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Bill in Congress Targets NSA's Accumulo Open Source Project

Kathleen Hickey | Government Computer News | July 20, 2012

A new bill on Capitol Hill could have far reaching implications for government use and development of open source platforms – potentially requiring all open source projects to “prove adequate industry support and diversification.”

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Does Healthcare Need More Programmers? Or, More MacGyvers?

Health care is full of black boxes.  As much as we think we've learned about the human body over the last hundred years, we're still constantly reminded about how little we actually understand its working (e.g., the microbiome). As much time and money we spend training physicians, much of how they diagnose and design treatments for patients remain a mystery.  And does anyone know why we always have to fill out so many damn forms? The many organizations working on applying AI to health care are trying to figure out some of these black boxes, although their solutions may come at the price of new black boxes.  I hope, though, that we don't just turn things over to AI.  We still need people to figure out the problems.

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FDA’s Public Data Project To Get An Upgrade Under $1.2M Contract

Whitney Blair Wyckoff | Fed Scoop | January 29, 2015

In an ongoing effort to improve openFDA, San Francisco-based Iodine will work on making the portal more user friendly...

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Four Things We Can Do Now to Unlock the Cure for Cancer

As a community we are capable of working together to achieve greater things. If we marshal our resources to work together, I believe we can unlock the cure for cancer. This is a rare opportunity. We need to change the models and shift our culture towards collaboration. We can’t just tweak around the edges — patients and their families can’t afford to wait. An alternative system, where all publicly-funded research and data are required to be shared would allow authors to unlock their content and data for re-use with a global audience, and co-operate towards new discoveries and analysis.

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Tomorrow’s Surveillance: Everyone, Everywhere, All The Time

Jon Evans | TechCrunch | June 29, 2013

Everyone is worried about the wrong things. Since Edward Snowden exposed the incipient NSA panopticon, the civil libertarians are worried that their Internet conversations and phone metadata are being tracked; the national-security conservatives claim to be worried that terrorists will start hiding their tracks; but both sides should really be worried about different things entirely. Read More »

Your Smartphone or Your Life...or, the Dangers of Addictive Technology

Rep. Jason Chaffetz's recent remarks suggesting that some Americans should invest in their health instead of in a new iPhone reminded me of nothing so much of the old Jack Benny bit, where Benny is accosted by a robber who threatens "your money or your life."  When Benny doesn't immediately respond, the robber prompts him, and the supposedly miserly Benny snaps back, "I'm thinking it over." I suspect that, like Mr. Benny, many of us would have a tough choice between our smartphones (and our other devices) and our health.  It may be not so that we're miserly as it is that we're addicted.