How ‘Social Intelligence’ Can Guide Decisions

Harrysson, Martin, Metayer, Estelle and Hugo Sarrazin. "How ‘Social Intelligence’ Can Guide Decisions." McKinsey Quarterly, November 2012. 

From the article: "Social media should help companies overcome some limits of old-school intelligence gathering, which typically involves collecting information from a range of public and propriety sources, distilling insights using time-tested analytic methods, and creating reports for internal company “clients” often “siloed” by function or business unit.

Today, many people who have expert knowledge and shape perceptions about markets are freely exchanging data and viewpoints through social platforms. By identifying and engaging these players, employing potent Web-focused analytics to draw strategic meaning from social-media data, and channeling this information to people within the organization who need and want it, companies can develop a “social intelligence” that is forward looking, global in scope, and capable of playing out in real time." Read more

Russia’s Big Leap in Internet Control

"Russia’s Big Leap in Internet Control." The Washington Post, November 12, 2012. 

From the article: "The Russian government this month began implementing a new Internet filtering policy, including a blacklist of banned Web sites. The policy is supposedly about protecting Russian minors from material about suicide, drugs or child pornography. But human rights advocates warn that the policy is intended to silence legitimate, independent speech in one of the last venues Russians have for it." Read more

Interoperability: Quick Route To Better Care

Versel, Neil. "Interoperability: Quick Route To Better Care." Information Week, November 12, 2012. 

From the article: "Healthcare quality and efficiency could move forward 20 years in a matter of months if only there were true interoperability of electronic health information, according to a noted critic of the health IT industry.

In the opinion of University of Pennsylvania sociologist Ross Koppel, interoperability would help unlock "rich, extraordinary data that would make medicine more wonderful." Koppel offered this assessment at last week's American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) annual conference in Chicago, where he participated in a panel about why interoperability was "taking so darn long," as AMIA put it." Read more 

Chicago Designing Predictive Software Platform to Identify Crime Patterns

Schectman, Joel. "Chicago Designing Predictive Software Platform to Identify Crime Patterns." The Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2012. 

From the article: "Chicago is designing an analytic software system to improve city services and fight crime.

The system will allow policymakers to analyze disparate pieces of information from across agencies, including crime statistics, building and business permits, and transcripts from resident complaints, Chicago’s chief data officer, Brett Goldstein, told CIO Journal. Goldstein hopes the system, which will be available to all agencies, will help officials parse out patterns for violent crime and allow public workers to provide better services by understanding how different factors affect city life." Read more

Global Survey on Internet Privacy and Freedom of Expression

Mendel, Tony, Puddephatt, Andrew, Wagner, Ben et al. "Global Survey on Internet Privacy and Freedom of Expression." UNESCO, 2012.

From the report: "This publication seeks to identify the relationship between freedom of expression and Internet privacy, assessing where they support or compete with each other in different circumstances. The book maps out the issues in the current regulatory landscape of Internet privacy from the viewpoint of freedom of expression. It provides an overview of legal protection, self-regulatory guidelines, normative challenges, and case studies relating to the topic." Read more

Mobile Health Starting to Come of Age

Heussner, Ki Mae. "Mobile Health Starting to Come of Age." Washington Post, November 9, 2012.

From the article: "Mobile health is starting to come of age.  In 2010, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that just 17 percent of cell phone owners used their devices to look up health information. 

But in a study released Thursday, the organization said that figure has climbed to 31 percent.

Mobile health is unsurprisingly even more popular among smartphone users, with 52 percent saying they have consulted their gadgets with medical questions." Read more

See alsoFox, Susannah, and Maeve Duggan. Mobile Health 2012. Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project, November 8, 2012.

Ambassador: Web Treaty Plans Pushed by Iran, China Could Lead to Censorship

Martinez, Jennifer. "Ambassador: Web Treaty Plans Pushed by Iran, China Could Lead to Censorship." The Hill, November 2, 2012. 

From the article: "U.S. Ambassador Terry Kramer on Friday warned that countries like China and Iran are looking to propose troublesome language for a telecommunications treaty that could lead to online censorship and government monitoring of Web traffic. 

The countries say those proposals are intended to protect computer networks from malicious spam and crack down on online child pornography, but the methods they suggest to accomplish this via the treaty would allow them to see "what information is flowing on the Internet," including what people are doing and saying on the Web, Kramer said at an event hosted by Johns Hopkins University's Center for Transatlantic Relations." Read more 

Despite Obama Win, Health IT Efforts Still Face Heavy Scrutiny

Bowman, Dan. "Despite Obama Win, Health IT Efforts Still Face Heavy Scrutiny." FierceHealthIT, November 7, 2012. 

From the article: "The re-election of President Obama to the White House--and Republicans retaining control of the House and Democrats retaining control of the Senate--almost assuredly means the continuation of healthcare IT efforts currently underway such as the Meaningful Use incentive program.

But those efforts will likely face increased oversight and scrutiny…" Read more

U.N. Must Lead Internet Regulation Effort

Toure, Hamadoun I. "U.N. Must Lead Internet Regulation Effort ." Wired, November 7, 2012. 

From the article: "With over 90 percent of the world’s people now within reach of mobile phones, the challenge today is bringing internet access to the two-thirds of the world’s population that is still offline. This challenge is compounded by the need to ensure connectivity is affordable and safe for all.

If we can achieve this, all the world’s citizens will have the potential to access unlimited knowledge, to express themselves freely, and to contribute to and enjoy the benefits of the knowledge society.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which is the United Nations specialized agency charged with coordinating global information and communication technology (ICT) resources such as satellite slots and international wireless spectrum, will host the World Conference onInternational Telecommunications (WCIT-12) in Dubai next month ...

The conference will chart a globally agreed-upon roadmap that offers future connectivity to all, and ensures sufficient communications capacity to cope with the exponential growth in voice, video, and data. The sole focus of the event is making regulations valuable to all stakeholders, creating a robust pillar to support future growth in global communications." Read more

Big Bad Data: Law, Public Health, and Biomedical Databases

Hoffman, Sharona and Andy Podgurski. "Big Bad Data: Law, Public Health, and Biomedical Databases."  Case Western Legal Studies Research paper No. 2012-34, October 30, 2012.

From the report: "The accelerating adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems will have profound impacts on clinical care. It will also have far-reaching implications for public health research and surveillance, which in turn could lead to changes in public policy, statutes, and regulations. The public health benefits of EHR use can be significant. However, researchers and analysts who rely on EHR data must proceed with caution and understand the potential limitations of EHRs. 

Much has been written about the risk of EHR privacy breaches. This paper focuses on a different set of concerns, those relating to data quality. EHR data can be erroneous, miscoded, fragmented, and incomplete. In addition, if causation is at issue, analysts must grapple with the complexities of causal inference. Public health findings can be tainted by the problems of selection bias, confounding bias, and measurement bias. These and other obstacles can easily lead to invalid conclusions and unsound public health policies.

The paper will highlight the public health uses of EHRs. It will also probe the shortcomings of EHR information and the challenges of collecting and analyzing it. Finally, we outline several regulatory and other interventions to address data analysis difficulties." Read more

2012: The First Digital Election

Savitz, Eric. "2012: The First Digital Election." Forbes, November 5, 2012.

From the article: "2012 could well be the Twitter Election. By December, election retweets and hashtags will inevitably feature in the postscript to this election, as tweets are by nature terse and very quotable – easy fodder for journalists. The volume of tweets surged from the moment Romney questioned federal funding to PBS and Big Bird. Many of those with Twitter accounts were raised on Sesame Street. This could be the first election where social media rather than advertising made the difference. ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox are all using the volume of blog and tweet activity as a real time barometer of this too-close-to-call campaign." Read more

See also

Springer, Paul and Mel Carson. Pioneers of Digital. London: Kogan Page (2012).

The Unbearable Trust of the Internet

Masiello, Betsy. "The Unbearable Trust of the Internet." November 5, 2012.

From the report: "As a result of the Internet's rapid growth, a number of private sector companies have found themselves thrust from the role of scrappy start-up to prominent global institution in a very short period of time. These new global institutions have had to work to advance accountability and trust without relying entirely on traditional democratic governance mechanisms offered by national organizations. In the past several years, the private, civil and public sectors have worked together to advance an explosion of institutional innovations, each an experiment in building accountability mechanisms and trust for this still-young ecosystem. For the long-term health of the Internet, it is imperative that these experiments continue, and that resources be poured into making the most promising of them a success." Read more

The Two Key Investments to Build Back Better Post-Sandy

Crawford, Susan. "The Two Key Investments to Build Back Better Post-Sandy." Huffington Post, November 6, 2012.

From the article: "What disempowered New Yorkers most wanted during the storm, in addition to safety and electricity, was a way to communicate. My suggestion: Prioritize rebooting communications infrastructure for New York City and its environs at the same time that we think seriously about water barriers and other infrastructural needs.

Our communications problems boil down to two central issues: Lack of capacity and lack of a safety net." Read more

Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win

Scherer, Michael. "Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win." Time, November 7, 2012. 

From the article: "Exactly what that team of dozens of data crunchers was doing, however, was a closely held secret. “They are our nuclear codes,” campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt would say when asked about the efforts. Around the office, data-mining experiments were given mysterious code names such as Narwhal and Dreamcatcher. The team even worked at a remove from the rest of the campaign staff, setting up shop in a windowless room at the north end of the vast headquarters office. The “scientists” created regular briefings on their work for the President and top aides in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, but public details were in short supply as the campaign guarded what it believed to be its biggest institutional advantage over Mitt Romney’s campaign: its data." Read more

The World Is Not Enough: Google and the Future of Augmented Reality

Madrigal, Alexis C. "The World Is Not Enough: Google and the Future of Augmented Reality." The Atlantic, October 25, 2012.

From the article: "It is The Future. You wake up at dawn and fumble on the bedstand for your (Google) Glass. Peering out at the world through transparent screens, what do you see? 

If you pick up a book, do you see a biography of its author, an analysis of the chemical composition of its paper, or the share price for its publisher? Do you see a list of your friends who've read it or a selection of its best passages or a map of its locations or its resale price or nothing? The problem for Google's brains, as it is for all brains, is choosing where to focus attention and computational power. As a Google-structured augmented reality comes closer to becoming a product-service combination you can buy, the particulars of how it will actually merge the offline and online are starting to matter." Read more 

Social Media and Voting

Rainie, Lee. "Social Media and Voting." Pew Resarch Center’s Internet & American Life Project, November 6, 2012.

From the report: "On Election Day 2012, the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds social media to be a significant part of the process by which voters are talking about their ballot selections, especially younger voters:

• 22% of registered voters have let others know how they voted on a social networking site such as Facebook or Twitter.

Social media platforms have also become a notable venue for people to try to convince their friends to vote.

• 30% of registered voters have been encouraged to vote for Democrat Barack Obama or Republican Mitt Romney by family and friends via posts on social media such as Facebook or Twitter.
• 20% of registered voters have encouraged others to vote by posting on a social networking site such as Facebook or Twitter." Read more 

Let the Crowd Fix Your Product's Bugs

McAfee, Andrew. "Let the Crowd Fix Your Product's Bugs." Harvard Business Review Blog, November 6, 2012. 

From the article: "I'm starting to come to the conclusion that of all the myths businesses and their leaders tell themselves, one of the most harmful is that they know where the expertise is. The more I learn about the results from crowdsourcing and open innovation efforts, the more I believe that the smart strategy is to expose your problems and challenges to as many people as possible and let them show you what they can do. Here's my most recent example of the power of this approach." Read more

CMS: $7.7 Billion in EHR Payments through September

Conn, Jospeh. "CMS: $7.7 Billion in EHR Payments through September." Modern Healthcare, November 6, 2012.

From the article: "More than 300,000 physicians and other eligible professionals have signed up to participate in the federal electronic health-record system incentive payment programs, while more than 4,000 hospitals have enrolled in the Medicare EHR incentive program, the Medicaid incentive program or both, according to the latest CMS data.

In total, $7.7 billion has been paid out in what has been estimated will be $27 billion in incentive payments through the lives of the two programs." Read more 

‘Do Not Track’ Effort at a Standstill

Sasso, Brendan. "‘Do Not Track’ Effort at a Standstill." The Hill, November 5, 2012. 

From the article: "Little progress has been made toward implementing a “Do Not Track” button for the Web more than nine months after a highly publicized launch event at the White House. 

Advertisers, privacy groups and government officials came together in February to tout their agreement to give Internet users an easy way to opt out of online tracking.

But stakeholders involved in the effort are "not really any closer to an agreement" to make the feature happen, according to Mike Zaneis, general counsel of the Interactive Advertising Bureau." Read more

Backdoors are Forever: Hacking Team and the Targeting of Dissent?

"Backdoors are Forever: Hacking Team and the Targeting of Dissent?" Citizen Lab, October 10, 2012. 

From the article: "In this report, Citizen Lab Security Researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire describes analysis performed on malicious software used to compromise a high profile dissident residing in the United Arab Emirates. The findings indicate that the software is a commercial surveillance backdoor distributed by an Italian company known as Hacking Team. The report also describes the potential involvement of vulnerabilities sold by the French company, VUPEN." Read more

Choice-of-Law in the Internet Age – US and European Rules

Czigler, Tamas Dezso. "Choice-of-Law in the Internet Age – US and European Rules." Acta Juridica Hungarica - Hungarian Journal of Legal Studies 53 (2012): 193–203.

From the report: "With use of the Internet, a new form of contract has appeared: the electronic contract, which is concluded online. Most of these involve a relationship of two parties: a consumer who is in a relatively vulnerable position, and a business entity. There are numerous examples of such transactions: youngsters downloading music from a website and paying for it – as they would in a music store. Many physical goods can also be purchased online – e.g. even though they live in Europe, the authors of this article regularly purchase books from the US. There are numerous ways such transactions can take place: one of the most obvious ways is buying goods on Amazon or eBay, on the website of a company, or purchasing goods using e-mail communication. The article attempts to summarize the choice of law rules affecting electronic contracts in the US and in Europe – i.e. to give an overview of which country’s or state’s law would apply to a contract concluded online, what the limits are on such a transaction and which state’s laws can protect us in case of a breach." Read more

Wikis Allow Patients to Help Develop Clinical Practice Guidelines

Bird, Julie. "Wikis Allow Patients to Help Develop Clinical Practice Guidelines." FierceHealthIT, October 29, 2012.  

From the article: "Patients can play a key role in developing clinical practice guidelines (CPG) through a specialized wiki, a group of Dutch researchers report in the current issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

The researchers tested their theory by developing a wiki about infertility treatment, according to the article, "Feasibility of a Wiki as a Participatory Tool for Patients in Clinical Guideline Development." Read more

There Goes Gravity: How Ebay Reduces Trade Costs

Lendle, Andreas, et al. "There Goes Gravity: How Ebay Reduces Trade Costs." World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 6253, October 1, 2012. 

From the report: "This paper compares the impact of distance, a standard proxy for trade costs, on eBay and offline international trade flows. It considers the same set of 62 countries and the same basket of goods for both types of transactions, and finds the effect of distance to be on average 65 percent smaller on the eBay online platform than offline. Using interaction variables, this difference is explained by a reduction of information and trust frictions enabled through online technology. The analysis estimates the welfare gains from a reduction in offline frictions to the level prevailing online at 29 percent on average. Remote countries that are little known, with weak institutions, high levels of income inequality, inefficient ports, and little internet penetration benefit the most, as online markets help overcome government and offline market failure" Read more

Benefits of 4G Overstated, Says Report

Thomas, Daniel. "Benefits of 4G Overstated, Says Report." The Financial Times, October 29, 2012.  

From the article: "Superfast broadband is unlikely to deliver the rapid returns for the UK economy that have been predicted, according to a leading business consultancy, before Britain’s first 4G network launch on Tuesday.

The Economist Intelligence Unit will say on Tuesday that expectations of big early returns from superfast fibre and mobile broadband may be overstated, even if there is greater confidence of a beneficial longer-term impact.

….The report – Superfast Britain? Myths and realities about the UK’s broadband future – was sponsored by Huawei, the Chinese telecoms equipment maker, and will be presented at a conference on Tuesday attended by Ed Vaizey, communications minister." Read more

Showdown Set on Bid to Give UN Control of Internet

"Showdown Set on Bid to Give UN Control of Internet." Agence France-Presse, October 29, 2012.

From the article: "It is expected to be the mother of all cyber diplomatic battles.

When delegates gather in Dubai in December for an obscure UN agency meeting, fighting is expected to be intense over proposals to rewrite global telecom rules to effectively give the United Nations control over the Internet.

Russia, China and other countries back a move to place the Internet under the authority of the International Telecommunications Union, a UN agency that sets technical standards for global phone calls.

US officials say placing the Internet under UN control would undermine the freewheeling nature of cyberspace, which promotes open commerce and free expression, and could give a green light for some countries to crack down on dissidents.

Observers say a number of authoritarian states will back the move, and that the major Western nations will oppose it, meaning the developing world could make a difference." Read more