Do We Really Need 100,000 Contact Tracers?
According to lexicographer and dictionary expert Susie Dent, the average active vocabulary of an adult English speaker is around 20,000 words. We also have a passive vocabulary of around 40,000 words, words we have stored but don’t use. The current environment is adding to our active vocabularies. It seems every day we hear the words […]
Why Did It Take a Pandemic to Be Able to Use Telehealth?
In early April I had a routine consultation with my electrophysiologist at Nuvance Health via telehealth. Nuvance uses telehealth technology from American Well. In preparation for the consult, I took my blood pressure with a Qardio cuff and my iPhone, weighed myself on the Fitbit scale, and took a 30-second ECG with the Apple Watch. […]
Voting With Paper or Internet: Which is Better?
Press articles about Internet voting abound. The articles quote technology experts who are worried about the theoretical risks of Internet voting, mobile or otherwise. They correctly say the Internet is not perfect. But, neither is the paper-base system we have. The anti-Internet voting activists continue to compare Internet voting to a perfect world which we […]
Do Researchers Help or Hurt Our Democracy?
On Thursday morning, The New York Times ran a story about how MIT researchers found alleged flaws in the Voatz software used to support overseas military voters from West Virginia. Voatz has great success with mobile voting in multiple precincts around the country with no security problems. The terrible way in which the Iowa caucus […]
You Can Never Test Too Much
A lot of knowledgeable experts will be weighing in with their points of view about what went wrong with the Iowa caucus vote counting. There were many problems but it is clear as can be the core problem was the lack of testing. I learned decades ago about the importance of testing anything involving software. […]