News Clips

A Better Way to Release Your City’s Data

Chris Bousquet | Data-Smart City Solultions | May 23, 2017

Open data has immense potential to catalyze creative problem solving by practitioners and policymakers, but troves of vaguely-labeled spreadsheets will do little to inspire interest or facilitate innovative solutions. To unlock the value of open data, governments have begun to launch open datasets in themed releases, which contain data and additional context about a specific policy area. These open datasets have two distinct advantages: a more useful and navigable platform for users and better marketing appeal to practitioners focused on the policy area...

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How Open Source Is Enhancing Healthcare

Audrey Throne | Open Source For U | May 23, 2017

With the recent development in software technology, many application systems are now competing for medical attention. Healthcare (or what we can call it as medical software) is evolving rapidly through communications, record-keeping system to a source of decision support, consequently, playing an active role in clinical service. However, unlike many other services, medical software is not very well regulated and places like a safety burden and cost of ineffective use solely depend on the physicians...

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4 Ways Blockchain Is the New Business Collaboration Tool

Lucas Mearian | Computer World | May 23, 2017

While blockchain may have cut its teeth on the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the distributed electronic ledger technology is quickly making inroads across a variety of industries. That's mainly because of its innate security and its potential for improving systems  operations all while reducing costs and creating new revenue streams. This year, blockchain technology is expected to become a key business focus for many industries, according to a Deloitte survey conducted late last year...

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IBM and the tranSMART Foundation Bring Translational Medicine Data to Scientists

Press Release | tranSmart Foundation | May 23, 2017

The tranSMART Foundation, a non-profit organization providing a global, open-source, open-data knowledge management platform for scientists to share pre-competitive translational research data, and IBM (NYSE: IBM), today announced their collaboration and the general availability of the tranSMART platform (version 16.2) on IBM Power8 servers. The translational research platform is running on IBM Power8 servers at the tranSMART Foundation's Center of Excellence at the University of Michigan. This new implementation allows users to take advantage of the optimized performance enabling them to more quickly and easily load and analyze data...

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How Open Source Software Will Drive the Future of Auto Innovations

Ted Serbinski | Venture Beat | May 22, 2017

Automotive companies are shifting from bending metal to bending bits. Soon they will be offering software and services to complement their manufactured metal. As these companies become software-driven, open source will become a staple to drive innovation faster and more reliably. Today’s cloud is powered by open source software: 78 percent of businesses run open source software in some form. With the convergence of automobiles and the cloud (supporting autonomous systems and connectivity), it’s quite clear this open source paradigm that took over the cloud will take over the automobile...

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New Path for Drug Development

Kalyan Ray | Deccan Herald | May 22, 2017

The 1960s was a decade that witnessed humans setting foot on the moon and a bloody war that changed the history. In between these events, a drug that would be the mainstay for doctors for decades to fight a smart bug, was born. Rifampicin was the last novel class of antibiotics against Mycobacterium tuberculosis till the arrival of bedaquiline at the fag end of 2012. Discovered in 1965, Rifampicin was marketed in Italy in 1968 and was approved by the US regulatory body in 1971...

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Hyperledger Adds Change Healthcare as Premier Member

Press Release | Hyperledger | May 22, 2017

Hyperledger, a collaborative cross-industry effort created to advance blockchain technology, announced today at Consensus in New York that Change Healthcare has joined as a Premier Member of the project. One of America's largest healthcare IT companies, Change Healthcare is the first healthcare organization to join at the top membership level. As a Premier member, Change Healthcare, CTO Aaron Symanski will join the Hyperledger Governing Board...

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McKesson Spinoff Change Healthcare Bets Big on Blockchain

Mike Miliard | Healthcare IT News | May 22, 2017

Change Healthcare has signed on with the Linux Foundation's blockchain-focused Hyperledger initiative, the first healthcare organization to join the industry group at the premier level. Other premier members of Hyperledger, which aims to advance blockchain technology across all industries, include Accenture, IBM, Intel and SAP. General members include Kaiser Permanente, NTT Data, VMware and more...

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A Global Health Scorecard Finds U.S. Lacking

Donald G.McNeil Jr. | The New York Times | May 22, 2017

Over the last 25 years, China, Ethiopia, the Maldive Islands, Peru, South Korea and Turkey had the greatest improvements in “deaths avoidable through health care at their economic level,” a complex but intriguing new measure of global mortality described last week in the Lancet. By that standard, the United States improved slightly over the same period, 1990 to 2015. But the American ranking is still so low that it’s “an embarrassment, especially considering the U.S. spends $9,000 per person on health care annually,” said the report’s chief author, Dr. Christopher J. L. Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, created by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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100 Million Reasons For Open Source Compliance

James Gatto | Law of the Level | May 19, 2017

CoKinetic Systems Corporation filed suit against Panasonic Avionics Corporation, seeking damages in excess of $100 million, in part, for violation of the GPL v2 open source license. CoKinetic alleged that Panasonic blocked competitors from having the ability to develop software for Panasonic’s In-flight Entertainment (IFE) hardware by refusing to distribute the source code for its open-source Linux based operating system. CoKinetic alleged that this software controls the basic functions of Panasonic IFE hardware systems...

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100 Million Reasons For Open Source Compliance

Jim Gatto | Law of the Level | May 19, 2017

This is another recent example of a lawsuit, between competitors, where open source issues will play a prominent role....The growing use of open source and the increasing number of enforcements for non-compliance with open source licenses highlights the need for well-thought out open source policies. To help companies understand these policies,we have prepared a guide on “Open Source Policies — Why You Need Them And What They Should Include.”

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Pressbooks working with Ryerson University on eCampusOntario grant: “Open Publishing Infrastructure”

Press Release | Pressbooks | May 19, 2017

We are very very excited to announce that we’re working with eCampusOntario and Ryerson University to improve Pressbooks as an Open Textbook authoring tool, under the just-announced eCampusOntario project: “Open Publishing Infrastructure for Ontario Post-Secondary Educators, Learners.” Most of the development work we undertake under this grant will be released as open source improvements to the Pressbooks GPL codebase — so anyone using Pressbooks will benefit...

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UC Libraries Make Open Science Framework Tool Available for Researchers

Press Release | University of Cincinnati | May 19, 2017

The Researcher Services group, an initiative of the University of Cincinnati Libraries along with the IT@UC Research & Development Team, is pleased to announce a new tool for managing research projects: OSF for UC. OSF, or the Open Science Framework, is an open-source workflow management tool developed by the Center for Open Science. Appropriate for any discipline, OSF enables researchers to manage workflows, share files, view project analytics, and more. Available at osf.uc.edu, OSF for UC is the portal for students, faculty, staff and others to manage project files and documents...

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She’s Got a Radical Approach for the Age of Superbugs: Don’t Fight Infections. Learn to Live with Them

Usha Lee McFarling | STAT | May 19, 2017

As her father lay dying of sepsis, Janelle Ayres spent nine agonizing days at his bedside. When he didn’t beat the virulent bloodstream infection, she grieved. And then she got frustrated. She knew there had to be a better way to help patients like her dad. In fact, she was working on one in her lab. Ayres, a hard-charging physiologist who has unapologetically decorated her lab with bright touches of hot pink, is intent on upending our most fundamental understanding of how the human body fights disease...

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LanguageTool Is an Open-Source Proof Reader for 25+ Languages

Mike Williams | Beta News | May 18, 2017

LanguageTool is an open-source spelling and grammar checker for Chrome, Firefox, the desktop (via Java) and more. The browser extensions enable checking the text you’re entering a web text box, or any other selectable text on a web page. The system works much like other spell checks. Enter text, click the LanguageTool icon and it instantly displays a report listing any issues...

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