all information technology stories

Taking distance education to the next level

jake — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:21:21 -0400

A major advance in distance education was initiated this fall in a specially equipped classroom at the Harvard Extension School. Classes held there give online students the ability to view on-campus lectures in real-time and actually take part in classroom discussions. The facility also serves as an experimental locus to test distance education teaching methods and technology. One of the extraordinary benefits of the $1 million in state-of-the-art equipment is that several courses can be taught at the same time.

The Extension School is among a small number of institutions across the country offering streaming video of college courses.

Creating a computer currency

50443248 — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:36:02 -0400

Computer scientists are using the latest version of peer-to-peer video sharing software to explore a next-generation electronic commerce model that uses bandwidth as a global currency.

The software, called Tribler, is available for download beginning today (Aug. 29) on the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) Web site: http://tv.seas.harvard.edu.

Once installed, the software lets those who download it join a peer-to-peer video sharing network. Tribler was originally created by scientists in The Netherlands, at Delft University of Technology and Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. The most recent release was created in collaboration with scientists at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

'Digital immigrants' teaching 'digital natives'

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:46:42 -0400

Students coming into universities today are 'digital natives' and fundamentally different in their use of technology than the 'digital immigrants' who teach them, according to John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Collaboration yields first citywide network of wireless sensors

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:13:39 -0400

Harvard University, BBN Technologies, and the city of Cambridge have begun a four-year project to install 100 wireless sensors atop streetlights in Cambridge, Mass., creating the world’s first citywide network of wireless sensors.

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the project is open-source, meaning it could eventually be accessible to researchers worldwide for everything from gathering meteorological data to monitoring traffic conditions and noise pollution.

Called CitySense, the wireless sensor network developed by computer scientists at Harvard and BBN Technologies, a technology solutions firm in Cambridge, will focus initially on monitoring air pollution and weather conditions, collecting data on a scale never before attempted.

Libraries, museums meet with IT

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:19:59 -0400

The ability to search the actual text of millions of books — instead of just titles or summaries — will change the way students and academics conduct research, revealing a host of new sources invisible to current search methods, a Harvard University Library official working on the Google project said on March 28.

Genome-wide map will help fight diabetes

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:57:51 -0400

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Lund University, and Novartis have announced the completion of a genome-wide map of genetic differences in humans and their relationship to type 2 diabetes and other metabolic disorders. All results of the analysis are being made accessible, free of charge, on the Internet to scientists around the world.

The work is the result of a pioneering public-private collaboration known as the Diabetes Genetics Initiative (DGI), which was formed in 2004 and is aimed at deciphering the genetic causes of type 2 diabetes. The collaboration brings together diverse expertise in diabetes and metabolic disease, human genetics, genomics, statistical analysis, and drug development.

"These discoveries are but a first step. To translate this study's provocative identification of diabetes-related genes into the invention of new medicines will require a global effort. We hope many will race to do so," said Mark Fishman, president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. "We hope as well that others adopt this novel and effective mode of open collaboration between scientists and physicians, in business and academia, and dedicate work to our patients by making the data quickly and freely available to all."

Type 2 diabetes and related cardiovascular risk factors, including obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, are among the most common and significant public health challenges in the industrialized world. Their incidence continues to climb despite advances in biomedicine, highlighting the need for new insights into the disorders' root causes and novel strategies for prevention and treatment. Although type 2 diabetes clearly runs in families, suggesting the importance of inherited factors, its genetic origins remain largely unclear.

DGI is an international collaboration of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Lund University, and Novartis. Collaborators include scientists from the Jackson Heart Study and the University of Southern California. The Broad Institute team includes scientists from its partner institutions, which include Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Children's Hospital Boston.

Web quiz helps predict women's health

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:02:32 -0400

Using data collected from more than 24,000 initially healthy American women, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have devised a new Web-based formula called the Reynolds Risk Score that for the first time more accurately predicts risk of heart attack or stroke among women. In addition to usual risk factors like cholesterol, blood pressure, and smoking, the new Reynolds Risk Score adds information on two new factors: family history of heart attack prior to age 60 and blood level of C-reactive protein (CRP), a measure of artery inflammation. Using the new risk assessment tool, the researchers found that nearly 50 percent of women in the study who were estimated to be at "intermediate risk" for heart attack or stroke based on current guidelines were in fact at significantly higher or lower risk levels.

For the 10 million American women currently classified at "intermediate risk," use of the Reynolds Risk Score provides doctors and their patients a much clearer picture of who should or should not receive drug therapies such as statins or aspirin, and highlights the critical impact that can be made on heart disease prevention by diet, exercise, and smoking cessation. The findings appear in the Feb. 14 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association and are available in a user-friendly format for both physicians and their patients at http://www.reynoldsriskscore.org.

"Women as well as men suffer premature heart attacks and stroke, but our standard methods for risk prediction have not been as effective in preventing disease among women," said cardiologist Paul Ridker, the Eugene Braunwald Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, who is director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at BWH and lead author of the study. "One of the problems cardiologists and preventive physicians face is that we often underestimate women's risk for heart disease and stroke. With the new Reynolds Risk Score, we found many women to be at substantially higher risk than anticipated. That's an enormous opportunity for prevention because if physicians can accurately tell a woman in her 30s or 40s about true lifetime risk, they've got a much better chance of motivating her to stop smoking, get regular exercise, reduce her blood pressure, and where indicated, start a statin or aspirin regimen."

In addition to providing each woman with an estimate of her risk of suffering a future heart attack, stroke, or other major cardiovascular event over the next 10 years, the Reynolds Risk Score Web site simultaneously shows each woman what her risk would be if she improved each of her individual risk factors to optimal levels. For young women, risk may appear low over the next 10 years, yet can be very high over a lifetime. The Reynolds Risk Score also allows each woman to calculate risk as she ages, demonstrating the impact that risk reduction early in life can have on future events. The Reynolds Risk Score Web site provides useful links to prevention programs for women from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the American Heart Association, and the American College of Cardiology.

Microsoft's Ballmer pulls out the stops at HBS talk

50443248 — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 09:51:11 -0400

The 24th richest person in the world made a visit to the Harvard Business School (HBS) last week (Dec. 7), and gave an audience of 700 advice on how to succeed in business: Have passion, curiosity, and empathy.

Microsoft CEO Steven Anthony Ballmer '77 (whose net worth is around $14 billion) also shared his vision of the high-tech industry's future: It's bright.

"The next 10 years will be hotter than the last 10 years," he said - surpassing the past decade with its huge new global markets for PCs, cell phones, the Internet, and digital cameras. (Microsoft's already grabbed its share. About 800 million PCs - 90 percent of the world's computers - use Microsoft Windows.)

'Usable Knowledge' Web site delivers research to educators

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:28:29 -0400

The Harvard Graduate School of Education on Dec. 6, 2006, launched a new Web site aimed at connecting the research of its faculty with educators in the field. The Usable Knowledge Web site features a diverse set of media - text, video, and audio - to make the leading research of its faculty accessible to educators all over the world.

The Usable Knowledge Web site is organized around five topic areas that align with high priorities for educators: leadership and policy; learning and development; decisions through data; community and family; and teaching and curriculum.

U.S. lagging in adoption of electronic health records

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 10:43:04 -0400

With fewer than one in 10 doctors making full use of electronic health records and as few as 5 percent of hospitals using one form of them, the U.S. health care industry is way behind in adopting new systems that can improve patient care and reduce medical mistakes, according to a new report co-authored by Harvard researchers.

"We are pitifully behind where we should be. We must find ways to get more physicians to embrace this technology if we are to make major strides in improving health care quality," said study co-author David Blumenthal, the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Medicine, professor of health care policy, and director of Massachusetts General Hospital's Institute for Health Policy.

Health care institutions have long adopted computerized records for financial and administrative systems, but have been slower to adopt electronic health records for the clinical side of their operations even though those systems have the potential to reduce medication mistakes, unnecessary tests, and inappropriate care; to cut costs; and to improve patient monitoring.

President George W. Bush has called on U.S. health care institutions to adopt electronic systems for a majority of patients by 2014 as a way to make health care delivery more efficient and more effective.

The report, "Health Information Technology in the United States: The Information Base for Progress," was drafted by a team of researchers from Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard School of Public Health, and George Washington University. It was sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the federal government's National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

Genetic 'road map' leads to discoveries

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 10:55:58 -0400

A research team led by scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard announced Sept. 28 the development of a new kind of genetic "road map" that can connect human diseases with potential drugs to treat them, as well as predict how new drugs work in human cells. Called the "connectivity map," the new tool and its uses are described in the Sept. 29 issue of Science and in separate publications in the Sept. 28 immediate early edition of Cancer Cell. The three papers show the map's ability to accurately predict the molecular actions of novel therapeutic compounds and to suggest ways that existing drugs can be newly applied to treat diseases such as cancer.

Innovative computing initiative sets sights on projects

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 11:05:49 -0400

After a year of hiring, moving into new digs, and generally getting its feet wet, the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) is ready to forge ahead into the new year, diving into computer-intensive projects that need not just computational firepower, but also innovative thinking.

The initiative is moving ahead on a half-dozen or so projects generated by groups of Harvard faculty in response to a call for ideas last spring. These projects span a broad array of disciplines, from using medical imaging technology to illuminate star creation to producing astonishingly detailed pictures of the mammalian brain to designing a Web portal that offers astronomers new ways to share data.

Bar code technology in hospital pharmacy cuts errors

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:28:13 -0400

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, evaluating the use of bar coding technology for storing and dispensing medication from the hospital pharmacy, found that the rates of medication dispensing errors and potential adverse drug events, which are dispensing errors that can harm patients, were substantially reduced when bar code scanning technology was used in the dispensing process. The findings appear in the Sept. 19, 2006, issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Shortly before bar code technology was installed, the researchers observed the dispensing of 115,000 medication doses from the hospital pharmacy to measure the rate of dispensing errors. During that time, pharmacy technicians and pharmacists manually retrieved medication doses from several storage areas and relied on visual inspection alone to verify the retrieved doses before dispensing the medications to the patient care units. With the implementation of bar code technology in the fall of 2003, every dose of medication was affixed with a bar code, and these barcodes were scanned in an additional step to ensure that the right medications were being dispensed. Following barcode technology conversion, the researchers observed the dispensing of nearly 254,000 doses to re-measure the rate of dispensing errors.

By comparing the error rates before and after the implementation of bar code technology, the researchers found that the rate of dispensing errors targeted for reduction by bar code technology fell by 85 percent. The rate of potential adverse drug events (or dispensing errors with the potential to harm patients) also fell by 63 percent.

The study was supported by a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Visualization Lab provides data in three dimensions

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:28:20 -0400

On the second floor of the Peabody Museum, in a darkened room painted flat black, Harvard geologist John Shaw slips on a pair of futuristic goggles as he sits before a 23-foot-wide wrap-around screen.

With a click of his mouse, a rotating yellow outline of Africa seems to jump off the screen and fill the small room. Globular columns of red magma lurking deep below most of the floating image slither in three dimensions up to volcanoes on the surface.

The southern tip of Africa appears to pass within easy arm's reach as the 3-D representation slowly whirls in midair.

"It would be very hard to represent this in any kind of two-dimensional display," says Shaw, Harry C. Dudley Professor of Structural and Economic Geology. "You end up having to show people 13 or 15 slices and try to let their brain do the work of composing this 3-D architecture."

Despite what early explorers feared, the Earth is not flat. And that has long presented a challenge for geologists trying to model and study three-dimensional sections of the Earth's crust on flat maps and computer screens.

The data used by Harvard's Structural Geology and Earth Resources Group are no longer imprisoned in two dimensions, thanks to a new state-of-the-art immersive Visualization Lab, the first of its kind at Harvard and one of few in the world. Racks of powerful computers and graphics processors feed stereo images compiled from scientific data to three digital projectors suspended from the ceiling.

The stereo image looks blurry until you slip on the high-tech goggles, which, in a feat of precision timing, block one eye then the other in time with alternating left and right perspectives projected onto the 8-foot-tall screen. The result is a breathtakingly realistic 3-D image.

Solitons may be the next wave in electronic circuits

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 11:12:27 -0400

Harvard scientists have solved the puzzle of how to generate a special form of wave in small electronic devices, allowing the electrical equivalent of the pulses of light that carry signals through optical cables.

The advance, highlighted in the March 2 issue of the journal Nature, occurred in the Harvard lab of Donhee Ham, assistant professor of electrical engineering in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The special waves, called solitons, are valuable in commercial and engineering applications because they are single, stable waves that don't lose strength as they travel large distances. Soliton waves in optical fibers, for example, have transferred large amounts of information over thousands of kilometers with no errors in the signal.