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Paul Alan Levy writes in to let us know about how a New Jersey School Board is trying to get around the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which limits what information the government can get about online speakers, in order to find out the identity of some anonymous commenters on a series of newspaper stories about teachers in the district using questionable diploma mills to get “degrees” and qualify for higher salaries.

I contacted Marc Zitomer, the School Board’s lawyer, to get his explanation for the subpoena.

His explanation was that the Board, as a body corporate, has the authority to file suit against members of the public who defame or threaten its staff.  I rather doubt that a school board could file suit for defamatory words that are not “of and concerning” the school board – the of and concerning requirement, after all, is a constitutional requirement under New York Times v. Sullivan.  Moreover, Zitomer conceded that he could not identify any cases in New Jersey where a school board had filed such an action on behalf of its staff.  When I pressed him on these issues, Zitomer claimed that an additional reason for the subpoena was that the Board could take disciplinary action against any of the bloggers who were members of its staff.  But even assuming that the criticism is a proper basis for discipline consistent with the First Amendment, the Board cannot compel the identification of bloggers on that theory without putting forward an evidentiary basis for believing that the bloggers are employees.  It remains to be seen whether Zitomer will be able to do that.

Board member William Bruno has been quoted as justifying its subpoena on the theory that “If they have nothing to hide, what’s the problem?”

You always know there’s something bad going on when someone busts out the “nothing to hide” line. But, once again, this seems like attempts by thin-skinned officials who can’t take the heat trying to expose anonymous commenters as an intimidation technique.

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Citing “officials who disclosed details on condition of anonymity,” The Associated Press reports that “health care legislation taking shape in the House carries a price tag of at least $1 trillion over a decade, significantly higher than the target President Barack Obama has set … Democrats have touted an unreleased Congressional Budget Office estimate of $871 billion in recent days, a total that numerous officials acknowledge understates the bill’s true cost by $150 billion or more. That figure excludes several items designed to improve benefits for Medicare and Medicaid recipients and providers, as well as public health programs and more, they added.” 

“Obama also said he would not sign a bill that raised deficits, and the CBO estimates the emerging House bill meets that objective. Officials said the measure would reduce deficits by at least $50 billion over 10 years and perhaps as much as $120 billion” (Espo, 10/23). 

The Associated Press in a separate story:  “Democratic leaders in Congress scrambled Friday to round up votes for allowing the government to sell health insurance in competition with private industry as they struggled to finalize a health care bill that meets President Barack Obama’s goals.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spent Friday “calling and talking with wavering Democrats to test support for different versions of the plan.”

“A similar process was under way in the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi was scratching for votes in favor of her preferred version of the so-called public option” (Werner, 10/23).

Roll Call: Pelosi’s remarks came as her staff pushed back on Friday reports that she has decided to ditch a public insurance option pegged to Medicare rates — the approach preferred by liberals — after a three-day whip effort revealed it lacks the necessary support” (Newmyer, 10/23).

The Wall Street Journal: “Ms. Pelosi said there is ‘no philosophical difference’ between the robust public option and other versions. She said it is less important now for the House to include a strong public option, than it was several weeks ago when it looked like a Senate health bill might omit the public option all together. ‘The atmosphere has changed. When we were dealing with the idea that the Senate had nothing, it was really important, again, to go in with the most muscle for the middle class with a robust public option,’ Ms. Pelosi said at the news conference. ‘This is about the endgame now,’ she said” (Vaughan and Yoest, 10/23).

Politico: “The ‘atmosphere’ she’s referring to is that in the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid seems to be giving some ground on a public option – which was long thought to be dead in the Upper Chamber. Now that the Senate is giving optional government-sponsored coverage a serious look, Pelosi seems to be open to their suggestions … ‘There’s no philosophical difference between a robust public option and negotiated rates. It’s just a difference in money,’ (she said). …  Pelosi, who had just emerged from a difficult closed-door caucus meeting with her rank-and-file, rarely shows her cards in public. So these concessions are noteworthy (O’Connor, 10/23).

Bloomberg reports on the various public option approaches that are getting attention. “Senate Democrats are leaning toward including a government-run insurance plan in U.S. health-care legislation, and House leaders signaled there may be room for compromise on the issue, one of the most divisive in Congress.”

In order to keep Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, the only Republican so far to support health overhaul legislation, and “pacify” some Democrats, “lawmakers are weighing whether to embrace [Snowe’s] idea of only triggering a public option if insurance rates aren’t low enough. Another possibility is to start with a public option that would pay higher rates than Medicare and allow states to opt out. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi today said she doesn’t see ‘much problem with that.’ Pelosi also said at a press conference today that “At the end of the day, we will have a public option in our legislation,” Pelosi said (Jensen and Rowley, 10/23).

On a lighter note, CBS News reports from the health insurers meeting in Washington: “Insurance industry pollster Bill McInturff was giving a speech Friday when he was interrupted at first with cheers of praise from people who seemingly belonged at the conference, given their business attire. The cheers turned into a song about the ‘public option,’ or government-run health insurance, performed to the tune of ‘Tomorrow’ from the musical Annie. The singers, who were eventually escorted out of the conference, belonged to a group that calls itself Billionaires for Wealthcare” (Condon, 10/23).

BioWare and Electronic Arts has announced that Dragon Age: Origins (PS3, PC, Xbox 360) has officially gone gold and is now currently in manufacturing …

It’s almost like someone got their Top Gear in my Mythbusters lately. First the duct tape holding up a car, and now the ‘golf ball’ effect on mileage. So what exactly does happen when you cover a car with clay, and then dimple it like a golf ball?

You can watch the video and find out, or just scroll past the picture of the lovely Kari Byron. The car part is about 40 minutes in.

Yes. Apparently, covering your car in clay and dimpling it like a golf ball will result in a significant increase in gas mileage. Who would of thunk it? The real trick it to make sure the dimples are scaled up to the proper size. I could get into the science, but it’s easier to let Jamie and Adam tell you all about it.

As various newspapers continue to think about new business models, Adam points us to the news of a community newspaper in New Zealand that experimented with a special 3D issue, including various 3D images and (of course) special 3D glasses. The idea is to get people to spend more time looking at the newspaper. While it does seem like a neat gimmick, it doesn’t seem like it is a sustainable idea on its own (they expect to do it again, but probably not for another year, due to the effort it takes). But, of course, no single gimmick needs to be sustainable by itself. It’s neat to see publications recognizing that they at least should be trying out other things to add value that people will appreciate.

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2009Oct23: Madagascar has experienced a 10% increase in temperature and 10% decrease in rainfall in the past 50 years, according to the World Bank (Guardian.co.uk).

Reference: Guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/23/madagascar-drought

Image Description: Ampefy, Madagascar. Photo by dada bob, 2006May25. Image Location: Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chute_de_la_Lili_%281%29.jpg Image Permission: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

We all contribute to the news cycle when we post timely content online, even if it’s 140 characters or fewer, and this week we learned that our little bits of information have substantive value when search giants Google and Microsoft announced that they will index our tweets and status updates.

But the sheer volume of content that we produce could be a problem, and Twitter users who find day-to-day value in the service may scoff at the idea that the “information firehose” of live content can be tapped and made searchable. It doesn’t take extensive use to see that most tweets are in fact worthless, and that thousands of bots simply use Twitter as a tool for free promotion, by tagging links to a particular Web site with trending topics.

But this seemingly uncontrollable flow of information is shaping the way news gets to us, and it presents an important evolutionary hurdle for the search industry: We know there is extremely valuable information there, but how do we make it work for us?

Gerry Campbell has been dealing in the search space since the days of CompuServe, and was one of the first to work on monetizing Web search at AltaVista nearly 11 years ago. Campbell is an angel investor in nearly a dozen social search companies, including Summize, which came to power Twitter’s own on-board search. He currently heads Collecta, a real-time search engine which shows how far we’ve come in terms of live news: It’s a continuous query search engine that streams news articles and relevant tweets (which are filtered for content rather than indexed) as they happen until the user decides to hit “pause.”

Campbell today shared some perspective on the trends in content creation and consumption. “There are two trends that are fascinating to me, the bright lights of all the trends: The first is the current velocity of content creation. Google has a trillion documents indexed, and about half a billion new indexable pieces of content are being published every single day. But the nature of what’s being published has changed dramatically since Google began about ten years ago. Today it’s short-lived, quickly published documents. They’re high velocity. Old documents were meant to have more weight to them so they could be read longer. Information now is valuable for less time, and an important space is in finding a better way to surface this.”

Startup search services like Worio attempt to do just this, and provide an equally valid mix of results from both traditional sources and “real-time” social sites. Worio combines keyword- and context-based search with “Web discovery” algorithms like the ones that suggest content in Pandora and Netflix. Topics which are spiking in interest on the social sites are more likely to be included in search results.

“You want current news, but you want to carefully look at what is interesting rather than just what is popular. iPhone, for example is historically more popular than Palm Pre. However, on the date such as the Pre’s launch, search results for ‘smartphone’ would have been more skewed toward the Pre because that topic had more traction at the time. Some search results are always more popular than others, but social media activity helps us determine how interesting a topic is,” Worio CEO Ali Davar said today.

The second important trend that Gerry Campbell pointed out today is the Web’s changed role in our daily life.

“The Internet isn’t a destination any more, we don’t make time in our schedules to get on the Internet,” Campbell said. “The emerging model goes beyond even the ‘always on’ concept. I’ve got my phone on, my notebook open at every meeting, with information constantly flowing to me at all times. I don’t necessarily want a summary explaining what happened…I want to be involved as the story evolves. All of those little bits of information have a daily value to us which gets less valuable over time. This is the evolution of news.

“The topics have a shelf life based upon the format in which they’re presented. A study recently showed the diffusion of a news story: it starts in Twitter and on social sites, then as it moves into blogs, it gets colored with interpretation and opinion, and the value goes up. Finally, mainstream media gets it and value goes up even further with trustworthy analysis.”

With the increased flow of real-time data and increased daily use of mobile devices, Web search in a post-Twitter world is not going to be a destination model, but rather a model of integration.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

So it looks like the “timing” on Barrie McKenna’s ridiculous Globe & Mail column spewing a bunch of recording industry propaganda wasn’t so random after all. Just after it came out, the new US ambassador to Canada, David Jacobson, made a point of scolding Canada for its copyright laws, and sticking by the decision to put Canada on the “watch list” in the USTR special 301 report. Once again, despite early suggestions that the new administration might actually take an evidence-based approach to intellectual property, it looks it’s instead decided to simply act as an enforcer for Hollywood make believe. Too bad.

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With France passing its new law to kick accused file sharers off the internet based on accusations rather than due process, you may wonder how that could possibly square with the EU Parliament’s position from earlier this year that no one should be kicked off the internet without due process, and should only be allowed in “exceptional circumstances.” Well, it looks like the lobbyists and the French gov’t put enough pressure on the EU Parliament that it’s now ditched that clause, even though 88% of Parliament agreed to it the first time around. Forget gov’t for the people, the EU Parliament has shown that it’s now the gov’t for an entertainment industry that doesn’t want to innovate. Sad. In the meantime, we’re back to asking the basic question that no one in the industry ever answers: how will kicking fans of your content offline make them want to buy anything? It may get some to stop file sharing, but it won’t make them buy. It seems the industry has become so confused that it actually thinks stopping file sharing is more important than making money.

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The blog reviewed here is ‘Open MRS‘.  Open MRS is an acronym for the Open Medical Record System and is described on the Open MRS website (the main website is found here) as follows:-

‘OpenMRS is a community-developed, open-source, enterprise electronic medical record system platform. We’ve come together to specifically respond to those actively building and managing health systems in the developing world, where AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria afflict the lives of millions. Our mission is to foster self-sustaining health information technology implementations in these environments through peer mentorship, proactive collaboration, and a code base that equals or surpasses proprietary equivalents‘

The invitation is made to the reader to contribute to this collaborative effort.

Appearance and Design

There is a white background which takes on a graded beige colour towards the title pane region of the page. The articles appear on the left 4/5’s of the page and articles are demarcated by thick blue lines. On the right hand side of the page, the reader can navigate through the site according to categories (‘what people talk about’), RSS feeds for the site, as well as a list of contributors. Previous articles can be accessed at the foot of the page by clicking on the arrow icon which takes the reader to the next page of articles. These have to be clicked through page by page.

Articles

There is no ambiguity here – the articles are highly technical often focusing on the actual code being written within the Open Medical Record System. The blog dates back to October 2005, but the articles start regularly from May 2007. On this page, the author describes the need to create a browser based form for data collection thus outlining a strategic object for the project in a semi-technical language. In an article on this page, Mathew Harrison reviews some useful books for designing open source projects. Vladimir writes his initial thoughts about coding a rule builder for the database. While superficially not sounding particularly interesting to the uninitiated, it is in fact a useful method for giving flexibility to the user in their interactions with the database. The rule builder would enable information to be retrieved from the database and displayed in a specific format. So for instance, they give the example of a list being generated for patients who need their bloods checked that day – logistically speaking this is potentially very useful for a health service. In another post, Matt describes the creation of a layer for allowing mobile phones to access data on the database. With time, more developers are recruited internationally, bringing their skills to bear on the project. Programmer Ime Asangansi joins the project and in an article from April 2nd 2008 describes the modification of an established part of the database interface – Xforms using archetypes. In a June 26th 2008 article the difficulties of correctly identifying patients in the database are discussed and this type of problem recurs in various database applications. At the time of writing version 1.5 of the Open MRS has been released and it is interesting to read about the actions behind the scenes during each part of the development cycle.

Conclusions

This is a highly technical blog about the development of an open source medical database. The blog is interspersed with a number of less technical articles which are able to engage a more general audience. The blog is particularly suited to those with an interest in open source healthcare paradigms as well as those with an interest in health databases. The developers are contributing to a noble cause which hopefully should lead to an improvement in healthcare for people in parts of the world still awaiting highly structured IT healthcare infrastructures with all of their accompanying benefits.

Twitter

You can follow ‘The Amazing World of Psychiatry’ Twitter by clicking on this link

Podcast

You can listen to this post on Odiogo by clicking on this link (there may be a small delay between publishing of the blog article and the availability of the podcast).

Responses

If you have any comments, you can leave them below or alternatively e-mail [email protected]

Disclaimer

The comments made here represent the opinions of the author and do not represent the profession or any body/organisation. The comments made here are not meant as a source of medical advice and those seeking medical advice are advised to consult with their own doctor. The author is not responsible for the contents of any external sites that are linked to in this blog

Looks like Verizon might not be the only one getting the Moto Droid. A few days ago, we wrote a post highlighting the fact that a GSM version of the oh-so-hypetastic Motorola Droid (otherwise known as “Sholes” or “Tao”) had cleared the FCC runway. At first, we got a bit excited and misread the details, reading them as if that GSM version of the Sholes had AT&T-friendly 3G bands built in. It didn’t (it was the European GSM version) – but this one does!

faceless writes “Xbox Live’s Major Nelson (aka Microsoft’s Larry Hyrb, Director of Programming for Xbox Live) announced on his blog that the newest Xbox 360 Dashboard update will block unauthorized 3rd party memory devices. These 3rd party items are big sellers because Microsoft charges $30 for a 512MB Memory card and $130 for a 120GB HDD. A 3rd Party 2GB Memory Card is $40 and is also expandable as it supports Micro SDHC cards. A 3rd party HDD is $70, and the Microsoft HDD’s are just 2.5″ drives in a proprietary enclosure.

People on various videogame forums, such as NeoGAF are worried about the content they bought not working and not even being able to get online on their Xbox 360 console if their memory device is locked out by the update.”

Once again, this seems incredibly short-sighted by Microsoft. The idea of breaking legitimately purchased hardware that makes the core of Microsoft’s profit center (the games) more valuable, this only serves to piss off Microsoft customers and drive them away from Microsoft. Blocking out third party hardware — especially without a detailed explanation for why — goes against the basic right to do what you want with your own, legally purchased, hardware.

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I’m leaving this image of kittens here for those who don’t want to see the images after the jump. However, this is a $44 Fleshlight (for putting your penis into) with vampire teeth. That’s right – you can recreate all your favorite scenes from your Twilight slashfic in the comfort of your own home, car, or place of worship.

The device is just a Fleshlight with teeth but what a profile this thing has. It looks like a nerdy lamprey. Here’s what the website has to say:

Introducing Succu Dry Sex in a Can from Fleshlight, the world’s first vampire inspired sex toy for men. Take a walk on the dark side and get familiar with this pale brew. But be careful! Though this may feel like love at first bite, make sure you have wood poised to penetrate before you get completely drained! Enjoy to excess to ensure encounters with Succu Dry are A-Positive experience.

Sex in a can: what America is having for dinner.

Is it better to have tons of customers, or some who are willing to spend a little more?  Well, whatever its corporate stance, it seems that Google has found its way into the second category with Android, according to one company’s findings.

WhitePages specializes in exactly what you might expect: phone-related apps.  More specifically, think phone directories and caller ID.  And WhitePages peddles its apps to both Android and iPhone users, so it has a decent understanding of both markets.

However, with respect to Android, Kevin Nakao, the vice president of mobile and monetization at WhitePages, told Paul Boutin, "Conversion rates and premium penetration rates are better than we expected."

He then continued, "We had projected five to six percent of people would buy the app.  Instead we’re seeing 13 to 15 percent conversion from our free trial Caller ID users to the $6.99 (for 6 months) premium version."

That could have developers dropping whatever they’re doing in order to create apps for Android.  They’re even more likely to do so as more and more Android phones come out and the user base increases, too.

Of course, many app developers probably do better with iPhones, so the WhitePages revelation hardly marks the end of the war.