Can Pen and Paper Help Make Electronic Medical Records Better?
IUPUI News Center (07/20/09) Aisen, Cindy Fox
Using pen and paper occasionally can make electronic medical records even more useful to healthcare providers and patients, concludes a new study published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics. The study, "Exploring the Persistence of Paper with the Electronic Health Record," was led by Jason Saleem, a professor in the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "Not all uses of paper are bad and some may give us ideas on how to improve the interface between the healthcare provider and the electronic record," Saleem says. In the study of 20 healthcare workers, the researchers found 125 instances of paper use, which were divided into 11 categories. The most common reasons for using paper workarounds were efficiency and ease of use, followed by paper's capabilities as a memory aid and its ability to alert others to new or important information. For example, a good use of paper was the issuing of pink index cards to newly arrived patients at a clinic who had high blood pressure. The information was entered into patients' electronic medical records, but the pink cards allowed physicians to quickly identify a patient's blood pressure status. Noting that electronic systems can alert clinicians reliably and consistently, the study recommends that designers of these systems consider reducing the overall number of alerts so healthcare workers do not ignore them due to information overload.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Blog: Can Pen and Paper Help Make Electronic Medical Records Better?
Blog: Can Computers Decipher a 5,000-Year-Old Language?
Can Computers Decipher a 5,000-Year-Old Language?
Smithsonian.com (07/20/09) Zax, David
One of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world is the meaning of the Indus civilization's language, and University of Washington, Seattle professor Rajesh Rao is attempting to crack the 5,000-year-old script using computational techniques. He and his colleagues postulated that such methods could reveal whether the Indus script did or did not encode language by measuring the degree of randomness in a sequence, also known as conditional entropy. Rao's team employed a computer program to measure the script's conditional entropy, and then measured the conditional entropy of several natural languages, the artificial Fortran computer programming language, and non-linguistic systems such as DNA sequences. Comparison between these various readings found that the Indus script's rate of conditional entropy bore the closest resemblance to that of the natural languages. Following the publication of the team's findings in the May edition of Science, Rao and colleagues are studying longer strings of characters than they previously examined. "If there are patterns, we could come up with grammatical rules," Rao says. "That would in turn give constraints to what kinds of language families" the Indus script might belong to.
Blog: New Technology to Make Digital Data Self-Destruct
New Technology to Make Digital Data Self-Destruct
New York Times (07/20/09) Markoff, John
University of Washington computer scientists have developed software that enables electronic documents to automatically destroy themselves after a certain period of time. The researchers say the software, dubbed Vanish, will be needed as an increasing number of personal and business documents are moved from being stored on personal computers to centralized machines or servers as the cloud computing trend grows. The concept of having digital information disappear after a period of time is not new, but the researchers say they have developed a unique approach that relies on "shattering" an encryption key that is widely distributed across a peer-to-peer file sharing system. Vanish uses a key-based encryption system in a new way, allowing for a decrypted message to be automatically re-encrypted at a specific point in the future without fear that a third party will be able to access the key needed to read the message. The researchers say that pieces of the key "erode" over time as they are gradually used less and less. To make the keys erode, Vanish uses the structure of peer-to-peer file systems, which are based on millions of personal computers that join and leave the network at will, creating frequently changing Internet addresses, making it incredibly difficult for an eavesdropper to reassemble the key because it is never held in a single location. A major advantage of Vanish is that it does not rely on the integrity of third parties, as other systems do.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Blog: What Is Google App Engine?
What Is Google App Engine?
Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users.
You can serve your app from your own domain name (such as http://www.example.com/) using Google Apps. Or, you can serve your app using a free name on the appspot.com domain. You can share your application with the world, or limit access to members of your organization.
Google App Engine supports apps written in several programming languages. With App Engine's Java runtime environment, you can build your app using standard Java technologies, including the JVM, Java servlets, and the Java programming language—or any other language using a JVM-based interpreter or compiler, such as JavaScript or Ruby. App Engine also features a dedicated Python runtime environment, which includes a fast Python interpreter and the Python standard library. The Java and Python runtime environments are built to ensure that your application runs quickly, securely, and without interference from other apps on the system.
With App Engine, you only pay for what you use. There are no set-up costs and no recurring fees. The resources your application uses, such as storage and bandwidth, are measured by the gigabyte, and billed at competitive rates. You control the maximum amounts of resources your app can consume, so it always stays within your budget.
App Engine costs nothing to get started. All applications can use up to 500 MB of storage and enough CPU and bandwidth to support an efficient app serving around 5 million page views a month, absolutely free. When you enable billing for your application, your free limits are raised, and you only pay for resources you use above the free levels.
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Blog: Researchers to Spotlight Darknets at Black Hat
Researchers to Spotlight Darknets at Black Hat
PC World (07/15/09) Vamosi, Robert
Hewlett-Packard security researchers Billy Hoffman and Matt Wood are planning to demonstrate a darknet that is capable of running entirely within a browser at the upcoming Black Hat USA conference. The darknet allows decentralized, private peer-to-peer communications, like other darknets, though it runs through a proof-of-concept browser called Veiled. Hoffman and Wood say their darknet offers a number of advantages over other darknets. For instance, their darknet is easier to use than darknets such as WASTE, which is used in the academic world to share data among researchers. In addition, the Veiled browser has a feature called Web-in-Web that enables darknet users to create private Web pages with links to content that is only available in the darknet. Like other darknets, the darknet created by Hoffman and Wood cannot be viewed by average users on the Internet, which means that it is ideal for users who want to create Web pages that they want to hide from the government, for example. Hoffman and Wood say that their talk at Black Hat USA will not provide many details about their darknet or Veiled, but they note that it will allow anyone with a passing knowledge of Web technology to go out and create their own darknet.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Blog: Memristor Minds: The Future of Artificial Intelligence
Memristor Minds: The Future of Artificial Intelligence
New Scientist (07/08/09) Mullins, Justin
The lack of a rigorous mathematical foundation for electronics impelled engineer Leon Chua to develop one, which led to the formulation of the memristor--a theoretical fourth basic circuit element in addition to the resistor, capacitor, and inductor where electric charge and magnetic flux come together. Since then the creation of memristors has been achieved, and their novel abilities might unlock key insights about the human brain that would be a tremendous step forward for the field of artificial intelligence. Advantages of memristors include rapid, nanosecond writing of data using a very small amount of energy, and retention of memristive memory even when the power is turned off. The most immediate potential application for memristors is as a flash memory replacement, while durability improvements should make memristors ideal for a superfast random access memory, says Hewlett-Packard (HP) Laboratories Fellow Stan Williams. The discovery that a slime mold was behaving in the manner of a memristive circuit in that it could memorize a pattern of events without the aid of a neuron inspired a physicist at the University of California, San Diego to construct a circuit capable of learning and predicting future signals. Much earlier, Chua had noticed a sharp similarity between synapse behavior and memristor response, leading to speculation that memristors might help engineer an electronic intelligence that can mimic the power of a brain. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has embarked on a project to create "electronic neuromorphic machine technology that is scalable to biological levels." HP's Greg Snider has envisioned the field of cortical computing that focuses on the potential of memristors to imitate the interaction of the brain's neurons. He and Williams are working with Boston University scientists to devise hybrid transistor-memristor chips that aim to replicate some of the brain's thought processes.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Blog: Twente Researcher Develops Self-Learning Security System for Computer Networks
University of Twente (07/01/09) Bruysters, Joost
University of Twente researcher Damiano Bolzoni has developed SilentDefense, an anomaly network intrusion detection system that could lead to a new generation of network security systems. There are two types of network intrusion detection systems. The first uses a database of all known attacks to identify signatures of commonly used methods, but these systems have difficulty stopping new attack methods. The second uses anomaly detection, essentially learning how the network is normally used and searching for any deviation from the standard pattern. Bolzoni says anomaly detection is not widely used because truly effective systems are not commercially available, but he says SilentDefense will rectify this shortcoming. SilentDefense is based on self-learning algorithms, which significantly improves the accuracy of the system and reduces the odds of false positives. Bolzoni says the ideal network intrusion detection system is not one type or another but a combination of the two. However, before such a system can be created, he says a better anomaly detection system needs to be developed.