Tuesday, August 18, 2015

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.


(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.
Two women pass Army Ranger school – historic first raises big questions
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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