Remembering America's Fresh Water Submarines
Hugh Pickens writes "As we move into Memorial Day and Americans remember the men and women who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces, I wanted to share the story of my Uncle Donald Cress born in 1922 in Bath Township, Minnesota who served as a Radioman, Third Class on the USS Robalo, one of the US Navy's 'Fresh Water Submarines' because they were commissioned in the Great Lakes. On the western shore of Lake Michigan, about 80 miles north of Milwaukee, lies Manitowoc, Wisconsin, a city whose shipyards had built car ferries and ore boats since 1902. In 1939 war broke out in Europe and President Roosevelt declared a limited National Emergency and US Navy shipbuilders were concerned that submarine building capacity was not sufficient to support a long war. The US Navy asked the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company to build submarines, a task far beyond their existing capabilities, but assured them that the Electric Boat Company, with the only shipyard in the country capable of building ...
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Amazon Adds New Features For Blind And Visually Impaired Users To Kindle For iOS App, Coming To Other Platforms Soon
Amazon today announced a number of new features for its Kindle for iOS app that aim to make it easier to use for blind and visually impaired users. Today’s update, Amazon says, will make it easier for these users to use features like “X-Ray, End Actions, sharing, highlighting and bookmarking.” Amazon says these new features are available on iOS today, but it plans to make them available on additional platforms in the future. These new features, the company says in today’s announcement, will give visually impaired users easier access to the more than 1.8 million titles in its catalog that feature its text-to-voice VoiceOver narration. The iOS app also allows users to read character-by-character, word-by-word and line-by-line and supports the usual iOS accessibility features like zoom, assistive touch and support for peripheral braille displays. Over time, Amazon has made its Kindle hardware and apps more accessible for visually impaired users. Last December, for example, added Voice ...
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MIT Investigating School's Role In Swartz Suicide
The untimely death of Aaron Swartz has raised a lot of questions over the weekend. Now MIT is launching an internal investigation to determine what role the school played in his suicide. From the article: "In a statement, MIT President L. Rafael Reif offered his condolences, saying that the school's community was 'extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many. Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT,' Reif said. 'I have asked professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT's involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it.'"
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Mr. Obama, Tear Down This Wall(ed Garden)
Today, I participated in a meeting at the White House described as an "expert roundtable on patient access to health data" hosted by Todd Park (Chief Technology Officer of the United States), Farzad Mostashari (the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology), Leon Rodriguez (Office of Civil Rights) and Peter Levin (CTO Veterans Administration). Being at the White House within a week of the 25th anniversary of President Reagan's famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech at the Brandenburg Gate, it struck me that tearing down a wall was a good metaphor for what was the goal of today's meeting. In many respects, healthIT is similar to the "walled gardens" that persisted in mobile phones until they were torn down by the iPhone and Google's Android. Just as the wireless carriers had their own proprietary environments for apps, health systems (and their EHR vendors) severely limit what can tie in with their systems directly impeding patient access to their health data. The ...
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