TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

One interesting side-story to the Oregon Medicaid study story is that the researchers initially published positive results for Medicaid. As a result, looking at how pundits responded to those initial findings and today’s final findings is… interesting. Peter Suderman’s done a good job of it:

Aaron Carroll, an influential health policy blogger at The Incidental Economist, emphasized the rigor of the study. “I’d like to reiterate that this was a randomized controlled trial,” he wrote. “An RCT is pretty much the best way to prove causality, especially if it’s well done.” And because it’s an RCT, he concluded, “we can even start talking causality.” Ezra Klein published a column touting the study with the headline, “Amazing Fact! Science Proves Health Insurance Works.” He explained why the randomized study was so valuable: “The gold standard in research is a study that randomly chooses who gets a new treatment and who doesn’t. That way, you know your results are unaffected by differences in the two populations you are studying.”

Now, well, it’s all a little less clear. “The problem with the Oregon study,” Klein wrote this morning,” …is we don’t really know what we’re learning.” Carroll, who was ready to start talking causality when the first study was published, is now counseling caution. “So chill, people. This is another piece of evidence. It shows that some things improved for people who got Medicaid. For others, changes weren’t statistically significant, which isn’t the same thing as certainty of no effect. For still others, the jury is still out.”

I like Klein and Carroll’s caution today. I just wish they had it when the results were, um, a bit more friendly to their prior beliefs, too.

Josh Barro’s take on the Oregon Medicaid study is good:

Yesterday, we got results from the two-year Oregon Health Study, which randomly assigned some low-income people to receive Medicaid coverage while others did not. The study found that Medicaid led people to consume more health care and was effective in reducing both financial strains due to medical costs and depression. But it did not find significant effects on the physical health measures that were tracked.

Despite efforts to spin it to the contrary, this is bad news for advocates of the Medicaid expansion. While Medicaid is clearly good for some things, it was supposed to be good for all of the measures tracked.

Adobe has been working on a pen and ruler for tablets, and the combination looks awesome.

The pen is pressure-sensitive, but the coolest part is the “ruler,” which allows you to draw straight lines or precise arcs. Really, really cool.

The demonstration, though, shows a very large lag between drawing and the line actually appearing on screen. It’s strange because it’s much, much worse than I’ve experienced with any drawing or sketching app on iOS.

In any case, it’s heartening to see Adobe working on meaningful projects like this.

Enstitute is a group providing apprenticeships for college-age people:

How did she catapult from dropping out of college to landing a plum job? She became an apprentice to Hilary Mason, chief data scientist at Bitly, through a new two-year program called Enstitute. It teaches skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building via on-the-job experience. Enstitute seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that top professional jobs always require a bachelor’s degree — at least for a small group of the young, digital elite.

“Our long-term vision is that this becomes an acceptable alternative to college,” says Kane Sarhan, one of Enstitute’s founders. “Our big recruitment effort is at high schools and universities. We are targeting people who are not interested in going to school, school is not the right fit for them, or they can’t afford school.”

Colleges are incredibly expensive, the cost continues to rise, and yet they are increasingly less effective at preparing people to be successful. There’s absolutely value in a liberal arts education (in fact, I think there’s even more value now), but many schools don’t even do a good job of exposing students to a variety of disciplines to make them more well-rounded. Universities crank students through, make them take class after class with lecture-midterm-lecture-midterm-lecture-final, put them tens of thousands of dollars into debt, and leave many of them not much better off than they were before entering.

So new education organizations like this should be welcomed. Perhaps they’re not exactly what we need to replace universities, but we don’t need to replace universities—we need different options, different paths, different ideas that allow people to take a route that fits them better, and places pressure on our bloated, staid education system to change.

David’s Brisket House:

The new David—a nickname he inherited along with the deli— turned it into his family’s business, and they’ve built that business into the kind of thing you’d only see in New York: a Jewish deli, run by Muslims with Brooklyn accents, for the benefit of Bed-Stuy.

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Bill Ayers defended the Weather Underground bombings over the weekend:

“To conflate a group of fundamentalist people [in Boston] who are nihilistic in some way with a group of people who spent their lives trying to oppose the murder of 6,000 people a week … and still the killing went on. And still the killing went on. What would you have done?” Ayers said. “There’s no equivalence [with Boston]. Property damage. That’s what we did.”

…

In his talk to the crowd, Ayers mentioned that in 1970, he lost three friends in the Weather Underground, including his lover, Diana Oughton. He did not explain in his talk how they died – they were killed when nail bombs they were making in a Greenwich Village townhouse blew up.

Nail bombs are a hallmark of bombings intended to damage property, and not to harm people, I’m told.

Chego is re-opening in Chinatown this Saturday (May 4th) after shutting down their Culver City location.

Chego is one of my favorite places to eat. Damned good food, great people running it, and reasonable prices. It’s one of the reasons I love Los Angeles so much. If you’re in the area and have never tried it, I suggest fixing that sometime. Roy Choi is a hero.

San Jose State University is integrating online courses in a big way:

Ms. Junn hoped that blending M.I.T.’s online materials with live classroom sessions might help more students succeed. Dr. Agarwal, the president of edX, agreed enthusiastically, and without any formal agreement or exchange of money, he arranged for San Jose State to offer the blended class last fall.

The results were striking: 91 percent of those in the blended section passed, compared with 59 percent in the traditional class.

Great news. More use of class time, cheaper for students, provides more access to education and frees up university resources; what’s not to like? Oh, well, the California’s university faculty unions propose a sensible alternative:

Any wholesale online expansion raises the specter of professors being laid off, turned into glorified teaching assistants or relegated to second-tier status, with only academic stars giving the lectures. Indeed, the faculty unions at all three California higher education systems oppose the legislation requiring credit for MOOCs for students shut out of on-campus classes. The state, they say, should restore state financing for public universities, rather than turning to unaccredited private vendors.

In other words: keep spending all that money on education and shut down anyone who tries to do it differently, more effectively, and more affordably!

If you’re looking for a new RSS feed service, David Smith’s Feed Wrangler looks like a great one.

As always, Federico Viticci (the man, the machine) has a very good look at the service and iOS apps.

Jay Haynes claims Ron Johnson failed at JC Penny because he misunderstood Steve Jobs’s statement that “You can’t just ask customers what they want”:

Ron Johnson took away the wrong message from Apple and decided not to analyze the jobs-to-be-done for JC Penney customers. Like almost every innovation effort that fails to analyze the customer’s job-to-be-done first, Johnson’s effort was a failure. But his biggest failure may be learning the wrong lesson from Apple and his former boss.

Jobs’s point was that you have to understand the needs customers have, rather than their expressed wants. Haynes presumes that because Johnson said that JC Penny shouldn’t test their changes since customers don’t know what they want, he meant customers don’t know what needs they have. That’s a huge leap that isn’t at all justified by the (second-hand) quote Haynes references nor by Johnson’s decision not to test changes. And one of Jobs’s other famous sayings is they do no market research for their products, and that they didn’t do any for the iPad because it isn’t the consumer’s job to know what they want.

I’m willing to bet that Johnson understands Apple quite a bit better than Haynes does, based upon this rather lazy attempt to connect a valid point—that there’s a difference between ignoring what people say they want and ignoring their needs—to Johnson’s failure at JC Penny. If you want to read a much more plausible take on why Johnson failed, Ken Segall’s is the one.

Jean-Louis Gassée:

Some read the decision to return gobs of cash to shareholders as an admission of defeat. Apple has given up making big moves, as in one or more big acquisitions.
I don’t agree: We ought to be glad that the Apple execs (and their wise advisers) didn’t allow themselves to succumb to transaction fever, to a mirage of ego aggrandizement held out by a potential “game changing” acquisition.

Yep. Large acquisitions are very, very hard. Apple’s discipline with its cash is one of its finer qualities.

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Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Facebook has agreed to acquire Parse:

These steps come in all sizes. Most are small and incremental. Some are larger.  Today we’re excited to announce a pretty big one.

Parse has agreed to be acquired by Facebook. We expect the transaction to close shortly. Rest assured, Parse is not going away. It’s going to get better.

Wow.

You know, if you’d like to build a mobile platform but don’t want to build an operating system, owning the best backend service for mobile developers is probably a good way to do it.

Marco Arment is selling Instapaper to Betaworks:

Instapaper is much bigger today than I could have predicted in 2008, and it has simply grown far beyond what one person can do. To really shine, it needs a full-time staff of at least a few people. But I wouldn’t be very good at hiring and leading a staff, and after more than five years, I’d like an opportunity to try other apps and creative projects. Instapaper needs a new home where it can be staffed and grown, but I didn’t want to give it to a big company that would probably just shut it down in six months.

Instapaper has been a key part of how I do work for years. Instapaper (and the New York Times application) are my two most-used applications.

Congratulations to Marco for creating such a useful and successful service, and congratulations to him for making what is a very hard decision: knowing when it’s time for your creation to move on to someone else who has the time and resources that it needs.

Here’s an example, I think, of where acquisitions are not at all wrong. Our community would do better to not automatically dismiss all acquisitions as a failure, but instead evaluate each one on their merits. Many times they are a failure; acquisitions are very difficult to do well. But sometimes, they’re the right choice for everyone involved, including customers.