Angular vs. React: An Epic Battle for Developer Mind Share

Peter Wayner | Info World | March 9, 2017

When the boss says it’s time to pour data into the screens of a bazillion visitors to your website, you have dozens of options for getting up and running fast. In the old days, most work was done on the server, but today much of the heavy lifting has been pushed to the client, making for a zippier, more interactive experience, because the client often has cycles to spare. There are a number of tools for client-side code that shoulder the job of laying out the data and interacting with the user. Two of the latest leading contenders are Angular and React, a pair of open source projects from Google and Facebook, respectively...

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Inside OpenSSL's Battle to Change its License: Coders' Rights, Tech Giants, Patents and More

Thomas Claburn | The Register | March 24, 2017

The OpenSSL project, possibly the most widely used open-source cryptographic software, has a license to kill – specifically its own. But its effort to obtain permission to rewrite contributors' rights runs the risk of alienating the community that sustains it. The software is licensed under the OpenSSL License, which includes its own terms and those dating back to the preceding SSLeay license...

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A New Kind of Doctor's Office Charges a Monthly Fee and Doesn't Take Insurance — and It Could Be the Future of Medicine

Lydia Ramsey | Business Insider | March 19, 2017

Dr. Bryan Hill spent his career working as a pediatrician, teaching at a university, and working at a hospital. But in March 2016, he decided he no longer wanted a boss. He took some time off, then one day he got a call asking if he'd be up for doing a house call for a woman whose son was sick. He agreed, and by the end of that visit, he realized he wanted to treat patients without dealing with any of the insurance requirements. Then he learned about a totally different way to run a doctor's office...

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Doctors Petition for Halt to Health-Record-System Rollout

Cindy E. Harnett | Times Colonist | June 7, 2016

More than 100 doctors have signed a petition asking Island Health to suspend the introduction of its $174-million electronic health record system at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital. The petition asks that Island Health suspend the system’s implementation until software that they say is canceling, overriding, changing or doubling up some drug orders is fixed or replaced. “Otherwise it’s inevitable something horrible is going to happen,” said one physician, on the condition of anonymity because of fear of repercussions...

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Who’s Logging Your Face?

Alvaro Bedoya | The Washington Post | March 22, 2017

In 1892, Sir Francis Galton published a treatise in which he argued that the patterns on our fingers were “an incomparably surer criterion of identity than any other bodily feature.” Today, fingerprinting is ubiquitous. But the limits of the technique are clear: Fingerprinting is a targeted, one-off process whereby a single person is identified, typically through an in-person or on-site interaction. Advanced face recognition, on the other hand, lets police identify people from far away and without interacting with them...

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EHR Optimization: Necessary Because EHRS Are Never “Done”

D’Arcy Guerin Gue | Phoenix Health Systems Blog | March 22, 2017

Why, if over 95 percent of hospitals have implemented EHRs, are so many planning to invest in improvements or replacements this year? A new Healthcare IT News survey of hospital executives showed that 24 percent are conducting a major EHR system upgrade, and 21 percent are replacing their EHR at one or more sites. KPMG’s survey of CHIME members last month found that at least 38 percent of CIOs are investing in EHR optimization projects this year; in fact, they plan to spend more on EHR optimization than any other area of HIT. These numbers are huge when you consider that most hospital EHRs are newer versions implemented to meet MU attestation requirements...

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How to Grow Healthy Open Source Project Infrastructures

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...

Halamka Recounts Early Experiences with Ambient Listening Devices (Alexa and Google Home)

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...

Is the Future of mHealth Based on SMS and Inexpensive Mobile Phones?

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

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...