June 2013

There’s a lot of attention focused on Project Loon, Google’s ambitious and bureaucracy-defying plan to blanket the Earth with internet signals from high-flying balloons. But there are multiple components to its plan to connect the world’s unconnected, and part of that plan is sitting atop a Soyuz rocket on a launch pad in French Guiana.

The first four satellites of O3b’s broadband constellation are ready to make their journey into medium-Earth orbit (MEO), where they will project spot beams down to some of the planet’s most poorly connected countries: from Rwanda to tiny Pacific islands. The project certainly isn’t Google’s alone. The search giant is part of a long list of investors and banks that forked over $1.18 billion to fund the startup. The others include satellite giant SES, cable operator Liberty Global, investment bank Allen & Company, North Bridge Venture Partners, Satya Capital, and the Development Bank of South Africa. But Google invested in the O3b Networks right as it was getting started in 2008, showing that its interest in finding alternative forms of broadband isn’t a new thing. You’ve heard lately a lot of references to Google connecting the billions of “others” who don’t enjoy internet privileges. Well, if you hadn’t already guessed, O3b stands for “Other 3 billion.”

Electronic health-record systems used in emergency departments are beset with poor data displays, loaded with so many alerts warning of potential patient-safety issues that they can lead to user alert fatigue, and may be generating incorrect physician orders, according to a report by two emergency physicians' study groups. Meanwhile, providers wanting to address these EHR issues are hampered by a lack of research and solid evidence of the extent of the problem with these systems, and by contract provisions with EHR vendors that stymie the free flow of information about system-linked safety concerns, the report authors say.

The groups found that “poor data display is a serious problem with many of today's EDISs,” while “the sheer volume” of alerts that range from the “completely irrelevant to life threatening” can “dull the senses, leading to a failure to react to a truly important warning.” They also found that “an alarming number of clinicians are anecdotally reporting a substantial increase in the incidence of wrong order/wrong patient errors while using the computerized physician order entry component of information systems.” Two study groups from the American College of Emergency Physicians have recommended a program of systemic vigilance over electronic health-record systems used in emergency departments to improve patient safety and enhance quality of care.

[Commentary] Could Big Data have prevented 9/11? Perhaps—Dick Cheney, for one, seems to think so. But let's consider another, far more provocative question: What if 9/11 happened today, in the era of Big Data, making it all but inevitable that all the 19 hijackers had extensive digital histories?

It used to be that one's propensity for terrorism was measured in books or sermons. Today, it's measured in clicks. It's not that books or sermons no longer matter—they still do—it's just today they are consumed digitally, in a way that leaves a trail. And that trail allows us to establish patterns. Are the books you bought on Amazon today more radical than the books you bought last month? If so, you might be a person of interest. The good news—at least to Big Data proponents—is that we don't need to understand what any of these clicks or videos mean. We just need to establish some relationship between the unknown terrorists of tomorrow and the established terrorists of today.

[Commentary] The tech industry faces a dangerous problem — a lack of gender and ethnic diversity that, I think, will lead to increased economic inequality and fewer innovative ideas originating from the Bay Area, the region that produced Google, Tesla, Facebook and more.

The statistics are pretty depressing. Only 3 percent of venture-backed companies were led by all-female teams, while 89 percent were all male. Fewer than 1 percent of those founding teams were led by black founders. Per capita income among blacks in Silicon Valley dropped by 18 percent between 2009 and 2011, while in the rest of the country income for blacks dropped by 4 percent. Income for whites and Asians went up in Silicon Valley over that same period even though it dropped in the rest of the country. I have deep hopefulness about the future of the tech industry, in part because of the conversations people are starting to have about these issues and the work that organizations like Code2040, Black Girls Code and Girls Who Code are doing to create opportunities in tech for women and minorities. We should be enabling those conversations, and supporting the organizations that are seeking solutions, by doing the hard work to understand the root of the problem. It's in the best interest of the companies growing their businesses in this environment and it's in the interest of all of us who care about a 21st century economy built by Internet technology companies.

[Bracy runs Code for All, Code for America's international program]