IEEE Spectrum

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It's 2019. Smartphones are Out...On to the Next Big Thing...

It's amusing to watch old movies where plot points often involved someone's inability to talk to the person they needed, in the pre-mobile phone era. We take our smartphone's omnipresence and virtual omnipotence as a given in our daily lives and treat even its temporary loss as a major inconvenience. So why are people already wondering if the smartphone era is almost over? Speculation on this is not new (voice has been touted as the next big platform for years), but intensified after Apple announced reduced revenue expectations earlier this year -- the first time in 16 years. It specifically cited slower iPhone sales in China and, even more jarring, said it would no longer break out unit sales of iPhones...

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MIT and DARPA Pack Lidar Sensor Onto Single Chip

Christopher V. Poulton and Michael R. Watts | IEEE Spectrum | August 4, 2016

Light detection and ranging, or lidar, is a sensing technology based on laser light. It’s similar to radar, but can have a higher resolution, since the wavelength of light is about 100,000 times smaller than radio wavelengths. For robots, this is very important: Since radar cannot accurately image small features, a robot equipped with only a radar module would have a hard time grasping a complex object. At the moment, primary applications of lidar are autonomous vehicles and robotics, but also include terrain and ocean mapping and UAVs...

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The Wrong Legacies of Health Information Technology

I read two articles this week that got me thinking, Robert Charette's "Inside the Hidden World of Legacy IT Systems" (IEEE Spectrum) and Douglas Holt's "Cultural Innovation" (Harvard Business Review). Both deal with what I'll call legacy thinking. It's a particular problem for healthcare...If you are in healthcare and rely on legacy systems, you're in trouble. If you are in healthcare and are not acutely aware of what your Achilles heel is, someone else is going to exploit it. Even if you are a new healthcare entrant with more modern technologies but still based on the current ideology, your impact is going to be limited.

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