Another great parody - about 'public' health insurance

I know, I know, this is turning into a lazy-man's blog but this Salon.com parody is just so spot on,
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/30/police/

Obama has said, if he had the chance to do it all from scratch he'd setup a single-payer system of healthcare. So why is he caving-in to the entrenched private insurers who are doing such a terrible job? Would anyone seriously question the need for universal -- publicly paid-for -- police service?

Here's something unique I can add to the discussion: Fire protection used to be privately funded, but everyone now agrees that it is better as a public service. How is medicine any different?

UPDATE: I wanted to make sure I wasn't blowing smoke about the private fire depts. I found some other recent articles making the same comparison,
http://open.salon.com/blog/bill_beck/2009/06/21/better_burnt_than_red
http://theamericanscene.com/2007/10/26/private-firefighters

Great parody of anti-Gay Marriage 'arguments'

Modern Day Snake Oil

My mother is suffering from cancer, unfortunately, and now this otherwise rational and intelligent woman is succumbing to the modern-day equivalent of snake-oil salesmen, hoping to find a cure in the field of "Alternative Medicine." Today my mom went to a 'doctor' who sold her $500 in dietary supplements that -- apparently -- are all going to cure her cancer! I'm glad she invited me along for her 'appointment' as I got a first-hand look at how the scam works.

CON MEN ARE ALL ALIKE

First of all, the guy showed-up in practically a full surgical outfit even though we were only meeting in a small strip-mall office suite. Very 'professional' looking! He then proceeded to talk-up a STORM full of medical and biological terminology. It was impossible to consider or evaluate any of his statements because he JUST KEPT TALKING. Regardless of the forum, I can tell when I'm being manipulated in this way. I started-out wanting to like him (even as I knew I wasn't likely going to agree with him) and, in fact, he seemed very earnest and honest, like he really believed his own schtick. But after TWO HOURS I had to bite my tongue lest I threaten to report him for fraud.

Note -- He was VERY careful not to say that any of these treatments would cure her cancer! So there was nothing I could report him for. (dangle...) In this way he was obviously very practiced at his sales pitch. He also gave several anecdotes of people he had cured -- but without mentioning if they were also receiving traditional cancer treatments.

I'm not actually saying he was a con man. He may very well have believed all that crap he spouted. But if that's the case he needs to realize that the high-pressure sales pitch is only going to work on gullible or overly-polite people, while alienating everyone else.

TRY PULLING *MY* FINGER, DUDE!

Since my mom has an ACTUAL VERIFIABLE ILLNESS, I had assumed we were merely there to discuss and recommend possible treatments. But, no, he also gave my mom an on-the-spot 'examination'. His entire diagnostic technique consisted of -- and I kid you not, you can't make this stuff up -- PULLING HER FINGER. How unscientific is this?? Oh, let me count the ways! He would ask my mom's "body" if it "wanted" a particular supplement, then pull her finger, and based on the resistance he claimed to feel, would tell my mom if it was a good treatment or not. Even assuming he believed all this (which I doubt) my mom could vary her response for both conscious and unconscious reasons, and he could vary the strength of his 'test' pull in the same way. As I watched this charade I started imagining tricks I could play on him, such as swapping his 'test vials' so that they were all the same -- hence impossible to use for a valid test. I knew that his 'results' would not change if I did.

The worst part for me, actually, was when I thought of a dastardly joke we could play on him, and then I had trouble not laughing. Since the 'doctor' insisting on pulling her finger, what if I could've planted a gag Fart Maker? Every time he pulled your finger --- pffft. "Sorry!" I wonder how long he could continue under those conditions :-)

MORE TRICKS OF THE TRADE

I noticed that he did a good job of 'eliminating' several 'unnecessary' treatments. In other words, he made a good show of not trying to sell her every possible pill. I also noticed that he correctly 'diagnosed' all the various ailments my mom had already mentioned to him. Kinda reminded me of TV fake John Edwards' use of undercover agents to interview the crowd before each show, to find-out what secret they were hoping he could divine.

For each ailment he would quickly explain a highly technical reason why this or that biochemical was 'off' and how this or that supplement would fix it. Of course, the human body is far more complicated than that. As my cousin once told me, "If your body needs more zinc, you can't just eat more of it. Your digestive tract will simply 'pass' most of it." In the same vein (ha ha) I have recently read several articles about once-promising drug treatments which, for reasons unknown, failed to work outside the lab. And that's for legitimate pharmaceuticals, not fly-by-night 'homeopathic' remedies that make no actual medical claims.

DOCTOR QUACK'S BACKGROUND

I had to wonder if this guy was even a legitimate doctor. His wall was festooned with certificates and degrees, and so I set about to make a study of them. Here's a quick summary:

1974 - BS from a christian college in Texas
1976 - MD from Baylor Medical in Houston
1977 - license in Oregon
1980-1 - certificate of appreciation for "Management" of a Texas hospital or something
1983 - license in Wyoming
2003 - license in CA from "Medical Board of CA"

There were various others which I've forgotten, but the one that really got my attention was the 2nd. Is it possible to get a medical degree in just 2 years? When I got home afterwards I googled "Baylor" as "Medical Board of CA", just to make sure they were real. I also looked him up on both the CA and TX medical boards' web-sites, and everything looked legit (and there were no actions against him).

WHY I'M NOT WORRIED ABOUT HER (MUCH...)

So maybe he really does believe all that crap he spouted? I hope so. Fortunately, my mom also has a team of doctors at UCSD who claim to be open to alternative medicine -- but still want to review her supplements, just "to make sure none will react" with her ACTUAL treatment. According to doctor snake-oil, "none of these treatments interact with each other." In other words, they're probably all placebos! Wasn't there such an expose a few years ago about the "supplements" industry?

P.S. I can't entirely blame the cancer for her loss of reason. She was already under the thrall of her "bio-energetisist" whom I've learned she pays several thousand dollars a year for monthly treatments. But at least he also performs a legitimate service -- physical therapy -- as part of his fee.

P.P.S. Despite my harsh negative view of this 'doctor', I'm not doctrinarily opposed to Alternative Medicine. I just want it to prove it works! Is that so much to ask? Maybe the foods we eat, and the plastics we use, really do cause cancer through some as-yet-unknown mechanism. I have no doubt that today's "modern" medicine will seem like medieval torture in the near future. But that doesn't excuse all the unscientific unverifiable unBELIEVABLE claims of all those supplements my mom just paid top-dollar for. (dangle dangle...)

WSJ bags on home ownership as an 'investment'

Even the supposed cheerleaders of the 'mainstream' economic-view are now starting to dish on homeownership. They point out that homes-as-investment have only returned at most 2.2% (after accounting for inflation) over the past decade.
http://finance.yahoo.com/real-estate/article/107122/Is-Your-Home-a-Good-Investment?

I'm just sayin' ....

How I tuned the dirt removal filter, part 2

HOW THE DE-SPOT FILTER WORKS
=====================

The De-Spot filter uses several parameters to identify what is dirt and what is not. In general it works by looking for groups of pixels on an individual frame that don't exist on the preceding, or subsequent, frame. Here are the primary settings (or, at least, the only ones I used!):

p1 = sensitivity to detect new spots
p2 = sensitivity to find size/edges of spots
mthres = sensitivity to identifying dirt spots vs non-dirt spots in-motion
minpts = minimum spot-size
pwidth = maximum spot width
pheight = maximum spot height

The three 'sensitivity' settings are actually kinda misnamed as higher settings don't necessarily mean More Sensitive. P1 and P2 are the minimum 'difference' to trigger a spot detection, so higher values make it LESS likely that they'll detect a spot (or, in the case of P2, detect all of it). MTHRES is the amount of 'motion' required for a spot to be ignored, i.e., low values make the filter skip a lot of spots! The default setting for MTHRES is very cautious, 16, and misses a lot of dirt.

FYI - The function for detecting motion is called Motion Estimation (ME) and is the most important element of the filter!


KEEPING NOTES
============================

I eventually realized that I needed to keep detailed notes about specific spots/problems for specific Despot settings, and added the following section (all commented-out) to my AVS script:

------------
# FRAME # - NOTES
# 11 - hair standing-up from back of head @ mthres=43 p=24,8
# 15 - tear, requires mthres>=43 @ p=16,12
# 24 - hair 'aimed' at baby's head
# 36 - fingerprint next to (same size as) baby's head, requires p=64,8
# at p=64,6 it's only half removed, at p=64,4 it's totally missed
# 40 - round dirt
# 55 - ME error on ear @ mthres=43 p=36,12 or 56,12

# ME NOTES
# mthresh >= 20 to catch dirt at frame 77
# mthresh >= 25 to catch dirt at frame 81
# pwidth >= 120 to catch dirt at frame 112
# Motion-Estimation errors at frames 158, 179, 200, 221
# minpts >= 80 fixes half the error at frame 158
# minpts >= 110 fixes error at frame 158, 221
# minpts >= 140 fixes error at frame 200; still has error at 179
------------

TUNING THE FILTER
===============================

Here's the 'general' procedure I followed:

1. First I observed what kind of results I obtained from the default settings in De-Spot. The settings for p1, p2, and mthres are relatively insensitive, i.e., they miss a lot of obvious dirt.
2. Starting with MTHRES (detect motion) I increased the value until it detected all the legitimate dirt. At this point, however, it was also making a lot of mistakes, e.g. detecting eyes and ears as 'dirt'.
3. Within that opening scene (the dirtiest, btw) I varied the P1 and P2 settings to see if I could eliminate any of the false positives.
4. I increased the maximum allowed dirt-size, pwidth and pheight, so that the filter wouldn't ignore the bigger clods of dirt.
5. Finally I increased the minimum dirt-size, minpts, to try and eliminate false-positives on eyes/ears while still detecting actual dirt (which was usually quite large).

Rinse, Repeat! Actually, I spent most of my time varying MTHRES and P1/P2.
_______________

Here's an example of the ME error on the eye of a bouncing baby (my aunt, btw)


FINAL OUTPUT
=========================

I quickly realized that I couldn't fix everything in the whole video with just one group of settings. So I used VirtualDub to chop-up the original video into scenes, or even sub-scenes, and created custom AVS scripts for each. I also took the opportunity to adjust the brightness and contrast on several of the scenes, to try and make them easier to see.

Finally, for each scene, I output it to the FFDSHOW video codec set to MJPEG '100%' quality. I was then able to load all the clips together in Nero Vision and create a much nicer DVD than I originally received.

How to remove dirt from old film transfers, part 1

BACKGROUND
=====================

I just finished a very exciting project: My mom located a really old family film from when she was a child back during the Great Depression! The film is absolutely one-of-a-kind and had become sort of a legend to me, as I'd heard that it existed but no one knew what had happened to it. Well, my mom found it several months ago and I secretly had it transferred to digital, in preparation for Mother's Day. This was not my first foray into the realm of digital film transfers and I wanted to do the best possible transfer of this priceless recording. And because it was on 16mm film I was hopeful that it would have significantly better picture quality than the less-old 8mm films I'd previously converted.

Now, there are lots of shops offering film-to-DVD transfer. But I've spent literally years searching for someone who could perform film-to-BluRay transfers, i.e., to capture the full picture quality, in high-definition. I finally located this shop:

Video Conversion Experts
1010 W Chandler Heights Rd, Ste 2
Chandler, AZ 85248

www.videoconversionexperts.com
(800) 575-6202

For my little 11-minute film it cost $200 to transfer it to digital (at high-resolution) and create both a Bluray and DVD version. If I'd known all the work I was going to put into fixing the file I could've saved myself about half the cost and just requested the raw files; this is what ended-up happening anyways.

(Actually, I just checked and they charge MORE for just giving you the raw files. Apparently they're charging you for the resulting picture quality rather than the amount of work required on their part.)


THE ORIGINAL TRANSFER
=====================

Alas, the film showed all the classic signs of old age. First of all, whoever owned the camera (which was surely a luxury back in the 1930's) didn't do a very good job with the settings. Most of the scenes were either over-exposed or under-exposed. And one segment of Christmas 1936 was out of focus for the entire time. Even worse, the film did not have the high-resolution of detail that I'd hoped for.

Most upsetting, however, was the amount of dirt on the film, especially in the first 30 seconds or so. I'd assumed that the film-transfer machines were capable of detecting and 'deleting' these problems. Instead, removing this dirt from the image was what inspired me to fix the entire film.

Actually, I wanted to fix the transfer and the DVD, as the version they sent me was accidentally recorded in "2-hr" mode (only 5 Mbps, or half the max) and with noticeable distortion. Since it was such a short piece of film there was no reason not to have recorded it at maximum quality, 10 Mbps or "1-hr" mode in their parlance. They also billed me unnecessarily for audio transfer (there was none). Rather than ask for a refund I asked them to just send me the original raw high-definition files. They described them as "HD-AVI" and so I was curious to see what they meant by that. Basically, their film-transfer machine outputs 1920x1080i HDV (M-JPEG). I did some quick tests and found that the compression was set at 85%, a reasonable setting but one that I ignored during my subsequent editing.


THE SOFTWARE I USED
=====================

• VirtualDub 1.8.8
  www.virtualdub.org
• AviSynth 2.5.6
  www.avisynth.org
• De-Spot filter for Avisynth
  avisynth.org.ru/despot/despot.html
• FFDshow
  www.videohelp.com/tools/ffdshow

VirtualDub is a general-purpose video editor and can be used as-is without any installation. AviSynth is a frame-server which has to be installed, and then the De-Spot filter operates as a a DLL which has to be copied into AviSynth's 'Plugin' sub-folder. Finally, I installed FFDshow and set it's MJPEG filter to record at 100% quality (effectively loss-less).

Note - All of these programs are open-source software, i.e., they cost nothing to use!

The one commercial program I used was Nero Vision (from the Nero Ultra Suite) to create a new DVD with menu and soundtrack.


THE GENERAL PROCEDURE
=====================

The first thing I did was identify what format everything was recorded-in. I then used VirtualDub to demux the original AVI (separate the audio and video streams). Even with 85% quality/compression the resulting video file was 6 GB (for 11 minutes!). Finally, I setup an initial AVS script, both to trim the black segments on left/right (the film had an aspect ratio of 4:3 whereas the 'high definition' transfer was done at 16:9 widescreen) and also to start experimenting with the Despot settings.

Here's what my AVS script looked like for the first segment:
(subsequent segments were similar with only slight adjustments to the Despot parameters)

------------
# REMOVE DIRT FROM 1ST SCENE (FRAME 1-64)

AVIsource("16mm_HDAVI.avi")

# SelectEven() to reduce frame-rate by half
SelectEven()
# Crop(Left-Pos,Top-Pos,Right-Size,Bottom-Size)
Crop(250,0,1440,0)

# run 'despot' plugin for old film
LoadPlugin("c:\program files\avisynth 2.5\plugins\despot.dll")
ConvertToYV12()

## Default settings for p1, p2, and mthres
#DeSpot(p1=24, p2=12, mthres=16, sign=1, minpts=10, interlaced=false)
# p1=sensitivity for detecting new dirt spots
# p2=sensitivity for finding the edges of dirt spots
# mthres=sensitivity for differentiating dirt spots from spots in-motion
# include 'show=1' for diagnostic mode

DeSpot(p1=64, p2=8, pwidth=540, pheight=300, minpts=80, mthres=43, show=1)
ConvertToRGB24
------------

I was then able to open the .AVS file directly in Virtualdub and immediately see the effect. Note the use of 'show=1' in the Despot parameters -- this produced a very cool diagnostic effect! Instead of showing the final result, the diagnostic mode shows you a colored-in version where you can see which parts of the image look like 'dirt' but are being left-alone because of Motion Estimation (shown in gray) versus which parts will actually be removed (shown in purple).


One question I had was about removing the duplicate frames. The original file was 1080i 29.97 fps and every other frame was a duplicate (which interfered with detecting dirt on individual frames!). I used the 'SelectEven' command in my script and this removed the duplicates while also reducing the frame-rate to 14.985. Most importantly, it didn't seem to reduce the resolution. I had read that M-JPEG was recorded in interlaced format and so I was afraid that SelectEven might result in a 1920x540 image; it didn't.

Whew! This is by far my longest blog entry to-date. So I think I'll take a break, make this a two-parter. In my next blog entry I'll detail the method I used to tune the de-spot filter. It was as much an art as a science!

There is no Social Security Trust Fund

Here's a quick follow-up to my previous blog re non-existent Social Security Trust Fund. A recent Atlantic Monthly article pointed-out that the "trust fund" actually consists of nothing more than a filing cabinet full of (worthless) Treasury Bonds.

Which led me to this 2005 story in USA Today,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-04-05-trust-fund_x.htm

I understand that the government faces a difficult situation:
How do you 'bank' or otherwise invest the excess income (which is really just a loan) from Social Security? 'Investing' in the government's own bonds, however, seems misleading -- if not illegal or even treasonous!

I wish there were a way of forcing the federal government to:

1. Stop buying Treasury bonds
2. Remove the SS overpayments from the federal budget, i.e., so they weren't being used to paper-over deficit spending

Maybe they could use the SS money to buy gold or oil reserves, or something else that would represent a long-term (>20 years) investment?