Tech Talk

Just last month, one of our frequent contributors was championing the transition of medical records from paper to digital form. Now, the issue seems to have bubbled up to the surface of national attention. The Associated Press reported yesterday that recent government and industry initiatives have made the use of electronic medical records more cost effective for physicians.

In October, our Robert N. Charette wrote, in "Dying for Data", that the new National Health Information Network in the U.S. should work primarily as a private-sector effort that has the support of and some funding from the federal government to replace paper-based files with a digital record containing your complete medical history, which your health care provider will be able to access almost instantaneously wherever you seek treatment.

He called the potential advantages of the new system "enormous." For the first time, physicians would have a lifetime view of a patient that would enable them to focus on preventive care, rather than just treating diseases. As a side benefit, health professionals could also conduct epidemiological studies, discover which treatments and medications work best, and provide the means to conduct surveillance for pandemics and biological attacks.

As Charette pointed out, President George W. Bush called for the creation of such a nationwide system in his 2004 State of the Union address, setting an ambitious goal of creating electronic health records for most Americans by the year 2014.

The AP report follows up on how the medical industry has been playing catch-up recently to try to approach some of these ambitious goals. It says that federal officials last month paved the way for hospitals to come to the aid of physicians concerned about the costs of making the transition, allowing the medical institutions to donate record systems to private practices to offset some of the financial burden. Plus, the industry itself has finally agreed on technology standards that let software tools from different companies share data, alleviating some fear among practitioners over their purchasing decisions.

"It's been a month since the [new regulations] were announced, and the increase in engagement has been immediate," Sunny Sanyal, group president for clinical solutions at McKesson Provider Technologies, in San Francisco, told the AP. "Physicians weren't ready to provide a big investment. The fact a hospital can now provide it for them completely changes the picture."

Research firm Jewson Enterprises, based in Austin, Tex., estimates that the new technology sub-sector could grow to as much as US $4.9 billion in sales by 2010. Other analysts noted that it will take time to work through the knotty legal questions surrounding the sharing of patient records and hospital-physician partnerships before the market sees a significant increase in sales, but it will come.

Let's hope it comes sooner than later, for the sake of patients whose lives could be in the balance.

From time to time, we like to look into the ongoing saga of electronic voting machines in the United States. When last we checked, our Senior Associate Editor Steven Cherry was telling us, in this space, that in the November 2006 national elections a hotly contested Senate race in Virginia would not be subject to a ballot recount mainly because there was "nothing to recount". Likewise, Senior Editor Tekla S. Perry confided in a report on her frustrating effort to even cast her vote in California on Election Day. So today, we couldn't resist passing along this link to a blog in the Contra Costa Times by Ian Hoffman called "E-voting Demise Could Be Near."

One of the outcomes of last November's results was the election of a new Secretary of State in California. Debra Bowen ran on a platform that included a plank promising reform of the state's voting systems (Cherry, in fact wrote about her in last October's article "The Next Voting Debacle?"). According to Hoffmann, she's now ready to act on that promise. He informs us that Bowen has proposed the toughest standards for e-voting machines in the nation, regulations that could even spell the demise of the controversial digital boxes. Bowen wants California to create so-called red teams of software experts to pore through the code of manufacturers such as Diebold Election Systems, looking for flaws or irregularities before the machines can be certified.

As usual, this has touched off another tempest in the tumultuous climate of technology in American politics. California's own local election officials have responded to their Secretary of State that there simply isn't enough time to prepare machines for such an inspection. You see, the Golden State recently revised its party primary balloting from June to February for next year's races, meaning all the software auditing and, if needed, resulting upgrades would have to be completed over the next 10 months.

Steve Weir, the president of the California Association of Clerks and Elections Officials (and chief elections officer in Contra Costa County) told Hoffmann: "When they moved that election up 119 days, I think the door closed on any significant changes to election systems for the presidential cycle in 2008."

E-voting reformers such as Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in the field of voting technology, was overwhelmingly supportive of the proposal. "Debra Bowen is holding up voting machines to the standards they deserve," he told the Contra Costa reporter. "I don't know of any other state in the country that requires red team testing of voting machines, and I've long maintained that this is the only reasonable way to test security."

Adding to the confusion, California passed a law three years ago mandating that all e-voting machines incorporate a paper-based record of individual ballots so that persons with visual impairments can have their votes confirmed by audio interpretation. Yet the state's election officials have not gotten around to enforcing even that provision, which does not augur well for Bowen's new testing proposal.

For now, Hoffmann informs us, the machine's manufacturers are standing on the sidelines, waiting to see how all the ruckus plays out.

So the saga will continue well into the next election cycle. And we'll be writing about it time and time again. Stay tuned for our next installment. This is one mess that somehow refuses to be cleaned up.

In something of a surprise, the United States was surpassed this year by six other countries in a prominent report on the competitiveness of the information and communications status of national economies. Released today by the World Economics Forum, the "The Global Information Technology Report" ranked Denmark as the world's most advanced nation in network-ready capabilities. The Danes were followed by Sweden, Singapore, Finland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The U.S., which had been rated first last year, fell to the seventh spot this year, trailed by Iceland, the United Kingdom, and Norway among the top ten.

The 2007 Networked Readiness Index (NRI) evaluated 122 nations for their strengths and weaknesses in the area of information and communications technology (ICT). The NRI measured the degree of preparation of a nation or community to participate in and benefit from ICT developments. It examined three key aspects of each nation's progress: their ICT environment; the readiness of their key stakeholders; and the usage of ICT among these stakeholders. It also sought to establish 'a broad international framework mapping out the enabling factors of such capacity', according to its creators.

"Leveraging ICT is increasingly becoming an essential instrument for countries and national stakeholders to ensure continued prosperity for their people," Irene Mia, senior economist of the Global Competitiveness Network at the World Economic Forum and co-editor of the report, said in a prepared statement.

"In recent years, the world has witnessed the power of ICT in revolutionizing the business and economic landscape and empowering individuals, while fostering social networks and virtual communities," added Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, based in Geneva, Switzerland.

Mia said that Denmark had climbed to the top of the network-readiness list due to "early liberalization of the telecommunications sector, a first-rate regulatory framework, and large availability of e-government services." The small Scandinavian country rose two positions from last year's report on the basis of a clear government vision and early focus on the penetration and usage of ICT in business and public administration. She noted that the report's authors found this to be generally true among all the Nordic nations, which placed five entrants in the top ten.

"Nordic countries have shown how an early focus on education, innovation, and promotion of ICT penetration and diffusion is a winning strategy for increased networked readiness and competitiveness," Mia stated.

The 361-page report, which can be ordered online, found that the U.S., for all its vaunted technological prowess, deserved a demotion because of the relative deterioration of its political and regulatory environment. It noted, however, that the nation that pioneered and perfected much of the technology the world now uses 'maintains its primacy in innovation, driven by one of the world's best tertiary education systems and its high degree of cooperation' with industry.

Its authors added that the 'extremely efficient market environment' found in the U.S. is 'very conducive' to the development of its ICT sector, particularly in the availability of venture capital for start-ups and financial market sophistication.

In an executive summary, the report's editors wrote: "There is growing evidence that ICT is driving innovation by allowing creative thinking and responsive problem solving to provide the promise of never-before-seen opportunities for all."

Now, there is growing evidence that the rest of the world is catching up to the nation largely responsible for launching the information and communications revolution. It really should come as no surprise.

A political historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that the energy crisis of the 1970s in the West was the product of a "perfect storm" of unfortunate events, not a grand conspiracy, according to a report from the MIT News Office. Meg Jacobs, an associate professor in the university's history department, told an audience at a campus symposium on 19 March that a combination of political, global, and social incidents coalesced to produce a chaotic chain reaction, not the least of which was an enormous mismatch between the public's perception of the situation and the harsh realities of the marketplace. This lesson must be heeded, she said, to avoid a needless replay of such a calamity occurring.

For those too young to remember first-hand the dramatic impact of the 1973 oil crisis, the seismic jolt to the economies of Western nations, most notably the United States, resulted in political and economic upheaval that sent most into recession. Prices skyrocketed across the board, ushering in an era of inflation that has never fully disappeared since. Motorists waited in lines that stretched for miles around gas stations. Truck drivers went on strike to protest soaring costs. The stock market collapsed. Unemployment escalated drastically. Savings disappeared. Nearly everything changed historically. To this day, we are living in an age reshaped by the economics of petroleum.

The causes of the emergency rested primarily in a swirl of geopolitical events that were largely beyond prediction. In the aftermath of the brief Yom Kippur War in October 1973 between Israel and an alliance of Egypt and Syria, the nascent Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (a subset of OPEC) embargoed oil shipments to Israel's allies in the West. At the same time, the broader OPEC alliance of oil producing countries leveraged their newfound influence to force the large Western consumer nations to cave in to demands for price increases that quadrupled the charge for a barrel of crude. These governments, in turn, facing spiraling inflation imposed resource rationing and wage and price controls on domestic goods and services that, unexpectedly, boomeranged on their economies, suppressing growth. Moreover, the shockwave hit at a time when the U.S. had reached a peak in its own production of oil within its shores, threatening future shortages.

These were the larger political forces in play. However, many in the West initially believed (and some still do) that the crisis had been manufactured. As the MIT report states, plenty of people in the U.S. thought that fully loaded tankers lingered just offshore, waiting for oil prices to go up. "They believed it was a conspiracy perpetrated by big oil to reap high profits, and they also blamed government," Jacobs said in her presentation. Americans accustomed to driving big vehicles simply couldn't come to terms with a drastic jump in price and cut in supply of the gasoline they had taken for granted for decades.

Jacobs said that the crisis offers a valuable example of how chaos can erupt when there is a divide between what citizens expect and how government reacts. She said the way the public and private sectors interacted at the time provides a "lesson from the past on the difficulty of winning support for solutions."

"What does the energy crisis teach us?" Jacobs prodded. "That it's hard for meaningful change when few think there is a problem." She noted in conclusion that the goal for governments today should be to understand what history has to teach us: to "create a market and momentum for new ways of thinking about energy." Nothing could be more instructive for our future.

Promising lightning-fast connectivity, IBM Corp. today demonstrated a new optical transceiver chipset that can operate at speeds of up to 160 gigabits per second. The company said in a morning announcement that the chip will be presented by its designers at the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference, in Anaheim, Calif., later in the day. The experimental transceiver could be as much as eight times faster than competing optical components currently available, according to the computer giant.

Positioned as a tool for future use in corporate and consumer networks, the tiny new chip (measuring 3.25 by 5.25 millimeters) would, its makers claim, enable users to download a file the size of a full-length movie in about a second. Operating by moving light pulses around instead of electrical signals, IBM claims the new chips in personal computers or set-top boxes could spark a revolution in communications, computing, and entertainment.

"The explosion in the amount of data being transferred, when downloading movies, TV shows, music, or photos, is creating demand for greater bandwidth and higher speeds in connectivity," said T. C. Chen, vice president of science and technology at IBM Research. "Greater use of optical communications is needed to address this issue. We believe our optical transceiver technology may provide the answer."

The announcement stated that IBM researchers built an optical transceiver with driver and receiver integrated circuits in current complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, the same standard, high-volume, low-cost technique used for most chips nowadays. The scientists then married the transceiver to the remaining components of the chipset with more exotic materials, such as indium phosphide and gallium arsenide, into a single integrated package. The resulting design should provide a high number of communications channels, as well as very high speeds per channel.

Manufacturers should be able to easily integrate the new chipset into optical printed circuit boards employing densely spaced polymer waveguide channels using mass assembly processes, according to the Armonk, N.Y., firm.

Partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, a full report on the new chipset ("160-Gb/s, 16-Channel Full-Duplex, Single-Chip CMOS Optical Transceiver") will be available from IBM on Thursday, the company announced.

A professor at Cambridge University is seeing her life's work in natural language and information processing reap a bouquet of awards from major computer science institutions this month. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced Wednesday that it has chosen Karen Spÿrck Jones as the recipient of both the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award and the ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award. Only weeks ago, she was also honored with the prestigious Ada Lovelace Medal by the British Computer Society (BCS).

The bevy of awards honor a woman who has been a pioneer since the 1950s in the area of language and information retrieval, particularly in techniques that enable people to interact with computers using ordinary words instead of equations or codes, a key breakthrough that has been instrumental to the development of modern search engines. Since 1990, her work has focused on speech applications, database querying, user and agent modeling, summarizing, and information and language system evaluation.

Spÿrck Jones will receive her ACM awards during presentation ceremonies this June and July. The Newell Award, bestowed each year in conjunction with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, recognizes those whose careers have demonstrated "breadth within computer science." The Athena Award, presented by the ACM Committee on Women in Computing, recognizes women who have made "fundamental contributions to computer science."

The BCS's Lovelace Medal honors "individuals who have made a contribution which is of major significance in the advancement of information systems."

Spÿrck Jones's career began with a doctoral thesis that introduced the idea that word classes could be derived by clustering words based on their frequency and patterns, a technique known as lexical co-occurrence. She was among the early innovators to employ document collections to automatically evaluate information retrieval systems. According to the ACM, she subsequently discovered the efficacy of term weighting, a statistical measure used to evaluate how important a word is in a collection, and thus the word's significance for an individual document. Search engines today use this process, known as inverse document frequency, to help score and rank a document's relevance for a user's query.

A Fellow of the British Academy, Spÿrck Jones has also been honored with, among other tributes, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Computer Linguistics (2004), the Grace Hopper Lecture (2002) from the University of Pennsylvania, and the ACM-SIGIR Gerard Salton Award (1988). She is the author of numerous research papers and nine books in the area of natural language and information retrieval.