Ninja Blocks puts a power into the hands of developers and users that has never been realized before, and which could be the genesis of an open source community of makers. Read More »

It’s been widely reported that the NSA is in the midst of collecting huge volumes of call metadata from Verizon associated with all domestic and international calls made by the company’s customers for three months [...]. Less attention has been paid to what exactly the government does with all that data or the technology supporting it. Read More »

In an overnight, grassroots movement, the open source platform Drupal has made an impact in Oklahoma. A group of more than 70 volunteer code sprinters—made up of developers, designers, and sys admins—congregated late Tuesday night at DrupalCon in Portland to create help4ok.org. Read More »

By empowering communities to collect data from their local environment and contribute to an interactive, worldwide environmental database, the folks behind the Smart Citizen Kit are enabling a whole new level of participation from citizen scientists. Read More »

It’s no secret that poor communication tops the list of patient complaints about their physicians.  [...] While understandable, that kind of a response seems to demean the interpersonal exchange which is the very essence of the physician-patient relationship. Read More »

Of course, the ever-present euphemism for life-threatening EHR malfunctions and defects, i.e., "glitches" are the cause... Read More »

"Legal corruption" was the description of current executive compensation practices appearing, of all places, in the Wall Street Journal.  The arguments [...] apply to health care, and provide a counterpoint to the usual talking points that are trotted out whenever a top health care manager, or his cronies, feels the need to justify his or her compensation. Read More »

It seems to have taken awhile, but organized medicine seems to finally be recognizing that today's commercial health IT is not quite the revolutionizing, transformative, plug-and-play panacea to healthcare's ills it is often touted as... Read More »

Last week, a report on German software firm SAP's recruitment drive for autistic programmers hailed the company's innovative step to attracting new talent. But for one British startup, realising the power of an autistic workforce is nothing new. Read More »

Todd Park is the United States Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the President. Previously, he was the CTO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where his idea to use crowdsourcing to collect health data and release information to citizens online was widely celebrated... Read More »