The consensus of the team now is that Voyager 1, at 8.7 billion miles from the Sun, has at last entered the heliosheath, the region beyond the termination shock," said Dr. John Richardson from MIT, Principal Investigator of the Voyager plasma science investigation.
When I teach about data interfaces in healthcare systems, and the complexity of integration, I compare Palm original representation of a 'contact' (address book entry) with Outlook/Exchange server's contact representation. The complexity (non-computable complexity in some areas) of synchronizing between these two was a huge problem for Palm. I'm not sure when they figured out how much trouble they were in, but once Microsoft took over the enterprise with Exchange server Palm's fate was pretty much sealed.
In later versions of the OS they tried to better match Outlook's data models, but they botched the software layer that provided some backwards compatibility (arguably they should have given up on the backwards compatibility, they ended up with the worst of two options).
Linux on the Palm is not as important, really, as matching the Exchange server data model.
More broadly, synchronization is a problem that's been grossly underestimated in many quarters. It often requires a fuzzy non-deterministic reconciliation of semantic models; the same challenge that Berners-Lee addresses in the context of the semantic web. This issue is a major part (along with some perverse economics) of why healthcare IT projects are so difficult.
I hope Palm now understands these issues, I fear that much of their intellectual capital may have moved on...
... At meetings, he stands instead of sitting. Talking on the telephone, he paces around. In his office he has a treadmill in place of a desk. He got it last year when he saw the data from the study comparing lean people and obese ones.I've seen a few people in our office sitting on a large ball while working -- keeping stable would certainly burn calories. This takes things to the next step. I'd read that he'd done this, but I hadn't seen the speed setting -- 1 step a second seems quite pleasant.
'My computer is stationed over the treadmill,' he said. 'I work at 0.7 miles an hour.'
A stand-up desk might seem simpler, but he prefers the treadmill.
'Standing still is quite difficult,' he said. 'You have a natural tendency to want to move your legs. Zero point seven is the key. You don't get sweaty, you can't jiggle too much. It's about one step a second. It's very comfortable. Most people seem to like it around 0.7.'
The United Kingdom's Health Department published tough new rules to guarantee that patients in England can control access to their electronic health care records in a system under development by the National Health Service.
The NHS National Programme for Information Technology kicked off a 10-year, $10 billion project in late 2003 to develop a nationwide e-health record (EHR) system for 50 million patients and 30,000 doctors in England. It would not cover Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.
The NHS Care Record Guarantee, published May 23, will allow patients to prevent information in their records from being shared, Health Ministry officials said. But the quality of care could deteriorate if patients block information sharing.
The health record guarantee also states that:
* Patients will be able to obtain a list of everyone who looks at their records.
* NHS will not share information outside the agency, particularly with other government agencies.
* Records will only be shared with health care providers or social service or education organizations with patient permission.
* NHS will take disciplinary action against anyone who accesses health records without permission or a good reason.
The new NHS electronic Care Records Service “has enormous potential benefits for patients," said Lord Warner, UK health minister. The system allows medical staff throughout England to have instant access to patient histories, including allergies, current medications and recent treatment.
Warner said the department developed the new privacy rules to address any patients’ concerns about the confidentiality of their records.
The Care Guarantee clearly establishes the rights of patients to control who has access to their information, Warner said. "These rules will be backed up with tough security measures to prevent unauthorized access to records, ensuring everyone can have confidence in the new system," he said.
Internal Server ErrorHmm. A few teething problems! Another bad sign was the initial login. They use the "secret question" method for password recovery, the approach favored by 99/100 crackers and identity thieves.
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, you@your.address and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Surely there is no subject on which more words are currently being said with less real meaning than that of the intersection of religion and politics in America. And that is why you ought to read a recent New Republic piece by the indispensable Alan Wolfe, who cuts through the fog like a search-light.Two interesting and thoughtful discussions -- both Wolfe's article and the above commentary. Wolfe doesn't mention the history of catholicism as a state religion, but from what he does write I gather he'd agree with me.
In the format of a review of Jim Wallis' much-discussed God's Politics, along with a collection of case studies of religio-political cooperative ventures, Wolfe pens a long, eloquent and often angry essay about the growing willingness of evangelical Christian leaders to reject the liberal principles of tolerance, pluralism and church-state separation that made the growth of their own tradition possible in the first place...
.... As you may know, in the Judeo-Christian tradition one who takes a prophetic stance believes the moral and spiritual conditions of a society have become so depraved that the faithful are obliged to step outside the normal bounds of civility and respect for authority and call down the righteous wrath of God. Taking a prophetic stance is by definition exceptional; occasionally essential, but always spiritually as well as politically dangerous. And that is why true prophets are so greatly honored, and false prophets are so feared and despised...
Account information on the customers was illegally sold by bank employees to a man identified as Orazio Lembo, whom police said was doing business by illegally posing as a collection agency.One of the most interesting thefts of this kind involved a legal purchase of such information through a legal "front" bank. This is crude by comparison.
When police in Hackensack, N.J., first announced arrests in the case on April 28, they estimated that more than 500,000 people were affected. That number was raised to 676,000 Friday. Because some people have more than one account, Hackensack Police Chief Charles "Ken" Zisa says the number of accounts breached may top 1 million.
"As this gets going, these numbers are going to go up and up," Hackensack Detective Capt. Frank Lomia told CNN earlier Monday, adding that more arrests may be coming in the case.
... As a doctor I have always been against health insurance except for catastrophic care and for the very poor. It has been my experience that the doctor-patient relationship is the most personal and rewarding for both the patient and the doctor when a clear, direct fiduciary relationship exists. In such a circumstance, both individuals value the encounter more, which invariably leads to more time, more attention to potentially important details, and a higher level of patient compliance and satisfaction - all of which invariably result in a better outcome.On the one hand, it's hard at first to see why bad genes should be much different from all the other bad luck that denies health coverage to many people. The difference is that this 'bad luck' strikes Republicans as well as Democrats. So I agree, there will be some sort of obligatory risk pooling, and it may turn out to be hard to use any criteria but citizenship to define the covered pool.
But with the end of pooling risk within defined groups, there is only one solution to the problem of paying for health care in the United States: to pool risk for the entire nation. (Under the rubric of health care I mean a comprehensive package that includes preventive care, acute care and catastrophic care.) Although I never thought I'd advocate a government-sponsored, obviously non-profit, tax-supported, universal access, single-payer plan, I've changed my mind: the sooner we move to such a system, the better off we will be. Only with universal health care will we be able to pool risk for the entire country and share what nature has dealt us; only then will there be no motivation for anyone or any organization to ferret out an individual's confidential, genetic makeup.
Macro Securities Research, a company affiliated with Robert J. Shiller, the Yale economist, has reached an agreement with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to list pairs of derivative instruments that are essentially index funds linked to home prices in certain markets. One instrument in each pair will rise as its market index rises; the other will rise as the same index falls. That will let investors bet on the direction of housing prices. Similar, but less sensitive, vehicles are being offered by HedgeStreet, a firm in San Mateo, Calif., that offers small-scale derivatives speculation online.
