Posts Tagged ‘President Obama’

Improving Health Care Anyway with Internet Speed

Friday, March 5th, 2010

President Obama may not be getting the support he wants for his Healthcare Reform, but he’s not giving up so easily.  In the meantime, he’s allotted almost one billion dollars from the Recovery Act money (largely devoted to national broadband) to improve the way medical information is accessed online. That’s gotta help, right? And hopefully help the economy and healthcare with internet speed.

Besides improving the healthcare system by helping it to run more smoothly, it will also provide jobs. Much of the money is going towards training over 10-15,000 new health IT workers. These jobs are in addition to the over 3,000 technology workers that health IT departments are expected to hire over the next few months.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said, “Health information technology can make our health care system more efficient and improve the quality of care we all receive.” She added that these grants are the first of their kind and will help support health care providers in hiring and training new employees in crucial technology-related fields.

The grants are technically part of an over $100 billion investment the Obama administration is making as part of the Recovery Act to ensure long-term economic growth and job creation in emerging industries. But it’s really a win-win for the President who really wants to improve the country’s current healthcare system which leaves many not able to afford proper care and the rest paying high premiums.

Speed Matters.org said that this current commitment of close to $1 billion will help ensure that many more Americans are able to take advantage of well-paid, secure employment in the emerging health care IT field.

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Social Radar may be a helpful Big Brother

Monday, September 14th, 2009

Social Radar, by Infegy, collects millions of articles and conversations from traditional media, social networks and blogs and captures them in a brand snapshot. As Read Write Web says, they know “when you’ve been bad or good.” 

This is a corporate version of what we talked about in our previous post, “Careful Job Seekers Think About Online Presence”, and was recently reinforced by President Obama in a Spetember 8th speech to a group of 14- and 15-year-old students. “I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life.”  An MSNBC slideshow gives examples of social networking cautionary tales.

Since January 2007, Social Radar has been crawling millions of pages and can compile a dossier-style picture of a company’s successes and flaws. Using the recent Domino’s Pizza disaster as an example, Social Radar shows a tag cloud of frequently used words, along with a percentage of negative and positive comments.

In this case, the opinions toward Domino’s Pizza went from good to bad in mid April, with internet speed, when two Domino’s Pizza workers in North Carolina uploaded a YouTube video of their less-than-sanitary kitchen antics. (Visit Read Write Web to see a news story video). While the employees were both fired and the franchise was closed for sanitation, the brand’s social stock still took a nose dive in both traditional and social media.

Such information can be helpful because Social Radar can be used to measure the success of their campaign to recapture consumer confidence. Other uses include the success of product launches or political campaigns…maybe even trading decisions, with their ratings of Fortune 500 companies and top brands across the web.

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YouTube and Internet Speed

Monday, March 9th, 2009

YouTube has changed the way the world uses the internet. And if you haven’t been able to participate, it’s probably because your internet speed is too slow.  Their system requirements include a minimum broadband connection of over 500 Kbps.  Here’s a quote from their site:

“Still rockin’ the 56k? No problem. As you may already know, a slower connection simply means slower delivery of services. You only need a little more time and patience than with a faster connection. For best results, you may want to start the video player and then click on the PAUSE button immediately. Then, wait until the red progress bar has reached the end of the video before playing it. Allowing the entire video buffer lets you watch it without interruption. Remember, the shorter the video, the shorter the amount of time it takes to buffer.”

But what if you want to share a video with the world? 

“Depending on your connection speed and the size of the video, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours to upload a video. Generally, if you have a high-speed Internet connection you can expect the upload to take somewhere between 1-5 minutes for every 1MB. However, the experience is different for every user because of the variation in connection speeds.”

There are other issues with accessing YouTube, such as the one that President Obama is having.  According to Read Write Web:

“Relatively archaic government policies, rules, and customs that impede progress are being covered by the Washington Post and reach the highest levels of government. To this day, Department of Defense workers, even some of whom are in charge of new media output, cannot access YouTube.”

So don’t feel too bad, internet speed is not the only thing that might be keeping you from enjoying YouTube.

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