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...

Read More »

Open Apereo 2017

Event Details
Type: 
Conference
Date: 
June 4, 2017 - 10:30am - June 7, 2017 - 6:30pm
Location: 
Sheraton Society Hill Hotel
One Dock Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
United States

Open Apereo 2017 is an international and inclusive open source conference for education. The conference is designed to encourage the exchange of ideas, the formation of new partnerships, and sharing of personal perspectives between community members and to promote community-wide, project-based, or institutional discussion and collaboration. Topics presented at the event will include DevOps for higher education, instructional designer support, learner data analytics, open academic environments, the next-generation digital learning environment, and more...

Read More »

How Secure Is Our Smart Grid?

Dan Lohrmann | Government Teachnology | February 26, 2017

Over the past several months, alarm bells have been going off regarding potential attacks against the U.S. electrical grid...In the [Department of Energy’s] landmark Quadrennial Energy Review, it warned that a widespread power outage caused by a cyberattack could undermine 'critical defense infrastructure' as well as much of the economy and place at risk the health and safety of millions of citizens. The report comes amid increased concern over cybersecurity risks as U.S. intelligence agencies say Russian hacking was aimed at influencing the 2016 presidential election”...

Read More »

Why You Must Secure Your Website with TLS

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | Medium | January 12, 2017

Security isn’t an option on today’s websites. It’s a necessity. Google confers on sites that use HTTPS a higher search ranking. And who doesn’t want a higher PageRank? But, wait there’s even more reason to lock down your site. Google will soon start marking websites that don’t use HTTPS first as insecure, then as broken. You so don’t want to go there...

Read More »

Using It or Losing It? The Case for Data Scientists Inside Health Care

Marco D. Huesch, MBBS, PhD & Timothy J. Mosher, MD | NEJM Catalyst | May 4, 2017

As much as 30% of the entire world’s stored data is generated in the health care industry. A single patient typically generates close to 80 megabytes each year in imaging and electronic medical record (EMR) data. This trove of data has obvious clinical, financial, and operational value for the health care industry, and the new value pathways that such data could enable have been estimated by McKinsey to be worth more than $300 billion annually in reduced costs alone. If appropriate investments in data science are not made in-house, then hospitals and health systems will run the risk of becoming reliant on outsiders to analyze the data that ultimately will be used to inform decisions and drive innovation”...

Read More »

Google, IBM, and Lyft Launch Open Source Project Istio

Natalie Gagliordi | ZD Net | May 24, 2017

Google, IBM, and Lyft on Wednesday announced the first public release of Istio, an open source service that gives developers a vendor-neutral way to connect, secure, manage and monitor networks of different microservices on cloud platforms. According to the companies, Istio was created to address the inherent challenges that come with integrating application-based microservices in distributed systems, namely compliance and security...

Read More »

Google, IBM, and Lyft Launch Open Source Project Istio

Natalie Gagliordi | ZD Net | May 24, 2017

Google, IBM, and Lyft on Wednesday announced the first public release of Istio, an open source service that gives developers a vendor-neutral way to connect, secure, manage and monitor networks of different microservices on cloud platforms. According to the companies, Istio was created to address the inherent challenges that come with integrating application-based microservices in distributed systems, namely compliance and security...

Read More »

OpenExpo 2017

Event Details
Type: 
Conference
Date: 
June 1, 2017 - 11:00am - June 2, 2017 - 12:30am
Location: 
LA N@VE
Calle Cifuentes, 5 28021 Villaverde District
Madrid
Spain

OpenExpo 2017 is a conference designed for professionals and companies interested in topics related to open source software and open world economy, such as open data, open innovation, and free software. More than 3,000 attendees are expected to attend this one-day event, including open source developers, experts and hackers, as well as representatives for major companies and institutions, suppliers, and users of all levels. As the largest event in Spain related to open source software, free software, and open world economy, OpenExpo 2017 aims to promote sharing, discovery, and evaluation of industry trends and solutions...

Read More »

Open Data Projects Win Wellcome Trust, NIH and HHMI Open Science Prize

The Open Science Prize, a new initiative from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the Wellcome Trust, encourages and supports open science approaches that generate benefit to society, advance research and spur innovation. An integral component of the selection process is demonstrated use and generation of open data, so PLOS is proud that this year’s winner of the Open Science Prize is PLOS author and evolutionary, computational biologist Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington...

MACRA: Big Fix or Big Problem?

J. Michael McWilliams, MD, PhD | Annals of Internal Medicine | May 16, 2017

In January 2017, the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) took effect, ushering in a new system for physician payment in Medicare. With MACRA, policymakers ended the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) method for updating physician fees in Medicare and provided a permanent “doc fix,” relieving Congress of its annual duty to override substantial fee cuts that the SGR would have imposed. In place of the SGR, MACRA instituted the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), which intends to reward clinicians for providing higher-quality and lower-cost care...

Read More »