If your medical records have 95% errors, how many other parts of your system have errors?

Part of the beauty of all that data out there is most you never use, and almost no one worried about the quality of the data when it was entered.  Now that Big Data is hot and machine learning is too, your data history is ready to be used.  But, how about those errors?  What errors?  WSJ writes on medical health care and makes the point that up 95% of the records have errors and doctors are asking patients to review their medical records.

Health-care providers are giving patients more access to their medical records so they can help spot and correct errors and omissions.

Studies show errors can occur on as many as 95% of the medication lists found in patient medical records.

Errors include outdated data and omissions that many patients could readily identify, including prescription drugs that are no longer taken and incorrect data about frequency or dosage.

Any one who has worked on asset management or ewaste and end of life of hardware discover how inaccurate inventory management can be.

If you don’t think of the quality of data, then you’ll have a much harder time using your data history.

Satellite dishes may come back to data centers

Remember when high availability data centers like military ones had satellite dishes.  With the growth of satellite connectivity dishes may be coming back to be part data centers.  WSJ reports on Google buying a satellite-imaging startup.

The Skybox team will initially work with Google's Maps business. Google Maps uses images from roughly 1,000 sources currently. Most of these images of the Earth are updated every few months or years. If Skybox can help Google update this information daily, it could help people respond to incidents, such as disasters, more quickly and help direct responses.

However, longer term, Skybox's technology may also help with Google's goal of spreading Internet access more widely.

"Skybox's mission is about more than just imaging," said David Cowan, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, which invested in Skybox. "Skybox is disrupting how satellites are deployed in space and that has implications for the types of global communication challenges that Google plans to address."

Adding Cell Network to a Helicopter can help you find People

Mobile devices are the electronic device people carry more than anything else, but when you have no cel coverage your device is only as good as the stuff you have downloaded that doesn’t require a data connection.

Someone asked the question what if you could be a Cell Network in a helicopter?  You can’t provide cell coverage, but you can find people who are lost.  Range Networks posts on this idea in Iceland.

That is what you get with coast guard helicopters flying about with an OpenBTS-based solution on board, scouring the Icelandic highlands for (extremely) lost souls during large-scale search & rescue missions.

Rögg of Reykjavik, led by technical director Baldvin Hansson, has created a complete system using OpenBTS and Range's SDR1 for a helicopter-mounted network which can pick up cell phone signals up to 35 km away, map them on iPad tablets, and lead the crew to swoop in and rescue someone while the up to 500-person search party is still pulling on its boots. They call it Norris for short, the Norris Positioning System officially. (But nothing to do with GPS - they use the timing advance value from the GSM connection to map the location.)

It's not just faster, it's better -- they used to fly around and...look! Any rain, snow or fog usually meant nothing to see, so they would ground the Super Puma helicopter and send everybody slogging. Now they have a tool which makes a fast rescue under even inclement conditions possible.

Wired posts on how an OpenBTS cel network can be a small fraction of a proprietary solution.

Range has already brought GSM service–the same type of network that carries voice calls and text messages elsewhere in the world–to Macquarie Island, a small island just outside the Antarctic Circle. This is preferable to walkie talkies or Wi-Fi because it provides wider coverage while using less energy. And although the network has a satellite uplink to connect it with the rest of the world, it doesn’t depend on satellites for local communications, which is essential to the safety of field researchers.

GSM networks like the one on the island usually cost about a million dollars to build, says Range Networks CEO Ed Kozel. But Range is able to bring the technology to Antarctica for just a few thousand dollars using an open source platform called OpenBTS, short for Open Base Transceiver Station. All you need to run a GSM network with OpenBTS is radio software and an off-the-shelf Linux server. “The legacy infrastructures are why most operators are so expensive to run, but we took a clean slate approach,” Kozel explains.

Making Sense of Sensor Data Webinar, June 25, 2014

Gigaom Research has a webinar on June 25, 2014 on Making Sense of Sensor data.

Maybe you’ve heard of the Internet of Things, and maybe you’re skeptical.  But this isn’t just about thermostats and personal pedometers.  It’s about fleet optimization, supply chain management, container shipping, manufacturing, sentiment analysis, and fraud prevention, too.

Analysis of streaming data focuses on determining not just the “what and why,” but also the “what’s next.”  By combining sensor data with historical data, even deeper insights can be extracted, equipment breakdowns averted, money saved and efficiencies gained.

I am on the panel along with two others.

FEATURED PANELISTS

Dave Ohara Founder, GreenM3

Jon Collins Founder, Inter Orbis

Jim Haughwout Chief Technology Architect, Building the IoT, Savi

The question hard to get answers to, how well does this work

After spending the last few months intensely discussing a range of technologies in the data center industry something was bothering me.  I understood what their technology did, but as I kept asking about performance and other operating issues I wasn’t getting answers I wanted.  The simple think I want to know is “how well does this technology work.”  If someone uses it what are the issues they will run into.  By solving one set of problems, what new problems do they pick up?

Telling me what customers you have as references tells me you have done a good job selling your service, but that doesn’t mean it works well.  Sometimes the people who make the purchasing decisions are far removed from the operating issues.  Being able to have conversations with operations staff is one of the ways to get to the truth.  Even if you have a nice looking report I’ll still be suspicious.

Hearing from someone who uses a technology in operations is one of the most credible sources.  As an option push the vendor to answer, “how well does this work?”  And when they tell you how it works.  Repeat, I know how it works.  I want to know how well it works, operates.