Jen A. Miller
Hired Pen.
Jen is the go-to writer for business to business publications that cover everything from logistics to data security to cryptocurrency. She also writes often for university publications and medical associations, and overseen production of development brochures, newsletters and annual reports; written articles for in-house publications, and also ghosted speeches, op/eds for university presidents and deans.
We are truly never alone, not even within our own bodies. Human beings play host to trillions of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microorganisms that make up the human microbiome. In recent years, the mix of these resident bacteria, and the presence of specific bacterial species, has been linked to conditions ranging from obesity to multiple sclerosis.
Penn Medicine has been on a multiyear journey to both raise the rates of screening for colorectal cancer and increase uptake of follow up care, with the goal of driving down colorectal cancer death rates and addressing inequities. Right now, colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the U.S., with higher rates in the Black community than any other racial/ethnic group. Black Americans are 20% more likely to get colorectal cancer, and 40% more likely to die of it compared to most other groups, according to the American Cancer Society.
When Idris Solomon ’02 launched the “Black Shutter Podcast,” he thought he was prepared.
“I bought two microphones, two microphone stands, two cables, everything,” he says.
The problem? He began the podcast in January 2020. After recording two episodes from his Brooklyn-based photography studio, COVID hit.
The Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) market—including everything from yoga and meditation to acupuncture and naturopathy—is projected to be worth $210.12 billion by 2026, according to Grand View Research.
When Vice President Dick Cheney received a new defibrillator in 2007, his doctor disabled the device’s wireless capabilities so that it wouldn’t be vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
“I worried that someone could kill you,” his cardiologist, Jonathan Reiner, told him years later on CBS’ 60 Minutes.
While healthcare systems have focused on warding off threats from malware and ransomware, a more insidious way to create havoc is gaining attention: hackers targeting patients by changing or disabling network-connected medical devices and diagnostic test results. Earlier this week, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) held a meeting to highlight the potential dangers.
HIPAA compliance is a challenge for every healthcare organization. The industry took note in April when Amazon announced new HIPAA-compliant features for its Alexa digital assistant. These features represent a step forward in the potential for smart speaker technology to meet growing demands from patients for easy access to health information.
When DHL decided to upgrade its 434,000-square-foot cold storage facility at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, the company had an eye not just on maintaining temperatures inside the facility, but making sure those temperatures held at all parts of the delivery cycle.
When David G. Marrero, PhD, talks about diabetes, he is not shy about using strong language. “Diabetes may be the most serious public health crisis of our time,” said Marrero, director of the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center for Border Health Disparities in Tucson. “If you think our healthcare system is stressed now and that the costs are exacerbated, put another 40 to 50 million people with diabetes into the mix, and we’ll be in very deep trouble.”
When researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the Center for Substance Abuse Research (CESAR) set up a study in two Maryland emergency departments designed to identify overdose patients with synthetic cannabinoids in their system, they expected to find just that. Instead, out of 175 urine samples, only one tested positive.
Antibiotic resistant bacteria are not just a $2.2 billion healthcare industry problem: They’re a modern-day health crisis that has continued to build a dangerous momentum.
Healthcare organizations are facing a mounting security challenge: Not only is patient data a ripe target for hackers, but legacy hardware systems have such holes in their security that ERI called the current situation a “perfect storm.”
According to the report, 3.15 million patient records were compromised in 142 healthcare data breaches in the second quarter of 2018. A full 30 percent of privacy violations involved repeat offenders.
If your warehouse isn’t on the wearable bandwagon, expect to jump on soon: MHI expects 70% of facilities to adopt wearables in the next five years.
Wearables don’t necessarily mean the latest GPS watch you’ll wear while marathon training. It could be as simple as a barcode scanner that eliminates the need for manual data entry, or as complex as smart glasses that identify what exactly a person should pick through augmented reality.
Companies have become obsessed with data, and for good reason: collecting the right data, and knowing how to analyze it, can unlock potential a company never knew it had.
One word executives will hear tossed around during almost any discussion about big data: “data lakes.”
An egg seller recently had a chicken/egg problem, though not which came first. The company wanted to figure out how to optimize its chickens’ egg laying capacity.
“The problem is the coop is covered with chicken feces,” said Alfonso Velosa, research vice president for IoT at Gartner, discussing a recent client’s conundrum. “For them, the central thing is how do we increase productivity while the floor is clean enough.”
At the end of one of the hottest summers on record, as fights rage on about how to power homes, renewable solar energy continues to present as an option that does not significantly add greenhouse gases to the environment in exchange for lighting and cooling our homes. And it’s just been given another edge through material science.
When both Amazon and DHL announced they were making moves to open warehouses in Latin America, it brought a spotlight onto a growing region – on the overall economy but especially on e-commerce and how it’s changing the demand for warehousing and supply chain services.
“The e-commerce boom in Latin America is changing the way that companies are servicing their customers,” Diego Rodriguez, director of the logistics practice at Americas Market Intelligence, told Supply Chain Dive.
When Arseny Reutov, a web application security specialist at Positive.com, set to test out potential attack points in games of chance that run on the Ethereum blockchain, he expected to find some flaws in the system, maybe.
What he didn’t expect was that half of what he tested had vulnerabilities that could be exploited to do what rarely can be done in a physical casino: beat the house.
“I thought that the security of random number generators should be much higher,” Reutov said. Reutovpresented these findings at OWASP AppSec California in January and PHDays 2018 last month.
The threat of blackmail never really goes away. It’s just now the bad guys want their anonymous payments in bitcoin (BTC).
In a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attack hackers bombard a website with so much traffic from multiple sources the site can’t function. To make the problem go away, hackers are demanding ransom in cryptocurrencies, which make the payments easier for them to get.
Paper, plastic or crypto plastic? Get ready to pay for those stylish jeans at your local retailer, in person, using cryptocurrency.
How? TillBilly, an Australian startup, unveiled this month its new blockchain-based “tap and go” terminal as well as an initial coin offering of its cryptocurrency, called BILL. The point-of-sale (POS) terminal uses blockchain to create a “secure, auditable ledger for transactions,” Sarthak Moghe, founder of TillBilly, tells ThirtyK.
You may know that hackers want to take over your devices and use them to get rich mining cryptocurrencies. What you may not know is the problem is getting worse very quickly.
That’s a key finding from McAfee Labs’ first-quarter threats report. The research unit of the computer security software company McAfee found what it calls a “stunning” 629 percent increase in coin miner malware during the first quarter compared with the fourth quarter of last year. This kind of malware infects a victim’s device and turns it into a cryptocurrency miner, allowing the attacker to pocket the profits.
Attractions have their core visitors—locals and those who travel back year after year—but what about capturing those out-of-town guests who may not know your facility exists until they’re within driving range? The answer is already in their hands … because people are always looking at their phones.
Big data is the buzzword we can’t avoid, but for good reason: it’s changing the way a lot of businesses operate, and will continue to do so, especially within the supply chain world.
Sixty-four percent of supply chain executives consider big data analytics a disruptive and important technology, according to SCM World, even though it’s still a relatively new application of the technology.
Employer demand for data analytics skills is up 82 percent since 2011, according to a study by labor analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies. Meet five alumni living the trend.
It’s a wrap for bulky, wasteful packaging. Shippers today have to satisfy consumers who not only demand that fewer materials be used in packaging, but also prefer those materials to have a low environmental impact.
In addition to eliminating packaging waste to satisfy consumers, shippers also need to consider cost. Cutting back on packaging can reduce both material spend and shipping costs. Making packages smaller and lighter helps companies streamline the supply chain for additional time and money savings.
Federal CIOs need an action plan for tackling software management.
The Making Electronic Government Accountable by Yielding Tangible Efficiencies (MEGABYTE) Act, signed into law July 29, requires agencies to develop comprehensive software licensing policies and work toward a more unified approach to software acquisition.
On a jobsite in Kingsville, Texas, in August 2013, a worker was mixing gypsum concrete in preparation for gypcrete installation on an apartment building. It’s not a particularly taxing job, but he was doing it in direct sunlight. “He wasn’t training or doing anything that involved a lot of lifting or climbing,” says Holly Webster, director of administration at Texas-based KWA Construction, which served as the general contractor on the job. (KWA would not release further information on either the worker or subcontractor.) The man, in his 20s, had just transferred from New Mexico, and he wasn’t used to the heat and humidity of a Texas summer. While he’d had some water that day, he also drank some caffeine-packed energy drinks.
When Smoothie King decided to change its point of sale system, the company didn’t just make alterations to what was currently in more than 600 stores. It scrapped the whole thing.
“As far as our guests are concerned, it’s really about what’s happening when they visit a story and what’s happening on their tablet or their phone,” says John Lapeyrouse, Smoothie King CIO. “The opportunity to replace point of sale systems doesn’t come along very often.”
The mobile health (mMealth) marketplace has lived up to its hype, but where it goes next depends on our changing healthcare needs.
The number of mHealth apps published on iOS and Android has more than doubled in two and-a-half years, reaching more than 100,000 apps in 2014, according to research2guidance’s fourth annual study on mHealth app publishing.
Market revenue reached $2.4 billion dollars in 2013 and is projected to grow to $26 billion by 2017.
Small and medium-sized businesses may think they’re immune to the kinds of attacks that wreaked havoc on Target last year, but they’re susceptible to the same nefarious forces — sometimes even more so, as they can lead hackers to a bigger prize.
Since the Target breach, other retailers have been affected, including Neiman Marcus,eBay and P.F. Chang’s. But the Target breach was huge — information on 40 million credit and debit cards was stolen, along with records of 70 million customers, including name, address, email address and phone number.
The beat goes on. In recent weeks, both JP Morgan Chase and Home Depot have been identified as the latest victims of large-scale cyberattacks.
JP Morgan Chase was among a handful of U.S. banks hit by hackers in a series of attacks in August. A few days later, Krebs on Security released details about a spring attack on Home Depot. The scope of the attack has not yet been determined, but it could be bigger than last year’s Target breach. Oh, and investigators found another Healthcare.gov hack in July, too.
Having a proactive attitude about money and healthy financial habits is an essential part of building a solid future for ourselves and our family. It’s important to start giving children the knowledge and skills they need to make smart money choices at a young age. But it’s not always easy to engage and empower kids and teenagers around financial issues. Maybe that’s why today’s college students are more in debt than ever before.
Zachry Engineering Corp. burst out of the recession with a full head of steam. On the heels of a tough couple of years, the design arm of Zachry Holdings is back among the region’s powerhouse firms. After its regional revenue dropped from $124.5 million in 2009 to $41.4 million in 2011, the company more than doubled the total in 2012, reaching $90.4 million. That secured it eighth place on the current list of top design firms in Texas and Louisiana.
Now in its third year, ENR California’s Top 20 Under 40 list makes clear that the construction industry has a deep well of talent.
Parents with cancer face special challenges. New points of connection can help you be there for your kids.
Sports used to be a boy’s club. But today women are integral players in the sports world, from your kid’s soccer team to the professional level.
“In half a century, we’ve gone from girls in high schools engaging in one or two play days a year and that counting for their athletic experience to full-blown athletic participation in virtually any sporting activity that a high school or college offers,” says Stephen D. Mosher, professor of sport management and media in the School of Health Sciences and Human Performance.
Breast cancer survivors who carry the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genetic mutation are at high risk for developing contralateral breast cancer — a new primary tumor in the other breast — and certain women within this group of carriers are at an even greater risk based on age at diagnosis and first tumor status, according to data presented at the 2011 CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, held Dec. 6-10, 2011.
On a rainy Friday afternoon in September 2011, The Wistar Institute celebrated a landmark occasion. Crowded inside the atrium of Wistar’s historic 1894 building, away from the torrent outside, the Institute made officially public its intent to build a new, seven-story, 89,700-square-foot research tower and renovate significant portions of its existing research complex. The project, estimated to cost more than $100 million, is designed to expand Wistar cancer and vaccine research capabilities, and provide a bold new presence for the Institute.
A novel protein marker has been found that identifies rare adult liver stem cells, whose ability to regenerate injured liver tissue has the potential for cell-replacement therapy. For the first time, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine led by Linda Greenbaum, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology, have demonstrated that cells expressing
the marker can differentiate into both liver cells and cells that line the bile duct.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have likely found one reason why the Ebola virus is such a powerful, deadly, and effective virus. Using a cell culture model for Ebola virus infection, they have discovered that the virus disables a cellular protein called tetherin that normally can block the spread of virus from cell to cell.
Diane Selkirk called from her in-laws’ place in Vancouver, British Columbia, the city she calls home. But as soon as we started talking, she was interrupted by a whisper, then a giggle.
“Here she comes,” says Selkirk, 42, who has a soft voice and the round o’s of a Canadian accent. The ‘she’ is Maia, her freckle-faced 9-year-old daughter. Selkirk asked me to call her back on Skype so we could talk over her computer, and got off the landline so Maia could use it.