For years, tech companies have touted blockchain technology as a means to develop identity systems that are secure and decentralized. The goal is to build a platform that could store information about official data without holding the actual documents or details themselves. Instead of just storing a scan of your birth certificate, for example, a decentralized ID platform might store a…
Tag: Healthcare
The Mars Perseverance Rover’s Parachute Contained a Secret Message
“The huge parachute used by NASA’s Perseverance rover to land on Mars contained a secret message,” reports the Associated Press — thanks to the rover’s puzzle-loving systems engineer Ian Clark. “During a live stream discussing the landing, one Nasa commentator said: ‘Sometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find. So we invite you all to give it a…
FCC Proposes Rules for Emergency Broadband Program To Keep Struggling Families Online
The FCC has taken a major step toward offering financial support for people struggling to pay broadband bills during the pandemic. If approved, the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program could provide $50 per month to millions of households, and more in tribal lands. From a report: The EBBP was created in the budget passed by Congress earlier this year, which earmarked $3.2…
Does Private Equity Investment in Healthcare Benefit Patients? Evidence from Nursing Homes
The summary of a study by National Bureau of Economic Research: The past two decades have seen a rapid increase in Private Equity (PE) investment in healthcare, a sector in which intensive government subsidy and market frictions could lead high-powered for-profit incentives to be misaligned with the social goal of affordable, quality care. This paper studies [PDF] the effects of PE…
IBM Explores Sale of IBM Watson Health
IBM is exploring a potential sale of its IBM Watson Health business, WSJ is reporting, citing people familiar with the matter, as the technology giant’s new chief executive moves to streamline the company and become more competitive in cloud computing. From a report: IBM is studying alternatives for the unit that could include a sale to a private-equity firm or industry…
23andMe Is Going Public As It Pushes Further Into Healthcare
23andMe is becoming a publicly-traded company through a merger with Virgin’s VG Acquisition. Engadget reports: The deal values 23andMe at about $3.5 billion and should give the company the finances it wants to boost its personal healthcare and therapeutics plans. It should have over $900 million in cash, for instance. The merger is expected to close in the second quarter of…
Get inspiration and advice from Paulina’s story—and see how she’s using AI to improve healthcare in Ghana!
Meet Paulina, a final-year medical student exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to solve healthcare delivery problems in West Africa. Read on to see how she’s using what she’s learned from her courses to not only expand educational opportunities in her community, but tackle community health projects through programming and data analysis. I […]
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SpaceX Announces First-Ever All-Civilian Space Flight Crew
Jared Isaacman, an entrepreneur behind a payment processing startup, is funding a multimillion trip to space aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which could be the first-ever orbital flight crewed entirely by non-astronauts. CNN reports: Isaacman, 37, said he will command the mission, which is slated for late-2021 and will see the spacecraft make a “multi-day” trip into Earth’s orbit, according…
New XPrize Challenge: Predicting Covid-19’s Spread and Prescribing Interventions
Slashdot reader the_newsbeagle shares an article from IEEE Spectrum:
Many associate XPrize with a $10-million award offered in 1996 to motivate a breakthrough in private space flight. But the organization has since held other competitions related to exploration, ecology, and education. And in November, they launched the Pandemic Response Challenge, which will culminate in a $500,000 award to be split between two…
DoorDash Is Hiking Customer Fees To Pay For a Law It Helped Write
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In the months since a coalition of app-based gig companies successfully passed Prop 22 in California, exempting themselves from reclassifying their workers as employees, DoorDash has been silently passing costs onto consumers. The company-funded Yes on Prop 22 campaign claimed that not passing the ballot initiative would result in higher prices for consumers,…