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Every year, the Global Forum undertakes two workshops whose topics are selected by the more than 55 members of the Forum. It was decided in this first year of the Forum’s existence that the workshops should lay the foundation for future work of the Forum and the topic that could best provide this base of understanding was “interprofessional education.” The first workshop took place August 29-30, 2012, and the second was on November 29-30, 2012. Both workshops focused on linkages between interprofessional education (IPE) and collaborative practice. The difference between them was that Workshop 1 set the stage for defining and understanding IPE while Workshop 2 brought in speakers from around the world to provide living histories of their experience working in and between interprofessional education and interprofessional or collaborative practice.

A committee of health professional education experts planned, organized, and conducted a 2-day, interactive public workshop exploring issues related to innovations in health professions education (HPE). The committee involved educators and other innovators of curriculum development and pedagogy and will be drawn from at least four health disciplines. The workshop followed a high-level framework and established an orientation for the future work of the Global Forum on Innovations in Health Professional Education. Interprofessional Education for Collaboration: Learning How to Improve Health from Interprofessional Models Across the Continuum of Education to Practice summarizes the presentations and small group discussions that focused on innovations in five areas of HPE:

1. Curricular innovations – Concentrates on what is being taught to health professions’ learners to meet evolving domestic and international needs;
2. Pedagogic innovations – Looks at how the information can be better taught to students and WHERE education can takes place;
3. Cultural elements – Addresses who is being taught by whom as a means of enhancing the effectiveness of the design, development and implementation of interprofessional HPE;
4. Human resources for health – Focuses on how capacity can be innovatively expanded to better ensure an adequate supply and mix of educated health workers based on local needs; and
5. Metrics – Addresses how one measures whether learner assessment and evaluation of educational impact and care delivery systems influence individual and population health.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Health and Medicine | Education

Amazon hopes to harness the large community of romance readers with a new weekly romance podcast, “Kindle Love Stories.” It will feature author interviews, reviews and trends in romance books, and is accompanied by a book discussion group on Goodreads, the reading social network that Amazon acquired in March.

The podcast is sponsored by Amazon Publishing’s romance imprint, Montlake Romance. The first two featured titles – Crazy Little Thing by Tracy Brogan and The Second Chance Café by Alison Kent — were both published by Montlake, although USA Today, which first reported the news about the podcast, says that “the books discussed will span a variety of publishers and imprints, including indie-pubbed books.” (Many of those indie-pubbed books will likely be published through Amazon’s own KDP.)

The podcast host is Laura Roppé, a singer-songwriter and the author of Rocking the Pink: Finding Myself on the Other Side of Cancer, published by Seal Press in 2012.

There are a number of podcasts out there focused on romance books, including those from Smart Bitches Trashy Books and Romance Radio Network. One possible advantage of “Kindle Love Stories” is that, if it focuses primarily on titles published by Amazon, all of those titles should be available free to Kindle owners through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Vin Diesel did an interview with Entertainment Weekly, which came out on Friday. Some comments he made about Facebook have been attracting some attention in the days since.

When interviewer Darren Franich asked Diesel what he attributes his large Facebook following to, he responded, “Did you ever see the movie Social Network? Do you remember what they said the reason was to make Facebook?”

To which Franich replied, “To meet girls?”

“YOU GOT IT!” said Diesel. “And when they made the movie, nobody had a million fans. They were promoting it, like, ‘We came up with a new way for people to check marital status.’ That’s not what Facebook was. That’s not why Facebook would be successful. No one gives a s— about people’s marital status. That’s as dated as MySpace! What Facebook didn’t realize is something very big was about to happen, and that was — for the first time in history, and it’s kind of a fluke they didn’t see this coming — when I jumped on that page in April 2009, I started talking to people. In the realest ways. Imagine if you could’ve been a Facebook friend to Marlon Brando, or whoever your role models are. Imagine, if you were able to Facebook Elvis, and talk to him, and hear from him without the Hollywood of it all. That was the Fast & Furious experience.”

Diesel said when he started his page, the only person who had a million fans was Barack Obama. It was the first quarter of 2009, just after the President’s inauguration.

“Facebook used to ask me to come up to their office to explain what the f— I was doing, and why I had so many fans. What was unique was: I never let anyone do a post, I never let anyone post for me in the last four years. My audience knows me so well on the page that if my producing partner’s in the room when I post, they’ll know somebody was around me. That’s kind of cool, that’s how sophisticated they are. Facebook really owes me billions of dollars. But whatever.”

It’s certainly worth noting, as indicated in the interview, that Diesel was laughing when he said that.

In 2013, Vin Diesel is still having fun with Facebook fans. For Valentine’s Day, he covered Rihanna’s “Stay” as a gift to them.

41 million people currently like Vin Diesel on Facebook. 35 million like Obama.

In the EW interview, Diesel talks about much more than Facebook (including Fast & Furious, Riddick and and Hannibal the Conqueror).

Zachary Quinto and Leonard Nimoy. Two Spocks of different eras brought together for a battle of speed and wits in Audi’s new commercial for the 420 horsepower S7 sedan . Quinto, our new Spock, returns for his second film in the upcoming “Star Trek: Into Darkness”, while Nimoy is a veteran of seven motion pictures and will forever be our #1 Spock. And while Quinto adds a wonderfully youthful flair to the character, let’s just say that there’s no replacement for tried and true experience.

Source: Youtube.com

Competitors, rivals, or whatever you want to call them – Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had a lot of shared history. And in a recent interview with Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes, Gates got emotional talking about the time he spent with the late Apple co-founder just before his death from cancer back in 2011.

Gates discussed the conversation the two had just prior to Jobs’ death, and how they talked about the boat Jobs was building and how he couldn’t wait to get on it – “even though we both knew there was a good chance that wouldn’t happen.”

“No, he was not being melancholy, like ‘oh I’ve been gypped’” said Gates. “It was very…forward looking.”

When asked about something Jobs had that he wanted, Gates didn’t hesitate.

“Oh, his sense of design. That everything had to fit a certain aesthetic. The fact that he, with as little engineering background as he had, it shows that design can lead you in a good direction and so phenomenal products came out of it.”

He had an intuitive sense for marketing…that was amazing.”

Gates made a point to discuss the respect he had for Jobs, even as rivals.

“He and I, in a sense, grew up together. We were within a year of the same age, and we were kind of naively optimistic and built big companies. And every fantasy we had about creating products and learning new things – we achieved all of it. And most of it as rivals. But we always retained a certain respect and communication, including even when he was sick.”

Check out the interview, with additional commentary from Rose, below:

Bill Gates and late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs are among a small group of people who helped shape the technology industry over the past 40 years and in a new interview conducted by 60 Minutes’ Charlie Rose, the former reflects on his final visit with the latter. Gates recently sat down with 60 Minutes to discuss his work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and although it didn’t air in CBS’ broadcast, the conversation veered off topic for a few moments as the Microsoft co-founder got emotional while recounting his last visit with friend and rival Steve Jobs in May 2011. No spoilers here — the unaired footage from the Gates interview follows below.

Continue reading…

Congress decided to let the sequester take place, but the Obama Administration decided where the cuts would occur. Unfortunately, for the American public, many of the cuts seem to have taken place in order to hurt the public rather than …

It takes an honorable person to support something that impacts them negatively (or conversely, be against something that impacts them positively). In other words, it is noble to support what is right rather than what is right for you. Some may view such an act as lunacy. For instance, I support the Internet Sales Tax Bill (Marketplace Fairness Act).

When it comes to Internet Sales Tax, you too should be honorable and support equality instead of looking out for your own interests. Anyone who is against the bill is simply selfish. Internet sales tax will impact your wallet. It will make you spend more money.

However, while internet stores do not currently charge tax, it is your responsibility to pay it. You are supposed to be paying these taxes on your own. However, this honor-system is simply a charade. Most people do not pay their fair share at the end of the year. So, this bill is in reality, enforcing a law that is already in effect. It is just closing a loophole.

Look, no one likes paying taxes but it is a necessary responsibility. Truth be told, I generally do not support sales tax at all. I tend to follow a libertarian ideology. We are already taxed on our income, so it is not fair to tax us to use that same money. However, the legitimacy of double taxation is a separate issue saved for another day.

The true issue at hand is equality in business. Tax-free internet shopping has reduced brick and mortar stores like Best Buy to nothing more than places to try out new tech before buying it online tax-free. Stores like Circuit City and CompUSA were forced to close their doors. Countless jobs have been lost due to a lack of internet sales tax; countless potential jobs were just never created. And it’s not fair.

We need to level the playing field.

I support a bill that will cause me to spend more money. I support a bill that is not in my best interest. Do you have the courage to do the same?

Give me your feedback in the comments below.

Photo Credit: Jane0606/Shutterstock

Kate Middleton, who is perhaps the most famous pregnant lady in the world right now (sorry, Kim), has managed to keep her baby’s due date a closely-guarded secret for months. However, reports are now coming in that she’s due July 13th, which falls smack in the middle of the Queen’s Coronation Festival.

When it was revealed last year that Kate was pregnant, thousands were overjoyed as many had been waiting for the news since she married Prince William. But the Palace wasn’t so happy, as they had to make the announcement before they were ready due to Kate’s stay in the hospital for severe morning sickness. Now, a friend of the family’s has leaked the due date to The Daily Mail, and although the Palace has said that her due date would be in mid-July, they might not be so happy to find out the date was leaked.

The “source” said that the date was extracted from a conversation recently overheard at a party.

“Some of Kate and William’s closest pals were at a barbecue hosted by a family friend of the Royals recently. They were all discussing the fact that Kate’s baby is due to be born on July 13. Everyone was very excited,” the source said.

If the due date is accurate–and if Kate doesn’t pop early–the baby will be arriving right in the middle of a festival held for the Queen to mark 60 years on the throne. We can’t imagine she’d mind too much, however.

Matt Cutts revealed late on Friday that Google Penguin Update 2.0 is on the way, and that it will be a big one. Yes, there have been multiple iterations of the update to come out, but those have simply been data refreshes of the original update. Google is readying a big new version of it, and when we say big, we mean bigger than the original.

Matt Cutts says the internal team at Google is referring to it as Penguin 2.0, despite what other numbers are making the rounds out there.

@dannysullivan your call, of course, but the internal team here has taking to referring to the upcoming release as Penguin 2.0.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 10, 2013

@dannysullivan the next update of Penguin will be larger, yes.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 10, 2013

Get ready, because it’s coming:

@mrjamiedodd we do expect to roll out Penguin 2.0 (next generation of Penguin) sometime in the next few weeks though.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 10, 2013

In case you don’t get the nose-biting reference, enjoy this scene from Tim Burton’s Batman Returns featuring Danny DeVito as The Penguin.

Hat tip to Danny Sullivan

Early last week, Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed realized his dream of a fully 3D printed gun with the Liberator – a handgun that can fire a single bullet. The blueprints for the Liberator were taken down by the government four days later, but those determined to 3D print a gun can still access the files. That’s exactly what two British journalists did over the weekend.

The Daily Mail’s Simon Murphy and Russel Myers created the Liberator on Friday, and then attempted to sneak it on board on an Eurostar train from London to Paris. Surprisingly, the two smuggled the gun on board the train without being stopped.

Of course, they couldn’t just carry the full gun through security checkpoints with them. Murphy and Meyers split the 3D printed gun into three separate pieces, and then hid those pieces in their clothing. They walked through the metal detector without setting it off, and were never subjected to a pat down. It should be noted that the two men didn’t smuggle bullets or the firing pin on board, but such small metal objects can be easily concealed when going through security checkpoints.

Once they were on board the train, they assembled the gun in less than 30 seconds. Afterwards, the two began to take pictures of themselves holding the gun next to other passengers. Said fellow passengers were none the wiser.

After their little adventure, Murphy and Meyers alerted UK politicians and security experts about the potential for people to smuggle 3D printed weapons on board public transportation. As expected, both groups expressed shock and concern. Former Labor security minister Lord West said that security checks need to be improved so they can detect 3D printed and other undetectable weapons.

The above scenario was a single test on a single train line. It will be interesting to see if anybody else tries to smuggle the Liberator or any other 3D printed weapon on board other train lines, or even an airplane. I would think that in the U.S., what with the TSA’s penchant for pat downs, smuggling the Liberator on board a plan would be especially difficult. Of course, agents would have to know what a disassembled 3D printed gun looks like, and therein lies the potential danger.

People were already scared of 3D printed guns, but this story will probably take everybody’s fears to the next level. I wouldn’t be surprised if a congressman called for a ban on 3D printers, but we’ve already talked about how stupid that idea is.

[Image: Daily Mail]

In less than two weeks, Netflix users will finally be able to enjoy the highly-anticipated fourth season of one of the most popular canceled TV shows of all time – Arrested Development. For Netflix, that means that it’s officially the “final countdown.”

With that in mind, they’ve finally released a full season 4 trailer. Everyone is back, and looking great – and we couldn’t be more excited. As Netflix has done with their previous original or exclusive series (House of Cards, Hemlock Grove), they will make all (15) of the episodes available at once, on May 26th.

Check here for more on the upcoming season of Arrested Development.

On April 27, a Valley Springs, California girl named Lelia Fowler was found stabbed to death in the home where she lived with her brother and father. Police, who immediately began searching for the 8-year-old’s killer, have now made an arrest in the case – Lelia’s 12-year-old brother.

According to an Associated Press report, the boy has been charged with the homicide of his younger sister. He had originally told police that he found Leila and saw an intruder fleeing from his house. The kids’ parents were reportedly at a little league game at the time of the murder.

The boy’s description of the alleged intruder kicked off a manhunt in the small Northern California community. Police found no signs of a robbery at the Fowler house, and a door-to-door search turned up no leads. Their questioning of sex offenders and parolees in the area were similarly unfruitful.

Lelia’s brother was arrested on the evening of Saturday, May 11. A candlelight vigil was held last week at the elementary school that Leila attended.

Let’s say you believed deeply in the importance of sleep health, and you wanted to start a movement to change people’s attitudes and behavior. Maybe, like Arianna Huffington, it’s a personal crisis that convinces you. Or maybe it’s a key piece of research or two that opens your eyes, as it were, to the dangers of too little sleep:

As a choice of cause, you could do a lot worse. Getting sufficient sleep is a need that every human on the planet shares. And for many people, the ability to do that is increasingly under assault, as daily rhythms are disrupted by the changing nature of work and always-on technology. Your arguments for that cause would be helped along by a mountain of evidence about the incidence and costs of sleeplessness, and the efficacy of various interventions. You’d have the advantage of a solid and accumulating knowledge base regarding what works. Yet you’d still have the gratifying ability to move the needle dramatically with your efforts because, for most people, sleep health — their own, their employees’, their communities’ — hasn’t yet become a top-of-mind issue. In the three-legged stool of good health, nutrition and exercise are constantly discussed, while sleep has so far come up short. Put all this together, and it’s hard to imagine a cause that would offer you a greater chance to change so many lives for the better.

Even better, you’d have access to a pretty good playbook for how to start a movement. The precedents are out there, and some of the most inspiring of them have been in the realm of public health. We’ve seen movements succeed in getting people to quit smoking, getting health workers to wash their hands, and getting people to register as organ donors. Smart people are working to codify the best approaches and tools for raising awareness, changing minds, and inciting action. Even if you don’t have time to master the rules yourself, there is consulting expertise available for hire.

A key piece of advice in that playbook would be to influence the influencers. Those include, for example, the entertainment industry: What would it take to get scriptwriters and directors to stop portraying people operating on no sleep as models of machismo and dedication? A second major set of influencers to influence would be the tech community. What new apps, for example, could they create to nudge people toward more healthful behavior? And then there are the healthcare and education sectors to influence. These are the trusted professionals with whom people already interact about health and informed behavior. What would it take to make sleep a topic of more of those interactions?

But also note that, on top of all those usual influencers, there is another sector that should be recruited into the movement for better sleep health. That would be the corporate sector — and the rationale for targeting it in particular has four parts:

• Selfish Interest. As the world’s largest employers, big companies stand to benefit directly from a greater awareness of the importance of sleep. It makes all the difference to productivity (which is diminished by sleeplessness in the same way it is by drug use or drunkenness), and hits the bottom line, too, in lower healthcare costs.
• Substantial infrastructure. Companies have invaluable capabilities they can apply to a public health campaign, such as communication channels to get the word out and wellness programs to support good habits. They also have the power, through their policies, to change how employees work (and how managers encourage them to).
• Social Influence. As well as having internal, local influence over their own workers, large employers help to establish broader norms in society. It’s important to get them focused on the importance of sleep health, because the expectations they create about the keys to good work and success spill over to other realms.
• Sense of Involvement. There’s also the fact, perhaps obvious, that the work environments cultivated by many companies are the cause of many people’s inadequate sleep. Whether it’s a hypercompetitive culture encouraging ambitious employees to burn the midnight oil, or the anxiety of working for a bad boss causing insomnia, or a level of pressure that leaves decision-makers lying awake at night, companies contribute to people’s sleep deficits. For some firms, that involvement might translate to a sense of obligation.

For all these reasons, it makes sense to pull more businesses into the movement to change attitudes and behaviors toward sleep. That’s why HBR publishes books, interviews, articles, and blog posts on sleep research (and for that matter, tries to save its own staff from evening and weekend work). And it’s why we’re participating in the Corporate Leaders Summit being hosted this month by the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School. (I’ll be moderating a panel there.)

If you’re a corporate leader, you’re constantly being asked to pitch in on a cause or add power to the arm of some activist. This is one of those cases where your answer should be yes. You have the reasons and you have the means to change today’s dysfunctional culture around sleep — and so many will rest easier when you do.

Reese Witherspoon tinted her hair a darker shade for her role in “The Good Lie”, but it looks like she’s back to blonde.

The 37-year old actress was spotted supporting her son Deacon at his soccer game the day before Mother’s Day with light locks tucked up beneath a hat. It could be that she just missed her natural shade, but many are wondering if her recent arrest had anything to do with it.

Witherspoon and her husband, Jim Toth, were taken in to an Atlanta police station in late April after Toth was found to be driving under the influence and Witherspoon argued with the officer and then tried to use her celebrity status to get out of trouble.

“Mrs. Witherspoon began to hang out the window and say that she did not believe I was a real police officer,” the officer wrote in a police report. “I told Mrs. Witherspoon to sit on her butt and be quiet. Mrs. Witherspoon asked, ‘Do you know my name?’ I answered, ‘No, I don’t need to know your name.’ I then added, ‘Right now.’ Mrs. Witherspoon stated, ‘You’re about to find out who I am.’… Mrs. Witherspoon also stated, ‘You’re going to be on national news.’ I advised Mrs. Witherspoon that was fine.”

Witherspoon has since apologized publicly for her behavior and said she simply panicked.

“I saw [the cop] arresting my husband and I literally panicked,” Witherspoon explained. “I told him I was pregnant. I’m not pregnant. I said all kinds of crazy things. We went out to dinner in Atlanta and we had one too many glasses of wine. We thought we were fine to drive and we absolutely were not . . .We know better and we shouldn’t have done that.”

A shooting spree in New Orleans during a Mother’s Day parade has shocked a neighborhood near French Quarter, and police are still investigating the damage left behind.

About 400 people had turned out for the parade, including many children, when someone opened fire in the crowd. At least 19 were injured, with three people in serious condition as of this morning. Two of the injured were 10-year old children. Although cell phone footage shows the aftermath of the gunfire–shocking images of the injured laying in pools of blood–no one has come forward yet with information on the shooter or shooters.

“These kinds of incidents will not go unanswered. Somebody knows something. The way to stop this violence is for you all to help,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu said.

As of right now, it isn’t clear whether specific people were targeted for the shootings or if it was a random act of violence, but the FBI is calling it a “flare-up of street violence”. The parade was just blocks away from where the popular HBO show “Treme” is filmed.

Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield has been doing awesome things in space, aboard the International Space Station, for some time now – now he’s on his way back to Earth after a stint as the ISS’ Commander.

Well, here’s his goodbye. It’s a slightly tweaked version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Yep, “Space Oddity” performed in space. It just feels right, doesn’t it?

[via reddit]

Ambuj Goyal is general manager, IBM Systems, Storage and Networking.

Technical evolution moves at different rates and for different reasons. Unlike other areas of computing, for example, storage solutions for distributed systems have evolved as a result of proliferation, rather than more traditional reasons such as price, performance and technical advancements. In other words, when organizations have bought a particular storage technology, they’ve grown with it whether they planned to or not.

That’s largely because storage vendors have spent a lot of time creating products that are based on a variety of individual architectures and protocols. Once an organization commits to one of those architectures, it’s difficult to even consider adding or transitioning to another, different, architecture, even if that alternative offers cost, performance, or management benefits. The result of being painted into this proverbial corner, of course, is that it can lead directly to things like storage sprawl, underutilized storage systems, and complex management – all of which reduces productivity and adds cost.

Storage Controllers at the Center

One area of repeated isolation has been the storage controller, or the brains of the storage system. For various reasons, the industry has had a propensity to create separate storage controllers for different protocols, such as block, file or object. Even though the media on which these controllers store the information is the same, the storage systems will only support the designated protocol it is serving. The software (or, so called microcode) simply interprets the protocol and stores the information.

So the question becomes, why has the industry produced so many different controllers? One reason is that technology has a tendency to be “fast out of the gate.” The industry is rife with examples of technologies that have raced to production and market only to be reined in at a later point with standards or consortium-led initiatives that enable more competition, ease of use, or ease of management. And to be honest, it’s often in the vendor’s best interest to push the concept of “engineered” or “optimized” boxes for each protocol.

The Revolution is Here

The storage situation is not dissimilar to what the industry experienced with the original x86 ecosystem, where suppliers and vendors succeeded by creating a certain technology proliferation in the enterprise. Today, however, that ecosystem has been revolutionized. Now, through workload consolidation technologies implemented in private and public clouds, there is higher utilization, and consistency of management. And, note, that in the mainframe and Unix worlds, workload consolidation and the resulting improved utilization has been the norm for more than a decade.

The storage environment is ready for the same kind of revolution. It’s ready for solutions that abandon the proliferation strategy of days gone by and help organizations avoid lock-in through wide protocol support, and encourage scalability through openness. That’s what we’re working on at IBM. Our Storwize platform of high-capacity systems, for example, tackles these issues head on.

Do Your Research

But don’t take my word for it. Ask yourself, what if there was a way to abstract the protocols from the basic store and retrieve functions? What if you could use old storage and new storage simultaneously, thus maximizing the return on capital investments? What if an application provider could automatically manage the life cycle of storage without getting a storage administrator engaged?

That’s where the storage industry should be headed.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

Late yesterday, cloud storage provider Box released updated apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. The latest iterations come with new features which are designed to “give users and businesses better control and enhanced security over their content”. Let’s take a look at the changes.

The most noteworthy feature introduced on Box for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 is the ability to manage (add, change and remove) access permissions for any collaborator in any folder, which the user owns. This functionality is aimed at both users, like students working together on an assignment, and businesses, which need in-depth collaboration features to manage a project.

Users who have two-step authentication enabled can now use security codes to log into the Box apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, after receiving them via text message. This brings the company’s offerings in line with SkyDrive, which has offered the feature ever since Microsoft enabled it (admittedly, in mid-April).

The final new feature is aimed at businesses. IT administrators can enforce certain policies for the Box apps, such as requiring an application-specific password, using a custom lock timeout and restrict local downloads, all meant to improve security.

On Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Box announced that its mobile apps have reached in excess of 500,000 downloads combined, hence the reason for the company’s continuous support of the two platforms.

By contrast other major cloud storage providers have only released apps for one operating system (like Dropbox with Windows 8) or none at all (the most prominent example being Google).

Box for Windows 8 is available to download from the Windows Store.

Box for Windows Phone 8 is available to download from the Windows Phone Store.

Photo Credit: Andreas Weitzmann/Shutterstock