December 2009

Philly Wireless - Third Times the Charm

[Commentary] Last week Philadelphia announced it hopes to buy the wireless network from a group of local investors who bought it from EarthLink about a year ago. Urban areas are likely to continue to be left out of the lion's share of the broadband stimulus money. And unless someone really fights hard for them, there's a chance they may not benefit much from the FCC's efforts to reform the Universal Service Fund either. Therefore, this proposed exercise may be doubly valuable as a means of tackling the digital divide in urban America.

Nice Thoughts and Naughty Thoughts About Broadband

[Commentary] Trying to figure out who's naughty and nice this time of year can be difficult. Many people are both, and figuring it all out by the end of the week will be quite the challenge.

The business model for news is and always has been broken and Rupert Murdoch can't fix it

In his remarks to the Federal Trade Commission's hearings on Journalism and the Internet, held at the beginning of this month, Rupert Murdoch made some characteristically bold statements about his views on the future of journalism. In Murdoch's world, the new model of journalism is one where people pay for journalism online. Murdoch is right when he asserts that the old model based on classified advertising is a failure, but he is wrong to suggest that people will actually pay for news. They never have paid for general interest news - not really, anyhow - and there's little to suggest that this historical precedent will change.

Forget E-Books: The Future of the Book Is Far More Interesting

[Commentary] Coming soon ... It's the end of the book as we know it, and you'll be just fine. But it won't be replaced by the e-book, which is, at best, a stopgap measure. We are on the verge of re-imagining the book and transforming it something far beyond mere words. Like early filmmakers, some of us will seek new ways to express ourselves through multimedia. Instead of stagnant words on a page we will layer video throughout the text, add photos, hyperlink material, engage social networks of readers who will add their own videos, photos, and wikified information so that these multimedia books become living, breathing, works of art. They will exist on the Web and be ported over to any and all mobile devices that can handle multimedia, laptops, netbooks, and beyond. For the non-fiction author therein lie possibilities to create the proverbial last word on a subject, a one-stop shop for all the information surrounding a particular subject matter.

Basically Every ISP Is Trying to Scare You Into Paying for Internet You Don't Need

Internet service providers often post charts that compare their service plans and the speeds consumers need to perform various activities. But the bottom line is that you have to know your own Internet habits and what kind of speed you really need—don't let your prospective ISP scare you into you paying for more bandwidth you'd actually use. Six Mbps downstream are probably sufficient for most people, unless you've got a bunch of people watching Netflix and downloading music and playing games all at once.

Tablets can't possibly save magazines and newspapers

[Commentary] Shafer can't help but applaud the rush of the magazine and newspaper industry to save itself exploiting a new publishing platform. But all the hoopla reminds him of the hype that greeted previous electronic publishing technologies. Publishers spent hundreds of millions of dollars shoveling print content into videotex, audiotex, fax, CD-ROM technologies, and such proprietary online services as America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, and Ziff Interchange. That's not to say that the tablet has no future. It's just if the past is any guide, the future of the tablet won't look like the prototypes -- any more than Pathfinder turned out to be the future of the Web. It is more likely that some young people at a startup will figure out the highest uses of the tablet form.

HHS Announces New Health IT Workforce Grants

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the availability of two additional grant programs to support the training and development of the skilled workforce required to support broad adoption and use of health information technology (health IT).

These programs are titled Information Technology Professionals in Health Care: Program of Assistance for University-Based Training Programs (University-Based Training Program) andInformation Technology Professionals in Health Care: Competency Examination for Individuals (Competency Examination Program). Authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the grants will work to help strengthen and support the health IT workforce. The new grant programs will award $32 million to establish university-based certificate and advanced degree health IT training programs and $6 million dollars to develop a health IT competency examination program. These awards, together with the previous announced $80 million in workforce program grants , recognize the critical importance of developing a well-trained health IT workforce to support the adoption and meaningful use of health IT.

For the University-Based Training Program, ONC anticipates issuing approximately eight to twelve one-time funding awards to support academic programs that rapidly increase the availability of individuals qualified to serve in specific health IT professional roles requiring university-level training. The training supported by this program will emphasize programs that can be completed by the trainee in one year or less. Awards are for a 39-month project period. Four-year colleges and universities are eligible to apply. Applications are due by Jan. 25, 2010, with final awards expected in March 2010.

For the Competency Examination Program, ONC anticipates issuing a single one-time funding award to support the development and initial administration of a set of health IT competency examinations. The examinations will assess basic competency for individuals trained through short-duration, non-degree health IT programs, and for members of the workforce with relevant experience or other types of training who are seeking to demonstrate their competency in certain health IT workforce roles integral to achieving meaningful use of electronic health information. The award is for a two-year project period. Applications are due by Jan. 25, 2010, and the final award is expected in March 2010.

Bringing the Public Into the HIT Conversation

[Commentary] The Recovery Act called for the creation of two new committees -- the HIT Policy Committee and the HIT Standards Committee. Created in May, 2009, and operating under the Federal Advisory Committee Act rules and regulations, the meetings and deliberations are open to the public. To date seven HIT Policy Committee meetings and eight Standards Committee Meetings have been held. Each committee has heard testimony from the public. These committees have a lot on their plate, and from the outset, we knew that in order to accomplish the scope of work set forth by each committee in a timely manner and be responsive to legislation, workgroups would need to be created. These workgroups bring together a diverse set of subject matter experts and key stakeholders to do research, deliberate and make recommendations to the committees. The workgroups don't prepare final recommendations for the government. To date, 10 workgroups have been created and we've held public workgroup hearings on Certification, Electronic Exchange of Laboratory Data and Adoption. The FACA rules allow workgroup meetings to be closed to the public and the findings from these workgroups are always reported in the full committees, but we want to do more to bring you into the conversation. Beginning January 1, we'll implement a new policy that will open up workgroup meetings to the public unless a closed meeting is clearly in the public interest. The decision to close a meeting will be done on a case by case basis at the written request of the workgroup chair(s) reflecting a majority vote by the membership to hold a closed hearing and a justification to do so. Our goal is to make every meeting open, but if a meeting is closed, we'll report the findings from the meeting on our website and any findings from the meeting will also be reported to the full committee - where anyone can listen to and comment on what the workgroup has to say.

Obama cyber czar choice worries about smartphones, social networking

In choosing Howard Schmidt as cyber czar President Obama has gotten someone who has held a similar job in a previous administration, has varied experience at high-level corporate jobs, was a frequent panelist at security conferences and who has even written a book on defending the Internet. The new cyber czar favors government promotion of education, research and prodding vendors to produce more secure products that will work their way into everyday use. He thinks Internet security is greatly improved since the mid-1990s when he ranked the impact of a foreign cyberattack in the United States at 5 or 6 on a scale of one to 10, with 10 meaning attacks would have no effect. That has improved to 8 or 9 because the number of attack vectors has been reduced. "We have the ability to turn back attacks. We also could shut down systems that might be under attack and bring them internal," he says. Getting cybersecurity considered as important as physical security -- such as protecting planes and ports -- was a hurdle that is being overcome. Schmidt says he realizes the country can't have two No. 1 priorities, but it needs to boost the effort put behind cybersecurity. "The government has recognized that work has to be done. We're getting much closer to having them on equal footing," he says. In past interviews he has said smartphones and other such mobile devices generate the most concern.

With Schmidt in place, who's his deputy?

Now that Howard Schmidt has officially been appointed the cyber coordinator, the next guessing game is how he fills out his staff. Melissa Hathaway, the former senior director for cyberspace for the National Security Council under President Obama, says the cyber coordinator's office is set up to have a coordinator, a deputy and several senior directors who would come from agencies on detail. Multiple sources say the next piece to the puzzle could be a staff member from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Sources say Sameer Bhalotra is a leading candidate to be deputy cyber coordinator. "Sameer interviewed with the White House earlier this year, but I don't think a decision has been made," says one source. Bhalotra has been with the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2007 where he has focused on cybersecurity and leads the committee's cyber study team.

Benton

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