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Information technology for medical care
Really interesting article in The Atlantic about efforts to reform the medical information system. One general observation is that the potential of information systems to permit flexible corporate/government operation are often defeated by corporate culture So representatives of Athenahealth approached the major health insurance companies and proposed a new payment model: Instead of paying for…
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Boeing security
So the court said Matthew Neumann and Nicholas Tides were properly fired in 2008 for violating company policy of disclosing company information to the media, in this case the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, without company authorization. In 2007, the PI wrote: “Boeing and its external auditors have rated the company’s inability to patch database and software development security…
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The wizards of finance
“This latest incident and the previous Chuetsu-Oki earthquake indicate that the business risk of operating nuclear power plants in Japan is higher than previously contemplated,” Moody’s analysts including Kenji Okamoto said in a note, putting the company [TEPCO] on a review for a possible downgrade. – Bloomberg. No kidding?
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Industrial robots state of the art
During the BP Macondo leak I was struck by the enormous level of skill needed by the robot submarine operators and wondered at the apparently low level of automation available to them. But the absence of robotic equipment in the TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi facility is really even more comprehensive and more puzzling – there’s no mile…
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Security news
The lesson of this story is that even (particularly?) computer security companies cannot put up with the inconvenience of standard security precautions. Greg Hoglund’s nightmare began on Super Bowl Sunday. On Feb. 6 the high-tech entrepreneur was sitting in his home office, trying to get to the bottom of some unusual traffic he was seeing…
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Incumbent Capitalism
This is one of my big beefs with the way we think about capitalism in this country: We fundamentally support what I call incumbency capitalism. We don’t support innovation capitalism. What’s the difference? Every rule around tax credits in the oil industry is set up by, and influenced by, the lobbyist from the oil industry.…
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Corporate organization in the modern age.
Spoke to a friend who manages a big technology group and is working on end of year evaluations. HR has set him up with a system where there are fixed percentages in each bucket e.g. %5 underperforming, 20% fair, %40 good, %20 excellent, %15 promotable or something like that. What’s remarkable is that people who…
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Wikileaks
Most of the diplomatic messages released by Wikileaks have been traced to a US defence department network, known as Siprnet, used for the exchange of classified information, media reports say. [..] It is thought about 2.5 million US military and civilian personnel have access to the network. However, Siprnet is not recommended for distribution of…
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The internet as we know it
Comcast demanded a “recurring fee” from Level 3 “to transmit Internet online movies and other content to Comcast’scustomers who request such content,” Thomas Stortz, the chief legal officer for Level 3, said in a statement Monday afternoon, seemingly alluding to the Netflix service. The action “threatens the open Internet,” Mr. Stortz added. Comcast did not…
