jwco

Crowdsourcing health insurance is a really interesting idea.

Why shouldn't I, and many other people, open our medical records and insurance information? I.e. post it to some publicly accessible database, anonymously or not.

Could we get insurance providers to make us individuals/families offers, then, instead of us having to do the searching?

It may take some time before such a social/industrial shift occurs, if ever.

In the meantime, a bot that submits my info to various providers and gives me their actual quotes in sortable format could expedite choosing health care based on actual quotes, rather than the (usu. equal or lower) advertised rates.

So there is some theoretical and experimental work arguing that the Fibonacci sequence minimizes the energy of soft particles interacting repulsively when constrained to the surface of a cylinder. In 2009, some physicists found the pattern when they made a "Magnetic Cactus": http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.0622

As a commenter on the Atlantic pointed out, lets not forget to consider the American Museum of Natural History's role here as the prime mover in the cascade of journalists. It surprises me that they didn't have more of an internal peer review.

So instead HN becomes the peer review.

Here's a link to some interesting theoretical work by Hernan Makse titled "Identifying Influential Spreaders in Complex Networks."

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1001/1001.5285v2.pdf

They actually used some online networks for their simulations:

"We investigate (i) the friendship network between 3.4 million members of the LiveJournal.com community [15], (ii) the network of email contacts in the Computer Science Department of the University College London (Zhou, S., private communication), (iii) the contact network of inpatients (CNI) collected from hospitals in Sweden [16], and (iv) the network of actors who have co-starred in movies labeled by imdb.com as adult [17]"

They found some rules about how the structure of the network influences the spreading ability of each node. As you may suspect, they find highly connected individuals aren't necessarily the best spreaders.

Related to Apple's recent partnership with Twitter?

Methinks so.