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FBI Agent to CHIME Attendees: The Cybersecurity Environment Is Becoming More Dangerous

Mark Hagland | Healthcare Informatics | August 15, 2016

The level of cybersecurity threat is growing exponentially in healthcare right now, but there are some very clear strategies that the leaders of patient care organizations can and should do in order to fight back. That was the core of the message that Timothy J. Wallach, a supervisory special agent in the Cyber Task Force in the Seattle Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) told attendees Monday morning at the CHIME/AEHIS LEAD Forum Event, being held at the Seattle Marriott Waterfront in Seattle...

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Google Is Waging A Financial War Of Attrition To Win The Cloud

Christopher Mims | Quartz | April 25, 2014

Google is fighting a war on multiple fronts—against Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and others—and is outspending them all in the one area that will be critical to winning the future: the cloud.  Google’s April 17 earnings report revealed that the company spent $2.35 billion on infrastructure, which for Google means its data centers and all the IT gear that go in them.

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Has the Internet Become an Epidemic?

Jeff Stibel | LinkedIn | July 10, 2017

It seems obvious that internet companies would calibrate their apps to keep you using them as often and as long as possible. But did you realize that these companies have become so good that your relationship with the internet has crossed from an affection to an addiction? Scientists across the globe have demonstrated that shifting the internet from our computers to our phones has created an epidemic worse than the one created by smoking, albeit attacking our minds instead of our lungs...

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Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Jean M. Twenge | The Atlantic | August 10, 2017

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”...

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Health Care Needs Some Spectacles

I've never written about Snapchat.  I didn't really get the point of its namesake app, the point of which was to post content that automatically disappeared.  I knew it was wildly popular among teens and celebrities, both of whom undoubtedly had more content they wished wouldn't persist than an old fogey like me, but it just seemed purposely trivial. With their recent introduction of Spectacles, though, I figured Snap Inc. (as the company renamed itself) deserves a closer look. The Wall Street Journal broke the story (as Business Insider also did) with an in-depth look at Spectacles.  It is not a new app, nor some new service on its existing app (which continues to be called Snapchat), but rather a piece of hardware: a pair of sunglasses that can record short videos.  Users can record ten to thirty second videos, taken from the sunglass's perspective...

Take Back Your Log-In: It’s Time To Move Away From Facebook Connect And Toward OpenID

Paul Fremantle | GIGAOM | September 20, 2014

It might seem easier to outsource your website’s log-in to Facebook. But do you really want to hand over all your user data to another company?...

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Towards a New EHR Metaphor - Or, How to Fix Unusable EHRs

News flash: docs hate Excel! In a recent study, which included researchers from Yale, the Mayo Clinic, Stanford, and the AMA, physicians rated it only at 57% on a usability rating, far below Google search (93%), Amazon (82%), or even Word (76%). But, of course, Excel wasn't their real problem; the study was aimed at electronic health records (EHRs), which physicians rated even lower: 45%, which the study authors graded an "F." If we want EHRs get better, though, we may need to start with a new metaphor for them.Lead author Edward Melnick, MD, explained the usability issue: "A Google search is easy. There's not a lot of learning or memorization; it's not very error-prone. Excel, on the other hand, is a super-powerful platform, but you really have to study how to use it. EHRs mimic that."

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Why Google Is Suddenly Obsessed with Your Photos

Victor Luckerson | The Ringer | May 25, 2017

Google tends to throw lots of ideas at the wall, and then harvest the data from what sticks. Right now the company is feasting on photos and videos being uploaded through its surprisingly popular app Google Photos. The cloud-storage service, salvaged from the husk of the struggling social network Google+ in 2015, now has 500 million monthly active users adding 1.2 billion photos per day. It’s on a growth trajectory to ascend to the vaunted billion-user club with essential products such as YouTube, Gmail, and Chrome. No one is quite sure what Google plans to do with all of these pictures in the long run, and it’s possible the company hasn’t even figured that out...

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Your Smartphone or Your Life...or, the Dangers of Addictive Technology

Rep. Jason Chaffetz's recent remarks suggesting that some Americans should invest in their health instead of in a new iPhone reminded me of nothing so much of the old Jack Benny bit, where Benny is accosted by a robber who threatens "your money or your life."  When Benny doesn't immediately respond, the robber prompts him, and the supposedly miserly Benny snaps back, "I'm thinking it over." I suspect that, like Mr. Benny, many of us would have a tough choice between our smartphones (and our other devices) and our health.  It may be not so that we're miserly as it is that we're addicted.