Case Study: Saving Money by Analyzing Trends

Like any other business today, ThedaCare, a Wisconsin-based health-care company with five hospitals and more than 20 primary-care clinics, is swimming in data. Nuggets about patients' demographic features, diseases, and treatments are buried in electronic medical records. Payroll tracks the hours employees spend working overtime or on call. The billing system knows how many patients have private insurance and how many rely on government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which reimburse ThedaCare at a lower rate.

Even from these few examples, you can start to see how it would be possible for ThedaCare to spot trends and deal with them in a more cost-effective way?if those tidbits of information weren't trapped in isolated programs and databases.

Brian Veara, ThedaCare's manager of decision resources, worked for retail and manufacturing companies before he moved into health care more than eight years ago. Health care lags about 10 years behind other industries when it comes to information technology, he says, so he wasn't surprised to find how long it took to produce reports. But he knew something needed to change.

A major part of the solution: "business intelligence" software. That's a type of program that pulls together information from disparate systems, builds relationships between data sets, and lets users explore the information by searching and clicking around through tables, charts, and graphs.

In June 2009, Veara bought a business intelligence program called QlikView from Qlik Technologies. The company has been around since 1993, but until about five years ago, computers were too sluggish to make its software model feasible or affordable for most customers. QlikView's "in-memory" approach means it stores a copy of all the aggregated data in a computer's local memory instead of going back to retrieve information from the disparate systems as needed, so customers can work with it in real time. Among QlikTech's other customers are fire departments, newspapers, consumer products companies, and insurance providers. Individuals can download a free version of the software; some people connect it to their iTunes music library to analyze their listening habits.

Before QlikView, ThedaCare produced about 9,000 reports a month, ranging from descriptions of the patient population (meant for internal use) to assessments of ThedaCare's performance that the government could compare with state and national averages. Every time Veara wanted to pull information for one of those reports, he needed to know ahead of time exactly what he was looking for and where to find it. Asking the wrong question might yield irrelevant information or even a blank document. And each request could take up to 15 minutes to process.

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Gartner: SSDs will reach mainstream prices in 2012

According to a report by PCWorld, Gartner believes solid-state drives will finally reach mainstream pricing next year -- a proposition that has taunted hardware buffs for eons. The research outfit estimates that by the second half of 2012, mainstream flash-based storage drives will reach $1 per gigabyte, putting them well within the grasp of most consumers and not just well-funded enthusiasts.

Intel's current-generation 80GB 320 series SSD (essentially an updated second-generation X25-M) is priced at $180, or about $2.25 per gigabyte. That price only goes up when you start looking at models outfitted with SATA 6Gb/s, such as Intel's 510 series or OCZ's Vertex 3 line. By comparison, it's not difficult to find 1TB and 2TB hard drives for less than a dime per gigabyte.

While SSDs have become more affordable over the last few years, Gartner expects NAND flash prices to fall by 30% this year followed by another 36% next year. Those declines are attributed to the rise of tablets and other electronics that ship with flash storage. Not only are consumers buying more flash chips, but they're demanding higher capacity solutions. Both are causing manufacturers to increase their output, which will eventually push prices down.

Although we're mostly excited about buying cheap SSDs for our desktops and notebooks, Gartner notes that those types of drives account for a small chunk NAND flash market. While flash cards and USB drives represented 38% of the NAND bit consumption in 2010, SSDs only accounted for 7.9%. With prices on the decline, that figure is expected to double to 15.9% by next year. How cheap will SSDs have to get before you're willing to take the plunge?

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/43752-gartner-ssds-will-reach-mainstream-prices-in-2012.html

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How people use check-in services, illustrated

Beyond has published an infographic that details the findings of their research into social location applications.

It?s no surprise to learn that after years of Foursquare and quite some time with Facebook Places in the wild, its only hardcore early adopters using these services with the privacy concerns they inherently bring.

I?ve only used Facebook Places once or twice in locations away from my home, and more public alternatives don?t appeal at all. Do you use social location apps?

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/05/12/how-people-use-check-in-services-illustrated/

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Budget Graphics Card Round-up: 13 Sub-$150 Boards Tested

In the last few months, AMD and Nvidia released what will likely be the last additions to their current generation graphics cards: the Radeon HD 6990 and GeForce GTX 590. Although both products deliver incredible performance for single card solutions, they are reserved for the most demanding users with pricing set around $700.

For all the glory that comes with owning a dual-GPU video card, the reality is most hardware buffs don't have the coin to fund their desires. Instead, the typical system builder settles for a graphics solution in the $100 to $250 territory, which generally provides enough performance to play any modern game with reasonable settings.

Fortunately for cash-strapped gamers, intense competition between AMD and Nvidia ensures that the sub-$200 market is well stocked. Along with wallet-friendly HD 6000 and GTX 500 products, many older mainstream cards have been demoted to the budget bracket. We'll compare the most relevant ones in this review.

Folks looking to spend around $150 have several options to choose from, no matter what camp they root for. Nvidia's current-gen GeForce GTX 550 Ti is at $145, while the GeForce GTX 460 (768MB) is now only $150, down from $200 last summer. On the other side of the fence, AMD recently released the Radeon HD 6790 at $155.

Stepping down a level, AMD recently launched its Radeon HD 6770 at $120 and the HD 6750 at $110. It should be noted that both cards are rebadged versions of the original HD 5770 and HD 5750, barring a firmware update that adds support for HDMI 1.4a as well as hardware-accelerated Blu-ray 3D video playback.

AMD's Radeon HD 6670 also occupies the $100 territory, though it's not a rebadged 5670. The HD 6670 is based on a new core codenamed "Turks," which has a higher clocked GPU that boasts a more complex configuration. Meanwhile, the $80 Radeon HD 6570 and $55 HD 6450 are also updated versions of their predecessors.

Nvidia relies on its eight-month-old GeForce GTX 450 to compete with the Radeon HD 6770 ($120), HD 6750 ($110) and HD 6670 ($100). Priced at $110, the GTX 450 represents Nvidia's only offering in this bracket, and the company feels no urgency to change this because again, AMD's HD 6770 and 6750 are renamed 5000 series cards.

At the bottom of the pile, Nvidia's GeForce GT 430 will square off with the Radeon HD 6570 in the $70 range, while the $60 GT 520 will be pitted against the HD 6450.

Before placing your bets, we should note that AMD won our previous sub-$200 showdown. In fact, Nvidia notoriously focuses on the performance market and it hasn't recently had much of a presence in this price range, so it'll be interesting to see if the green team can pull an upset this time around.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/review/392-budget-gpu-comparison/

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They Draw & Cook adds some color to cooking with illustrated recipes

They Draw & Cook is a fun concept for a recipe site. Instead of wordy, textual recipes, They Draw & Cook describes recipes using illustrations, varying between comic-style images and infographic-style images.

Most of the illustrated recipes are user-generated, with those who consider themselves both foodies and designers able to submit their work through the site. If you?re a fan of the style, there?s also a relatively cheap book published by the people behind the site.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/05/12/they-draw-cook-adds-some-color-to-cooking-with-illustrated-recipes/

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Hardware 23 - Socket to 'em

Hardware 23 - Socket to 'em

Posted on 9th May 2011 at 11:49 by Podcast with 4 comments

This week, Clive, Harry, Paul and Antony discuss Folding@home, going through what it's all about and what hardware you should be using to generate the most points per day.

Also on the agenda are some of our thoughts about factory-overclocked graphics cards. We discuss where in the market these provide real value, and when you?d be better of trading up to a better GPU altogether.

Harry also treats us all to a very long comprehensive run down of the current state of the SSD market, and what developments we can expect to see there over the next few months.

Finally, we take a look at AMD?s soon to be retired Phenom brand, and discuss what AMD got right and wrong with this chip-generation. We also take a look back at the conclusions we drew from our first experiences with Phenom-branded processors, and how our thoughts back then compare to our thoughts now.


As always, we've also set up our weekly competition, the lucky winner of which will walk away with a Speedlink Strike FX wireless gamepad. This gamepad is compatible with both the PC and PlayStation 3, and functions at distances of up to 10m.

As ever, the bit-tech hardware podcast features music by Brad Sucks, and was recorded on Shure microphones. You can download the podcast direct, listen in-browser or subscribe through iTunes using the links below. Also, be sure to let us know your thoughts about the discussion in the forums.

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Critical Letter By Catholics Cites Boehner On Policies

But now Mr. Boehner is coming in for a dose of the same kind of harsh criticism previously leveled at some Democrats ? including President Obama ? who have been honored by Catholic universities: the accusation that his policies violate basic teachings of the Catholic Church.

More than 75 professors at Catholic University and other prominent Catholic colleges have written a pointed letter to Mr. Boehner saying that the Republican-supported budget he shepherded through the House will hurt the poor, the elderly and the vulnerable, and that he therefore has failed to uphold basic Catholic moral teachings.

?Mr. Speaker, your voting record is at variance from one of the church?s most ancient moral teachings,? the letter says. ?From the apostles to the present, the magisterium of the church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.?

The letter writers criticize Mr. Boehner?s support for a budget that cut financing for Medicare, Medicaid and the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program, while granting tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations. They call such policies ?anti-life,? a particularly biting reference because the phrase is usually applied to politicians and others who support the right to abortion.

Michael Steel, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner, responded by e-mail: ?The speaker will be delivering a personal, nonpolitical message at the Catholic University of America that he hopes will speak to all members of the graduating class, regardless of their backgrounds or affiliations. He is deeply honored to have been invited by C.U.A. to address the school?s graduating class, and is looking forward to receiving an honorary degree from the only Catholic college in our country that is chartered by Catholic bishops.?

Mr. Steel included a link to an editorial in a student newspaper on the campus exulting that finally the senior class could ?brag? that the university had nabbed the third-most powerful politician in the country as commencement speaker.

The choice of graduation speakers at Catholic universities has grown more fraught in recent years. The bishops advised that Catholic universities should not honor Catholics who had publicly disagreed with church teachings. But the resulting controversies so far have mostly been about more liberal-leaning Catholics who have taken positions in favor of access to abortion or gay rights, in opposition to the church.

When Mr. Obama, who is not Catholic, was invited to receive an honorary degree at the University of Notre Dame in 2009, there was an outcry from politically conservative Catholics because of his support for abortion rights. A few bishops said the university should withdraw the invitation, but the university administration held firm. Protesters showed up to picket.

A spokesman for Catholic University, Victor Nakas, said that the decision to invite Mr. Boehner and give him an honorary degree was made by the university?s president, John Garvey, and approved by its trustees, which includes prominent bishops and cardinals.

As for the issues the professors raised in their letter, Mr. Nakas said, ?There are diverse viewpoints on these questions not only within our university but also within the Catholic community.?

Stephen F. Schneck, one of the professors who drafted the letter, says he wanted to stake out a different approach. Mr. Schneck, the director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies, at Catholic University, noted that the letter did not ask the university to revoke the invitation.

?We are going out of our way to say, ?Welcome to the Catholic University,? ? Mr. Schneck said, ? ?but we don?t agree with you.? ?

The professors point out that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops also recently issued a letter expressing concerns about budget cuts in programs that aid the poor.

The letter to Mr. Boehner is signed by professors at Xavier University, from which Mr. Boehner graduated, and the University of Dayton, both in Mr. Boehner?s home state of Ohio, as well as at universities like Fordham, Marquette, Notre Dame and Santa Clara.

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Obama Seeks Reset in Arab World

Administration officials said the president was eager to use Bin Laden?s death as a way to articulate a unified theory about the popular uprisings from Tunisia to Bahrain ? movements that have common threads but also disparate features, and have often drawn sharply different responses from the United States.

The first sign of this ?reset? could come as early as next week, when Mr. Obama plans to give a speech on the Middle East in which he will seek to put Bin Laden?s death in the context of the region?s broader political transformation. The message, said one of his deputy national security advisers, Benjamin J. Rhodes, will be that ?Bin Laden is the past; what?s happening in the region is the future.?

?The spotlight is understandably always on whatever country things are going worst in,? Mr. Rhodes said. ?What?s important is to step back and say, ?The trajectory of change is in the right direction.? ?

Still, although Bin Laden?s killing may provide a rare moment of clarity, it has less obvious implications for American strategic calculations in the region. Some administration officials argue that the heavy blow to Al Qaeda gives the United States the chance to be more forward-leaning on political change because it makes Egypt, Syria and other countries less likely to tip toward Islamic extremism.

But other senior officials note that the Middle East remains a complicated place: the death of Al Qaeda?s leader does not erase the terrorist threat in Yemen, while countries like Bahrain are convulsed by sectarian rivalries that never had much to do with Bin Laden?s radical message. The White House said it was still working through the policy implications country by country.

Even before the Bin Laden raid, officials said, Mr. Obama was casting about for ways to tie together events in the Middle East. White House officials had weighed a speech in which the president would link the upheaval to the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations ? a process that seems, if anything, even more paralyzed after the recent agreement between the Palestinian Authority and the militant group Hamas.

Given that, officials said, the current plan is for the president to keep his focus on the broader changes in the Arab world, rather than to present a specific new plan for reviving the peace talks.

From the earliest days of protests in Tunisia, Mr. Obama has balanced his desire to paint an overarching Arab narrative with the need to evaluate each country on its own terms. He has juggled the same idealistic and realistic impulses that have marked his approach to domestic issues.

Interviews with several administration officials suggest that the tensions in his Middle East policy are less the product of a debate among advisers than of a tug of war within the president himself.

In Egypt, for example, Mr. Obama?s advisers say he decided to push for President Hosni Mubarak?s exit early on, against the advice of aides, after watching Mr. Mubarak?s defiant televised address on a screen in the White House Situation Room. Even then, they said, he feared that the dreams of young activists, like the Google executive Wael Ghonim, would be let down by the fitful transition to democracy.

One of his aides said that when he asked Mr. Obama to predict the outcome, the president said: ?What I want is for the kids on the street to win and for the Google guy to become president. What I think is that this is going to be long and hard.?

That has proved even more true in Libya, where Mr. Obama reluctantly threw his support behind a NATO-led bombing campaign that has bogged down. Libya has become a major preoccupation for him, necessitating daily meetings, in which officials said he was being briefed on the targets for airstrikes and on diplomatic efforts to pry Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from power.

Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, said Mr. Obama was as deeply immersed in all the Arab countries undergoing political upheaval. ?The president, in each of these cases, has really been the central intellectual force in these decisions, in many cases, designing the approaches,? he said.

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Carcassonne iPad Review

Carcassonne iPad Review

Posted on 7th May 2011 at 10:18 by David Hing with 9 comments

The iPad is an ideal platform for board games. It's large enough for more than one person to sit round it for a local game without feeling stupid, and its touchscreen is sizeable enough to make it practical to move pieces, even if you have chubby fingers. Thus, it was only a matter of time before classic board games such as Carcassonne jumped to the platform.

The game itself is easy to learn, and is mostly based around the idea of developing the areas around the titular French town. At higher levels, though, the strategies and tactics involved can become enormously complex, although this iPad version eases you in with spoken tutorials and a full digital manual. It takes very little time to get to grips with the mechanics, with only a few references back to the documentation, and the interface is kept gloriously pristine.

There are a few different basic game-types, including a Solitaire mode that follows slightly adapted rules to the core game, plus online, local and AI matches.


The developers have done an excellent job in rendering the tiles and pieces, managing to retain the feel of a board game while still making the most of the digital format. None of the graphics feel out of place and everything emulates the physical version perfectly, with a decently tactile quality provided by the ability to drag pieces around the board.

As a game itself, Carcassonne is excellent to play with a couple of friends sat around the iPad. It wouldn't be completely out of the question to use this instead of setting out a full boxed copy of the game, as it?s so easy to pass the iPad around a circle. Of course, this version will never completely replicate the physical version, but it's solid enough to at least sit on par with it.


Online matches are a slightly more troublesome affair, however. The app apparently match-makes according to skill, but it was hard to tell whether or not this was happening, as most of the games ended with an opponent mysteriously disappearing the second it looked like the game might not be going their way.

We found ourselves mostly playing against the AI opponents supplied with the game, which are broken down into Easy, Strong, Weird, Evil and Simple behaviour types. Although it isn't always clear how the Strong AI improves over the Easy AI, the Evil AI can teach you a couple of nasty tricks if you're paying attention. You?ll often find yourself cursing and softly swearing at.

Verdict
This is a beautifully realised portable version of a very well constructed board game. Even if you haven't played the original, this is a brilliant introduction that's much cheaper than buying the full boxed version. Recommended!

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Workplace Robots Need a Better View

A coming wave of industrial robots will be smart enough to work safely alongside humans in many different settings, says Rodney Brooks, a professor emeritus of robotics at MIT and a founder of iRobot.

Industrial robots have evolved little since the first ones appeared in General Motors factories about 50 years ago, Brooks says. Most workplace robots?such as those used in car manufacturing?are designed to perform simple, repetitive tasks. And they lack the sensory smarts to work safely alongside humans.

"I think there's room for a real revolution by putting sensors and computation into industrial robots," says Brooks. "What if the robots were smarter and they could go into smaller companies and be easier for ordinary people to use?"

If manufacturing robots could recognize their human coworkers and interact with them safely Brooks says they could be used in many more manufacturing environments, assisting with repetitive and physically demanding manual tasks.

In 2008, Brooks founded a new company, called Heartland Robotics, to develop robots for manufacturing. The company has said that its robots will be intelligent, adaptable, and inexpensive. But the company is still in stealth mode, and hasn't revealed what technologies these robots will use.

In the last few years, robotics researchers have made progress in machine vision, due in part to the falling cost of computer power, and the photo and image resources that can be pulled from the Web and used to train computer vision systems to recognize different objects. However, Brooks says, giving machines more human-like vision remains one of the biggest challenges to the development of more practical robots.

"Perception is really, really hard. For robots, I think it's largely unsolved," says Brooks. "Image-based recognition has worked surprisingly well, [but] it can't do the recognition that a three-year-old child can do."

Commercial machine vision systems are still usually focused on a narrow task. For example, some cars now come equipped with a system that can identify pedestrians and other vehicles, even in a cluttered scene. The system, developed by Mobileye, based in Israel, is connected to an onboard computer that applies the brakes if a collision seems imminent.

"This is the first wide-scale, highly demanding use of computer vision," says Amnon Shashua, the Sachs professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a cofounder of Mobileye.

Shashua says the company's computer vision system works well because it only has to identify a handful of objects. But he hopes that within the next five years, the system will be able to reliably recognize almost everything within a scene. "There are at least 1,000 object classes you need to know in an image to at least do semi-autonomous driving," including signs, lights, guard rails, poles, bridges, exits, and more, he said during a symposium on artificial intelligence at MIT last week.

Mobileye is developing specialized hardware to support the specific demands of rapid image recognition. "There's still a long way to go to build hardware that is efficient, low cost, low power, that can do very complex computer vision," Shashua adds.

Better machine vision systems might lead to significant advances in robotics. "How we deploy our robots is limited by what we can do with perception, so improvements in perception will lead them to be smarter and have modicums of common sense," says Brooks.

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