News

Summaries of open source, health care, or health IT news and information from various sources on the web selected by Open Health News (OHNews) staff. Links are provided to the original news or information source, e.g. news article, web site, journal,blog, video, etc.

See the following -

In Second Look, Few Savings From Digital Health Records

Reed Abelson and Julie Creswell | CNBC | January 11, 2013

The conversion to electronic health records has failed so far to produce the hoped-for savings in health care costs and has had mixed results, at best, in improving efficiency and patient care, according to a new analysis by the influential RAND Corporation. Read More »

In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers Of N.S.A.

Eric Lichtblau | The New York Times | July 6, 2013

In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say. Read More »

In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers Of N.S.A.

Eric Lichtblau | New York Times | July 6, 2013

In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks [...]. Read More »

In Sochi, Open Source Maps Beat Google's

Robinson Meyer | The Atlantic | February 19, 2014

[...] OpenStreetMap, a free-to-edit and free-to-use world map often compared with Wikipedia, received a similar—though less validated—commendation last week, when the reporter Greg Miller at Wired found that its maps exceeded Google’s at describing Sochi, the home of the 2014 winter Olympics. Read More »

In Stunning Win For Open Science, Johnson & Johnson Decides To Release Its Clinical Trial Data To Researchers

Matthew Herper | Forbes | January 30, 2014

Drug companies tend to be secretive, to say the least, about studies of their medicines. For years, negative trials would not even be published. Except for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, nobody got to look at the raw information behind those studies. The medical data behind important drugs, devices, and other products was kept shrouded. Read More »

In sudden announcement, US to give up control of DNS root zone

Cyrus Farivar | ArsTechnica | March 14, 2014

In a historic decision on Friday, the United States has decided to give up control of the authoritative root zone file, which contains all names and addresses of all top-level domain names...Signs point to fallout from NSA spying that lead to "multi-stakeholder" model. Read More »

In Tech-Savvy Japan, Citizens Utilize Crisis Mapping

Shereen Meraji | NPR | March 28, 2011

Open source software called Ushahidi allows people to add and update information to maps that anyone with an Internet connection can access. In Tokyo, a crew of volunteers is using the software to map everything — from health services to the location of emergency aid workers — in Japan's hardest hit areas

Read More »

In Thailand The Cost Of Overfishing Is Trafficked Human Beings

Gwynn Guilford | Quartz | March 4, 2014

Thailand has a long-standing problem with human trafficking. Migrants from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos are conscripted into its seafood industry. A report out today from the Environmental Justice Foundation suggests that, despite increasing international pressure and Thai government attention, it’s still happening. Read More »

In The Belly Of The Beast

Paul Solotaroff | RollingStone | December 10, 2013

Sarah – let’s call her that for this story, though it’s neither the name her parents gave her nor the one she currently uses undercover – is a tall, fair woman in her midtwenties who’s pretty in a stock, anonymous way, as if she’d purposely scrubbed her face and frame of distinguishing characteristics. [...] It’s the worst job she or anyone else has had, but Sarah isn’t grousing about the conditions. She’s too busy waging war on the hogs’ behalf. Read More »

In The Cloud, It's Amazon Vs. The Rest

Dana Blankenhorn | Seeking Alpha | September 25, 2012

VMware (VMW) is just the latest company to join the OpenStack Foundation, an effort to build an open source cloud stack from parts first developed by NASA, then Rackspace (RAX), and now being implemented at the latter. Read More »

In The News

Rachael Mclellan | Indigo Trust | October 1, 2013

Mobile technology is now being used for everything from paying bus fares to eye tests, donating money for disaster relief to distance learning.  ICT for development remains a big issue in Africa and here’s a sweep of some of the latest developments that we’ve been following at Indigo. Read More »

In the UK, Open Access For All Publicly Funded Research by 2014

Ariel Bogle | Melville House | July 18, 2012

In one of the first moves to address these issues, the British government has unveiled plans to allow all publicly funded scientific research to be openly available by 2014... Read More »

In The Wake Of Aaron Swartz's Death, Let's Fix Draconian Computer Crime Law

Marcia Hoffman | Electronic Frontier Foundation | January 14, 2013

Aaron was one of our community's best and brightest, and he acheived great things in his short life. He was a coder, a political activist, an entrepreneur, a contributor to major technological developments (like RSS), and an all-around Internet freedom rock star. As Wired noted, the world will miss out on decades of magnificent things Aaron would have accomplished had his time not been cut short. Read More »

In Their Own Words: Unix Pioneers Remember The Good Times

Julie Sartain | InfoWorld | August 20, 2013

We caught up with the pioneers who brought us the Unix operating system and asked them to share some memories of the early days of Unix development. Read More »

In Third Year, Materials Genome Initiative Pushes Forward

Colby Hochmuth | FedScoop | June 24, 2013

Federal government leaders, industry leaders and academia agreed two years ago to double the pace of technological development. Today, they renewed that commitment. Read More »