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Hospitals Are Mining Patients’ Credit Card Data to Predict Who Will Get Sick – Businessweek
Replace credit card with your Google data and imagine your online habits being pushed analysed to send you Google Now alerts and that you just might form a picture of healthcare a few years from now, especially considering the recent foray of the major mobile OSes into healthcare.
Also, Google did try using search data to make predictions with Google Flu.
Author: Aditya
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Healthcare links 07/09/2014
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Thinking about the next iPhone
The rumour mill is really heating up, and there have been quite a few leaks showing a larger iPhone. Healthkit is also getting more features in the new betas, including built in support for step counting.
What will be more interesting this time will be what Apple does with the internals, particularly the SoC and camera. On the SoC front, we’ve been stuck on the 28nm node for almost a couple of years, and they’ve already played the 64-bit card to improve performance last year. Maybe they’ll astound everyone by announcing that the new SoC (A8?) is fabricated on Intel’s facilities on their next-gen 14nm process. In fact, even using Intel’s mature 22nm process would be pretty revolutionary. There have been regular rumours of such partnerships over the last few years, so maybe this is the year of the switch?
On the camera front, the decreasing thickness of the iPhones will surely limit the sensor size & optics. The 5s was probably the limit for the 8MP sensor size. This is going to be a really interesting area as Apple has thus far never traded off device aesthetics for camera specs.
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The Reasonable Man
If you think about it, the reasonable man actually adapts himself to the unreasonable man. After all, the world in which he resides is pretty much shaped by the unreasonable one.
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Switching to Celsius in Google Now on desktop Chrome
I had this vexing issue where the Google Now notification would show the temperature in Fahrenheit on my desktop Chrome browser notifications. It seems that this is a known bug, and is not fixed properly. The workaround that did the trick for me (as highlighted in this comment) was to switch to Fahrenheit in Google Now on the mobile app and then switch back to Celsius again. The desktop notification finally started displaying the temperature in Celsius. A very silly issue, and a reminder that practically all the OSes (both mobile & desktop) are now being developed in a country that does not follow the metric system.
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Test post from Fargo
This is a test post from Dave Winer’s Fargo outliner
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A month with Windows Phone 8.1 on the Lumia 720
I installed the Windows Phone 8.1 Preview on my Lumia 720 as soon as it was out and the new features bring it up to par with Android and iOS. While the overall experience was pretty positive, there were a few downsides. Most notably, the battery life seemed to take a hit. Previously, the phone used to last 2 days comfortably on a single charge, but the 8.1 update had me reaching for the charger well before the end of the second day. That said, the 2000 mAh battery on the Lumia 720 ensures that you can comfortably use it heavily throughout a single day and not worry about running out of juice even with the 8.1 update.
The 8.1 update also pretty much nullifies the utility of the notification centre. So, if you were accustomed to using the notification centre to view facebook notifications without installing the facebook (as buggy as ever), then you’re out of luck. Of course, since the final Windows Phone 8.1 update is not rolled out for most of the phones, we can expect the situation to improve once the apps are updated to take advantage of the action centre and better integrate with the 8.1 update.
Apart from this, I also noticed issues with the kid corner feature. There were times when the phone used to freeze on the kid corner after bringing it out of my pocket and only a soft reset would fix the issue. Disabling the kid corner seemed to fix the issue. There have also been issues with the Exchange mail not updating properly and showing error messages within the mail app. Whatsapp also has issues with the action centre, and the clearing the notifications did not update the live tile or glance\home screen counter. In fact Whatsapp was temporarily pulled from the Windows Store, but is again available albeit showing a warning if you are on Windows Phone 8.1.
Cortana is also a pretty useful addition and speech recognition is certainly better than Siri for Indian accents, and almost as good as Google voice. The only odd bit is that the quiet hours feature is available only when Cortana is enabled, and that requires you to switch the phone region and language to US.
At the end of the day, the Windows Phone 8.1 update is a solid one and the new features outweigh the hiccups which are sure to be fixed in the final build and Nokia’s Cyan update. Moreover, the 8.1 update also takes care of limited storage space on Windows Phones as it allows you to use SD cards as an extension of internal storage and install apps, download content and store music, images & videos on it. It is interesting to see Microsoft take the very opposite approach of Google who opted to practically nuke the utility of external storage with the KitKat update. Plus, with the developer preview program, WIndows Phone users can get the latest OS releases without depending on OEMs or carriers a la iOS, and very much unlike the situation with Android.
Microsoft has in fact leapfrogged Android and iOS in a few key areas with the 8.1 update, and the future sure looks interesting with iOS 8 loosening a lot of restrictions.
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Why didn’t Chris Lynn fall on the boundary rope while making the best catch in cricketing history?
In case you were wondering…
Also, would make for a very interesting exam question…Answer by Mahek Mody:
Let's start with a slight detour – There is a very famous (& I think very cool) physics fact about pole vault. When a pole vaulter jumps a high bar, her Center of Gravity (CG) need not go as high as the bar she needs to clear. In other words, at the top of the jump the pole vaulter needs to go over the bar and not her CG. To achieve this the pole vaulter arches her back forwards or backwards to be in a situation where the body is clear of the bar but the CG passes under for the most optimal jump. The idea being that Newton's laws only dictate the trajectories of the CG and not the entire body.
Lynn's miraculous falling back within the boundary rope is something similar. After the little stumble he has just before he makes his jump, he has his eyes on the ball. Assess the trajectory of the ball, and it looks something like this –
Now Lynn considers jumping straight up and try get the ball. Is there a chance he can make it? His jumping ability is limited and there is only a limit to which he can raise his CG. He would not have caught the ball.
However, if he jumped and turned back at the same time things could look very different even if the his jumping ability is considered to be the same. As this diagram illustrates –
At this point if a snap was taken it seems as if he would fall on the boundary rope, but he has some angular (spin) momentum on his side which a still would not capture.
He does exactly that makes the catch and after which since his CG is still very much inside the boundary region he can easily use his flexible and agile body to bring his hands inside the boundary rope. Eventually using his hands to safely land well within the boundary.
I am sure Lynn did not go through all this physics in his mind before making the catch, but intuition is a powerful physics engine due to the world experience it has.
Cross posted on my blog – On the Boundary Lynn Catch
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Crazy Dude Builds Fully Automatic Wolverine Claws In His Garage
Just remember that it doesn’t come with Wolverine’s super healing powers…
