Dan Pelino, General Mgr, IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences, talks about the move towards patient-centric healthcare. He paints this as a requirement as the boomers get older, especially since we spend as much in the last five years of our lives as we do in the rest of our lives.

Lee Strickland spent many years in the intelligence community but is now at the U of Maryland. He says we need to restructure the intelligence community, revitalize the discipline of analysis, and rationalize our policies.

In intelligence today the technology supporting the efforts is neither a backwater nor state of the art. The community is moving from stove-piped, proprietary solutions to one in which info is ubiquitous.

“We tend to ignore the uniquely human aspect of intelligence.” Intelligence is, he says, the human mind converting information into knowledge, in light of the entire context, through a rigid process of hypothesis and testing.

He suggests five points to improve security:

1. Rationalize and restructure. Organize around intelligence priorities and then apply intel sources and methods and technologes required for the task. Don’t let the collection machinery drive the train.

2. Institute performance-based measurement.

3. The Cold War culture of secrecy is no longer appropriate. Secrecy inhibits the efficiency of intel analysis because secrecy inhibits access. But lack of secrecy imperils sources.

4. Revitalize the practice of analysis. “Analysis is nothing more or less than the scientific method in action.”

Agencies are adopting federal IT standards. Digital info enables the creaation of ad hoc communities of practice. The digital tech provides a platform, but it’s a platform for human work.

S. Abraham Ravid, an economist at Yale School of Management and Rutgers talks about the declining cost of transmitting entertainment and the legal battles regarding piracy.

He begins with a quote that seems to excoriate music downloading but that turns out to be a case from 1908 in which the owners of sheet music sued the creators of piano rolls. The Supreme Court went against the composers. He says that this type of suit has continued, but the new technologies have actually increased the market.

Abraham thinks that the current struggles will be resolved with a new business model that works out for both the producers and the audience. The new model will “distribute the cost savings among all participants.”

“Intellectual property” [yech – I hate that phrase] will be available everywhere, any time. “We just have to make the contractual environment amenable to this.” He does not think theaters will go away, even though attendance is declining. (The peak in terms of absolute numbers was in 1929, he says…an amazing fact.) People will go to the theater and buy the DVD later, he says.

Content production is being democratized, he says. “Things are moving very quickly and it will take a while before settle into a new model. I’m very optimistic.” [Tags: libraries entertainment copyright health_care intellligence]

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