Benlog

I meant to mention this a while ago, but I keep forgetting. Amy Wallace at Wired wrote a fantastic piece on how irrational fears of vaccination are putting us all at risk. The feedback to Ms. Wallace has been enormous, and although tilted towards the positive, the negative feedback from the anti-vaccination crowd is insulting, [...]

On many issues, I’m an Apple fanboy. On the issue of the iPhone, less and less. Here’s the short version of the story: Apple produces iTunes, which manages all of your music and videos, and syncs them to your iPod/iPhone. Very cool software, magnificently built, great experience overall. I’ve been using this setup for 6+ [...]

My friends and colleagues might soon wonder if they’re witnessing a kind of metamorphosis in me lately: what’s with the Apple criticism, Ben the Apple Fanboy? It’s true, I work exclusively on Macs (often with Linux running inside VMware for development), and I’ve converted many family and friends to Macs. I use the original iPhone. [...]

John Halamka, renowned CIO of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), is a blogger, and he just added a Creative Commons license after making the following remarks: I want my blog to be used for education, training, and research. I hope that its contents appear in derivative works such as other blogs, websites, and [...]

Health Information Technology is moving along fairly quickly, with the stimulus money and the rise of Personally Controlled Health Records (Indivo/Dossia, Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault). I’m quite optimistic about the future of health data: there is a growing effort to free the data in order to empower patients. And then there are some really boneheaded [...]

Stuart Shieber, the architect of Harvard’s Open Access policy and a colleague at Harvard’s Center for Research on Computation and Society, has started a new blog on open-access academic publishing. Worth keeping an eye on if you want to understand the politics, mechanics, and economics of the issue.

I’m on the Program Committee for a new conference being held at MIT in the Fall, the Engaging Data Forum. A number of fascinating topics around the issues of managing personal electronic information. Of course I’m focused on the security, privacy, and interoperability aspects, but there’s more, including geolocation, collection from portable devices, etc… Send [...]

Creative Commons is holding its third technology summit on June 26th. The previous two have been lots of fun, very productive, with a unique mix of policy-oriented tech folks. Plus, it’s in Italy! How can you go wrong?

At some point in the history of patents, something went a little nutty: it became possible to patent genes themselves. Not “a method for extracting” a gene. Not “a method for synthesizing” a gene. But the gene itself. As a result, a number of biotech companies own human genes. If you want to find out [...]

Major credit goes to Shep Smith of Fox News for this: Fox News is generally right-wing propaganda, but credit is due here, and I completely agree with Shep Smith. It doesn’t matter if it works. We do not torture. Well, we should not torture, because it’s fairly clear now that we did, and that is [...]