffered permanent injury or death. Finally, if you can't work, eventually you hit the end of what you're employer is willing and able to provide and you go bankrupt. This drives a suprisingly large portion of bankruptcies in the United States (article here).

I haven't even touched upon how things are even more broken because we're not even the ones shopping for this healthcare soda. Our employers are usually the one shopping for it.

I don't know how to fix things - I do like to idea of a publicly chartered competitor to private insurance, but really we need to find a way to connect up the healthcare market costs to delivered value to us, the consumers.

Touchable Holograms

Popular Science posted this article and video about touchable holograms at Siggraph '09, this year. It's a combination of three items: a 3d display using concave mirrors something like this 3D mirascope toy, two wii-motes strapped statically for position detection, and a home-brewed (university-brewed?) phased array of ultrasound drivers.