Blog: Microsoft Rolls Out Publishing and Research Tools for Academics

Microsoft Rolls Out Publishing and Research Tools for Academics
Chronicle of Higher Education (07/31/08) Monaghan, Peter

Microsoft has released a set of software tools intended to help scholars and publishers write, edit, and publish academic articles, as well as navigate difficult copyright issues and find and share scholarly data. The tools are add-ons for Microsoft Office Word and are available for free to licensed users of Word and other Microsoft products. One tool, the Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007, enables authors to structure and annotate their documents according to formats required by publishers and digital archives. The tool allows users to create documents in the format developed by the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central. Users will also be able to shape the software to suit other formats because the code for the software is openly accessible and freely adaptable. The products are intended to make it easier for authors and editors to electronically embed into papers details about the research process and results, such as bibliographies and key phrases. Microsoft says the goal is to help readers who conduct searches in electronic databases find relevant articles more easily.
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Blog: Home Healthcare Co. Agrees to Pay US $100,000 to Settle HIPAA Violations

SAN News Bites: Vol. 10, Num. 57; 7/22/2008

--Seattle Home Healthcare Co. Agrees to Pay US $100,000 to Settle HIPAA Violations (July 18, 2008) Providence Health & Services of Seattle, a home health care services company, has paid US $100,000 to resolve complaints about breaches of information privacy and security rules. The company will also make changes to its policies and procedures to guard against similar incidents. Providence acknowledges that laptop computers, disks and tapes that held patient health records were taken from employees' cars five times in 2005 and 2006. The information on the devices is covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Providence notified affected patients and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). More than 30 patients filed complaints with HHS.

The US $100,000 payment is the outcome of a HHS investigation and precludes the need to impose a civil penalty.

http://www.govhealthit.com/online/news/350464-1.html

http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/enforcement/agreement.pdf

[Editor's Note (Ullrich): Some healthcare providers are watching closely to see whether the fines make it worthwhile for them to pay more attention to HIPAA. I am not sure $100,000 is enough to will do the trick.]

Blog: Data Can Leak from Partially Encrypted Disks

Data Can Leak from Partially Encrypted Disks
IDG News Service (07/16/08) McMillan, Robert

Encrypted data can spill over into unencrypted parts of a computer, exposing it to hackers and viruses, according to researchers from the University of Washington and British Telecommunication. Essentially, a computer is not fully protected unless it is 100 percent encrypted, says study co-author Tadayoshi Kohno. "I suspect that this is a potentially huge issue. We've basically cracked the surface," says Kohno, an assistant professor at the University of Washington's Seattle campus. When a user opens an encrypted file with Word, Google Desktop, or even an encrypted USB drive, the information can still be stored in unencrypted areas of the hard drive. During their experiments, researchers viewed encrypted Word documents by opening the auto-recovery folder and read encrypted files over Google Desktop when the Enhanced Search option was on. Even encryption software platforms like TrueCrypt 5.1a contain the same vulnerabilities, researchers found, and the software version 6.0 addresses some problems but still does not fully protect encrypted data on an unencrypted computer.
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Blog: The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
Wired (07/08) Vol. 16, No. 7, P. 108; Anderson, Chris

Thirty years ago, statistician George Box said "all models are wrong, but some are useful." At that time imperfect models were the only option to explain complex theories involving topics such as cosmological equations and human behavior. However, researchers operating in today's era of massively abundant data do not have to settle for imperfect models, and can go without models completely. Speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Google research director Peter Norvig updated George Box's maxim to say, "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them." The massive amounts of data that are readily accessible in today's high-tech, petaflop industry enable researchers to replace traditional tools with actual data and applied mathematics. The new information age is making the traditional approach to science--hypothesizing, modeling, and testing--obsolete. Petabytes of readily available information allow researchers to analyze data without hypotheses about what the data might show, and to instead simply submit massive amounts of information to the world's biggest computing clusters and let statistical algorithms find patterns. The best example is the shotgun gene sequencing done by J. Craig Venter. Using high-speed sequencers and supercomputers to statistically analyze data, Venter went from sequencing individual organisms to sequencing entire ecosystems. By sequencing the air, Venter discovered thousands of previously unknown species of bacteria and other life forms, without hypothesizing that they were there. Experts say that such techniques are about to become mainstream.
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Blog: Study Refutes Niche Theory Spawned By the Web; the "Long Tail" economy may not be surfacing

Study Refutes Niche Theory Spawned By the Web
Wall Street Journal (07/02/08) P. B5; Gomes, Lee

In his 2006 book "The Long Tail," Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson outlined a theory that society is "increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of 'hits' [mainstream products and markets] at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail" as a result of the vast number of choices facilitated by the Web, but a new study published in the Harvard Business Review counters that assumption, writes Lee Gomes. An analysis of data for online video rentals and song purchases has led Harvard marketing professor Anita Elberse to conclude that online and offline shopping patterns are essentially the same. She says the importance online shoppers ascribe to hits and blockbusters is growing rather than shrinking thanks to the Web. Elberse also cites qualitative social research implying that Anderson's theory may have incorrectly characterized consumers as being eager to escape the limitations of physical inventories so that they can enjoy a wider variety of niche products. She notes that there is a major element of social conformity in cultural consumption, in that consumers tend to want to experience the same things others are experiencing. Gomes acknowledges that patterns of cultural consumption are definitely being reshaped by the Web, but says these changes do not appear to be having the kind of dramatic leveling effect on demand curves as forecast by the Long Tail. "While whole new cultural categories--YouTube videos, for example--are indeed emerging, they seem to quickly settle into the same winner-take-all dynamic experienced in the pre-Google age," Gomes concludes.
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