UN Plans Internet Governance Amid Outcry to Defund ITU

"UN Plans Internet Governance Amid Outcry to Defund ITU." ZDNet, January 16, 2013.

From the article: "A petition to de-fund the U.N.'s telecom arm emerges just as the ITU readies to hammer out internet governance plans at the World Telecommunication Information andCommunication Technology Policy Forum meetings in February and May 2013.

The website De-fund the ITU surfaced on the January NANOG (North American NetworkOperators' Group) email list. 

…Five days ago ITU's Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré released the fourth and final ITU/WTPF-13 report outlining groundwork for internet governance (and internet regulatory topics) at upcoming meetings on February 6-8 and May 14-16." Read more

The Real World of Cost-Benefit Analysis: Thirty-Six Questions (and Almost as Many Answers)

Sunstein, Cass. "The Real World of Cost-Benefit Analysis: Thirty-Six Questions (and Almost as Many Answers)." Harvard Public Law Working Paper, January 10, 2013.

From the report: "Some of the most interesting discussions of cost-benefit analysis focus on difficult problems, including catastrophic scenarios, “fat tails,” extreme uncertainty, intergenerational equity, and discounting over long time horizons. As it operates in the actual world of government practice, however, cost-benefit analysis usually does not need to explore the hardest questions, and when it does so, it tends to enlist standardized methods and tools. It is useful to approach cost-benefit analysis from the bottom up, that is, by anchoring the discussion in specific scenarios involving trade-offs and valuations. Thirty-six stylized scenarios are presented here, alongside an exploration of how they might be handled in practice. Open issues are also discussed." Read more

It’s 10 P.M. Do You Know What Your Avatar Is Doing?

Tsui, Bonnie. "It’s 10 P.M. Do You Know What Your Avatar Is Doing?" Pacific Standard, January 8, 2013. 

From the article: "A few years ago, a research psychologist at Stanford University named Jeremy Bailenson effectively proved the soundness of Anderson’srecruitment methods (pdf). A week before the 2004 presidential election, Bailenson asked a bunch of prospective voters to look at photographs of George W. Bush and John Kerry and then give their opinions of the candidates. What the voters didn’t know was that the photographs had been doctored: each voter’s own visage had been subtly morphed together with that of one of the candidates.

In this and two follow-up experiments, Bailenson found what Rudy Rucker, the novelist who wrote Software, would have predicted: voters were significantly more likely to support the candidate who had been made to look like them. What’s more, not a single voter detected that it was, in part, his or her own face staring back." Read more

The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks

Bennett, Drake. "The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks." Bloomberg Business Week, January 10, 2013. 

From the article: "A little more than 10 years ago, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar began a study of the Christmas-card-sending habits of the English. This was in the days before online social networks made friends and “likes” as countable as miles on an odometer, and Dunbar wanted a proxy for meaningful social connection. He was curious to see not only how many people a person knew, but also how many people he or she cared about. The best way to find those connections, he decided, was to follow holiday cards. After all, sending them is an investment: You either have to know the address or get it; you have to buy the card or have it made from exactly the right collage of adorable family photos; you have to write something, buy a stamp, and put the envelope in the mail. These are not huge costs, but most people won’t incur them for just anybody." Read more

Technology-Enabled Medication Tracking: A Tough Nut To Crack

Darves, Bonnie. "Technology-Enabled Medication Tracking: A Tough Nut To Crack." iHealth Beat, January 14, 2013.  

From the article: "A patient who comes into the hospital for a complex cardiovascular procedure, at one end of the spectrum, or a straightforward pneumonia case, at the other, both face a safety risk in what may appear relatively simple to do: Getting, and maintaining, an accurate medication list.

Even with health IT advances and the march toward computerized provider order entry, health care facilities still struggle with the process of medication reconciliation, which is woven throughout the care continuum." Read more

Mining Electronic Records for Revealing Health Data

Jaret, Peter. "Mining Electronic Records for Revealing Health Data." The New York Times, January 14, 2013. 

From the article: "Over the past decade, nudged by new federal regulations, hospitals and medical offices around the country have been converting scribbled doctors’ notes to electronic records. Although the chief goal has been to improve efficiency and cut costs, a disappointing report published last week by the RAND Corp. found that electronic health records actually may beraising the nation’s medical bills.

But the report neglected one powerful incentive for the switch to electronic records: the resulting databases of clinical information are gold mines for medical research. The monitoring and analysis of electronic medical records, some scientists say, have the potential to make every patient a participant in a vast, ongoing clinical trial, pinpointing treatments and side effects that would be hard to discern from anecdotal case reports or expensive clinical trials." Read more 

Will 2013 Be the Year of Privacy on Steroids?

Nigam, Hemanshu. "Will 2013 Be the Year of Privacy on Steroids?" The Huffington Post, January 14, 2013. 

From the article: "As I was flying 30,000 feet above sea level after spending time at the International Consumer Electronics Show, it became quite clear that 2013 is going to be 'The Year of Privacy on Steroids.' With so many new sites, gadgets and technology offerings integrating social media into their core functionalities, legislators will be hungry to regulate and legislate. The notion of privacy has become indelibly integrated into all aspects of our lives, impacting what we do on a daily and hourly basis. We communicate, we entertain, we consume, we share, we travel -- we live. And as technology and the online world continue to advance, we are seeing the introduction of new legislation that impacts our private lives.

Here is just a glimpse into what's to come." Read more

Health Online 2013

Fox, Susannah, and Maeve Duggan. "Health Online 2013." Pew Research Center, January 15, 2013. 

From the report: "81% of U.S. adults use the internet and 59% say they have looked online for health information in the past year. 35% of U.S. adults say they have gone online specifically to try to figure out what medical condition they or someone else might have. 

Online resources join the stream of information flowing in from people's interactions with clinicians, family, and fellow patients. When respondents were asked about the last time they had a serious health issue and to whom they turned for help, either online or offline:
- 70% of U.S. adults got information, care, or support from a doctor or other health care professional.
- 60% got information or support from friends and family.
- 24% got information or support from others who have the same health condition." Read more

Can Twitter Predict the Future? Pentagon Says Maybe

Lim, Dawn. "Can Twitter Predict the Future? Pentagon Says Maybe." Mashable, January 14, 2013. 

From the article: "The Defense Department wants new computer tools to analyze mounds of unstructured text, blogs and tweets as part of a coordinated push to help military analysts predict the future and make decisions faster.

The search is part of the Office of Naval Research's "Data to Decisions" program, a series of three-to-10-year initiatives that will address the volume of information that threatens to overwhelm planners in the digital age, contract databases indicate. The goal is to build an open source system that can unite various tools that collect, manage and draw relationships between data sets." Read more

Emotional Arousal Key to Information Sharing, Study Says

Morgan, Mandy. " Emotional Arousal Key to Information Sharing, Study Says." Deseret News, January 9, 2013. 

From the article: "Fueled by the ever-growing power of the Internet and countless websites being started up every day, today's world revolves around information sharing and receiving. And a study conducted by Jonah Berger of the University of Pennsylvania, shows that both high physical and emotional arousal lead to the sharing of more information, giving more insight as to why people share what they do.

A two-part study, "Arousal Increases Social Transmission of Information" was conducted with more than 100 participants by The Wharton School at the university, to look at the role emotional and physical arousal plays in information sharing, specifically news, both personal and public." Read more

See also

Berger, Jonah. "Arousal Increases Social Transmission of Information." Psychological Science 22 (2011): 891-893.

Kickstarter Launched 18,000 Projects in 2012; 17 Raised More than $1 Million

Dewey, Caitlin. "Kickstarter Launched 18,000 Projects in 2012; 17 Raised More than $1 Million." The Washington Post, January 11, 2013. 

From the article: "Kickstarter reports that its 2.2 million members pledged more than $319 million in 2012, up 221 percent from the year before. But more striking, perhaps, is the scale of some of Kickstarter’s latest success stories. While no project had raised $1 million at this time last year, 17 projects passed that mark in 2012." Read more

'Crowdfunding' Sites Pay Medical Bills, Raise Hopes

Alkon, Cheryl. "'Crowdfunding' Sites Pay Medical Bills, Raise Hopes." USA Today, January 11, 2013. 

From the article: "More people are turning to crowdfunding sites to ask friends, and friends of friends, for help with medical bills, accident costs and much more. But, surprise: Strangers give, too." Read more

Why Electronic Health Records Failed

Kliff, Sarah. "Why Electronic Health Records Failed." The Washington Post, January 11, 2013. 

From the article: "Back in 2005, researchers at the influential RAND Corp. made an optimistic prediction: Digitizing electronic medical records could save the health-care system at least $81 billion annually.

The savings were significant but not unreasonable: It would represent less than a 1 percent cut to health-care spending, much smaller than the 1.5 percent efficiency increase the retail sector saw when it went digital.

Seven years later, those savings have not materialized." Read more

U.S. Intelligence Community Forecasts Digital-Driven Future

Wladawsky-Berger, Irving. "U.S. Intelligence Community Forecasts Digital-Driven Future." The Wall Street Journal, January 11, 2013. 

From the article: "The digital technology revolution is transforming every single business and industry around the world. But, beyond that, it is having a transformational impact on economies and societies around the world, as we transition from the industrial society of the past couple of centuries to a new kind of information-based society. What will our world look like over the next couple of decades?" Read more

The Internet of Things Has Arrived — And So Have Massive Security Issues

Rose, Andrew. "The Internet of Things Has Arrived — And So Have Massive Security Issues." Wired, January 11, 2013. 

From the article: "While not devoid of hype and hyperbole, the Internet of Things (IoT) does represent a revolution happening right now. Companies of all kinds – not just technology and telecommunications firms – are linking “things” as diverse as smartphones, cars and household appliances to industrial-strength sensors, each other and the internet. The technical result may be mundane features such as intercommunication and autonomous machine-to-machine (M2M) data transfer, but the potential benefits to lifestyles and businesses are huge." Read more

The Theory of Crowd Capital

Prpic, John, and Prashant Shukla. "The Theory of Crowd Capital." Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences 46, Maui, Hawaii, USA, January 2013. IEEE Computer Society Press, Forthcoming.

From the report: "We are seeing more and more organizations undertaking activities to engage dispersed populations through Information Systems (IS). Using the knowledge-based view of the organization, this work conceptualizes a theory of Crowd Capital to explain this phenomenon. Crowd Capital is a heterogeneous knowledge resource generated by an organization, through its use of Crowd Capability, which is defined by the structure, content, and process by which an organization engages with the dispersed knowledge of individuals –the Crowd. Our work draws upon a diverse literature and builds upon numerous examples of practitioner implementations to support our theorizing. We present a model of Crowd Capital generation in organizations and discuss the implications of Crowd Capital on organizational boundary and on IS research." Read more

Facebook and Google May be Forced to Ask Permission to Use Personal Data

"Facebook and Google May be Forced to Ask Permission to Use Personal Data." The Guardian, January 9, 2013. 

From the article: "Internet companies such as Facebook and Google may have to get further permission to use information if European Union lawmakers give users more control over their personal data.

EU lawmakers want to limit companies' ability to use and sell data – such as internet browsing habits – to advertising companies, especially when people are unaware their data is being used in such a way." Read more

Internet Users May Search, Pin, Tweet and Like - But Don’t Know How Their Favorite Sites Turn a Profit

"Internet Users May Search, Pin, Tweet and Like - But Don’t Know How Their Favorite Sites Turn a Profit." The Search Agency, January 9, 2013. 

From the report: "The Search Agency, a global online marketing firm and the largest independent U.S. search marketing agency, today announced wave II results of its 2012 Online User Behavior and Engagement Study, conducted online by Harris Interactive among 2,006 U.S. online adults from August 14-16, 2012. In addition to other findings, the study shows that, while Americans may be tweeting, searching and pinning to their hearts delight, they can’t pinpoint how some of the web’s most popular sites make a dime.

Findings Include:

We Know How to Post, but Not How They Profit
70% of U.S. online adults know how to post on someone’s wall, but only 54% understand how Facebook makes money. Males demonstrated a higher understanding around Facebook’s monetization strategies at 57%, vs. females at 51%.

Men Tweet, Women Pin
More online men know the character length of a tweet (37%) than online women (27%). When it comes to Pinterest, more women know what it means to “pin” something online (48%) than men (42%)." Read more

How Much of the Web Is Archived?

Ainsworth, Scott G., AlSum, Ahmed, SalahEldeen, et al. "How Much of the Web Is Archived?" Unpublished paper available through Cornell University Libraries,  January 6, 2013. 

From the report: "Although the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is the largest and most well-known web archive, there have been a number of public web archives that have emerged in the last several years. With varying resources, audiences and collection development policies, these archives have varying levels of overlap with each other. While individual archives can be measured in terms of number of URIs, number of copies per URI, and intersection with other archives, to date there has been no answer to the question - "How much of the Web is archived?" We study the question by approximating the Web using sample URIs from DMOZ, Delicious, Bitly, and search engine indexes; and, counting the number of copies of the sample URIs exist in various public web archives. Each sample set provides its own bias. The results from our sample sets indicate that range from 35%-90% of the Web has at least one archived copy, 17%-49% has between 2-5 copies, 1%-8% has 6-10 copies, and 8%-63% has more than 10 copies in public web archives. The number of URI copies varies as a function of time, but no more than 31.3% of URIs are archived more than once per month." Read more

Why the UN’s Push to Control the Internet Isn’t Over

Mullin, Joe. "Why the UN’s Push to Control the Internet Isn’t Over." Ars Technica, January 9, 2013.

From the article: "That was seen as a success for the US and its allies, but anyone celebrating the outcome might be doing so too soon.

In fact, several of the companies that sided with the US only ended up in that position because of an overreach on the part of Iran, according to one speaker at a Thursday CES panel. Ambassador David Gross, who was the US representative to the ITU for several years, said that Iran decided to "meddle in a well-cooked document," adding an unusual "human rights" proposal that suggested a human right to access telecommunications networks.

The twist is that this was a situation in which the "human rights" were granted to a government, not to actual humans. The real goal was to strike a blow against sanctions." Read more 

ONC Delves into Patients' Privacy Concerns

Conn, Joseph. "ONC Delves into Patients' Privacy Concerns." Modern Healthcare, January 9, 2013.

From the article: "In considering whether to participate in a health information exchange, patients want to know whether their clinical information will be shared with their insurance company and whether their more sensitive information, in addition to routine patient information, will be included.

They also want to know whether, once they have opted into a health information exchange, they can ever opt back out.

These were the findings of a survey of patients at four healthcare organizations in western New York state who participated in the eConsent Trial Project sponsored by HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology." Read more

The Optimist’s Timeline

Gates, Bill. "The Optimist’s Timeline." Project Syndicate, December 27, 2012.   

From the article: "Even so, there is one area of technology and global development where reality has tempered my optimism: the idea that cellphones would revolutionize life in developing countries. A decade ago, many people believed that the proliferation of mobile devices in Africa would mean a short leap to digital empowerment. It didn’t. Digital empowerment is a long and ongoing process, and the mere existence of cellular technology does not immediately change how poor people meet their basic needs.

But now, after years of investments, digital empowerment is underway, owing to a confluence of factors, including growing network coverage, more capable devices, and an expanding catalogue of applications. As more people obtain access to better and cheaper digital technology, an inflection point is eventually reached, at which the benefits of providing digitally services like banking and health care clearly outweigh the costs. Companies are then willing to make the investments required to build new systems, and customers are able to accept the transition costs of adopting new behaviors." Read more

Defining Homeland Security: Analysis and Congressional Considerations

Reese, Shawn. "Defining Homeland Security: Analysis and  Congressional Considerations." Congressional Research Service, January 8, 2013. 

From the report: "Varied homeland security definitions and missions may impede the development of a coherent national homeland security strategy, and may hamper the effectiveness of congressional oversight. Definitions and missions are part of strategy development. Policymakers develop strategy by identifying national interests, prioritizing goals to achieve those national interests, and arraying instruments of national power to achieve the national interests. Developing an effective homeland security strategy, however, may be complicated if the key concept of homeland security is not defined and its missions are not aligned and synchronized among different federal entities with homeland security responsibilities." Read more

What It Will Take To Achieve The As-Yet-Unfulfilled Promises Of Health Information Technology

Kellerman, Arthur L. and Spencer S. Jones. "What It Will Take To Achieve The As-Yet-Unfulfilled Promises Of Health Information Technology." Health Affairs 32 (2013): 62-68. 

From the article: "A team of RAND Corporation researchers projected in 2005 that rapid adoption of health information technology (IT) could save the United States more than $81 billion annually. Seven years later the empirical data on the technology’s impact on health care efficiency and safety are mixed, and annual health care expenditures in the United States have grown by $800 billion. In our view, the disappointing performance of health IT to date can be largely attributed to several factors: sluggish adoption of health IT systems, coupled with the choice of systems that are neither interoperable nor easy to use; and the failure of health care providers and institutions to reengineer care processes to reap the full benefits of health IT. We believe that the original promise of health IT can be met if the systems are redesigned to address these flaws by creating more-standardized systems that are easier to use, are truly interoperable, and afford patients more access to and control over their health data. Providers must do their part by reengineering care processes to take full advantage of efficiencies offered by health IT, in the context of redesigned payment models that favor value over volume." Read more 

Digital Health Funding Rose 45 Percent in 2012

Huessner, Ki Mae. "Digital Health Funding Rose 45 Percent in 2012." GigaOm, January 7, 2013. 

From the article: "According to health tech accelerator Rock Health, investors poured $1.4 billion into digital health companies last year, which is up 45 percent from 2011. The major areas of interest include healthcare purchasing tools for consumers, personal health tracking, Electronic Medical records and hospital administration." Read more