It’s Friday again, so it’s time to take a look at what you may have missed in the world of technology outside healthcare.
Here are five interesting general technology stories from the past seven days that people in healthcare should pay attention to. These issues could have an impact on health tech in the future.
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1. “Girls Trump Boys on Engineering, Technology Test” (US News & World Report)
“We did not expect this pattern and the pattern does seem to be pretty clear from the data,” said Peggy Carr, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, a data arm of the Department of Education that evaluated the test results. “Overall it looks like girls have the ability and critical thinking skills to succeed in the fields of technology and engineering, and that’s worth noting.”
The difference in performance between female and male students was especially surprising, Carr said, because female students tend to perform equal to or worse than male students on math and science achievement exams.
2. “Another Day, Another Hack: 117 Million LinkedIn Emails And Passwords” (Motherboard)
A hacker is trying to sell the account information, including emails and passwords, of 117 million LinkedIn users.
The hacker, who goes by the name “Peace,” told Motherboard that the data was stolen during the LinkedIn breach of 2012. At the time, only around 6.5 million encrypted passwords were posted online, and LinkedIn never clarified how many users were affected by that breach.
Turns out it was much worse than anybody thought.
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3. “The 10 biggest announcements from Google I/O 2016” (The Verge)
At I/O this year, Google displayed its vision for a more ubiquitous and conversational way of interacting with technology. Its Assistant is chattier, answering natural language queries with a more human voice, and it’s found its way into several new Google products: the messenger Allo and the Echo-like speaker Home. Both are areas where other companies have a lead, but Google’s strength in AI gave these services some nice twists, doing things like automatically generating surprisingly specific reactions to photos.
4. “Are Services Like Uber and Airbnb Driving a Digital Divide?” (NBC News)
[T]he very economy that sprung up to provide streams of revenue to people without the capital investment to start their own business, seems to be benefiting mainly those who are well educated and better off. American households earning upwards of $100,000 a year are three times more likely to use an on-demand service than those earning $30,000.
5. “Study shows customers give up on a brand after one poor mobile experience” (Business Insider)
Approximately one-third of the respondents (4,500 mobile users and 450 brands) said they would give up on a brand completely after just one poor mobile experience, a statistic that should make retailers take notice.
More than one-third (35%) of the respondents expect personalized apps and websites in the near future, while 27% want to be able to place orders “on the move.” Finally, 25% of respondents want their apps and mobile sites to react more quickly to localization changes.
Photo: Flickr user Per Gosche