Saturday, November 10, 2012

Local (Colorado Springs) But not important enough to make the evening news? No indication of “when” they discovered the breach/loss.
By Dissent, November 9, 2012
Memorial Hospital (University of Colorado Health) issued the following statement on November 6:
Memorial Hospital has discovered that laboratory reports containing a certain amount of health information for 6,400 patients are missing. The laboratory reports are used for processing billing and charges for laboratory services, not for clinical care.
There is no evidence the missing records have been disclosed to or used by unauthorized individuals.
The reports cover lab work done between May 1, 2012 and Aug. 31, 2012. The missing reports contain the patient’s name, Memorial internal account numbers (these were not credit card numbers), dates and the type of lab work that was completed. Results from the lab work were not part of the missing reports. Also, demographic information and Social Security Numbers were not contained in the missing lab reports, making the risk of identity theft low.
Upon discovering that the reports were lost, Memorial conducted an immediate and thorough investigation. Investigators, however, have been unable to determine how the records were lost or what became of them. The information contained in the reports remains available in the patients’ electronic medical records for purposes of medical care and treatment.
… Patients who have concerns related to this incident are asked to call 1-866-283-9930


Also local, but this could be more fun.
Part Incubator, Workspace & Code School, Galvanize Wants To Turn Denver Into A Startup Hub; Uber, Forkly & More Already On Board
… The latest initiative is Galvanize, a 30,000-square-foot workspace for digital startups that recently opened in downtown Denver. While most of Colorado’s entrepreneurial energy emanates from Boulder, the Galvanize founders are on a mission to bring Denver into the conversation by creating a shared workspace that will accommodate over 300 individuals and approximately 60 to 70 startups once it’s fully operational.
Jim Deters, the founder and Managing Director of Galvanize, tells us that the idea was inspired by other national startup communities and workspaces like RocketSpace in San Francisco and 1871 in Chicago. It offers support and office space for every phase of the business development process, from a shared area for small, one-or-two person teams in the ideating phase to suites for 10-person startups.
… That’s why the workspace is also adding an experiential and community-based education platform called gSchool that offers an intensive six-month course designed to take those with zero coding experience and turn them into legit, professional web developers. The class has been created in partnership with JumpstartLab, a Washington, D.C.-based firm led by Jeff Casimir that runs Hungry Academy for Living Social. The program is similar to that of Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco, except for the fact that these services are offered from within the Galvanize community.
And the best part: Because Deters, Casimir and team want to put their money where their mouths are, they’ve decided that students graduating from gSchool must receive a job offer within three months of graduating from the program, or they’ll get their money back. (Which admittedly is a lot, considering the price of admission is $20K/person.)


Never leave technology to the Liberal Arts majors...
"Many talking heads have attributed Obama's success to an unmatched 'ground game.' Now, inside reports from campaign volunteers suggest that Project Orca, a Republican, tech-based voter monitoring effort with 37,000 volunteers in swing states, turned out to be an epic failure due to dismal IT. Problems ranged from state-wide incorrect PINs, to misleading and delayed information packets delivered to volunteers, to a server outage and missing redirection of secure URLs."


Something does not ring true. (Although, now he does not have to testify about the attack n Lybia)
"After serving as Director of the CIA since September 2011, David Petraeus resigned from his position today, November 9. The retired four-star Army general has cited an extramarital affair as reason for the resignation. Michael Morell will now serve as Acting Director of the CIA."


Perspective Is Google leading or following?
… According to a note to investors from Morgan Stanley, three Google executives presented at the 2012 Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco and spoke about the future of the company and where it’s headed.
… During the presentation, there were some bullet points said that are worthy of a mention. First, the execs said that Google is now considering themselves a “mobile first” company. Steiber also mentioned that he thinks mobile will be the primary way people access Google in 2013. Varela believes that total mobile traffic to YouTube may soon surpass 50%.
The execs also brought up a couple of statistics to prove their points. They mentioned that mobile searches have increased by 200% in 2012 so far, and 25% of traffic on YouTube, as well as 40% of video views come from mobile devices, which is up a staggering 300% in 2012.


For those times when you really , really don't want your messages intercepted.
… While people won’t have immediate access to encrypted files, they may eventually find a brute force way to decrypt it, or they may force you to share the password and encryption algorithm. For cases like those, you’ll not only want to encrypt, but hide the data. But hiding data isn’t easy because it can’t simply vanish while still existing on your storage medium. Instead, you’ll want to hide it inside another file.


The bits I find interesting...
… Kudos to Udacity for making their lecture videos downloadable via YouTube under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-NC-ND).
[A partial list from their website:
  • CS101 - Intro to Computer Science: Building a Search Engine
  • ST101 - Intro to Statistics: Making Decisions Based on Data
  • CS215 - Algorithms: Crunching Social Networks
  • CS222 - Differential Equations: Making Math Matter
  • CS253 - Web Application Engineering: How to Build a Blog
  • CS259 - Software Debugging: Automating the Boring Tasks
  • CS262 - Programming Languages: Building a Web Browser
  • CS212 - Design of Computer Programs: Programming Principles
  • CS313 - Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science
  • CS373 - Artificial Intelligence: Programming a Robotic Car
  • CS387 - Applied Cryptography: The Science of Secrets
Pearson unveiled Project Blue Sky this week, an OER search engine (that also happens to turn up proprietary Pearson content in its search results). Blue skies indeed. More details via Inside Higher Ed. [Still, with over 2,000,000 items, you probably can find something useful Bob]
Macmillan announced this week that it would stop printing dictionaries. Starting next year, the Macmillan Dictionary will be online-only. [Making old dictionaries collectable? Bob]
Jim Groom reports that the University of Mary Washington project Domain of One’s Own has been fully funded — awesome news as giving students their own digital domain and teaching them the skills to manage their own online identities and data is one of the most important projects in education.


Free is good!


NPR's Car Talk announces the results of their (much more amusing) “election” NOTE: My favorite includes the word “Lawyer!”

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