Hiccup?

The HICCup Manifesto

Hiccup, self doubt.

Lights, vending machine, public phone, hiccup clock!

Indeed, HICCup will not choose which communities participate.

So, how will this be funded? Not by HICCup.

HICCup will spend a lot of time with lawyers and actuaries!

For starters, HICCup will focus on communities of 100,000 people or fewer.

Another argued that the summertime market stress would most likely be a hiccup.

Luke Skywalker, or Hiccup, until we reach the bottom and meet the anti hero.

And yet, there it is, so you assume there's been some kind of hiccup.

It has a little cough and a hiccup, and out comes sprays of little frogs.

So our approach at HICCup will be to help people figure out for themselves what works.

When the financial crisis came, Chile was able to mount an aggressive fiscal stimulus without so much as a hiccup from financial markets.

Since September, this new market has traded the Eurozone s Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, or HICP a contract that traders call the hiccup.

There is, however, one unbreakable rule To work with HICCup, communities must collect and publish a lot of independently vetted data (without personal information, of course).

If the latest global economic data reflect something more serious than a hiccup, and markets and economies continue to slow, policymakers could well find themselves empty handed.

Even on the population level, we are facing some of the same complexities at HICCup (the Health Initiative Coordinating Council), a startup that I founded. How do you measure health improvement?

In particular, we note with satisfaction that the brief hiccup of the events in the Republic of Guatemala in May and June does not appear to have seriously flawed that country apos s efforts at permanent redemocratization.

Instead of just complaining, I recently decided to create HICCup, the Health Intervention Coordinating Council, a self appointed counseling service aimed at persuading local institutions to embrace a long term perspective and launch a full scale intervention in their communities.

But there are many smaller scale examples, such as Oklahoma City, which lost one million pounds of collective weight in a population of about 600,000 we hope the people involved will join with HICCup to share their experiences, good and bad.

I think about this challenge a lot these days, because my new startup, called HICCup (Health Initiative Coordinating Council), aims (in part) to help people do just that on a massive scale, though initially concentrated in just a few communities.

While I expect to learn much more as I work on HICCup, I am already sure that the biggest problem will be finding people to take on the challenges in each community. What s the optimal balance between replicability and the human touch?