RightsCon is an annual conference that focuses on awareness-raising, organising, and advocacy on global issues at the intersection of technology and human rights. The event is produced by the international nonprofit organization AccessNow. RightsCon participants include members of digital rights organisations, legal experts, civil society, government, and business representatives. Creative Commons, Mozilla, and the Wikimedia Foundation organized a panel discussion on the work being done to reform the European Union copyright rules...
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2 Tools for Transforming Senior Management into Open Leaders
By DeLisa Alexander | April 4, 2017
This is the third article in our "Open Leadership Development" series. In part 1, I shared how we got started with building a leadership development system for our open organization. In part 2, I walked through four stages of leadership development in an open organization. Now, I'd like to share some leadership tools we've created for our open organization and published on GitHub under a Creative Commons license. One of my favorite homegrown pieces of our open leadership system is the OPT model, which was developed by my colleague Jan Smith, based on her observations within Red Hat and experience working with various leadership models. As you'll see, it's a strengths-based approach to development...
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RightsCon Redux: Working Toward A Progressive Copyright Framework For Europe
By Timothy Vollmer | April 4, 2017
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Peering into Complex, Tiny Structures with 3D Analysis Tool Tomviz
By Robert Hovden | April 3, 2017
New open source software tomviz—short for tomographic visualization—enables researchers to interactively understand large 3D datasets. More specifically, the software analyzes 3D tomographic data similar to a medical CT-scan but at the nanoscale. "When you can take a nanoparticle or biomolecule and spin it around, slice it, look inside it, and quantitatively analyze it, you get a complete picture from all angles," says Yi Jiang, a physics Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University. Watch this 3-minute video from the Michigan Engineering department....
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The Age of Hacking Brings a Return to the Physical Key
By Jungwoo Ryoo | April 2, 2017
With all the news about Yahoo accounts being hacked and other breaches of digital security, it’s easy to wonder if there’s any real way to keep unauthorized users out of our email and social media accounts. Everyone knows not to use the same username and password combination for every account – though many people still do. But if they follow that advice, people end up with another problem: way too many passwords to remember – 27 on average, according to a recent survey. That can lead to stress about password security, and even cause people to give up secure passwords altogether. It’s an ominous feeling, and a dangerous situation...
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Crowdfunding for Healthcare
By Kim Bellard | March 30, 2017
Elizabeth Rosenthal's searing article about medical billing, adapted from her forthcoming book An American Illness, is well worth a read. Its topic of sophisticated medical billing/upcoding -- done by organizations ostensibly acting in the best interests of patients and often under the guise of a non-profit status -- is also worthy of a discussion itself. This is not that discussion. What jumped out to me (and to many others, on Twitter and elsewhere) was the following indictment: "In other countries, when patients recover from a terrifying brain bleed — or, for that matter, when they battle cancer, or heal from a serious accident, or face down any other life-threatening health condition — they are allowed to spend their days focusing on getting better"...
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How to Grow Healthy Open Source Project Infrastructures
By Elizabeth K. Joseph | March 30, 2017
In 2013 I joined the OpenStack Infrastructure team. In the four years I spent with the team, I learned a considerable amount about the value of hosting an infrastructure for an open source project in the open itself. In 2014 I gave a talk at All Things Open and was interviewed by Jason Baker about how we'd done our systems administration in the open. My involvement on this team led me to advocate for systems administrators to use revision control and learn about tools for working with a distributed team. At the OpenStack Summit in Austin in 2016, our team did a talk on navigating the open source OpenStack Infrastructure...
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Halamka Recounts Early Experiences with Ambient Listening Devices (Alexa and Google Home)
By John D. Halamka, MD | March 29, 2017
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has a long tradition of testing speculative technologies with the notion that breakthroughs often require tolerance for failure. For example, we’ve embraced blockchain in healthcare because we believe public ledgers have promise to unify medical records across institutions. Over the past few months, we’ve developed healthcare applications for Alexa, Amazon’s ambient listening device that combines natural language processing and easy to use application program interfaces. We have also tried Google Home. Here’s our experience thus far...
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Is the Future of mHealth Based on SMS and Inexpensive Mobile Phones?
By James Michiel | March 29, 2017
Earlier this month the Finnish mobile phone maker, Nokia, announced that they will be re-releasing an updated version of their legendary 3310 GSM phone. Since it was first released in the early 2000s, the Nokia 3310 has gained a cult following for its incredible durability, long battery life and compact design featuring an internal antenna. Many Europeans and Americans fondly remember the 3310 as their first mobile phone, a device that made meeting up with friends in a crowd easier and a device that provided endless hours of entertainment with the timeless game Snake...
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Sometimes Innovation Requires Disobedience
By Kim Bellard | March 28, 2017
The M.I.T. Media Lab is taking nominations for its Disobedience Award, which was first announced last year. As the award's site proudly quotes Joi Ito, the Director of the Lab and who came up with the idea: "You don't change the world by doing what you are told." I love it. The site, and the award's proponents, make clear that they are not talking about disobedience for the sake of disobedience. It's not about breaking laws. They're promoting "responsible disobedience," rule-breaking that is for the sake of the greater good. The site specifies...
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3-D Printing Turns Nanomachines into Life-Size Workers
By Chenfeng Ke | March 28, 2017
Nanomachines are tiny molecules – more than 10,000 lined up side by side would be narrower than the diameter of a human hair – that can move when they receive an external stimulus. They can already deliver medication within a body and serve as computer memories at the microscopic level. But as machines go, they haven’t been able to do much physical work – until now. My lab has used nano-sized building blocks to design a smart material that can perform work at a macroscopic scale, visible to the eye. A 3-D-printed lattice cube made out of polymer can lift 15 times its own weight – the equivalent of a human being lifting a car...
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