The health care industry, a well-known laggard in information technology, is where most of corporate America was a decade or more ago in adopting Internet-style computing. There are innovators, intriguing experiments and lots of interest, but the technology hasn’t yet gone mainstream. Still, the direction is now clear, and only the pace of the shift is in question. The Obama administration’s plan to spend $19 billion to hasten the adoption of electronic health records that can share data across networks – ‘interoperable, in techspeak – will only give more impetus to the shift toward Internet-style computing. And there is plenty of evidence of the emerging transition being demonstrated and announced this week at the health information technology’s big annual conference and trade show in Chicago, sponsored by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, or HIMSS. One good example of the trend is a joint project, announced on Sunday, between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and GE Healthcare. The project will deliver individually tailored public health alerts to electronic health records in doctors’ offices. The goal, for example, is to have an alert pop up on a physician’s screen that a certain patient, based on location, […]
Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is President Obama’s energy secretary, recently gave a speech in which two key words never passed his lips. He talked about energy efficiency, electricity transmission lines and renewable energy sources. He waxed eloquent about technology and the need to fund energy research. But afterward, Chevron vice chairman Peter Robertson noted disconsolately that ‘it would be nice to hear a bit about oil and gas.’ Oil and natural gas, however, are not what’s lighting up the Obama energy agenda. The new president is setting out to change the very nature of American energy, from the way we use it to the way we generate it. It’s a goal that drives his policy on automakers, whom he wants to push to manufacture more fuel-efficient cars. And it’s why he inserted a ‘down payment’ of mammoth proportions into the stimulus bill, roughly $70 billion or more in grants, loans and loan guarantees for Chu to hand out for high-tech research and commercial projects for renewable energy such as biofuels and wind, solar and geothermal power. That’s nearly three times as much as the baseline Energy Department budget and more than the annual budgets of the […]
WASHINGTON — One Antarctic ice shelf has quickly vanished, another is disappearing and glaciers are melting faster than anyone thought due to climate change, U.S. and British government researchers reported on Friday. They said the Wordie Ice Shelf, which had been disintegrating since the 1960s, is gone and the northern part of the Larsen Ice Shelf no longer exists. More than 3,200 square miles (8,300 square km) have broken off from the Larsen shelf since 1986. Climate change is to blame, according to the report from the U.S. Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey, available at pubs.usgs.gov/imap/2600/B. ‘The rapid retreat of glaciers there demonstrates once again the profound effects our planet is already experiencing — more rapidly than previously known — as a consequence of climate change,’ U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement. ‘This continued and often significant glacier retreat is a wakeup call that change is happening … and we need to be prepared,’ USGS glaciologist Jane Ferrigno, who led the Antarctica study, said in a statement. ‘Antarctica is of special interest because it holds an estimated 91 percent of the Earth’s glacier volume, and change anywhere in the ice […]
BOSTON — The Iowa Supreme Court’s approval of same-sex marriage on Friday gave advocates an important first victory in the nation’s heartland, thwarting the notion that only the Northeast will accept it. But for now, New England remains the nucleus of the same-sex marriage movement, with a campaign under way to extend marriage rights to gay men and lesbians in all six of the region’s states by 2012. Massachusetts has allowed same-sex marriage since 2004, and Connecticut began allowing it last fall. The Vermont Legislature just voted to let same-sex couples marry, and supporters hope to gather enough votes to override a veto promised by Gov. Jim Douglas, a Republican. New Hampshire is not far behind; its House of Representatives approved a same-sex marriage bill last month. The legislatures in Maine and Rhode Island are considering their own versions, though they are not as far along in the process. Across New England, advocacy groups have been raising money, training volunteers and lobbying voters and lawmakers as part of a campaign they call ‘Six by Twelve, led by the legal advocacy group that persuaded the Supreme Courts in Massachusetts and Connecticut to allow same-sex marriage in 2003 […]
People can guess pretty successfully what breed of dog a person might own just by looking at the owner, a new study finds. A group of 70 people who do not own dogs were asked to match photos of 41 dog owners to three possible breeds - Labrador, poodle or Staffordshire bull terrier. They matched the owners to the dogs more than half the time. Yet given three choices, they should have been right only about a third of the time. ‘This suggests that certain breeds of dogs are associated with particular kinds of people,’ said study leader Lance Workman, a psychologist at Bath Spa University in the UK. It’s no secret that people are obsessed with pets. Two-thirds of American households have at least one, and dogs are the top choice (though by sheer numbers, fish win out). And dog owners are particularly so, suggests a study in 2007 that found when a pet goes missing, dog owners contact and visit shelters much sooner than cat owners. The analysis runs deep: Those who don’t own dogs used stereotypes to match the dogs to their owners, Workman figures. ‘These stereotypes persisted into judgments of the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
