August 2009

Files prove Pentagon is profiling reporters

Contrary to the insistence of Pentagon officials this week that they are not rating the work of reporters covering US forces in Afghanistan, Stars and Stripes has obtained documents that prove that reporters' coverage is being graded as "positive," "neutral" or "negative." Moreover, the documents — recent confidential profiles of the work of individual reporters prepared by a Pentagon contractor — indicate that the ratings are intended to help Pentagon image-makers manipulate the types of stories that reporters produce while they are embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The new revelations of the Pentagon's attempts to shape war coverage come as senior Defense Department officials are acknowledging increasing concern over recent opinion polls showing declining popular American support for the Afghan war. The American Federation of Radio & Television Artists Wednesday joined the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and other groups to condemn the US military's actions.

ACLU files lawsuit on border laptop searches

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a lawsuit demanding that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) release details of its policy that allows the agency to search travelers' laptops at U.S. borders without suspicion of wrongdoing. The ACLU's lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is an effort to get CBP to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that the civil liberties group filed in June about the laptop-search policy. The agency has not supplied any information, although the FOIA law requires it to give a response within 30 days.

San Francisco's DataSF.org Won't be a DC Copycat, CIO Says

San Francisco CIO Chris Vein and federal CIO Vivek Kundra seem to be reading from the same script when explaining the virtues of open government and data transparency. But their vision for the future doesn't always run parallel. Vein says DataSF.org -- a newly launched Web portal "clearinghouse" for data sets published by San Francisco's city/county government -- will likely evolve differently than a similar Web portal that Kundra launched last year when he was the CIO of Washington (DC).

Connected Nation Story Wins Journalism Award

Capitolbeat, the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, has announced its awards for the best statehouse reporting in the country. Fiona Morgan of the Independent Weekly in North Carolina won 2nd place in the In-depth Reporting category for newspapers under 75,000 circulation and weeklies for her reporting on Connected Nation's entrance to North Carolina. Her Dec 2008 article chronicles the state's telephone and cable industry associations hiring of Connected Nation, a nationwide nonprofit, to map the availability of broadband services statewide for an undisclosed fee.

Health Care Still the Summer's Dominant Story

Despite the emergence of several major international stories - including an election in war-ravaged Afghanistan and the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber, the public continued to be focused on domestic news - particularly the ongoing debate over health care reform. Fully 45% say they followed health care developments more closely than any other story last week. That's about the same level as the previous week (46% most closely) and twice the percentage that say they followed reports about the condition of the economy most closely (21%). Using a slightly different measure, half say they very closely followed news about the economy (50%) or the health care debate (49%), according to the latest weekly News Interest Index survey, conducted August 21-24 for the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Several significant events overseas attracted far less attention.

Investors Like Health IT

The progress of turning paper medical records into digital copy has been slow. Blame it on a long, confusing and -- perhaps most of all -- costly process for many medical practices. Enter the government's stimulus money. On average, it cost approximately $30,000 per doctor to implement electronic medical records; if they qualify for stimulus funds, doctors will receive $44,000 in grants in the following five years. "Some investors that are looking at a menu of health care options, look at health care IT because it is more attractive," says Todd Warner, a software and Internet infrastructure analyst at Stifel Nicolaus. "No matter what's going on, the health IT stocks aren't based on the ebbs and flows of the health care reform. You know the money is there."

Wearable radio devices to transform home health monitoring

Telemedicine is hardly a new discipline - for more than a decade, hospitals and doctors have been keeping tabs on patients in their homes using devices from companies such as Philips and CardioCom, connected to POTS lines via dialup modems or, more recently, broadband connections, to do daily checkups on chronically ill patients. With the advent of new radio devices that are small enough to be worn by patients and capable of providing real-time diagnostic information, a new category of telemedicine is emerging. Doctors and hospitals will be able to have a constant stream of diagnostic information about patients with heart problems, diabetes, blood disorders and much more. The health care and technology industries are gearing up to see this technology widely deployed, even as business models for how it all happens are still developing.

How Web Changes Patient-Doctor Relationship

Immediately following a doctor's diagnosis, nearly half of consumers report using a search engine to further research their alleged conditions, according to a new study conducted by About.com. What is driving this behavior? Disconcertingly, only 35% of consumers say they completely trust their doctor's diagnoses. For better or worse, "the patient-doctor visits are no longer just one way conversations but rather on-going dialogues," the study concludes. "People are going online to educate themselves and confirm doctors' diagnosis."

CDC: Gamers At Risk For Health Problems, Dream Pharma Target Market

Online video games could become the perfect advertising medium to reach overweight, out-of-shape, introverted, aggressive, depressed adults age 35 and older. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released findings this week suggesting that habits developed in youth appear to follow people into adulthood. The study, based on a 2006 online survey of 552 adults between the ages of 19 and 90 who lived in Seattle/Tacoma and western Washington state, suggests that children and teenage video game players tend to become physically inactive adults with health problems.

iPhone app issue shows mobile Net growing pains

At one level, the fracas about Google's stymied attempt to bring Google Voice to the iPhone is a squabble about who gets to control the phone's user interface. But in the bigger picture, it's a fight that was destined to happen as the free-wheeling ways of the Internet arrive in a handset-sized package. The way Shankland sees things shaking out, Google and its kind will prevail in the long run, for good or ill. As with the Internet on computers, it'll mostly be up to us to decide what applications to use. Today's kerfuffle shows that we're going through mobile Web growing pains right now as major players seek to establish their brands and seize the customer relationships, but ultimately this particular adolescence will pass.

Benton

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