Health monitor or Privacy risk? If it works here,
can government health systems be far behind?
Humana
Using Analytics to Improve Health Outcomes
Earlier this year a CDW survey revealed that
analytics
is a top priority for two thirds of decision-makers in the health
care industry. Nearly 70 percent of respondents said they were
planning for or already implementing analytics.
This is no surprise, given the strong results seen
by analytics from early adopters like Humana.
The health insurer has made analytics a
foundational piece of its clinical operations and consumer engagement
efforts. Humana uses predictive models to identify members who would
benefit from regular contact with clinical professionals, helping
them coordinate care and making needed changes in healthy lifestyle,
diet and other areas. This proactive approach results in improved
quality of life for members, at a lower cost, said Dr. Vipin Gopal,
Enterprise VP, Clinical Analytics.
According to Humana, it identified 1.9 million
members with high risk for some aspect of their health through
predictive models in 2014. It also used analytics to detect and
close 4.3 million instances where recommended care, such as an eye
exam for a member with diabetes, had not been given. In those cases,
Humana notified members and their physicians, through which such gaps
in care were addressed.
Does the constitution apply in the Cloud?
Dan Horowitz writes:
Why is the Second Circuit being forced to defend our electronic privacy and preserve an international agreement from the Obama administration?
Recently,
a Federal
Judge in New York was convinced by lawyers from the Obama
administration that international agreements and the Fourth Amendment
were simply minor impediments to be brushed aside at the behest of
the Department of Justice (DoJ) and their insatiable desire to have
automatic access to any electronic data U.S. citizens and companies
possess.
How is this possible? Why have very few people heard of this? Why aren’t the Netizens up in arms over it?
Read more on The
Hill.
You may not be a criminal, but you might sue me?
Maybe everyone should wear a camera.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman writes that the use of
police body cameras has spread to schools:
…. As these programs began to proliferate, schools took notice. In Houston, Texas, 25 school officers have started wearing body cameras in a pilot program, and the school district plans to expand the program to all 210 members of the force.
An Iowa school district has even taken this initiative one step further, buying cameras for principals and assistant principals to wear while interacting with students and parents. While the administrator overseeing the program has said the cameras are not intended to monitor every activity, he expressed the hope that any complaint could be investigated through body camera footage, suggesting that principals would need to record early and often.
The spread of body cameras into our schools may come as surprise to some, but it shouldn’t. It is not unusual for surveillance technologies to leap from one world to another, or to be deployed for one purpose and gradually used for many more.
Read more on Brennan
Center for Justice.
(Related) Another interesting question.
Should
Everyone Get to See Body-Camera Video?
… If a police officer has a hostile encounter
with a teenager on the street, but neither of them are badly injured,
does the teenager have a right to see video of the incident recorded
from the officer’s body camera? If an officer is invited inside
the home of a domestic-violence victim, will that victim be able to
tell the cop not to record?
And, most importantly, if someone is killed in an
altercation with an officer, could that officer watch the video
before testifying to a grand jury? Because if so, critics say, that
cop would be able to alter his or her account of the event to match
what was on video—even if their initial account was wildly
different.
I'm surprised the government could buy anything
that cheaply.
Price for
TSA's failed body scanners: $160 million
Background.
CRS –
National Security Letters in Foreign Intelligence Investigations
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Aug 17, 2015
National
Security Letters in Foreign Intelligence Investigations: A Glimpse at
the Legal Background, Charles Doyle, Senior Specialist in
American Public Law. July 31, 2015.
“Five federal statutes authorize intelligence
officials to request certain business record information in
connection with national security investigations. The authority to
issue these national security letters (NSLs) is comparable to the
authority to issue administrative subpoenas. The USA PATRIOT Act
(P.L.
107-56) expanded the authority under the original four NSL
statutes and created a fifth. Thereafter, the authority was reported
to have been widely used. Then, a report by the Department of
Justice’s Inspector General (IG) found that in its use of expanded
USA PATRIOT Act authority the FBI had “used NSLs in violation of
applicable NSL statutes, Attorney General Guidelines, and internal
FBI policies,” although it concluded that no criminal laws had been
broken. A year later, a second IG report confirmed the findings of
the first, and noted the corrective measures taken in response. A
third IG report, critical of the FBI’s use of exigent letters and
informal NSL alternatives, noted that the practice had been stopped
and related problems addressed.”
When dealing with police, you become a second
class citizen?
Spanish
woman fined for posting picture of police parked in disabled bay
A Spanish woman has been fined €800 (£570)
under the country’s controversial new gagging law for posting a
photograph of a police car parked illegally in a disabled bay.
… The police tracked her down within 48 hours
and fined her.
The Citizens Security Law, popularly known as the
gagging law and which came into force on 1 July, prohibits “the
unauthorised use of images of police officers that might jeopardise
their or their family’s safety or that of protected facilities or
police operations”.
… Asked how the photo had put the police at
risk, he said the officers felt the woman had impugned their honour
by posting the picture and referred the incident to the town hall
authorities. “We would have preferred a different solution but
they have the legal right to impose the fine,” Portillo said.
Aggressive lawyering or simply testing the legal
waters?
Movie
Studios Pull Injunction Demand in MovieTube Lawsuit
In the face of objections raised by prominent tech
companies, the Motion Picture Association of America is declaring
that it has already accomplished its primary mission in its lawsuit
against the anonymous operators of various MovieTube websites.
… Such a demand for injunctive relief
triggered an angry response from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and
Tumblr, which in an amicus brief accused
the MPAA of attempting to "resurrect" the Stop Online
Piracy Act by seeking an injunction on "non-parties in a lawsuit
without proof that the nonparty was acting in concert with the
defendant."
… The big legal issues pertaining to the
standards under which web-hosting providers, digital advertising
service providers, social media services and others must take action
with respect to piracy sites has thus been dodged. However, this
likely won't be the last time the controversy comes up.
Is Walmart a bad neighbor?
Mayor to
Walmart: Pay for Your Own Security
Violent incidents at a local Walmart (WMT)
in Beech Grove, Indiana have the town’s mayor declaring the store a
public nuisance. With more than three police visits a day, the mayor
argues Walmart is sapping tight resources for a little town of 14,000
that sits southeast from Indianapolis.
… Or is there another storyline here, that
Walmart, with nearly a half a trillion dollars in annual revenue,
$482 billion, isn’t doing enough to provide security at its local
stores, as customers get assaulted, shoppers brawl, and even killings
occur?
The Beech Grove mayor’s move comes as big cities
like San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Washington, DC fight
Walmart’s continued expansion.
Sua Sponte ("Of their own accord")
Rangers Lead The Way! As Yogi said, "Baseball is 90% mental --
the other half is physical." Same with Ranger school.
For the first time ever,
two women have passed Army Ranger School – widely considered one of
the most physically and mentally grueling courses in the United
States military.
… But it raises questions, too, about the
future of Ranger School and the broader ban on women in combat roles.
The decision on women in combat roles is expected
to come in January, when each of the services is required to either
lift the exclusion or ask for an exemption to extend it, backed by
scientific research showing why women can’t fulfill the tasks
necessary to serve on the front lines.
Is it me or is the
State Department tossing Hillary under the bus? Or perhaps they are
the best example of government mismanagement I've ever found for my
students.
Earlier this year, Gawker Media sued
the State Department over its response to a Freedom of Information
Act request we filed in 2013, in which we sought emails exchanged
between reporters at 33 news outlets and Philippe Reines, the former
deputy assistant secretary of state and aggressive
defender of Hillary Clinton. Over
two years ago, the department claimed
that “no records responsive to your request were located”—a
baffling assertion, given Reines’ well-documented
correspondence with journalists. Late last
week, however, the State Department came up with a very different
answer: It had located an estimated 17,000 emails responsive to
Gawker’s request.
On August 13, lawyers for the U.S. Attorney
General submitted
a court-ordered status report to the U.S.
District Court of the District of Columbia in which it disclosed that
State employees had somehow discovered “5.5 gigabytes of data
containing 81,159 emails of varying length” that were sent or
received by Reines during his government tenure. Of those emails,
the attorneys added, “an estimated 17,855” were likely responsive
to Gawker’s request
(Related)
New Clinton
email count: 305 documents with potentially classified information
More than 300 of former Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton’s emails — or 5.1 percent of
those processed so far — have been flagged for potential secret
information, the State
Department reported to a federal court Monday
as the political furor continued to grow for the Democratic
presidential candidate and her aides.
(Related) Yet amazingly, her poll numbers are
improving!
Poll: 2% of
Americans Believe Hillary Clinton
Coming soon to a home near you?
How Much
Can You Save With Solar Panels? Just Ask Google
… On Monday, the company unveiled Project
Sunroof, a tool that calculates your home’s solar power
potential using the same high-resolution aerial photos Google
Earth uses to map the planet. After creating a 3-D model of your
roof, the service estimates how much sun will hit those solar panels
during the year and how much money the panels could save you over the
next two decades.
… The service is now available for homes in
the San Francisco Bay Area, central California, and the greater
Boston area. Google is headquartered in California, you see, and
project creator Carl
Elkin lives in Boston.
For my Ethical Hacking students with young
children? Also for my Excel students.
Hack
Amazon's Dash buttons to do things other than buying stuff
Amazon's Dash
buttons are tiny adhesive physical triggers that can order for
you, through the magic of WiFi, anything you need to stock up on.
But that's not the limits of their power, if you're willing to tinker
with them. Ted Benson, (who works
at a company that likes to regularly perform such shenanigans
with the aid of its web tools), reckons it''ll you take under 10
minutes to repurpose Amazon's physical iteration of Buy It Now. (I
think he's underestimating the degree of incompetence this editor
possesses, but anyhow.) Benson managed to hack a diaper-ordering Dash
button to act as an Internet
Of Things-style tracker for how often his (adorable) baby poops.
Or how many times he wakes up in a night. The trick lies in the fact
that Amazon's buttons aren't constantly connected to WiFi. For the
sake of battery life, the buttons only come to life when pushed,
meaning the workaround picks up when your button is trying to access
the internet, and registers that as a trigger for anything but buying
stuff from Amazon.
With a little bit of python code, a simple program
can track when the button tries to connect to the WiFi, and once it
gets a hit, record a datapoint. (In this case, inside a Google Doc
spreadsheet.) Of course, you need to ensure you've setup the button
not to order something every time you press it --easily done when you
first start using the button. If you're looking to make the idea of
smart
diapers seem suddenly very stupid, you
can find all the code and instruction needed in the Medium post right
here
(Related)
How to Get
Started With Apple's ResearchKit
Earlier in the year, we
reported on Apple's announcement of ResearchKit, an open source
framework that researchers can use to create apps that leverage the
iPhone to help gather new types of data. Here, we let you know what
you need to get started with your own ResearchKit-powered app.
For my Computer Security students.
This Is How
They Hack You: The Murky World of Exploit Kits
Stop in the morning to wake up, stop after work to
mellow out? Perhaps they will sell weed here in Colorado?
Starbucks
serving wine, craft beer and small plates in South Florida starting
Wednesday
For the student Movie Club?
7 Places To
Find Free Movie Rentals Online
Perhaps we could use this to make short tutorials
for our students? (See # 4 & 8)
12 Ways to
Use Periscope for Business
Perhaps a tool for students to learn the “Terms
of Art” in my classes?
How to
Quickly Create Vocabulary Lists from a Document
Last winter I was contacted by a high school
student who had developed a neat tool for generating vocabulary lists
and study sheets from a document. That tool is called Vocabulist.
Vocabulist enables students to upload a document and have it extract
words and definitions from it. Each word in the document is matched
to a definition. If the definition rendered isn't exactly right,
students can modify it within Vocabulist. Once the list of words and
definitions is set students can download the list as a PDF or export
the list to Quizlet
where it will then be turned into a set of digital flashcards.
(Students must have a Quizlet account). In the video embedded below
I demonstrate how easy it is to create a vocabulary study sheet
through Vocabulist.
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