Welcome to the CLS Solutions Technology Blog. Here You can find interesting and useful information on most technology topics. There are currently 620 technology posts.
The cloud-enabled quantum computing platform, called IBM Quantum Experience, will allow users to run algorithms and experiments on IBM’s quantum processor, work with the individual quantum bits (qubits), and explore tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing.
AlphaGo’s victory is seen as a major landmark for artificial intelligence Credit: Reuters
A computer programme has beaten an 18-time international Go player champion in a best-of-five series competition.
The Google-developed programme took an unassailable 3-0 lead against one of the ancient game’s greatest modern players, Lee Se-dol, in South Korea on Saturday.
Its triumph is seen as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence.
Lee Se-dol looks deflated after his defeat to AlphaGo Credit: Reuters
Chinese board game Go is considered to be a much more complex challenge for a computer than chess.
But the computer programme, AlphaGo, took just four hours to secure its third consecutive win over Lee.
Lee, who has topped the world ranking for much of the past decade and had predicted an easy victory when accepting the AlphaGo challenge, now finds himself fighting to avoid a whitewash in the two remaining dead rubbers on Sunday and Tuesday.
“I don’t know what to say, but I think I have to express my apologies first,” Lee said.
“I apologise for being unable to satisfy a lot of people’s expectations. I kind of felt powerless”.
Lee acknowledged he had “misjudged” the computer programme’s abilities.
Go involves two players alternately laying black and white stones on a chequerboard-like grid of 19 lines by 19 lines. The winner is the player who manages to seal off more territory.
AlphaGo uses two sets of “deep neural networks” that allow it to crunch data in a more human-like fashion – dumping millions of potential moves that human players would instinctively know were pointless.
AlphaGo’s creators reacted to the computer’s victory saying they were “stunned and speechless”.
At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced the launch of Visual Studio Code, a lightweight cross-platform code editor for writing modern web and cloud applications that will run on OS X, Linux and Windows. The application is still officially in preview, but you can now download it here.
This marks the first time that Microsoft offers developers a true cross-platform code editor. The full Visual Studio is still Windows-only, but today’s announcement shows the company’s commitment to supporting other platforms.
Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, A Free Cross-Platform Code Editor For OS X, Linux And Windows
There has been many intriguing issues come into light recently from posts that people enter into their facebook pages. These issues include (and there’s more):
1. Workplace discrimination, firings, demotions,etc. A good number of Facebook users have already been given pink slips based on what they have posted. Some were sent to the unemployment line for venting about their jobs or posting harmless pictures from their vacation, while most were stupid enough to admit crimes and engage in racist rhetoric.
2. Semi-bogus internet disclaimers added to facebook posts. Example: “WARNING – Any person and/or institution and/or Agent and/or Agency of any governmental structure including but not limited to the Federal Government also using or monitoring/using this website or any of its associated websites, you do NOT have my permission to utilize any of my profile information nor any of the content contained herein including, but not limited to my photos, and/ or the comments made about my photo’s or any other “picture” art posted on my profile. You are hereby notified that you are strictly prohibited from disclosing, copying, distributing, disseminating, or taking any other action against me with regard to this profile and the contents herein. The foregoing prohibitions also apply to your employee(s), agent(s), student(s) or any personnel under your direction or control. The contents of this profile are private and legally privileged and confidential information, and the violation of my personal privacy is punishable by law.
Viewing my profile means that you have read, understand, and agree with the privacy notice above.”
Facebook’s stance in copyright is this: “As outlined in our terms, the people who use Facebook own all of the content and information they post on Facebook, and they can control how it is shared through their privacy and application settings. Under our terms, you grant Facebook permission to use, distribute, and share the things you post, subject to the terms and applicable privacy settings,” says Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes.
So, I guess that this actually means you are posting a privacy disclaimer within a facebook disclaimer which states that anything you post is public domain and that you agreed to this when you signed up for facebook.
3. Threats – real or imagined having the consequences of the feds raiding peoples houses and hauling them to jail. There are many instances for threats being reported from within facebook and other forms of communication. Recently,Christopher Castillo, 28, was arrested in November 2012 after prosecutors say he posted a message on his Facebook page reading, “That’s the last straw, if he gets reelected I’m going to hunt him down and kill him and watch the life disappear from his eyes.”
Agents went on to testify that when they followed up on Castillo’s threats, the Brevard County man told them, “I wouldn’t call it a threat, more of a promise. I’d be more that happy to take a few of them with me.”
Castillo’s defense attorneys say that Castillo didn’t realize the seriousness of what he was saying and wouldn’t have gone through with the threats. One public defender said that Castillo made those comments when he was unemployed and unable to control his anger.
The Secret Service was notified of the post and agents went to question Castillo at his Melbourne home. Agents say Castillo told them if Obama were standing in front of him he would slap him and beat him up and that it didn’t matter to him that threatening the president was a violation of federal law.
4. Facebook dangers; i.e. birthdays,etc. Of all the things that you shouldn’t post, if you can only choose one, it should be this. Keep your birthdate figures a secret. Why? Do you know what birthdays are good for apart from reminding everyone to add another candle on your chocolate cake? Yeah, passwords to emails, online accounts and websites. Do not deny it.
When asked to provide a 6-to-8 character password, the first thing that pops into your mind will probably be a variation of your birth date or the birthdates of someone close to you. But if you have to put your birthday up (just to feel the love Facebook reminders have to offer), consider not revealing the year you were born.
It’s an odd scene to picture: a domainer’s reps in a sit-down with Ephraim Inoni, the prime minister of Cameroon, to discuss the power of type-in typo traffic and pay-per-click ads. And yet, as with most of the angles Ham has played, the Cameroon scheme is ingeniously straightforward.
Ham’s people installed a line of software, called a “wildcard,” that reroutes traffic addressed to any .cm domain name that isn’t registered. In the case of Cameroon, a country of 18 million with just 167,000 computers connected to the Internet, that means hundreds of millions of names. Type in “paper.cm” and servers owned by Camtel, the state-owned company that runs Cameroon’s domain registry, redirect the query to Ham’s Agoga.com servers in Vancouver.
The servers fill the page with ads for paper and office-supply merchants. (Officials at Yahoo confirm that the company serves ads for Ham’s .cm play.) It all happens in a flash, and since Ham doesn’t own or register the names, he’s not technically typo-squatting, according to several lawyers who handle Internet issues.
The method is spelled out in a patent application filed by a Vancouver businessman named Robert Seeman, who Ham says is his partner in the venture and who also serves as chief adviser at Reinvent Technology. (Seeman declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Ham won’t reveal specifics but says Agoga receives “in the ballpark” of 8 million unique visitors per month. Fellow domainers, naturally, are envious.
“As soon as it started happening, there was a huge sense of ‘Why didn’t I think of that?'” says attorney Berryhill, who represents Schilling and other domainers.
Still, several companies have already tracked down Ham’s attorneys, claiming trademark infringement. Ham argues that his system is legally in the clear because it treats every.cm typo equally and doesn’t filter out trademarked names.
Berryhill concurs. “You can’t really say that [wildcarding] is targeting trade-marks,” he says. “It captures all the traffic, not just trademark traffic.” Moreover, the anti-cybersquatting statute applies only to people who register a trademarked domain; using a wildcard doesn’t require registering names.
Clever though it may be, .cm is “a very small part of our operations,” Ham says. He won’t disclose how much he pays to the government of Cameroon, whose officials could not be reached for comment.
The partnership has been a rocky one so far, and the system has sporadically shut down. But .cm is only one of several country domains where the typo play can work. According to Ham, he and his team are working with other governments. The dream typo play — .co — belongs to Colombia, to which Ham says Seeman paid several visits long before they began working on Cameroon. (Citing safety concerns, Ham hasn’t yet made the trip. “I would only go if the president requests to meet me,” he says.)
As for other countries he might soon invade, Oman (.om) is an obvious target. Niger and Ethiopia are out there too, but since they would play off less lucrative .net typos, they might not be worth the trouble.
As for Colombia, Ham says, “we’re making progress.”
Google’s algorithm on the characteristics of unnatural pages is periodically updated by a machine learning background job. This means it is not a live algorithm! The much reported Panda versions 1.0 to 2.5 are algorithm changes which are first calculated on a training dataset and combined with the existing learnings they are exported to the live Google environment as more static algorithm tests.
This means that while bounce-rate (in this case: visitors returning to search results quickly) isn’t used as a direct ranking factor, it is used to teach the Panda new tricks. Signals like bounce rate are fed as bamboo to the Panda background system with the instruction to find out what patterns can be derived from characteristics that form thin content, unnatural text and excessive on-page advertising. The system picks various combinations of attributes combined to get a high degree of certainty for someone’s spammy activities.
For those familiar with “distributed tree learning”, look up the works of Google engineer Biswanath Panda. After whom the Panda update was named. He will explain how continuously splitting sites into groups with similar attribute values helps you afterwards derive which attributes effected a certain outcome (like high bounce-rate) the most. It also gives some indication of the thresholds to be used and it can signal when false positives or negatives are likely to occur.
Interesting visual word tool that arranges words based on the frequency of the words. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. In this example, I entered the text of my resume to create this image..
source: http://www.wordle.net/
KANSAS CITY, Mo. –
Dr. James E. Sanders is a big believer of switching patient records from old paper files to sophisticated computer databases.
The electronic medical records system at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Kansas City Medical Center gives Sanders and his staff almost immediate access to medical histories, allowing them to seamlessly treat veterans from other states. But when patients aren’t in the VA’s system, it could mean hours or days before doctors have crucial information to properly care for patients.
“It’s increasingly frustrating for us and other providers that it’s difficult to find a workable interface,” said Sanders, chief of staff for the Kansas City veterans hospital. “Our systems don’t talk to each other.”
Interoperability, or allowing providers to share records and view them from anywhere, is a requirement for facilities to receive some of the more than $17 billion in stimulus funding that the government is offering to encourage the adoption of electronic medical records. Congress will likely penalize providers who aren’t doing so by 2014, cutting their Medicaid and Medicare payments, the Obama administration said.
But the debate over interoperability among health care providers, which has been going on for years, could take well beyond the 2014 timeframe to be solved, industry experts say.
“A private sector effort started 11 years ago and is still a going concern,” said Carla Smith, executive vice president of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. “Every year they solve an X number of problems. They’re eating the elephant one bite at a time.”
For an integrated system to work, developers at different companies have to agree on how their hundreds of programs uniformly present information and connect with each other. For example, if one uses its own set of abbreviations, the information would be useless to a doctor who uses a different program.
As opposed to a “national” system, some envision a “network of networks” that would resemble the model used in the banking industry for customers to access their accounts through ATMs nationwide.
Studies have found that less than 10 percent of U.S. health care providers are using electronic medical records.
Sanders, for instance, has access to one of the nation’s most expansive computerized record systems, allowing VA staff to securely access patient data from 1,400 VA hospitals and clinic across the U.S. — but that benefit ends at the medical center’s doors. When a patient isn’t in that system, Sanders said his staff has to revert to receiving the records by fax and then scanning them into the system.
Dr. David Blumenthal, the Obama administration’s health information technology director, acknowledged that a national system for sharing records is far off. He said federal officials hope to issue regulations controlling how medical information is shared by the middle of next year and plan to provide about $300 million in stimulus funds to develop regional and local information exchanges.
But he said the government will likely stay out of the thorny issue of exactly how that national system will work.
“We’re very committed to innovation and we’re very aware that the government is not the repository of all wisdom, especially in a field as dynamic as health information technology,” Blumenthal said. “So we fully expect there will be a lot of different solutions to the exchange problem.”
Regional groups, which use bridge programs to allow health care providers in a city or state to view patient records in each others’ databases, have shown some success hurdling the differences between records software.
A survey this year by Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit firm eHealth Initiative found 57 health information exchange groups were operating in the U.S., up from 32 in 2007.
At the moment, there are hundreds of programs sold by scores of developers approved by the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, a nonprofit group that evaluates whether medical record software meets federal and industry standards.
With billions of dollars in potential revenue at stake, the vendors have a big incentive to ensure that their products don’t get shut out of a national system. Industry experts say that’s made interoperability a key feature in most new programs.
“If you envision that everyone who has a computerized system can talk to another system in a standardized way, you’ve in essence started to build the foundation of a national network even if it didn’t exist as such,” said Rod Piechowski, senior associate director on policy for the American Hospital Association.
The federal stimulus package passed in February may help some IT companies climb the stock charts.
 |
The law provides $19 billion to replace the ubiquitous paper chart on a clipboard with electronic medical records.
While some traditional technology names will benefit from this portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, it’s the healthcare IT companies that will see the biggest boost and represent the biggest opportunities for investors.
Forrester Research expects about $14 billion of the $19 billion will be available to technology vendors through purchases of technology gear and related services.
Much of the money will come in the form of grants the federal government makes to healthcare providers.
President Obama on Thursday said his administration will create a new electronic health records system designed to seamlessly transfer medical records from the Department of Defense to the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Washington Post reports. Obama said, “Currently, there is no comprehensive system in place that allows for a streamlined transition of health records between DOD and the VA.” He added that the new system will “contain [veterans’] administrative and medical information from the day they first enlist to the day that they are laid to rest” (Brown, Washington Post, 4/10).
The new program is a part of DOD’s $47 billion health care budget for fiscal year 2010, the Obama administration said. According to the administration, VA’s overall budget is set to increase by $25 billion over the next five years (Hefling, AP/Kansas City Star, 4/9). Currently, the two agencies have different medical systems, which has led to delays for veterans entering the VA system and a six-month backlog in disability claims at VA (CongressDaily, 4/9). White House officials said that the goal is to integrate the two systems, but no details have been released about how that could be achieved, the Post reports (Washington Post, 4/10).
Administration officials said the electronic system, called the Joint Virtual Lifetime Record, could serve as a model for a national EHR system (Burns, Wall Street Journal, 4/10).
In his remarks, Obama said, “I’m asking both departments to work together to define and build a seamless system … with a simple goal: When a member of the armed forces separates from the military, he or she will no longer have to walk paperwork from a DOD duty station to a local VA health center. Their electronic records will transition with them.” Pentagon spokesperson Cynthia Smith said, “This new approach incorporates a transition strategy by maintaining a seamless access to all clinically relevant data from both systems, while concurrently building ‘common services’ between the two” (Washington Post, 4/10).
CNN’s “Newsroom” on Thursday reported on the new EHR system and included a live broadcast of Obama’s remarks. A transcript of the segment is available online. The show also examined existing health care services for veterans (Harris, “Newsroom,” CNN, 4/9). A transcript of the segment is available online.
PBS’ “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” on Thursday also reported on the new system. The segment included a discussion with Steve Robinson of the Veterans for Common Sense; Donald Berwick, president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement; and Deborah Peel, founder and chair of the Patient Privacy Rights Policy Center (Suarez, “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” PBS, 4/9).
Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
An article from googleblog.blogspot.com .
Sameer Samat, Director, Product Management of Google Health Speaks about progress:
3/04/2009 03:43:00 PM
Sameer, “We continue to learn a tremendous amount since launching Google Health in the spring of 2008. We’re listening to feedback from users every day about their needs, and one issue we hear regularly is that people want help coordinating their care and the care of loved ones. They want the ability to share their medical records and personal health information with trusted family members, friends, and doctors in their care network. I can relate to this.”
“Just a few years ago, my father suffered a minor heart attack and was sent to the ER. I arrived on the scene in a panic, and was asked what medications he was taking. To my surprise, I had no clue. If my father had a Google Health account, and had shared his profile with me, I would have been up-to-date on his current medications.”
“I’m happy to announce today Google Health has addressed this issue with the release of a new “Share this profile” feature enabling Google Health users to invite others they trust (whether it’s a family member, a trusted care network provider, friends, and/or a doctor) to view their medical records and personal health information.”
“Log into Google Health, click on “Share this Profile,” and type in the email address of the person with whom you’d like to share your profile. Google Health will send an email to them with a link to view your profile. The link will only work in connection with the email address of that person — your profile can’t be accessed if the link is forwarded on. You can stop sharing at any time, and you can always see who has access to your information. Those who are viewing your profile can only see the profile you share — not any other one in your account. We’ve also built in some extra protections to make sure your health information stays safe, private, and under your control:”
“For doctors and family members who are not yet online, we’ve also made it easier to share a hard copy of your information via our new printing feature. The wallet format prints a wallet-sized card that includes a user’s medications, and allergies; the PDF format prints a letter-sized copy of a user’s profile, including medications, allergies, conditions, and treatments. ”
“Finally, we’ve launched a new graphing feature that helps patients visualize their medical test information. This is great for, say, someone who has high cholesterol. They can use Google Health to enter their lab results on a monthly basis and see the trend over time.”
“There is still a lot more work to do on Google Health, and we’re excited to keep hearing from you so we can continue to make improvements. For now, we hope this new sharing feature makes coordinating your care, or the care of loved ones, a little easier.”
[SOURCE] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
Cramer interviews Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman.
President-elect wants to computerize the nation’s health care records in five years. But the plan comes with a hefty price tag, and specialized labor is scarce.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — President-elect Barack Obama, as part of the effort to revive the economy, has proposed a massive effort to modernize health care by making all health records standardized and electronic.
Here’s the audacious plan: Computerize all health records within five years. The quality of health care for all Americans gets a big boost, and costs decline.
Sounds good. But it won’t be easy.
In fact, many hurdles stand in the way. Only about 8% of the nation’s 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians currently use the kind of common computerized record-keeping systems that Obama envisions for the whole nation. And some experts say that serious concerns about patient privacy must be addressed first. Finally, the country suffers a dearth of skilled workers necessary to build and implement the necessary technology.
“The hard part of this is that we can’t just drop a computer on every doctor’s desk,” said Dr. David Brailer, former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, who served as President Bush’s health information czar from 2004 to 2006. “Getting electronic records up and running is a very technical task.”
It also won’t come cheap. Independent studies from Harvard, RAND and the Commonwealth Fund have shown that such a plan could cost at least $75 billion to $100 billion over the ten years they think the hospitals would need to implement program.
That’s a huge amount of money — since the total cost of the stimulus plan is estimated to cost about $800 billion, the health care initiative would be one of the priciest parts to the plan.
The biggest cost will be paying and training the labor force needed to create the network. Luis Castillo, senior vice president of Siemens Healthcare, a company that designs health care technology, said the laborers will have the extremely difficult task of designing a a system that “thinks like a physician.”
“Doctors cannot spend hours and hours learning a new system,” said Castillo. “It needs to be a ubiquitous, ‘anytime, anywhere’ solution that has easily accessible data in a simple-to-use Web-based application.”
But highly skilled health information technology professionals are as rare as they come, and many IT workers will need to be trained as health technology experts.
Early government estimates showed about 212,000 jobs could be created from this program, but Brailer said there simply aren’t that many Americans who are qualified.
Furthermore, ensuring the privacy of patients’ records in a nationalized computer network will be tricky. There are obvious concerns about hackers and system failures. And new online health record systems, such as Google Health are not currently subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the national health privacy law.
“HIPAA was never intended for the digital age, because the laws never anticipated the emergence of Web-based records,” said Brailer. “Congress can pass one of numerous policy proposals for change, it’s just a question if they have the will to do that.”
The Obama transition operation declined a request to elaborate on Obama’s proposal. The president-elect said Thursday in a speech on the economy that the benefits of a modernized national health record system go beyond just cost savings.
“This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests,” said Obama. “It just won’t save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs — it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system,” he added.
Still, compared to the $2 trillion a year that the industry spends, the $100 billion experts say it may cost to implement Obama’s plan is a drop in the bucket.
“We must reduce waste to become more efficient” said Brailer.
The savings of such a plan could be substantial. Brailer estimates that a fully computerized health record system could save the industry $200 billion to $300 billion a year.
That could ultimately slow the rapid rise of health care premiums, which have cut into Americans’ paychecks. While wages are rising at a rate of around 3% a year, health care costs are growing at about three times that rate.
“Obama’s support for electronic medical records is one of the key efforts of health reform that actually will deliver lower costs for hard-working American families,” said Larry McNeely, a health care advocate at U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “Long-term savings can’t happen unless we have 21st century health information technology.”
Massachusetts has developed a plan to fully computerize records at its 14,000 physicians’ offices by 2012 and its 63 hospitals by 2014. After a pilot program, the state legislature estimates it will cost about $340 million to build the statewide computer system, with a cost of about $2 million per hospital.
“[Obama’s] timeframe is very ambitious, but there is a need to be able to track data on patients and talk across providers and health care systems,” said Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, Secretary of Health and Human Services for Massachusetts. “The program will allow for greater patient safety.”
Some say some of the hard work has begun. The Bush administration laid much of the groundwork for the program, leading to several pilot programs in a handful of states, as well as a standardization of medical records.
“The whole structure has already been developed,” said Stephen Schoenbaum, executive director of The Commonwealth Fund’s commission on a high performance health system. “It’s feasible to at least make a lot of progress on this in the next five years.” 
The External Connections Monitor html table is created from a korn shell script that runs command line calls to /dev/tcp querying the IP and Ports.
The is the output ‘html’ table created from a korn shell script that uses external calls to the emanager’s command line utility called em-cmdline-client.sh . This could be run every half hour and html file uploaded to the web portal.
I’m on my 3rd install of JavaCAPS6 using JCAPS Installer.
First issue – Port 12000 was in use from a prior JCAPS513 installation. The JCAPS513 repository was running, and had started automatically. I cannot see it in under services,so it must be starting up in the registry. I killed the process to get the JCAPS6 installation going again.
Second Issue – When JCAPS6 was installing it asked for the location of the JDK. I tried to get away with pointing it to my 1.5 jre installation. I was able to get away with this for 5.1.3 – but not for JCAPS6. Installed the full JDK1.6. After making sure the port 12000 was free and the full JDK1.6 was installed the installation reported success.
Next step was to double click the start-repository icon – repository started up fine.
Next I opened I.E and typed url=> http://localhost:12000. Once in the JCAPS uploader, I selected all the sars needed [HL7OTDLibrary251,LDAPeWay,HL7eWay,etc.]. I previously had to unzip these into individual .sars.
Next we open the NetBeans IDE (start_nethbeans icon) and install the plugins..
Start repository. Start Netbeans IDE, click Tools, Plugins, then the tab called available plugins (these are the sars you uploaded before), select all, click install.
Next create a top level project, then you can import Jcaps513 sub projects under that project. This went pretty smooth.
**NOTE: I had an issue when installing JCAPS6. My JCAPS513 repository kept auto starting, and caused conflicts with JCAPS6 installation.
I had to remove reference using msconfig (start-up tab), go to Service tab and un-check Repository name (w/ manufacturer Seebeyond Technology Corp).
