Jake Shapiro of PRX is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk.

PRX is the Public Radio Exchange, a service that enables public radio stations to find audio reports posted by producers. Public radio’s audience is increasing (currently 30M listeners per week). How can it embrace the new ecology? Program directors have been gatekeepers, but many are open to the idea that through the Net they could provide more than 24 hours worth of programming per day. (You can see Public Radio’s statement of values here.) They feel threatened by time-shifting, the growth of

Chris Lydon asks if there’s any point in going through the stations instead of just posting podcasts. Jake, who was a producer of Chris’ previous radio show, says that it’s not an either/or. “Public radio is primed to plug in.”

Chris: Have you thought about PRX becoming a packager of podcasts, filtering the thousands of them?

Jake: That’s what we’re doing. PRX hopes to have many people creating playlists.

Rebecca MacKinnon: You could do Greensboro101 but for podcasting.

Much discussion ensues. A few random points:

Jake: Program directors can become a “feed-j.”

Jake: You could have the pledge drive feed that interrupts and asks you to buy flowers for your mother, or you could pay to get the pledge-free feed. Or there could be subscriptions and/or sponsorships.

Jake wonders what the legality and good practices of the redistribution of feeds will be. He says the only terms of use for a feed that he’s seen is on NPR.org. He points out that Cory recently blogged a similar question. [Technorati tag: berkman]

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Mark Dionne points out that the old toy computer, Geniac, is sellling on eBay for $305, whereas he bought a new real computer for $250.

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When I travel, I carry a heavy knapsack on my left shoulder, and for the past two weeks, I’ve been traveling a lot. I’ve also had a persistent ache in my left shoulder, occasionally in my left pec, and persistent aches and pains in my left arm. I’ve had no shortness of breath and no sweating. Ibuprofen does a good job relieving the pain. So does changing my position. In other words, I am showing all the marks of a muscular/skeleton problem and only one of a heart attack.

Nevertheless, when I called Harvard Vanguard, our excellent (and impossibly expensive) health plan, to see if I could get an appointment with an acupuncturist or possibly a muscle-shoveler, they had me come in for an EKG.

They knew I wasn’t haven’t a heart attack. I knew I wasn’t having a heart attack. But they’re hypochondriacs. So, I had an EKG confirm that I wasn’t having a heart attack.

I appreciate the care. I appreciate more that they were reasonable enough to let me wander in when it was convenient instead of sending an ambulance shrieking to our house. But the doctor – friendly, professional, attentive – spilled the beans. He told me about a guy who came in with unalarming symptoms, passed his EKG, and dropped dead 2 hours later. “They sued the pants off of us.”

I admit I’m an alarmist. If I get ink on my fingers, I assume it’s skin cancer. But I’m also a rational alarmist and can usually talk myself down off the ledge, at least since the time in grad school when I had a doctor inform me that that lump in my chest was a rib. Our health care system is far worse. It’s a fear-based alarmist hypochondriac. The result is that I get medical care that most of the world would die for, so to speak. But the system is optimized badly.

(By the way, if I drop dead of a heart attack in two hours, nothing I’ve written here should be construed as preventing or inhibiting my survivors from suing the clinic’s pants off.) [Technorati tag: healthcare]

Speaking of health care, Dr. Bill Koslosky points to an NPR story and a report in Time Canada that even some Republicans are getting behind a bill that would expand the stem cell lines currently available for research. Bill wonders if this might occasion W’s first veto.

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Back of the Frosted Flakes box (click for large image)

Jedi Spoon next to Jedi Google Tchochke for size comparison

[Technorati tag: starwars]

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Jean-Paul Borda, blogging from Afghanistan, has posted his “golden rules of milblogging.” As always with this type of advice, it’s actually more like “How to blog like me” than a set of eternal rules, although “Don’t tell readers about military plans” probably holds pretty well across all types of milbloggers. And much of it transposes nicely for us civbloggers.

Of course, I already seem to have violated rule 11: “Don’t just put references to other milblogs in your milblog as a substitute for writing. Do you think the readers are that stupid? They’ll figure out that you have nothing to write about soon enough.” [Technorati tag: milblogs]

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I sent in my Thinkpad on Tuesday, in a box IBM shipped to me, and it came back to me on Thursday with a new motherboard. That’s damn fast service. Thanks, IBM.

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AKMA reports on the possibility that The Beast’s number may have dropped from 666 to a mere 616. Whew! 666 is tough, but I think with that 50 point drop, we can probably take him.

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John Siracusa goes behind the new Mac search facility, Spotlight, with an eye on the metadata it gathers and the facilities not yet exposed by the UI. [Technorati tags: macintosh metadata]

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For reasons I don’t quite understand, Gianluca Baccanico (AKA Jon Luca Botanico), one of the students I got to hang out with at the U of Napoli, has asked people to write a haiku about symmetry. Here is mine:

There is symmetry.
One half balances half one.
Symmetry is there.

[Technorati tags: haiku poetry symmetry]

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A work colleague of mine from way back, J. Fox Garrison, has written P.S. Julia, the story of her life after a massive brain hemorrhage and stroke. So far I’ve only read the sample chapter (pdf), but I wasn’t expecting to laugh quite so much. I look forward to reading the rest. [Technorati tag: stroke]

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