May 2011

The National Black Farmers Association has written the Federal Communications Commission urging the FCC to approve AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile.

NBFA says the transaction will give the combined company the resources to deploy LTE, the most advanced and fastest wireless network technology, to more than 97% of – covering an additional 1 million square miles across the country than current deployment plans allow—creating new jobs and economic growth in the small towns and rural communities where most NBFA members reside.

On May 23, as part of President Obama’s Wireless Innovation and Infrastructure Initiative, we hosted a roundtable discussion at the White House Conference Center with a number of top technology leaders and visionaries representing the transportation and communications industries.

The intent was to explore ways to catalyze innovation through research and development in the arena of emerging broadband wireless technologies and applications aimed at the transportation sector. The transportation component of this initiative, called for in the President’s FY 2012 budget, is called the Wireless Innovation for Transportation (WIN for Transportation) Initiative. This initiative would complement and build upon the Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) ongoing Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) research program. The WIN for Transportation Initiative would provide the USDOT’s ITS Program and its stakeholders the ability to seek new and innovative opportunities to pursue ground-breaking research and development toward deployment of wireless technology applications. It proposes to develop and demonstrate innovative wireless transportation applications that deliver safety, mobility, emergency response, energy, and environmental benefits to passenger, fleet, and freight transportation systems. Part of the roundtable discussion focused on the roles that policy, technology, and applications play in advancing transportation wireless innovation. During this discussion, participants addressed a number of important issues such as standards, availability of open data, the advantages of top-down or bottom-up approaches to accelerating technology innovation, and the importance of the proper driver interface. Participants were encouraged to further share their ideas through our recently announced Request for Information. We also exchanged several ideas as part of the proposed wireless research, technology, testing, and model deployment program.

The Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights has posted proposed changes to rules regarding the disclosure of patients' health information that could give patients more insight into how their information is shared.

The 95-page proposed rule, to be published in the May 31 issue of the Federal Register, proposes changes to the privacy regulations under the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The Civil Rights Office has enforcement authority for the HIPAA privacy rule and said the proposed rule reflects changes mandated by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, or HITECH, which are part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. However, the Civil Rights Office noted that it also is looking to exercise the "more general authority" granted to it through HHS under HIPAA itself. The rule comes less than two weeks after audit reports by HHS' inspector general's office took the Civil Rights Office, the CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to task on what they found to be lagging efforts to enforce HIPAA security provisions and promote health information security.

iPad users aren't stingy with their devices, according to a new usability report by the Nielsen Norman Group focusing on Apple’s tablet. In fact, iPad owners who lived with one or more individuals reported that they shared their iPads freely, unlike the iPhone. The report also illuminated many things we like and don't like about the apps we use on our iPads. For example, the study found that users aren't crazy about using their iPad devices to deal with complicated forms that require lots of user input, especially if those forms are found in non-optimized websites, rather than housed in an app. Users would skip registrations processes rather than deal with inputting information in many cases. The solution to such a problem would be to make forms simpler, requiring less information, and reduce the need for repeat entry of information (so apps that offer to remember login details are better, for example).