Blog

So, two-time reigning NBA MVP Stephen Curry has picked the Blue Devils to win it all this year because they can “get hot at the right time and they’re gonna stay hot.” Not to mention, his brother Seth used to play for Duke. How about you? Have you filled out your own bracket? How can you predict how your picks will fare? While the chances of picking the perfect bracket are one in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, you have a fifty-fifty chance of predicting who emerges in each matchup. Using historical data (and barring tournament-changing injuries to key players), you can objectively analyze each matchup in …

The Telephone Game is a great icebreaker for parties, company retreats or classrooms. The rules are simple: The group stands in a line or circle, with everyone close enough to whisper into each other’s ear, and the person at the beginning of the line whispers a phrase or word into the next person’s ear. The game continues until the message has been passed along to everyone. The phrase heard by the last person in line is rarely the same one uttered by the first person – illustrating how information is transformed by factors such as personal experience, perception, listening skills …

You don’t have to be Irish to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day – wearing green, enjoying parades and decorating with shamrocks – can be enjoyed by everyone. As I think about St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, the phrase “luck of the Irish” comes to mind. The expression was coined in the days of the gold and silver rush days by less successful miners to attribute the success of other miners – many of whom were Irish or Irish-American – to luck rather than insight, good decisions and hard work. Just as sheer luck was not solely responsible for the success of Irish …

College basketball’s annual championship tournament, which runs from March 14th through April 3rd this year, is an exciting, complex tradition and there’s always the chance a Cinderella team from a smaller school will emerge from nowhere to topple a perennial powerhouse. That’s why we watch. The mad scramble and chaos that mark the tournament, with vaunted teams going down to defeat, scrappy schools fighting for a lead to live another day, etc., takes hold of the country’s attention throughout the month of March. But bosses nationwide could be forgiven if they gave it alternative name: “Spring Slacking.” That’s because millions …

Changes in healthcare affect the life sciences sector and vice versa, as the two are inextricably intertwined. These changes require those in industry to think in new ways, and react swiftly and efficiently to the evolving environment. Value-based Healthcare Leads Pharma Companies to Value-Based Pricing The drive in healthcare to improve patient outcomes and lower costs has created a shift to value-based care and is in turn driving a movement toward evaluating value (price for the amount of benefit) in the pricing of drugs on the part of pharmaceutical companies and their end using constituents (clinicians and patients). A balance …

The pharmaceutical industry and all its players, including multinational pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and chemical manufacturing organizations, are facing several trends in the shifting global landscape. These trends include an aging workforce and population, ever-changing regulatory and compliance requirements, global innovation, and the need for education—coupled with pricing pressures and the shift in focus toward customer engagement and patient-centricity. The integration of business intelligence into the strategic planning of every organization is another industry trend—one which not only brings various business benefits to the pharma industry, but also provides information access and an advanced platform for data visualization. All these trends will have …

Over the years, we’ve seen many encryption algorithms (MD5, DES, 3DES, RC4, etc.) become deprecated as computing power advances and these algorithms become easier to crack. Most recently, Google announced that they successfully submitted the first ever collision attack for SHA-1 while significantly reducing the previously estimated cost for this attack. The announcement also stated their intention of publicly releasing the proof-of-concept code after 90 days, which could put many companies still using SHA-1 encryption at risk. Since 2010, researchers and federal agencies have been publicly speaking out against and banning the use of SHA-1. The push by Certificate Authorities …

An increasing number of enterprises are looking to the cloud for their business software and application needs. Technology Business Research predicts that global public cloud revenue will double to $167 billion in 2020 from $80 billion in 2015. The cost benefits of moving software expenses from capital expenditure (CAPEX) to operating expenses (OPEX), the scalability and mobility that cloud services offer, and enhanced security features are driving this massive shift toward cloud services. However, as enterprises adopt multiple Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud services, many are finding out how difficult it is to integrate these services with each other and with their …

During the Amazon AWS outage last week, I saw an attention-grabbing headline on the gadget and technology review website Gizmodo that read, “Amazon Just Broke the Internet.” While clearly a little tongue-in-cheek, this headline did get me thinking about just how ubiquitous the cloud has become and how interdependent we all are, both personally and professionally. A post-mortem analysis of the outage uncovered that it was not caused by a malicious hack or distributed denial of service attack (the culprit behind other recent high-profile outages including that of the DNS provider Dyn last October), but an innocent typo made by …

What’s the top topic and talk going to be at next year’s HIMSS Conference & Exhibition?  That’s the same question everyone asks right after they’re exhausted from walking through 1200 vendor exhibits and attending more sessions than the body is able to without the muscles giving out from all the walking.  Personally, I like to think of the HIMSS conference as my second “get in shape” resolution after failing each New Year’s – the timing is perfect! But really, looking at the big picture, we are seeing progress.  It is clear that over the past few years we’ve shifted from …