Tag Archives: web 3.0

Electronic Medical Records Could Help Find Cures, Speed Progress, Cut Costs

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Electronic medical records (EMR), like health insurance, benefit from being spread over the widest pool possible. A system that aggregates and cross-references data from hundreds of millions of patients can find statistical evidence far more efficiently than today’s statistical modeling for health problems and solution improvement.

Allowing for non-identified EMR sharing across the system creates a universal pool of data in which drug side-effects, treatment failure or success rates, disease history, specific organ damage or healing, and all sorts of incidence of drug interactions and health specifics can be cross-referenced, spurring a massive amount of data-rooted research and improving quality of care and treatment success rates.

Pres. Obama has consistently touted the potential for a widespread or even national standard of EMR to help spur innovation and bring down healthcare costs, but the issue has been very little explored by mainstream media and has been consistently opposed by some critics who fear “nationalized healthcare”. The first thing we must understand in exploring EMR and its potential is that it does not mean a nationalization of healthcare.

Unbelievably, a provision in economic recovery legislation signed into law by Pres. Obama was vehemently opposed by some in the opposition on the grounds that EMR would bring about a situation in which the government “punishes” doctors who don’t comply with federal mandates. No such punitive measures were in the bill and no specific mandates for doctors either.

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Google Looks at Making Mobile TV for 'Android' Platform

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt told PBS’ Charlie Rose that the search juggernaut is looking at applying its mobile phone OS Android to enabling phones to act as mobile TVs. Noting that within years, up to 5.5 billion people may be using mobile phones, Schmidt told Rose that the technology now empowers people the world over with access to huge amounts of information, and that TV functionality will add transparency to the positive outcomes of this development.

Schmidt says we need to “learn as a society what it means to be interconnected all the time” and is quoted in a Tech Crunch transcript as saying the following:

In our lifetimes we’re going from almost no one being able to communicate to almost everyone be able to communicate. We’re also going from almost no one having any kind of information and access to libraries to virtually everyone having access to every piece of information in the world. That is a enormous accomplishment to humanity.

Indeed, bringing the knowledge that has accumulated over the course of all human history, to billions of people, in remote corners of the world, via hand-held browsing devices, is an astonishing advance. Allowing those devices to also show full-quality TV, with news, documentaries and raw video, means providing the average person with more visual access to the world than ever before.

It also means there is potential for instant-upload of new footage from anywhere, viewable anywhere. This is where Android TV could help provide a massive increase in transparency across politics and media. Politicians, whether in local US elections or national bids for foreign government positions, would be visible in multiple instances to any audience. Viewers could compare and contrast past speeches with current ones, raising the bar for clarity and integrity.

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Page-perfect Touchscreen e-Reader will Revolutionize Mobile Computing

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page-perfect-perspective-300x169The Amazon Kindle is a nice device, and it handles its job well, but it is just a very clumsy start to what will be a technological convergence few in mainstream media (and publishing) are anticipating, though it may not be far off. The page-perfect, for lack of a better term, e-reading device will make portable electronic reading easier and more comfortable than ever, packing huge amounts of data, as well as wireless downloading and even browsing capability, into an ultrathin tablet touchscreen.

The device may, after one or two initial iterations, come to have the computing power of today’s less expensive laptop computers, and will capitalize on the great discoveries in user-interface technology that have emerged from the introduction of the iPhone into the mainstream consumer market.

Whether it will belong to Apple, or be the next generation of the Amazon Kindle, or whether an as-yet-unknown pioneer in consumer electronics will pull it off, e-paper technology is certainly advanced enough to make it possible, and it’s just a matter of time until someone figures out the best way to market such a product, building on the success of the Kindle, the iPhone, the inexpensive streamlined netbook, and ever more available flat-rate unlimited mobile web services.

page-perfect-keyboard-300x378What is happening right now in the investigation of e-paper technology, at MIT especially, is promising in the extreme, warranting enthusiasm about great leaps in speed and ease of use, as computing circuitry advances to make the tactile e-paper device more like a fully-functional touchscreen.

What looks and feels a lot like paper and will produce ultra-sharp black-and-white text displays, will also be able to produce high-quality color and a mutable graphic-user-interface that allows for typing, searching, scrolling and all sorts of more agile file-search and manipulation. One-touch downloading and nearly full-sized qwerty-keyboard interaction will make the page-perfect tablet into a replacement for today’s netbooks.

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In Defense of Essay-length Online Writing

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ThoughtPossible.com :: Brevity is the soul of wit. True enough. But, information that brings us to a more enlightened approach to understanding the world often needs to “play out” in a substantial interaction of ideas, a “testing” of logical thought-processes as relating to concept and interpretation, an essay. There has long been a presumption that online writing must be brief, due to the “above the fold” bias of attention-span deficient online readers, but I would argue that the medium is actually ideally suited to something very different.

The traditional newspaper or magazine has a limited amount of space, as well as the physical constraints of materials used, weight, shipping, cost, etc., that necessarily interfere with the length and scope of materials contained within. And yet, one can often find far longer profile or investigative pieces printed in the pages of The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair, than one tends to find on even probing, serious investigative online publications.

Indeed, traditional print news sources are often the most reliable sources of lengthy, in-depth online writing and analysis. The paradox here is that the online medium lends itself to length, as costs for storage and “global distribution” are so low as to be almost zero for any given article published. What we do not have is an established tradition of treating web media as primary sources for serious journalism and cultural analysis, and so we have not come to devote our attention spans to reading the fullest, most in-depth writing available online.

There are legitimate reasons relating to both craft and content for longer, even meandering essays. An essay, as such, is an experiment with an idea, or a series of ideas, a rehearsal of thought-processes and rhetoric, aimed at behaving like a forum for exploration of related themes and the testing of certain challenges to a central thesis or guiding set of principles. This is a vital part of our literary and philosophical collective endeavor, as a species, as a civilization, and the online medium is ideally suited to “give place” (a phrase taken from the Spanish language) to that rehearsal.

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Recovery.gov to Track Recovery Spending, because "Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant"

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obama-online-300x169Pres. Barack Obama announced, just one week after taking office, the creation of a new website, Recovery.gov, which will detail the manner in which all the money from his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, once passed by Congress and signed into law, is being spent. The website is another in a series of steps to create a far-reaching reform of the federal government’s reporting to the public about its activities, with the aim of achieving Obama’s promise of the “most transparent” government in US history.

Economic recovery requires a massive amount of new federal spending, and the administration has asked Congress to find ways to use that wave of spending to implement vital innovations in the overall structure of the American economy, so that some of the “stimulative” effects actually turn into sustainable new areas of compounded growth. That means not only infrastructure, but the fomenting of new industries, like clean-energy businesses that will build a new energy distribution system and new industrial output.

Stimulus also requires the rapid disbursal of funds to specific industries, which will immediately use those funds on projects that will lead to retention or increase of jobs in a given market. Among those industries is the entertainment industry that dominates the city of Los Angeles, and which needs the investment to keep employing the hundreds of thousands who depend on its intermittent projects for their income, as banks are not lending as freely as they once did.

All of this means Recovery.gov is a necessary tool, aimed at informing the public about how each recovery dollar is spent, where that stimulus has been directed, or where there are long-term infrastructure projects getting underway. This is a new wave of information which will also benefit those who are practically or geographically mobile and can shift skill-focus or change location in order to take advantage of new funding, something that can optimize the effects of the recovery and reinvestment plan.

Over the long-term, education spending has a better return-on-investment than any other type of government spending, in terms of generating economic activity, and so it will be instructive for the public to be able to view what sorts of new economic opportunities are being made available and what sorts of new horizons open up for the adults and young people who are able to take advantage of those opportunities.

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Resilient Complexity versus Exposure to Entropy

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All systems fail, all organized interactions are vulnerable to entropy, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And at best, we are but stardust, a beautiful yet haunting explanation of our origins. Infused with light. Doomed to shadow. Whatever your spiritual beliefs, in the mortal physical realm, entropy is always interfering. The intellect often uses convenient conceptualizations to feel it is better understood or more secure, more real and lasting, than it is.

Remember: the only constant is change, so to oversimplify is to willfully strip ourselves of needed understanding, the power of intellect that can do the best work against entropy. To paint in broad strokes an entire universe of experience to exist only in dualities of black and white, up and down, matter and void, is to confuse simplicity with clarity, at our peril. While the best explanation is usually the simplest one, the truth is almost always more complex than we can perceive.

So, we are left to navigate a universe of traumas and disappointments we cannot just dismiss as signs of the wrong thing happening or the other side gaining temporary control over our otherwise pure and decent environs. Darkness and light are lies in that they are not so diametrically opposed as they pretend; there are better options for understanding what they mean. As R. Buckminster Fuller has written: “We have relationships, not space”.

Relativity posits that light and other cosmic forces or expressions of energy and mass are not constants, but exist in a relational continuum. Moving at the same speed as an object makes it appear not to move at all, as with the Earth that carries us through its orbit around the Sun, and our Sun’s orbit around the galaxy’s deep center. We also experience this when we are traveling inside an automobile or an airplane. Light and dark are both wave dynamics relative to perception, frequency, local electro-magnetic activity, even the refractive capabilities of gravity, distance and time.

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Transparency Network as Means of Restoring Financial Confidence

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It may be that “a few bad apples” got the ball rolling on what has turned into a massive international financial disaster. Or, it may be that a few bad apples got their names in lights, while the entire system conspired unwittingly in a spectacular collapse. Either way, the best expression of the problem might be to say that markets have stopped working, in part, because they have been comprehensively modified to stop working like markets.

With capital vanishing, nearly $7 trillion in stock losses in just a few months, and banks refusing to lend even the tens of billions they were given precisely to lubricate the lending process, we are facing a crisis of confidence and an inability to conceptualize shared interest. The idea that self-interest motivates markets somehow developed, irresponsibly, into the idea that self-interest is more important than the functionality of market dynamics.

With ever-larger banking interests concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands, they also began to rely on mystical assumptions about the wealth-generating power of certain financial risks. The obscurity of those financial gambles, the need to believe in their power of wealth-expansion, allowed financial institutions to use questionable deals, with even more questionable projected rates of return, to paper-over already measurable under-performance, both in their own businesses and in the markets generally.

The underlying problem in the system —which allowed banking institutions to hide bad debt in bundled assets, and resell it to trading partners who may not have been given full disclosure on the unsustainable nature of much of the underlying debt— is transparency. A fierce individualist ideology led to a convenient clouding over of the reporting mechanisms intended to make financial institutions more ethical, more stable, and more useful to those outside their walls.

One of the major innovations that could take place —either by collaborative effort now in a time of crisis, or over time, as everyday operators within markets work to adopt the most intelligent organizational tools— would be a vast network of open information, regarding the management of investment funds, securitized loan holdings, and lending practices at a given institution.

This system need not reveal any personal private information about individual investors or bank customers, but would be made available to the public so that the maximum possible amount of information be searchable for anyone wishing to vet the claims of in-house analysts. Part of the goal would be to facilitate the proliferation of new smart-reporting economic databases, and to allow competing points of view on the most complex investment-backup schemes to have an open hearing, as based on credible information.

One of the side-effects of this sort of banking transparency network would be to reduce the motivation for wrongdoing, be it small manipulations or distortions on a grand scale, because by its nature, the system would privilege the more reliable sources of information. Banks with better reporting would be considered superior institutions, in terms of viability and therefore smart investment choices. Grandiose claims would be far less relevant, because they would be measured by their truthfulness, not their dimension.

For many reasons, this may seem like pie in the sky; for one: we don’t know what sort of computing technology could do the work necessary to parse such large volumes of information in a timely fashion. But computer speeds are accelerating rapidly, with the Roadrunner super-computer at Los Alamos achieving petaflop speeds —one thousand trillion calculations per second— and nano-chemical computing on the horizon, potentially magnifying the processing power of traditional microprocessors by thousands or even millions of times.

And, that’s still without touching on the controversial topic of quantum computing, in which everyday substances —like 12 ounces of coffee— can be turned into massive computational neural nets capable of working out problems that require trillions of calculations instantly. The complications there are too many to go into at present, and there is no reliable quantum computer that can be applied to something with so many legal implications as a banking system, at the moment, but the work is ongoing.

Cloud computing may be the first major speed-related improvement that can allow the beginnings of a true banking transparency network. This is a major undertaking, and will require a daunting philosophical shift for many in the financial industry, but armed with computers working at thousands of times today’s computers’ top speeds, spread out over a dispersed cloud-computing network, it would be possible to optimize processing speed, memory allocation, memory recall, informational back-up, time-keeping and matrix cross-referencing.

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Conventional Hybrid Super-computer Reaches 1,000 Trillion CPS

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A hybrid super-computer has reached the astounding speed of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, termed a petaflop. The Roadrunner super-computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory operates on a conventional paradigm of computational mechanics — meaning it operates over semiconductors and established systems of computer circuitry, not quantum computing innovations or molecular processors.

The Roadrunner, like other hybrid super-computers, is made up of thousands of distributed computing “nodes”, each with its own microprocessor and separate memory store. There is a time-lapse between memory retrieval and central processing registry of computation, which means researchers have to come up with creative ways to narrow the ever-widening gap between computation and memory-retrieval time, a barrier difficult to overcome due to the physical limitations of the raw materials.

Roadrunner’s specific hybrid design is a breakthrough because it allows some improvement on this front. According to the Los Alamos website:

Roadrunner is a cluster of approximately 3,250 compute nodes interconnected by an off-the-shelf parallel-computing network. Each compute node consists of two AMD Opteron dual-core microprocessors, with each of the Opteron cores internally attached to one of four enhanced Cell microprocessors. This enhanced Cell does double-precision arithmetic faster and can access more memory than can the original Cell in a PlayStation 3. The entire machine will have almost 13,000 Cells and half as many dual-core Opterons.

It is believed the petaflop speed will allow Roadrunner to be useful in calculating the rapid evolution of supernovae, the massive explosions that sometimes result from dying stars, a process which, if understood, can help to explain to astronomers, physicists and cosmologists, not only how the details of cosmic radiation have played out but also: what can be expected in the evolution and decay of certain star systems, and what that means for the physics of stars and galaxies, forces like gravity, the nature of black holes and, ultimately, provide some of the information necessary for testing sweeping theories about the beginnings of our universe.

The Milagro Cosmic Ray Observatory at Los Alamos, using special code designed to trace fluctuation and tranmission of radiation, to map the celestial background and study the effects of interstellar radiation on the Earth and near-Earth objects, would be the forum through which such applications for Roadrunner would be explored. In Milagro’s work with specially designed code to study radiation physics, according to Los Alamos itself:

The major application areas addressed were radiation transport (how radiation deposits energy in and moves through matter), neutron transport (how neutrons move through matter), molecular dynamics (how matter responds at the molecular level to shock waves and other extreme conditions), fluid turbulence, and the behavior of plasmas (ionized gases) in relation to fusion experiments at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

It is also expected the petaflop speed will be useful in testing medical advances, potentially projecting cell reaction to chemical treatments, radiation innovations, gene therapy and other complex metabolic interventions that could adversely affect or significantly improve patient prognoses. John Turner, a Los Alamos researcher, says his team expects “proposals in cosmology, antibiotic drug design, HIV vaccine development, astrophysics, ocean or climate modeling, turbulence, and we hope many others”.

The Lab’s website also reports plans to use Roadrunner, starting in 2010, to test means of improving nuclear weapons technology, to enhance performance, and facilitate higher levels of maintenance and security, with a state goal of “maintaining confidence in the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile without actual nuclear testing”.

Molecular computing innovations, like 16-bit, 128-bit or 1,024-bit simultaneous molecular processing hubs, could allow processor speeds to accelerate exponentially, once such technologies are developed and able to be specialized, mass-produced and widely distributed. Research into nano-scale molecular chemical brains or chemical computational network nodes means “nano-chemical computation may soon be possible, ushering in a new era in super-light, super-fast, more versatile computer processing capabilities and, by extension, robotics.”

Computing speed is relevant not only to improving the performance of super-computers and later commercial microprocessors, enabling more advanced research, but also to the practical application of computational solutions for new zero-emissions models of energy capture, storage and distribution, distributed cloud computing processing platforms, the next generation of hyper-convergent online services, neural nets and artificial intelligence.

Zero-downtime Must Be a Standard of the Open Web

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Freedom of information and the standard of net neutrality —connection providers not controlling content or access to content in any way— require that information posted online not be removed, blocked, or made unavailable to readers, so long as the publisher wishes to include that content. For content publishers and content consumers to shape the web experience they desire, not only do we need an ethical standard of total net neutrality, but we need a technical standard of zero-downtime bandwidth guarantees.

Zero downtime is necessary for providing fair service to online publishers and consumers for a number of reasons, not least of which is that some services require a wide-open uninterrupted secure connection. Online voice communications should fit into the net neutrality standard: some connection providers (ISPs) also provide voice telephony services, and would like to prevent low-cost or free voice-over-IP services, but a fair standard for managing basic web connection services cannot allow such interference with competition.

There are a wealth of breakthrough technological solutions that can revolutionize not only communications and mass media, but also the ability of the individual to achieve the self-empowerment of reliable information and to produce and secure data in ways that transcend the physical limitaitons of individual devices or storage centers, if we take advantage of the potential of “cloud computing”, or dispersed IT. Without a constant connection, devices and networking systems using cloud computing systems will be limited in their ability to provide the best quality of service to their users.

Achieving the zero-downtime standard would be in the interest of nearly all entities involved in the Internet business, except perhaps media giants that provide both access and separate telephony services, but increasingly, telecoms involved in the web connectivity business appear to be getting the hint that constant uptime and unlimited data, even unlimited anywhere web access, are good for business. If we reach the general standard of mass-market zero-downtime web connectivity, consumers should have a wide range of new options, both to achieve interesting new services and to protect their data.

As web infrastructure and connectivity standards evolve toward their optimal state, telecommunications should move toward inexpensive, flat-rate calling, eventually with global unlimited calling plans that cost little more than what we are accustomed to paying now for high-speed broadband Internet service. This will of course be a revolutionary moment in telecommunications and will spur a number of currently unimaginable media innovations, though it is likely that for sometime, quality of service considerations will prevent massive content downloads (like digital movie downloads direct to mobile phones) from being workable.

The zero-downtime question, coupled with net neutrality and consumer rights generally, raises important issues about whether media giants are required to facilitate or participate in the evolution of new technologies that capitalize on their services, but also surpass them and reduce their influence. In general, the United States has a unique media-innovation engine driving this debate, the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits any laws that “abridge… the freedom of the press”, and “of the people to peaceably assemble”, both of which relate to consumers’ interests in expanding the online clout of the individual.

The individual is now also the press, the press consumer is potentially part of the press, legally speaking, and anyone can become a publisher in the online media environment. Their freedoms are covered multiple times in the First Amendment alone, while major media companies, traditionally permitted to engage in a certain amount of laissez-faire decision-making, have grown into utilities that are less information providers than they are purveyors of a piece of basic infrastructure.

The open web is a dream that will enable a number of vital new democratic processes to evolve, where consumers and content-providers spontaneously organize to change the manner in which information travels through the broader culture. It will also allow much better access to vital and sometimes esoteric information for the average consumer, and eventually, new forms of digital data security, related to revolutionary dispersed coding platforms and segmented-multiple-redundancy data storage systems.

FCC Chairman Says He Will Take Action to Prevent ISPs from Controlling Users' Activities

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will take regulatory action to prevent internet service providers (ISP) from blocking or controlling users’ access to online content. The announcement came from the FCC chairman after Comcast moved to manipulate internet access —limiting their freedom to navigate— who had engaged in file-sharing online services, presumably in an effort to control access to content for which the cable provider was not being paid per-content-access.

According to The New York Times:

Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said Friday that Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, should be sanctioned because it had interfered with the Internet connections of users who were exchanging files with other people.

Martin recommends a strong defense, in law and in regulatory practice, of network neutrality, the principle that ISPs cannot “favor some uses of their networks over others”. AT&T has repeatedly hinted at plans to create a new kind of Internet, stratified by bandwidth, where paying services would have the highest speed connections directed to them, and users attempting to access other sites would see their access slowed or obstructed.

Legislation to create, favor or protect a stratified web like that proposed by AT&T would be a direct violation of the First Amendment protection of the free press, and potentially of the First Amendment right of citizens to free assembly. The scheme is part of an attempt by ISPs to charge 3 times for the same access: charge the content provider for their access, the end-user for their access, then charge one or both for the special added bandwidth required to deliver the best connection speeds.

Comcast had claimed that its actions were designed to prevent the hoarding of bandwidth by users accessing filesharing sites like BitTorrent, but not only those trying to access the most bandwidth intensive files were blocked. The Times reports that a Comcast spokesperson has said the company “is developing a system that will slow the Internet connections of people who are moving large amounts of data at busy times.”

Among the concerns of net neutrality advocates, the FCC chairman and web planners, is the long-term meaning for a free society of not instituting firm network neutrality and freedom to navigate principles. If the stratified web were permitted to be deployed by ISPs, they would not only begin to decide what content is most visible or even most visited, they may seek to replace or take over the job of content provider, adjudicating what information can or cannot gain access to a less figurative “mainstream”.

It is not surprising, then, that so many critics argue such an ISP-controlled web would be the end of a free and independent press, blocking the free flow of information and undermining the very purpose of the world wide web, which American politicians have long touted as one of the greatest means ever conceived of advancing democracy.

The legislative parameters of the issue may be more deep-rooted and more complex than those related to media or the press:

“The normative message is that it is wrong to block the Internet,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who is the chairman of Free Press, an advocacy group that filed the complaint about Comcast for which Mr. Martin is proposing a resolution.

“The deeper message he’s sending here is that users are sovereign. If two people want to send a file between each other, the carriers are not to get in the way.”

Professor Wu said the issues at stake go back to the common-law concept of a common carrier, which defined certain businesses — from blacksmiths to ferries — as so essential to commerce that their owners could not discriminate against any paying customer.

Prof. Wu’s analysis, as reported by The New York Times, means there could be interstate commerce clause concerns tied to any attempt to legislate in favor of ISPs’ blocking access to content. It has also been argued that while these providers appear to believe it is in their interest to assert more aggressive control of users’ activities, perhaps directing users to sites they privilege for profit, the overall result may be the slowing of commerce in general across the nation, and a deterioration of the innovative and communicative value of the Internet as such.

As the web moves toward a period of mounting hyper-convergence, in which everyday services and activities in physical space are integrated into a fabric of personal accounts, information gathering and communication, connectivity must be enabled, not blocked. It is in the fundamental interest of all involved that access be able to be constant, fast, uninterrupted, free and secure against unwanted intrusion.

It may actually be necessary to institute a regulatory policy whereby ISPs cannot “actively observe” the IP addresses being accessed by their users for anything other than statistical analysis, and possibly not even for that purpose, as access and content should not have a single controlling hierarchy.

Some assert that Comcast is showing its flaws, by needing to take action to cover up weaknesses in its overall network capacity, while others argue that the market will push users toward providers whose network infrastructure enables maximum possible access, bandwidth and download speed and quantity.