Apple Hit With Federal Lawsuit Over iMessage Delivery Issues

Apple’s vanishing iMessages continue to cause trouble, and now the company must answer its former customers in federal court. Christina Bonnington/WIRED

When someone switches to a new phone, they have a reasonable expectation that all the network functionality that worked on their old device—things like messages and phone calls—will continue to work on their new device. Unfortunately for some iOS users who switched to Android devices, Apple’s iMessage blocked them from receiving any more messages from iOS users. The Cupertino company will be heading to federal court over the issue.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh decided that Apple will have to face former iPhone owner Adrienne Moore, who’s seeking judgement in a class-action lawsuit against Apple for interfering with her Verizon service after switching to an Android phone. Moore claims that Apple failed to reveal iOS 5 could interrupt the delivery of messages from other iOS users if she switched to a non-Apple device. Numerous people on Apple’s support forums share similar woes.

In court papers, Apple posits it never promised iMessages or Messages would recognize when a user switched to a different operating system. “Apple takes customer satisfaction extremely seriously, but the law does not provide a remedy when, as here, technology simply does not function as plaintiff subjectively believes it should,” the company says.

This isn’t the first time iOS users have had troubling iMessage issues beyond bothersome system outages. In the past, unlucky iPhone owners whose phones were stolen discovered their iMessages continued to be sent and delivered on their stolen device despite the de-activation of the old phone and re-activation on a new phone. While Apple seems to have resolved issues and expanded messaging functionality across its own platform, there are still problems if you try to switch from Apple to non-Apple hardware.

These problems stem from the fact that iMessage service is tied not just to your Apple ID but also your phone number, and operates over your data connection rather than your carrier’s cellular network (unless the platform detects a temporary lapse in data connectivity). Because of this, if you don’t actively switch off iMessage before heading to another OS like Android or Windows Phone, other iOS users’ handsets still think you’re using the service, and their messages will continue to be delivered over data connections as iMessages. Because your new device can only see messages sent over SMS, those iMessages end up lost in the ether rather than in your messages folder. It’s a problem that goes beyond inconvenience—the perception of unresponsiveness has cost some former iOS users time, money, and respect professionally.

Apple has since established a support page outlining how to avoid the issue by de-registering iMessage on your handset before switching to a new phone, and offering a de-registering process using your phone number. Past fixes, which had mixed results, included deleting and then re-adding iPhone contacts.

Users that stick exclusively with text messages (Settings > Messages > toggle iMessage off) or use a third party messaging platform like Kik or WhatsApp should not experience issues if they hop from OS to OS with new handsets.

The Next Big Thing You Missed: LinkedIn’s Quest to Get a Job for Everyone on Earth

From left, Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. Techonomy

According to LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, the world has about 600 million “knowledge workers”—the professional class that spends much of its workday in front of a computer. Of these, he says, more than half have a profile on LinkedIn.

Yes, he wants to get the other half to join his company’s business-centric social network. But that’s only the start of his ambition, Weiner told an audience of CEOs and entrepreneurs this week at Techonomy, a technology and business conference held this year in Half Moon Bay, California. More than just professionals, Weiner says, he wants to get everyone on LinkedIn—and, in the process, find everyone a job.

“We are in the process of asking ourselves what it would take…to create economic opportunity for the 3 billion people in the global workforce,” Weiner said.

In Silicon Valley, such high-flown rhetoric is standard fare, and no doubt talk of such massive growth pleases shareholders. But even just as a thought experiment, LinkedIn’s utopian goal raises interesting questions about the relationship between transparency and economic growth. What does the global economy look like if everyone were on LinkedIn?

In the same way that Facebook is based around the concept of the “social graph”—real-life social connections mapped through a digital network—Weiner says that LinkedIn today is built around the “professional graph.” To reach its goal, however, he says LinkedIn must transform itself into the “economic graph.”

‘We are in the process of asking ourselves what it would take to create economic opportunity for the 3 billion people in the global workforce.’

In practice, he says, that means a LinkedIn profile for all of the world’s 3 billion workers, not just white-collar professionals. He wants every company in the world—a number he puts at 70 million—to have a profile on the network. In Weiner’s ideal world, every job opening would be posted on LinkedIn. The site would also become a catalog of every skill needed to obtain every job, and these would link to LinkedIn profiles of every school and university where those skills could be obtained.

“What we ultimately want to do…is digitally map the global economy,” Weiner said. “Our objective is to take a step back and allow capital, all forms of capital—intellectual capital, working capital, and of course human capital– to flow to where it can best be leveraged.”

Lining Up Work

The concept of “flow” is the crux of every digital social network—connections made radically more efficient by the internet and mobile technologies. But while connecting on Facebook is an end in itself, on LinkedIn those connections are just a means. Putting up a profile on LinkedIn is a signal in itself of a desire for professional advancement—and employers come to LinkedIn looking to hire.

Everyone on LinkedIn wants something, which makes it a little less like Facebook and a little more like Amazon. LinkedIn is a massive marketplace, except instead of consumer goods, what’s being bought and sold is work.

Weiner’s vision of the economic graph is a utopian vision of bringing a kind of ultimate transparency to that marketplace. If every worker, every job, and every skill is known (and searchable), then theoretically nothing should hinder the flow of supply and demand. In the real world, inequality and unemployment are hardly just a function of imperfect information.

But Weiner did offer a more practical illustration of the economic graph in action. A more comprehensive, more inclusive LinkedIn, he said, could serve up data that, when aggregated on the city level, could show how the skills of the current workforce and the skills needed for available jobs weren’t lining up. Schools could see that skills gap and come in to bridge it, a kind of three-part marketplace where everyone is working toward a kind of equilibrium.

The Rate of Innovation

In Weiner’s eyes, one of the biggest challenges is how rapidly the demand for particular skills and knowledge changes. During other periods of technology-driven upheaval—the agricultural revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the information revolution—people always had some time to catch up. Not so now, Weiner said.

“The rate of innovation is exceeding our ability to train people to take advantage of the opportunities those innovations create,” Weiner said. “It’s not years anymore. It’s months. It’s weeks.”

With better information available, however, Weiner believes schools can create “just-in-time curriculums” that meet the real needs of real economies more efficiently. Getting everyone on LinkedIn might not get everyone a job. But like dieters using calorie counters, more information about the mismatch of supply could mean a more bracing clarity about where the real problems in the economy lie.

With the Rise of Online Developer Tools, Startup New Relic Files for IPO

Web software monitoring company New Relic is filing for an initial public offering. According to paperwork filed with the Security Exchange Commission, the company plans to trade under the ticker symbol NEWR and hopes to raise $100 million.

New Relic offers a service that monitors websites and online applications for outages, performance issues or other problems. By offering a free service, and then charging for premium tools, New Relic was able to bypass traditional information technology department managers and put its products directly into the hands of the programmers and system administrators who actually use them.

Founded in 2008, the company was one of the first wave of these “business-to-developer” companies, along with code collaboration giant GitHub and cloud computing service Heroku, which was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2010. These companies inspired an entire movement within the enterprise software market—where developers and admins can directly take hold of their own tools—and New Relic is among the first to go public.

New Relic is also representative of growing movement towards a new breed of data analytics. Unlike companies such as Hortonworks, which also just filed the necessary paperwork to go public, or MongoDB, New Relic doesn’t sell tools for collecting and analyzing raw data. It sells a service that gathers and analyzes data for you. That puts it more in line with companies like data analytics company Keen, IT infrastructure analysis company Splunk, which IPOed in 2012, and data visualization company Tableau, which IPOed last year.

New Relic competes with other monitoring and analytics companies, such as Tracelytics and Boundary, but it’s surely the best known company in its market. Tech workers have a hard time not hearing about New Relic. The company’s advertises heavily on tech-centric websites, and its ads are ubiquitous around the San Francisco area.

Although developers can frequently be found grumbling on sites like Hacker News about New Relic’s heavy handed marketing, the company’s advertising seems to be paying off. According to its S-1, the company had $63.2 million million in revenue in previous fiscal year. Despite this healthy revenue, the company still lost $40.2 million, meaning it still has a way to go before it can declare victory in the application monitoring market.

Taylor Swift’s New App Hints at What’s Next for Music Videos

We are never ever getting back together.

It’s been a big week for Taylor Swift: besides dumping Spotify, her album 1989 scored more sales in its debut week than any album since 2002 (when Eminem released The Eminem Show). Now, she’s hinting at the future of music videos.

On Monday, the music video for the country singer-turned-pop music maker’s track “Blank Space” leaked. Set on the immaculately manicured grounds of a countryside mansion fit for a Vogue photo shoot, the video follows a ball gown-wearing Swift in shot after shot as she romances, and then terrorizes, a handsome (and unsuspecting) man. By all accounts, it’s a glossy, theatrical, traditional kind of music video—except that along with it, Swift is launching an app that gives fans access to an immersive, interactive version of the video. The app (available for iOS and Android) turns the mansion and its grounds into a videogame-like setting that the player can enter and explore at her whim.

Director Joseph Kahn filmed the video and the app with a camera that has six lenses to produce the 360-degree viewing experience. The app leverages the accelerometers in phones and tablets, so while inside it you can tilt the app side to side, or even up towards the ceiling, to see different views of the house’s six different rooms. Each room gets its own choreographed narrative: Taylor and her man walk (or dance, or fight) in each room for certain intervals, and if you were to linger behind, ancillary characters like a butler, or a portrait painter, will pop up and start sneaking bites of food or adding some color to a painting. There are also some 40 easter eggs scattered about to be discovered, including things like Polaroids snapped by Ms. Swift herself. Taken together the app simulates an experience that’s part Google Street View, and part Sleep No More, the immersive theater version of Macbeth.

A Plan to Turn Your Unused Subway Money Into Charity

Common Pence

It happens on public transit systems everywhere. Tourists buy a pass and put a bunch of money on it so they don’t have to refill every time they want to go somewhere. And in all likelihood, they leave town without using up all of what they paid for. The money goes to waste, funneled directly into the coffers of the agency running the system.

Or maybe not. A British designer has come up with a device that will let you donate to charity whatever cash is left on your card. Zander Whitehurst made Common Pence to work with the Oyster Card, RFID-enabled currency of the London public transportation system. After you take your final trip, find a Common Pence box (stylishly made of wood), and hold your card against it. A quick tap on the box takes 50 pence from your balance, hold it there to give it all away.

This is a first step in Whitehurst’s plan to utilize the touch payment technology of future credit cards and devices that used RFID (radio frequency identification) or NFC (near-field communication) for good causes. “The applications for the project span all forms of fundraising,” he says. “I hope Common Pence can encourage tactile generosity.” He hasn’t said which charities would benefit, but a prototype Common Pence box is marked “Prostate Cancer UK.”

The idea makes sense. Modern transit passes function only in a very specific setting—that transportation network—and lots of people never spend their full balance before leaving town. Whatever money’s left is tied to a card that ends up in the garbage or a scrapbook. In New York, unspent money on MetroCards added up to nearly $500 million between 2000 and 2010, The New York Times reported. So if you can redirect that money to worthy causes, and the technology makes it easy, why not? Well, Whitehurst is in talks with the governing body for London’s public transportation, and says, “[Transportation for London] are very excited by the idea.¹” But he isn’t the first to build something like this. And the idea hasn’t caught on yet.

Apple Hit With Federal Lawsuit Over Lingering iMessage Delivery Issues

Apple’s vanishing iMessages continue to cause trouble, and now the company must answer its former customers in federal court. Christina Bonnington/WIRED

When someone switches to a new phone, they have a reasonable expectation that all the network functionality that worked on their old device—things like messages and phone calls—will continue to work on their new device. Unfortunately for some iOS users who switched to Android devices, Apple’s iMessage blocked them from receiving any more messages from iOS users. The Cupertino company will be heading to federal court over the issue.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh decided that Apple will have to face former iPhone owner Adrienne Moore, who’s seeking judgement in a class-action lawsuit against Apple for interfering with her Verizon service after switching to an Android phone. Moore claims that Apple failed to reveal iOS 5 could interrupt the delivery of messages from other iOS users if she switched to a non-Apple device. Numerous people on Apple’s support forums share similar woes.

In court papers, Apple posits it never promised iMessages or Messages would recognize when a user switched to a different operating system. “Apple takes customer satisfaction extremely seriously, but the law does not provide a remedy when, as here, technology simply does not function as plaintiff subjectively believes it should,” the company says.

This isn’t the first time iOS users have had troubling iMessage issues beyond bothersome system outages. In the past, unlucky iPhone owners whose phones were stolen discovered their iMessages continued to be sent and delivered on their stolen device despite the de-activation of the old phone and re-activation on a new phone. While Apple seems to have resolved issues and expanded messaging functionality across its own platform, there are still problems if you try to switch from Apple to non-Apple hardware.

These problems stem from the fact that iMessage service is tied not just to your Apple ID but also your phone number, and operates over your data connection rather than your carrier’s cellular network (unless the platform detects a temporary lapse in data connectivity). Because of this, if you don’t actively switch off iMessage before heading to another OS like Android or Windows Phone, other iOS users’ handsets still think you’re using the service, and their messages will continue to be delivered over data connections as iMessages. Because your new device can only see messages sent over SMS, those iMessages end up lost in the ether rather than in your messages folder. It’s a problem that goes beyond inconvenience—the perception of unresponsiveness has cost some former iOS users time, money, and respect professionally.

Apple has since established a support page outlining how to avoid the issue by de-registering iMessage on your handset before switching to a new phone, and offering a de-registering process using your phone number. Past fixes, which had mixed results, included deleting and then re-adding iPhone contacts.

Users that stick exclusively with text messages (Settings > Messages > toggle iMessage off) or use a third party messaging platform like Kik or WhatsApp should not experience issues if they hop from OS to OS with new handsets.

Typhoid gene unravelled

People who carry a particular type of gene have natural resistance against typhoid fever according to new research published in Nature Genetics.

Lead researcher, Dr Sarah Dunstan from the Nossal Institute of Global Health at the University of Melbourne said the study is the first large-scale, unbiased search for human genes that affect a person's risk of typhoid.

Enteric fever, or typhoid fever as it more commonly known, is a considerable health burden to lower-income countries.

This finding is important because this natural resistance represents one of the largest human gene effects on an infectious disease.

"We screened the human genome to look for genes associated with susceptibility to, or resistance from typhoid.," Dr Dunstan said.

"We found that carrying a particular form of the HLA-DRB1 gene provides natural resistance against typhoid fever. This gene codes for a receptor that is important in the immune response, by recognising proteins from invading bacteria."

Typhoid is contracted, by consuming food or water contaminated with the bacteria, Salmonella Typhi or Paratyphi. It has been estimated that typhoid causes 200,000 deaths a year globally, and infects 26.9 million people per year.

"If we can understand this natural mechanism of disease resistance, then we can use this knowledge to help develop improved vaccines for typhoid fever, but also potentially for other invasive bacterial disease,"

Better treatments and vaccines are needed for typhoid fever as the infecting bacteria are getting increasingly more resistant to antibiotic treatment, and the current vaccine is only moderately effective and does not protect against paratyphoid fever, which is increasing within Asia.

This work was conducted in patients from Vietnam with findings then replicated in independent patient cohorts from Vietnam and Nepal

The research collaboration was between the Genome Institute of Singapore and Oxford University Clinical Research Units in Vietnam and Nepal.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Melbourne . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

The Next Big Thing You Missed: LinkedIn’s Quest to Get a Job for Everyone on Earth

From left, Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. Techonomy

According to LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, the world has about 600 million “knowledge workers”—the professional class that spends much of its workday in front of a computer. Of these, he says, more than half have a profile on LinkedIn.

Yes, he wants to get the other half to join his company’s business-centric social network. But that’s only the start of his ambition, Weiner told an audience of CEOs and entrepreneurs this week at Techonomy, a technology and business conference held this year in Half Moon Bay, California. More than just professionals, Weiner says, he wants to get everyone on LinkedIn—and, in the process, find everyone a job.

“We are in the process of asking ourselves what it would take…to create economic opportunity for the 3 billion people in the global workforce,” Weiner said.

In Silicon Valley, such high-flown rhetoric is standard fare, and no doubt talk of such massive growth pleases shareholders. But even just as a thought experiment, LinkedIn’s utopian goal raises interesting questions about the relationship between transparency and economic growth. What does the global economy look like if everyone were on LinkedIn?

In the same way that Facebook is based around the concept of the “social graph”—real-life social connections mapped through a digital network—Weiner says that LinkedIn today is built around the “professional graph.” To reach its goal, however, he says LinkedIn must transform itself into the “economic graph.”

‘We are in the process of asking ourselves what it would take to create economic opportunity for the 3 billion people in the global workforce.’

In practice, he says, that means a LinkedIn profile for all of the world’s 3 billion workers, not just white-collar professionals. He wants every company in the world—a number he puts at 70 million—to have a profile on the network. In Weiner’s ideal world, every job opening would be posted on LinkedIn. The site would also become a catalog of every skill needed to obtain every job, and these would link to LinkedIn profiles of every school and university where those skills could be obtained.

“What we ultimately want to do…is digitally map the global economy,” Weiner said. “Our objective is to take a step back and allow capital, all forms of capital—intellectual capital, working capital, and of course human capital– to flow to where it can best be leveraged.”

Lining Up Work

The concept of “flow” is the crux of every digital social network—connections made radically more efficient by the internet and mobile technologies. But while connecting on Facebook is an end in itself, on LinkedIn those connections are just a means. Putting up a profile on LinkedIn is a signal in itself of a desire for professional advancement—and employers come to LinkedIn looking to hire.

Everyone on LinkedIn wants something, which makes it a little less like Facebook and a little more like Amazon. LinkedIn is a massive marketplace, except instead of consumer goods, what’s being bought and sold is work.

Weiner’s vision of the economic graph is a utopian vision of bringing a kind of ultimate transparency to that marketplace. If every worker, every job, and every skill is known (and searchable), then theoretically nothing should hinder the flow of supply and demand. In the real world, inequality and unemployment are hardly just a function of imperfect information.

But Weiner did offer a more practical illustration of the economic graph in action. A more comprehensive, more inclusive LinkedIn, he said, could serve up data that, when aggregated on the city level, could show how the skills of the current workforce and the skills needed for available jobs weren’t lining up. Schools could see that skills gap and come in to bridge it, a kind of three-part marketplace where everyone is working toward a kind of equilibrium.

The Rate of Innovation

In Weiner’s eyes, one of the biggest challenges is how rapidly the demand for particular skills and knowledge changes. During other periods of technology-driven upheaval—the agricultural revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the information revolution—people always had some time to catch up. Not so now, Weiner said.

“The rate of innovation is exceeding our ability to train people to take advantage of the opportunities those innovations create,” Weiner said. “It’s not years anymore. It’s months. It’s weeks.”

With better information available, however, Weiner believes schools can create “just-in-time curriculums” that meet the real needs of real economies more efficiently. Getting everyone on LinkedIn might not get everyone a job. But like dieters using calorie counters, more information about the mismatch of supply could mean a more bracing clarity about where the real problems in the economy lie.

With Rise of Online Developer Tools, Startup New Relic Files for IPO

infocux Technologies/Flickr

Web software monitoring company New Relic is filing for an initial public offering. According to paperwork filed with the Security Exchange Commission, the company plans to trade under the ticker symbol NEWR and hopes to raise $100 million.

New Relic offers a service that monitors websites and online applications for outages, performance issues or other problems. By offering a free service, and then charging for premium tools, New Relic was able to bypass traditional information technology department managers and put its products directly into the hands of the programmers and system administrators who actually use them.

Founded in 2008, the company was one of the first wave of these “business-to-developer” companies, along with code collaboration giant GitHub and cloud computing service Heroku, which was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2010. These companies inspired an entire movement within the enterprise software market—where developers and admins can directly take hold of their own tools—and New Relic is among the first to go public.

New Relic is also representative of growing movement towards a new breed of data analytics. Unlike companies such as Hortonworks, which also just filed the necessary paperwork to go public, or MongoDB, New Relic doesn’t sell tools for collecting and analyzing raw data. It sells a service that gathers and analyzes data for you. That puts it more in line with companies like mobile analytics company Keen.io, IT infrastructure analysis company Splunk, which IPOed in 2012, and data visualization company Tableau, which IPOed last year.

New Relic competes with other monitoring and analytics companies, such as Tracelytics and Boundary, but it’s surely the best known company in its market. Tech workers have a hard time not hearing about New Relic. The company’s advertises heavily on tech-centric websites, and its ads are ubiquitous around the San Francisco area.

Although developers can frequently be found grumbling on sites like Hacker News about New Relic’s heavy handed marketing, the company’s advertising seems to be paying off. According to its S-1, the company had $63.2 million million in revenue in previous fiscal year. Despite this healthy revenue, the company still lost $40.2 million, meaning it still has a way to go before it can declare victory in the application monitoring market.

Taylor Swift’s New App Hints at What’s Next for Music Videos

We are never ever getting back together.

It’s been a big week for Taylor Swift: besides dumping Spotify, her album 1989 scored more sales in its debut week than any album since 2002 (when Eminem released The Eminem Show). Now, she’s hinting at the future of music videos.

On Monday, the music video for the country singer-turned-pop music maker’s track “Blank Space” leaked. Set on the immaculately manicured grounds of a countryside mansion fit for a Vogue photo shoot, the video follows a ball gown-wearing Swift in shot after shot as she romances, and then terrorizes, a handsome (and unsuspecting) man. By all accounts, it’s a glossy, theatrical, traditional kind of music video—except that along with it, Swift is launching an app that gives fans access to an immersive, interactive version of the video. The app (available for iOS and Android) turns the mansion and its grounds into a videogame-like setting that the player can enter and explore at her whim.

Director Joseph Kahn filmed the video and the app with a camera that has six lenses to produce the 360-degree viewing experience. The app leverages the accelerometers in phones and tablets, so while inside it you can tilt the app side to side, or even up towards the ceiling, to see different views of the house’s six different rooms. Each room gets its own choreographed narrative: Taylor and her man walk (or dance, or fight) in each room for certain intervals, and if you were to linger behind, ancillary characters like a butler, or a portrait painter, will pop up and start sneaking bites of food or adding some color to a painting. There are also some 40 easter eggs scattered about to be discovered, including things like Polaroids snapped by Ms. Swift herself. Taken together the app simulates an experience that’s part Google Street View, and part Sleep No More, the immersive theater version of Macbeth.

A Plan to Turn Your Unused Subway Money Into Charity

Common Pence

It happens on public transit systems everywhere. Tourists buy a pass and put a bunch of money on it so they don’t have to refill every time they want to go somewhere. And in all likelihood, they leave town without using up all of what they paid for. The money goes to waste, funneled directly into the coffers of the agency running the system.

Or maybe not. A British designer has come up with a device that will let you donate to charity whatever cash is left on your card. Zander Whitehurst made Common Pence to work with the Oyster Card, RFID-enabled currency of the London public transportation system. After you take your final trip, find a Common Pence box (stylishly made of wood), and hold your card against it. A quick tap on the box takes 50 pence from your balance, hold it there to give it all away.

This is a first step in Whitehurst’s plan to utilize the touch payment technology of future credit cards and devices that used RFID (radio frequency identification) or NFC (near-field communication) for good causes. “The applications for the project span all forms of fundraising,” he says. “I hope Common Pence can encourage tactile generosity.” He hasn’t said which charities would benefit, but a prototype Common Pence box is marked “Prostate Cancer UK.”

The idea makes sense. Modern transit passes function only in a very specific setting—that transportation network—and lots of people never spend their full balance before leaving town. Whatever money’s left is tied to a card that ends up in the garbage or a scrapbook. In New York, unspent money on MetroCards added up to nearly $500 million between 2000 and 2010, The New York Times reported. So if you can redirect that money to worthy causes, and the technology makes it easy, why not? Well, Whitehurst—who’s in talks with the governing body for London’s public transportation—isn’t the first to build something like this. And the idea hasn’t caught on yet.

Could Hospitals Be an Engine of Economic Development?

jasleen_kaur/Flickr

The United States has over 5,700 hospitals, and most of them are central to their communities for an obvious reason: They help people get healthier. When I look at these hospitals, I see an untapped resource, a way they could provide greater value to their communities and the country.

Intellectual assets — the ideas and know-how in the heads of clinicians — are vital, intangible resources for most hospitals. They’re equivalent to the research assets at universities. In addition to knowledge and know-how, clinicians working in hospitals are creating ideas for new health care technologies (apps, processes, devices, therapies, drugs) and cost-effective care models, often as part of their response to the value-based care principles of health care reform.

Medical and administrative know-how and inventions are positively impacting patient care, patient costs and hospital revenue. Yet almost all of the formalized programs to transfer technology to patient bedsides are within major academic medical centers not at the thousands of community hospitals nationwide, many of which have become or are looking to become part of a larger health care system through acquisitions, mergers and affiliation arrangements.

We need to have technology commercialization expertise available to more hospitals. This includes health care systems expanding their technology commercialization functions to their affiliated community hospitals. Alternatively, I anticipate that certain hospitals with substantial technology commercialization capabilities will offer their services to other hospitals with which they aren’t affiliated.

The technology commercialization program for a hospital would identify and evaluate the know-how and ideas of the doctors, nurses, and technical and administrative personnel and provide assistance in such areas as product design and development, intellectual property protections, commercialization (licensing or start-up or spin-off development), funding (including sponsored research agreements) and corporate partnering to translate a hospital’s know-how and innovations into clinical use.

A recent academic study found that technology commercialization offices can make money while benefiting society for the public good; they aren’t just cost centers. The annual income earned by technology commercialization offices as a multiple of annual licensing costs is close to six times. For many community and affiliated hospitals, the costs of hiring competent technology professionals as full-time employees wouldn’t be justified.

Community hospitals would likely do best to outsource these functions to major research hospitals. Set up in this way, the cost of these offices would probably be repaid. I’m not guaranteeing that the hospital TCO infrastructure would make money for every hospital or health care system, but statistically, it’s likely this approach would make money for hospitals and their communities.

With access to technology commercialization expertise, the know-how, innovations and technologies found in these non-academic medical centers/non-research organizations could make their way into the community and eventually the broader population. Health care represents about 18 percent of our economy. Arguably, it’s a big enough portion of our economy that we should develop health care know-how and technology commercialization infrastructure that’s broader than at just the relatively small number of academic medical centers and research institutions. Plus, more U.S. citizens would have access to the great ideas our clinicians have for improving the standard of care and working toward a healthier population — a pretty good “side effect,” I think.

Mark E. Coticchia is Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer of the Henry Ford Health System.

Mapping spread of diarrhea bacteria a major step toward new vaccine

Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) bacteria are responsible each year for around 400 million cases of diarrhea and 400,000 deaths in the world's low- and middle-income countries. Children under the age of five are most affected.

ETEC bacteria also cause diarrhea in nearly one in two travellers to these areas.

Major breakthrough

Researchers at the University of Gothenburg's Sahlgrenska Academy are world leaders in research into ETEC and have now made a major breakthrough in collaboration with colleagues from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK, Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and universities in Japan, Germany and the USA, among others.

A study published in Nature Genetics details how the Gothenburg researchers used comprehensive DNA analyses to reveal the ETEC bacteria's genetic composition -- an analysis that also makes it possible to map how the bacteria spread.

Of global benefit "We can see that some of the dangerous strains of ETEC derive from a single bacterium that has divided and spread right around the world," says Astrid von Mentzer, doctoral student at the Sahlgrenska Academy. "This may sound like bad news, but it actually means that the vaccine that we are developing on the basis of the most common types of bacteria will be of global benefit."

Largets collection of strains

The University of Gothenburg is home to the world's largest collection of strains of ETEC bacteria, comprising more than 3,500 strains from around the world. The present study saw the researchers focusing on a total of 362 strains, which were isolated from children, adults and travellers affected by diarrhea in Africa, Asia and Latin America in the last 30 years.

"The analysis shows that children, adults and travellers are all affected to the same extent by diarrhea caused by the different strains of ETEC," says Astrid von Mentzer. "Which would suggest that the vaccine could work for all three groups."

174 years old

The researchers were also able to demonstrate in the study that some of the ETEC groups identified came into existence as far back as 174 years ago. Astrid von Mentzer feels that this new information about the genetic composition of ETEC bacteria and how they spread means that we are a step closer to reducing the prevalence of diarrheal diseases worldwide.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Gothenburg . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Researchers discover how to cultivate norovirus in human cells

Noroviruses are pernicious intestinal viruses. They cause violent vomiting and diarrhea, and people ill with the virus remain contagious up to three days after they seem to recover.

Although a vaccine for these viruses is in clinical trials, there is still no medication to combat them. That's in part because researchers have not been able to culture human noroviruses so they can test potential treatments -- until now, according to a study by University of Florida Health researchers published Friday, Nov. 7 in the journal Science.

UF Health researcher Stephanie Karst, Ph.D., has found a way to grow a human norovirus by identifying a cell it targets in the intestine.

"The biggest hurdle to doing norovirus research for its entire history -- it was discovered in 1972 -- has been that we can't culture the human viruses in a cell culture dish," said Karst, an associate professor in the department of molecular genetics and microbiology in the UF College of Medicine. "That complicates every aspect of research. We can't study how it replicates, we can't test therapeutics and we can't generate live virus vaccines."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States, human noroviruses cause 19 to 21 million cases of illness per year, and contribute to 56,000 to 71,000 hospitalizations and 570 to 800 deaths, mostly in young children and older adults. Noroviruses are resistant to many common disinfectants. Very little of the virus is needed to infect a host, so a surface may still contain enough virus to infect a person even after it is cleaned.

Previously, researchers speculated that noroviruses primarily target intestinal epithelial cells, which line the intestine and protect it from pathogens, Karst said. However, this new research demonstrates that the virus targets B cells, a type of white blood cell common in the intestine.

"That's a big surprise," Karst said. "You would think that any virus that's going to target the intestine would instead target the intestinal epithelial cells because that's the first cell the virus is going to encounter."

Researchers also were surprised to find that bacteria present in the body's gut flora, also known as commensal bacteria, helped the human norovirus infect B cells. Karst said scientists have long known that noroviruses need a particular kind of carbohydrate to infect cells.

"What we've shown is that noroviruses attach to that carbohydrate expressed on commensal bacteria, and that this interaction stimulates viral infection of the B cell," Karst said. "This is a really exciting, emerging theme. A variety of intestinal viruses seem to exploit the bacteria that are present in our intestines all the time. These viral infections are enhanced by the presence of bacteria in the gut."

UF research scientist Melissa Jones, Ph.D., a co-author on the paper, said the idea to study B cells came from Karst's research on mouse noroviruses. UF scientists detected virus in Peyer's patches, pockets of lymphoid nodules that line the intestine and survey the organ for pathogens.

This system can now be used to study norovirus replication and assess effectiveness of therapeutics and disinfectants, though more work needs to be done to increase its efficiency. Karst and Jones said while this is the first time researchers have been able to culture a human norovirus, the virus does not replicate to high levels in the current system, which hinders growth of the virus in the laboratory.

"Ultimately, this system should open up new avenues for norovirus vaccine and antiviral drug development," Karst said.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Florida . The original article was written by Morgan Sherburne. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Can Technology Make for Better Concerts?

Fans show off LED wristbands at a recent concert. (Image: Brandon Campbell)

It’s requisite concert behavior, the lighter in the air. A way to signal appreciation, commission an encore, and create a communal scene that is larger than the sum of its parts. It’s also definitively old school, having come of age at rock shows in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and while the flickering flames retain nostalgic allure, the feeling they seek to engender has not been addressed with much innovative flair over the intervening decades. (And no, iPhone virtual lighter apps don’t count.)

Justin Roddick and his team at Glow Motion Technologies are hoping to change that. With their patented LED wristbands, which can be programmed with a range of light patterns emitting any of 16 million colors, concertgoers are integrally involved in the show, serving as a key part of the set design. “It’s something else for the audience to both be a part of, and to look at,” explains Roddick. “And it’s a new part of the production industry; audience lighting is becoming the next big thing.”

The latest iteration of their wristbands debuted last week as country superstar Hunter Hayes’ Tattoo (Your Name) Tour kicked off in New York City. Glow Motion’s wristbands have been used before in live music events, and lights in the audience are nothing new (electronic music has a particularly strong track record), but “this tour is taking it to the next level,” says Roddick. “It’s the first tour that is truly using the technology to its fullest extent.”

The devices not only receive signals from a centralized control module, but they also can “talk to” each other, enabling a range of node-based effects. They operate at radio frequencies and thus don’t require a direct line of sight between transmitter and receiver. Other similar products in this space have traditionally used infrared wavelengths, which do, and it’s an important consideration for wrist-wear in a tightly packed crowd of thousands of people.

For his part, Hayes has firmly embraced the technology, and the early returns are promising. “When we got them going, it was breathtaking to watch from the stage,” he recalls. “I saw them all lift up and move around; people were really just playing around and having a good time with them.” Hayes pursued the wrist bands after sensing the potential of crowd-based lighting at a Coldplay concert. “With those wrist bands, it was mostly an on-and-off kind of thing,” he recalls from an Albany-bound tour bus. “I just kept thinking, there are a lot of advances to be made. There’s a lot you could do with it.”

One thing Hayes and production designer Paul Normandale have been experimenting with is a proximity feature that can send ripples outward through the crowd, or create a wave of light as the artist runs across the stage. Glow Motion can also fit the bands with accelerometers and other sensors, expanding the range of possible effects.

Critically, the technology straddles both sides of the concert experience: the spectacle and the personal. While an individual pixel in a sea of lights connects each fan into a larger scene, individuals can also be catered to. The bands synch with a purpose-built app into which fans can enter information like their favorite colors, their birthdays, and their music preferences. During the show, specific people may light up based on these data. (Ultimately, Glow Motion hopes, this sort of proximity-based technology and opt-in data sharing will be very attractive to vendors and sponsors.)

The first few nights of wrist band incorporation have been deliberate and relatively conservative roll-outs of the equipment, and Hayes is wary of coming on too strong. After all, much of the appeal of attending a concert is the artist-fan intimacy, and shattering any such connection with an over-wrought production can be disorienting. “I’ve definitely had designs in the past with a stage and a massive screen, but I ditched it because it was distracting,” Hayes says. “It didn’t contribute to the show, and the same could be said if you don’t do the wrist band right.”

Introducing novel reasons for fans to drop substantial cash on a concert is particularly urgent, as gate receipts make up an increasingly dominant part of an artist’s revenue in the era of anemic record sales and pervasive streaming services. But it’s also a challenge faced by other live events, the result of an arms race between improved video and home theaters on one side and more audacious “events” and the cache associated with attendance on the other. Efforts to draw patrons to live events have included over-the-top sports stadiums or elaborate give aways. Other strategies deconstruct the very form of a live event, turning a communal experience into an individual one. The Invisible Cities opera, for example, allowed attendees to wander Los Angeles’ Union Station in search of performers, as the music and vocals were transmitted through personalized headphones.

Intriguingly, the two forces of live event attendance and time-agnostic consumption need not be in full opposition. Evergig bridges the gap with an automated suite of software that stitches fan video into multi-angle re-creations of live concerts. It’s a service that sanctifies and preserves the concert experience. As company president Arthur Dagard says, “live music is all about being there, in the moment. Technology allows us to extend this moment in time and share it with our friends.” Computerized algorithms scour the internet for the best footage, score candidate videos based on 14 criteria (including face resolution and motion blur), enhance and synchronize the audio, and label tracks based on audio signatures. (The Hunter Hayes show from October 28th recently went live, and can be seen here.) With increasingly impressive cameras inhabiting smart phones and the rise of GoPro, the footage is only going to improve, all the better to glorify live concerts.

“If you do it right,” says Hayes, reflecting on the use of technological gambits, “it becomes an extension of the music. Everything really has to lend itself back to the music: that’s why you’re there.”

Space Rocks for Sale! Buy a Piece of the Moon or Mars

This piece of the Seymchan meteorite, which was discovered in Russia in 1967, was shaped into a sphere. Golden gems of a mineral called olivine are embedded in iron nickel, forming a type of meteorite called a pallasite. $5,000 Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

This piece of the Seymchan meteorite, which was discovered in Russia in 1967, was shaped into a sphere. Golden gems of a mineral called olivine are embedded in iron nickel, forming a type of meteorite called a pallasite. $5,000

Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

A piece of the Seymchan meteorite. $6,500 Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

A piece of the Seymchan meteorite. $6,500

Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

Another piece of the Seymchan meteorite. $48,000 Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

Another piece of the Seymchan meteorite. $48,000

Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

This iron meteorite originated in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. $45,000 Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

This iron meteorite originated in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. $45,000

Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

This pallasite, found in Kansas in 1881, was part of an asteroid that broke apart 100 million years ago. $2,000 Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

This pallasite, found in Kansas in 1881, was part of an asteroid that broke apart 100 million years ago. $2,000

Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

A slice of the Imilac meteorite, which was discovered in the Atacama Desert in Chile in 1822. $14,000 Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

A slice of the Imilac meteorite, which was discovered in the Atacama Desert in Chile in 1822. $14,000

Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

This meteorite was blasted off the surface of Mars. It was found in Morocco in 2012. $26,000 Courtesy Christie's Inc

This meteorite was blasted off the surface of Mars. It was found in Morocco in 2012. $26,000

Courtesy Christie's Inc

A partial slice of the Imilac Meteorite. $1,000 Courtesy Christie's Inc.

A partial slice of the Imilac Meteorite. $1,000

Courtesy Christie's Inc.

A part of a lunar meteorite found in Morocco in 2007. $110,000 Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

A part of a lunar meteorite found in Morocco in 2007. $110,000

Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

An iron meteorite found in Morocco in 2007. $65,000 Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

An iron meteorite found in Morocco in 2007. $65,000

Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

The cheapest of the lot, this meteorite contains dust from the early solar system. $450 Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

The cheapest of the lot, this meteorite contains dust from the early solar system. $450

Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

In 1947, a 70-metric-ton chunk of iron exploded 6 km over Siberia, creating a fireball brighter than the sun. This is one of those Sikhote-Alin meteorites. $2,000 Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

In 1947, a 70-metric-ton chunk of iron exploded 6 km over Siberia, creating a fireball brighter than the sun. This is one of those Sikhote-Alin meteorites. $2,000

Courtesy of Christie's Inc.

This spherically shaped piece of a Gibeon meteorite was forged in the core of an asteroid. $500 Courtesy of Christie's Inc

This spherically shaped piece of a Gibeon meteorite was forged in the core of an asteroid. $500

Courtesy of Christie's Inc

Ever wanted a piece of the moon, or even Mars? Now’s your chance. Starting today, the auction house Christie’s will be taking online bids for meteorites from asteroids, the moon, and Mars. Check out a few of the space rocks above, which are only a few inches in size, along with starting bids. To make a bid or to see the rest of the 30 available specimens, click here. They’re not cheap, though. Starting bids range from $450 to $110,000. The auction lasts until November 25.