Mobility in Nursing: An Ongoing Evolution

Originally Published: July 24, 2012

Link: http://www.healthcare-informatics.com/article/mobility-nursing-ongoing-evolution 

In any kind of provider setting, the importance of nurses cannot be overstated. For those on the front lines, nurses are usually the “glue,” a term that Shannon Hubler, R.N., director of contact center operations at the Minneapolis-based seven-hospital healthcare system, Fairview Health Services, has appreciatively bestowed on the profession.

“In my experience, nurses are the closest ones to the patients and the families,” Hubler says. “They are the link between everything, the glue that holds everything together. They are speaking with the docs. They understand the physical therapy, the occupational therapy, the speech therapy. They interface with the social workers about what patients will need when they get home. They work with the family enough to know about dynamics. We often treat things episodically, but the truth is those patients will go home and they’ll either have a support system or none at all. The nurses are an important part of understanding that.”

For that reason, Fairview is one of many providers across the country that has invested significant dollars in mobile technology to improve nursing at the point of care. Mobile computing in healthcare is not a recent phenomenon—it’s an evolving one, and this especially holds true for nurses.  From beepers to computers on wheels to PDAs, a variety of mobile systems, with a range of nursing capabilities, have come down the pipe over the past few decades.

With the rise of mobile health (mHealth) through smartphones—recent research from Rockville, Md.-based Kalorama Information indicates that the market for mobile medical apps was worth about $150 million in 2011 and will compound annually over the next five years—many industry leaders say the evolution will only continue, while becoming more integrated and more integral to nursing care. Currently, the rising tide of investments by providers across the U.S. is evidence of how much mobility has impacted nursing.

FIXING COMMUNICATION BARRIERS
Long-standing communication problems, due to an old call center system and other connectivity issues, are the main reason why Hubler’s Fairview is in the early stages of implementing an enterprise mobile solution from Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Amcom Software. At the center of this implementation is Amcom’s mobile event notification middleware, which Fairview is integrating into its Ascom (Morrisville, N.C.) and Vocera  (San Jose, Calif.) mobile devices for nurse call requests. The middleware has the ability to process alerts straight to the nurses’ devices, which are supplied by the hospital.

“If you’re on a nursing unit and you’re being assigned four to six patients on any given shift, you’re spread pretty thin. You might geographically not be next to the room. You may not hear beepers beep. There’s a lag in hitting that call light, the message goes to the front desk and then somebody is finding the nurse by pager,” Hubler says. “The ability to push those alarms or patient pushbuttons directly to the nurse who can prioritize and get to you as quickly as possible saves time, it’s more efficient, patients are more satisfied, and it’s safer.”

Hubler would like to see further additions down the line, including the ability for patients’ families to connect to a nurse’s point-of-care mobile directly. He also foresees nurses at Fairview bringing their own devices and using Amcom’s software to send encrypted messaging.

TIME AND TEXTING
Across the country, at the Rochester, N.H.-based Frisbie Memorial Hospital, an 87-bed acute care community hospital, investments have already been made in mobile-based text messaging among nurses.

Much like Hubler, Sally Gallot-Reeves R.N., healthcare project director at Frisbie, understands the criticality of time. Thus, as projects director, she oversaw the implementation of iPhones and a point-of-care application from Voalté (Sarasota, Fla.), initially for the nursing and emergency staffs and then later for the rest of the ancillary providers.

Sally Gallot-Reeves R.N.

The application combines voice, alarm, and—most importantly, Reeves says—text messaging onto a single platform. She says text messaging is a good way for nurses to quickly say something to other nurses or care providers and coordinate with them, rather than talking on the phone, which usually opens up a time-consuming discussion. Since Frisbie first rolled out the app in the fall of 2010, 80,000 texts have been sent per month across the enterprise. Texts, she says, can be sent from mobile device to mobile device or from mobile device to a web-client.

“The first week, we had many early adopters, because of course, with the younger staff that’s their life,” Gallot-Reeves says. “They use it all the time. Then we had other people, who probably don’t have a cell phone. They said, ‘This will never work, I’m never going to do it, etc.’ Then an interesting thing happened. It became apparent that if you weren’t using a [cell] phone and you weren’t responding to messages, you didn’t know what was what going on. By the second week, if you didn’t have an iPhone, you were going to senior management and asking, ‘When can I get mine?’”

At specialty hospitals, like the 93-bed Craig Hospital, a rehabilitation facility in Englewood, Colo., mobile solutions are being used to help nurses as well. At Craig, the mobile investments are for telemetry solutions and RFID barcode scanning for medication administration. Craig uses an app from Patient Safe Solutions (San Diego) for the barcode scanning on what Diane Reinhard, R.N., vice president of patient care services and chief nursing officer at Craig, calls an “iPad-like platform.” The telemetry sits on a separate Cisco phone.

These days, mobile technology is even being emphasized during a nurse’s training. It is a huge part of the curriculum for students at the Weston, Mass.-based Regis College School of Nursing, which mandates that every incoming student adopt an iPhone.  The trainees at Regis use mobile software as reference tools at the point of care and as a way to interface with EMR systems.

“We realized we had to prepare for the nurse of the future, while keeping the nurse of the present in mind as well,” says Nancy Bittner, Ph.D., R.N., associate dean of Regis. “Because we’re in the Boston area, we use all the major [medical] centers and stay on top of what they are requiring for their nurses.”

AN EVIDENCE-BASED TOOL
Industry experts say the best is yet to come. Many, like Patricia Hinton Walker, Ph.D., R.N., FAAN, PCC, vice president for nursing policy and professor of nursing at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Md., who have seen the nursing and the mobile health IT evolution first-hand, consider the present time to be the perfect intersection of opportunity for nursing, mobility, and patient/consumer health.


Patricia Hinton Walker, Ph.D., R.N., FAAN, PCC

Thanks to the developments in real-time evidence-based change technology through mobile applications, nurses are in a greater position   to empower and engage patients, she says.

Walker is one of the leaders of the Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform (TIGER) Initiative Foundation, which primarily enables nurses (and also inter-professional colleagues) to use informatics and emerging technologies. She says a collaborative of national nursing organizations is working to create a document that identifies the competencies and type of education that a nurse coach would have.

“The point I would make about the connection of mobile technology for improving patients’ and consumers’ health to this emerging role of nurses as coaches is you can’t just dub a well-meaning nurse or other provider a coach,” Walker says. “There are particular approaches, skills, and strategies, used in coaching that are different than what we’ve historically been taught and practiced as healthcare professionals. Rather than educate and advise, the coaching model has you getting the patient or consumer to be clear about why they want to make a behavioral change and how the data that are available through mobile health technologies are linked to the need for and progress of behavior change.”

Bittner similarly sees mobility being used by nurses for evidence-based practice at the bedside. Both she and Walker point to the changing healthcare environment, and the emerging requirements to maneuver through an EMR and interface with other information systems from provider to provider, as proof that this transformation is inevitable.

“They have to have this level of technology comfort, or they won’t be able to perform in this practice environment,” says Bittner, adding why nursing in particular is so critical to this progression. “[As nurses] we spend the most time at the bedside. So we need access to that information. We’re the ones who are providing that information to other providers, to other members of the team. We’re the managers of their care, and we’re inputting that data and making sense of it. That’s what nursing education is focused on, not just using technology for the sake of technology.”

A Hazy Outlook for Cloud Computing

Originally Published: December 29, 2011

Link: http://www.healthcare-informatics.com/article/hazy-outlook-cloud-computing

Author's note: This is my first feature article for Healthcare Informatics, published last month.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
Because of competing priorities as well as cost, security and implementation concerns, cloud-based storage development has gotten off to a slow start in healthcare. CIOs, CTOs and other healthcare IT leaders are adopting a variety of strategies in this area, based on their organizations’ needs, resources, and priorities.

With healthcare data set to spike over the next few years due to the advent of electronic health records (EHRs) and the ongoing digitization of diagnostic images, a new debate has emerged in the industry over the value of the cloud. While a considerable number of healthcare providers are turning to cloud computing as an alternative to traditional servers for storage purposes, others remain skeptical.

Cloud computing gives providers the opportunity to store data on a virtual server, and can be either public (operated by a third party vendor) or private (kept strictly in-house); or it can be created as a hybrid, using a combination of both public and private clouds. There’s no doubt that the cloud has become a trendy idea to solve storage-related cost issues. Consulting firms like Accenture (Chicago, Ill.) say cloud computing can save up to 50 percent of a provider’s hosting costs on an annual basis.

However, a look inside the front lines of the healthcare industry shows that CIOs and other technology leaders in healthcare aren’t fully sold on the concept. Questions about its security and reliability have cropped up while a multitude of other, more pressing IT issues have kept cloud development on the backburner. Even its cost savings have come into question. In short, when it comes to the cloud, there seems to be more doubt than certainty.

COST DOUBTS
Curt Kwak, CIO of the Northwest and Southwest Regions of Providence Health & Services, could be a poster boy for those who have expressed public cloud-based doubts. Kwak’s particular region of Providence Health & Services, which is a 27-hospital network encompassing the Pacific Northwest, uses a traditional data center with physical servers that are currently being virtualized.
Kwak, who notes his opinions are not necessarily reflective of the other regions of the Renton, Wash.-based Providence Health & Services, is not ready to switch to a public cloud anytime soon.

“I’m not convinced yet that the cloud environment is ready to accommodate and support healthcare,” he says. “I wish it were, because I see a lot of benefits from it. Things like HIE [health information exchange] and other community needs can be hashed out and resolved by a good, efficient cloud-based solution, but we haven’t seen that yet.”

According to Kwak, the cost factor has also kept him leery of the cloud. He says he hasn’t seen any solid proposals or strategies that prove it can cut costs. Even if there are some operational savings, Kwak says the return on investment is not nearly enough to justify a full-fledged shift to the cloud. “There might be some savings, but at the end of the day we only have a finite amount of resources on hand,” he says.

Additionally, between the ongoing conversion to IDC-10 and the streamlining of their health informatics systems, Kwak says there are a lot of priorities that come ahead of infrastructural needs, which are pretty good as are, in his view. Often, Kwak tells others in the industry to proceed with caution regarding the cloud. “If you have a tough time articulating your value proposition, don’t do it for the sake of doing it,” he says.

SECURITY CONCERNS
Chuck Christian, CIO of the 232-bed Good Samaritan Hospital in Vincennes, Ind., has his own reasons for doubting the cloud. For Good Samaritan, he has chosen to virtualize his traditional servers rather than go for a public cloud solution. Christian says there are six servers on one farm running 65 to 70 virtual servers on one farm and three servers running 15 to 20 virtual servers in another. He considers this solution a type of private cloud, although both keep operations in-house.

For Christian, the reason to keep everything in house has to do with security more than anything else. “We’re a hospital and we’re very concerned about keeping this data as safe as we possibly can,” he says. “I’m concerned with the idea of turning that data loose.” He notes how under federal regulations, data breaches are the responsibility of the healthcare provider, not the cloud operators or other third parties.

“If it’s in our data center, I know where it is,” he adds. “If it’s in the cloud, then I’m not sure where it is. The only thing I can be assured of is that we have a really good contract in place, but that doesn’t ensure the data will or will not be comprised.”

According to Jeff White, principal at Aspen Advisors (Pittsburgh, Penn.), the fact that most vendors won’t sign a business associates agreement (BAA) with healthcare providers is a strong deterrent for the cloud. Without a BAA, data breaches, as Christian says, would fall under the jurisdiction of the provider and the provider only.

TEST CLOUD
Brian Comp, chief technology officer of the 2,000-bed, eight-hospital Orlando Health System, also thinks that security is a drawback to the cloud. Comp’s Orlando Health has some cloud-based experience to draw back on if its leaders choose to adopt such a solution in the future.

The organization previously worked with Symantec (Mountain View, Calif.) to create a cloud-based imaging storage system that would allow physicians who worked outside of Orlando Health to connect and access images. Comp says the system was a test project for both Symantec and Orlando Health, with both having reservations about the project even during the development stage. Symantec ended up shutting the project down after a while, likely because of cost concerns, says Comp. “My perception was that they didn’t perceive there was going to be a worthwhile return on investment,” he says.

With diagnostic image-based volume growing at approximately 40-50 percent annually, Comp says, Orlando Health will continue to look at cloud solutions in the future. However, the organization is not under much pressure to adopt the cloud, since it has recently made a capital investment with an archive hardware provider. “We will continue to investigate and keep our finger on the market, and determine whether or not it’s right for us, but at this point there is no timeline,” says Comp.

This “wait until later” attitude seems to be reflective of many in the industry. For all of his reservations, Good Samaritan’s Christian says in the future he would like to look at a cloud-based backup system, where data could be duplicated. He’d also like to eventually treat storage as a commodity, pay-per-use. White of Aspen Advisors says this is one of the most likely uses for a public cloud in healthcare.

A SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION
Brad Harrison, executive director of technology for The Regional Medical Center of Memphis (the MED), is a bit of a rare breed when it comes to technology leaders in healthcare. His organization not only uses an offsite cloud solution, but Harrison himself is extremely pro-cloud. The MED, a level-one trauma center that takes in patients from multiple states in the south, uses Iron Mountain’s (Boston, Mass.) Digital Record Center Medical Images (DRCMI) solution.

Thanks to aging technology, a lack of storage availability, and limited capital expenditure funds, the MED was practically forced into adopting a cloud solution for imaging purposes, he says. The DRCMI system provides a long-term storage base for any image created at MED. According Harrison, it has more than worked out. “It was almost like they had a custom, tailor-made solution for us,” he says. “Come to find out, that’s really just the DRCMI solution as a whole. But it really fit what we were trying to accomplish.”

Harrison says the system is so low-maintenance that the MED‘s IT professionals often forget it’s in place. He says the system bailed out the MED when the organization lost 400,000 image-based studies from its database. While the MED’s Carestream (Rochester, N.Y.) imaging system couldn’t recover the studies, the DRCMI was able to restore all but two percent of those studies.

Even the leaders in the MED’s radiology department, who were skeptical at first about a cloud-based solution, have been won over by the DRCMI, Harrison says. “They have done the biggest about face. They were skeptical at first, but now they believe, especially when we had those lost those studies. This solution that we had engineered a year-and-a-half earlier, it ultimately saved the day.”

LONG-TERM VIEW IS CLOUDY
The apprehension in healthcare surrounding public cloud solutions is very real and it comes about for multiple reasons, according to Aspen Advisors’ White. There are the security/data-breach concerns that Christian and others have expressed, and there are other legitimate concerns with performance, he says. There’s also the fact that vendors are for the most part not able to guarantee complete 100-percent space availability. Even only guaranteeing 99.9 percent availability isn’t good enough for healthcare providers White says.

In addition, White says that vendors are holding back on the cloud, because of platform specific issues. He says a lot of healthcare providers use certain platforms for their core systems that are reliant on certain technologies. For instance, any group that uses Meditech (Westwood, Mass.) systems relies on Dell (Round Rock, Texas) platforms. This specific code, he says, may not necessarily run on cloud computing. “There are so many infrastructure things like data transfer and performance that need support,” he says. “There’s no guarantee for performance sitting out in these cloud services. People know that it works, but is it really designed for high-transactional environments? Not really.”

White doesn’t foresee widespread cloud-adoption any time soon based upon the nature of healthcare and the industry’s move to integrated systems. Some, like Comp of Orlando Health, say the cloud may end up as a viable solution for smaller, community-based hospitals that don’t have large investment funds.

Others, like Providence’s Kwak, say there will be a place for the cloud once organizations figure out how to leverage its positives. He says organizations should build it into their long-term strategy. “It’s hard to do this with other competing priorities, government mandates, ministry requirements and business requirements, which take away from innovation,” he adds. “You just have to keep your pulse on it and execute when that opportunity comes. That’s the hardest thing, though, for any CIO, healthcare or otherwise.”

Book Review

War Room: The Legacy of Bill Belichick and the Art of Building a Perfect Team

Written by Michael Holley

Long-time Boston Globe scribe and current radio personality Michael Holley isn’t exactly David Halberstam in terms of writing ability, few can compare to the famed author when it comes to non-fiction narratives. However, as far as in-depth sports books are concerned, Holley is pretty good.

His latest, War Room: The Legacy of Bill Belichick and the Art of Building a Perfect Team, is a follow up on a favorite of mine (for obvious reasons since I’m a diehard Pats fan) Patriot Reign, about the New England Patriots football dynasty in the early 2000s. In War Room, Holley does an admirable job of taking on an improbable task: trying to make the process of building and drafting of an NFL team sound interesting to the common sports fan.

Compare the climaxes of Holley’s two books and you’ll see what I mean. In Reign, the book’s climax is the end of Superbowl 38, when the Patriots won the game on a last second field-goal from Adam Vinatieri. In War Room, the climax is the NFL draft, and a big trade pulled off by Atlanta Falcons GM Thomas Dimitroff. What is more exciting to visualize as a reader? Exactly.

The truth is the NFL draft isn’t exactly the most scintillating event to watch, read about or relive. Even draft die-hards can agree watching action on the field is about 1,000 times more entertaining than figuring out what cornerback will be drafted first.

Yet despite this, Holley makes War Room an enjoyable read. He does a great job of getting into the heads of three distinct, connected personalities: Legendary coach of the Patriots, Bill Belichick, his former cohort and current GM of the Kansas City Chiefs, Scott Pioli and Dimitroff, their friend and associate, and GM of the Falcons. All three worked together in New England creating a championship team, and then Pioli and Dimitroff flew the coop to run their own franchises.

Their stories are built-up from the first NFL team Belichick ran in Cleveland, the Browns, and followed through until modern day. The first half of the narrative takes place mostly in New England, where the dynasty was created and molded by all three men.

Thanks to thorough reporting done by Holley, and numerous interviews, we get an inside look at some of the coaches, locker room dynamics, players and moments from those teams. Even though a lot has been written about those teams (as a Patriots fan, I’m pretty sure I’ve read it all), there was a lot of new interesting tidbits in this book.

Once the past is completely retold, the second half of the book is all about the three teams in modern-day, and all three men assessing and building their franchises. We learn about the unique scouting methodology Belichick and former Browns vice president of player personnel, Mike Lombardi created in Cleveland. The methodology, which uses a unique numbering system and avoids cliché assessments like the plague, has been adopted and tinkered by all three men. It’s interesting to see it used against current players.

Dimitroff is really the star of the show as we read about his rise from being the unknown son of long-time, hard-nosed NFL scout (Thomas Dimitroff Sr., who was on Belichick’s Cleveland staff) to finding his place on those Patriots Superbowl teams to becoming “the man” in Atlanta. Dimitroff’s offbeat personality – he’s a vegan with an interest fashion and mountain biking – mixed with his old-school attitude towards team-building is fascinating to read about.

What drags the book down is the lack of a payoff in the end. Unfortunately, this is part of the reality of reading a book on reality. You won’t always get a storybook ending. I encountered this problem in another non-fiction book I recently read, Devil in the White City. Sometimes, a payoff isn’t possible.

Holley practically laments near the end of the book how it’s quite possible that one day Pioli’s Chiefs will square off against Belichick’s Patriots with the winner playing Dimitroff’s Falcons. That moment could have happened last year, and would have made for a great ending, but sadly (for the book’s sake) all three teams flamed out in the playoffs.

Thus, the book ends in the draft room after Dimitroff makes his big move, trading a number of picks to Cleveland (ironically) and moving to the sixth position in the draft where he gets Alabama WR Julio Jones. Ending a football book with a big move in the draft is like ending a mystery novel with another murder – it leaves you with too many questions.

Still, War Room is a must-read for any NFL fan. It gets into a seemingly mind-numbing, niche-driven topic and makes the best of it. I strongly recommend it.

How Watson Works

Originally Published: February 16, 2011

Link: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/113291/20110216/watson-jeopardy-robot-eric-nyberg-cmu.htm

Eric Nyberg knows a thing or two about Watson, IBM's super intelligent computer competing on Jeopardy! and why the robot has owned the classic quiz game show.

Watson, which is equipped with question answering technology, has taken Jeopardy! by storm by dominating his opponents, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. At the end of the second day of a three day competition, Watson has $35,734 while Rutter and Jennings have $10,400 and $4,800 respectively. The competition will conclude tonight as Watson and his competitors Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings will play one last entire game of Jeopardy!, and add their cumulative scores.

The winner will get $1 million. IBM has said it will donate their winnings to charity, while Jennings and Rutter will donate half of their winnings.

Nyberg, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor, led a team of researchers at the university's Language Technologies Institute, to assist IBM in the development of the Open Advancement of Question-Answering Initiative (OAQA) architecture and methodology. Two of Nyberg's CMU students even worked on Watson directly as interns this past summer.

"I'm satisfied with what we've seen on TV," Nyberg said. "I think its representative of Watson's capabilities."

Nyberg, who once got a chance to compete against Watson himself, says the robot has definite strengths and weaknesses. Despite what people watching at home might believe, the robot isn't perfect. Watson, which is made up of 90 IBM Power 750 servers using 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,880 processor cores, is at its best when the clues are easier.

"You have to remember Watson is fundamentally different from humans. If I know an answer, I can buzz in and I have a few seconds to retrieve it. Contestants will do this. Watson will not buzz in unless it has the answer. By the time it has buzzed in, it already has a high-confidence answer. Where Watson is dominating is when the clues are easy, it can get a high-confidence answer quickly," Nyberg said.

Whereby humans may take a few seconds to process a question and the clues, if Watson knows the answer, it's almost automatic. With all of its processing CPU power, Watson can scan two million pages of data in three seconds.

However, Watson is not the perfect machine. "When the clues are hard to understand or it doesn't have good resources, it comes up with answers you and I would never give. It doesn't dominate, it still has weak spots," Nyberg said.

Yesterday, Watson screwed up on the final Jeopardy! question and show its weaknesses. The answer was, "This city's largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle." The question was, "What is Chicago?" Both Jennings and Rutter answered correctly, while Watson answered, "What is Toronto?" While there are U.S. cities named Toronto, they are not large enough to have two airports.

David Ferrucci, the manager of the Watson project at IBM Research and someone Nyberg has worked with extensively, gave multiple reasons for the odd screwup. He said Watson downgrades the significance of category titles and since "what U.S. City" wasn't in the question; it probably didn't know it had to be in America.

Also, Ferrucci said Watson was likely confused because there is a city named Toronto in the United States and the Toronto in Canada has an American League baseball team. Ferrucci was pleased with how much Watson bet.

As far as Watson's next frontier is concerned, IBM and Nyberg say it could be in healthcare. In fact, IBM has already begun working on Watson based healthcare applications.

"Physicians might be able to use a Watson MD when there are questions about strange symptoms with unusual conditions. You can have Watson sit through textual information about what treatments there are and what kinds of patients have had it. This is important. Most of the information about patients is written in free text, difficult to leverage that without a tool like Watson," Nyberg said.

Influence Of Violent Video Games Still Up For Debate

Originally Published: September 17, 2010

Link: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/63462/20100917/video-games-xbox-nintendo-mario-influence-violent-games.htm

While the video game industry celebrates the 25th birthday of one of its landmark titles, it continues to face lingering challenges from government and advocacy groups regarding its influence on children.

In terms of technology, video games have clearly come a long way since the original Super Mario Brothers debuted on September 13, 1985. However as the hardware and software continually has evolved, many perceptions on the industry have remained stagnant. The most damning is that video games, specifically violent ones, have had a bad influence on children.

Common Sense Media, a parents advocacy group, released a study recently that said 72 percent of adults support the ban of ultraviolent video games. More than half of the parents surveyed rated the industry poorly, with 75 percent saying it does not do enough to protect violent games from kids.

"The results of this poll clearly show that not only do the effects of ultraviolent or sexually violent games weigh heavily on the minds of parents, but also that parents feel that the video game industry isn't doing nearly enough to protect kids from accessing the most ultraviolent games," James Steyer, chief executive office and founder, Common Sense Media, said in a statement.

The poll comes in advance of an upcoming Supreme Court decision. In 2005, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill into law prohibiting the sale of ultraviolent video games to minors. However, the video game industry was able to fight it and bring the case to the Supreme Court, where it will be decided in early November.

"The Supreme Court's decision in this case is going to have a huge impact on families and kids across the United States, and what we've learned from this poll is that parents want to be the ones deciding which games their kids play, not the video game industry," Steyer said.

However, academics who've studied the impact of violent video games on children are unconvinced of such an impact. Cheryl Olson, a clinical assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and author of the book, "Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do," is one such skeptic. Her years of research on the effects of electronic games on preteens and teens led her to one prevailing thought.

"Playing video games is normal kid behavior. If you're an otherwise good kid with a balanced life with friends and you take out the trash and are generally respectful, these games will not negatively impact you," Olson said.

Instead, Olson said studies need to be done on video games' influence on non-typical kids, for instance those who are developmentally delayed. She said this kind of research could shed light of any potential impact for these kids.

"We've barely scratched the surface there," Olson said.

Scott Steinberg, video game analyst and host of the web-based show, "Game Theory," says most of the misconceptions on the industry come from an age gap. While gaming has evolved to include older generations, he says stereotyping still lingers.

"There is a generational gap," Steinberg said. "A lot of people still consider video game to be a kid's game, when in reality the average gamer is 35. Baby boomers and older still believe in the stereotype that gamers are kids. It's not intentional, it's just lingering misinformation. In the past there was a similar stigma to rock and roll and comic books."

Steinberg says the growing popularity of games like Farmville and Pet Society have permeated those older generations. Olson pointed to Guitar Hero and a number of Nintendo Wii titles as examples of family-based video games. Yet despite this, violent video games remain a hot button issue.

Olson said beyond a generational gap, the violent game influence debate has remained in place because politicians will use it as a way to get voters riled up. "Issues like parenting, bad neighborhoods and child abuse, those can't be solved in two years. But if you say something like, 'I've seen videos of these video games, they are violent and I want to protect your children from them,' you win points," Olson said.

Violent video games are no worse than violent movies says Steinberg. "This U.S. made Saw IV the number one movie in America, it's really hypocritical to take a small subsection meant for mature audiences and attempt to make the entire industry a scapegoat," he said.

Private Space Exploration: The Next Frontier

Originally Published: July 19, 2011

Link: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/183212/20110719/nasa-space-shuttle-space-exploration-spacex-space-adventures.htm

As NASA wraps up its final mission of the space shuttle program, many are left wondering what will come of space exploration.

The probable answer? The private sector.

Even NASA is in on it, as the agency recently awarded contracts to companies like Lockheed Martin to built new age spacecrafts. Other companies like Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and The Boeing Company were awarded NASA contracts as well.

"With NASA's support, SpaceX will be ready to fly its first manned mission in 2014," SpaceX CEO and Chief Designer Elon Musk said recently.

SpaceX is working on a spacecraft it has called the Dragon. The company says it can carry seven astronauts at a time to the space station at a cost of $20 million a seat. Spacex's Falcon 9 became the first non Shuttle rocket to be man-rated for space exploration in 2010.

Like NASA, the company even has its sights set on Mars. While NASA is looking to send a man to Mars by the 2030s, Musk says it can happen in 10-20 years.

Other companies are similarly looking at private space exploration. Space Adventures President Tom Shelley said the company has already sent seven private citizens into space on eight missions and has plans for much more.

"We were the first company to arrange for a private citizen to fly into space when we sent Dennis Tito up into space in 2001," Shelley said. "We were the start of the private space industry and I think over the next few years you'll see space travel dominated by private companies sending more and more people into space."

Space Adventures uses Russian Soyuz spacecraft to travel into space. However, in has already partnered with Boeing to sell seats on future Boeing spacecraft trips.

The Common Man and Space

There are essentially two types of space travel packages for the common man. There is the super expensive and time costly one: approximately $50 million for a trip to the international space station and lots of training. While some people may do that option, he says it's likely that people will do the cheaper one.

"The sub-orbital space flight costs about $110,000. You go 110 kilometers above the earth's surface, you see the curvature and beauty of the earth, spend about five minutes there floating in weightlessness and then go back down," Shelley said.

He says space travel will eventually become affordable to the common man but it will be "a few decades" before it's as low as something like a transcontinental flight.

"It's because of physics, gravity is holding us down," he said.

Shelley is among the many which look to create a space tourism industry. There are also other private companies looking to get into space all on their own without help from NASA. Billionaire mogul Richard Branson is one of the men leading this charge with his company Virgin Galactic. In a previous interview with CBS News, Branson said he was inspired by the moon landing.

"It was one of those momentous moments in your life. I was absolutely sure I would go to the moon sure thereafter and the years ran by, it seemed clear NASA hadn't really got a big interest in sending you or me or Joe Public up into space, and so I was determined to do something about it," Branson said.

To Shelley, there will be a scientific element to private citizens going into space. He sees private space stations being built and companies paying for citizens to conduct experiments while there.

The biggest mission for private space explorers will be Mars but the one that's closest to happening? The moon. It's been a while since man has been close to the moon but Shelley and Space Adventures are looking to get back there.

"We've sold one ticket for the mission and we need to sell another to get it going. Once we do, it will be about three years of training but the next person who is even close to the moon will be a private citizen. That's pretty cool," Shelley said.

The Math Is In: Red Sox, Yankees Will Top MLB In Wins

Originally Published: April; 1, 2011

Link: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/129766/20110401/mlb-baseball-season-predictions-mathematics-njit-bruce-bukiet.htm

Forget traditional scouting reports; in order to predict the 2011 MLB season, one New Jersey Institute of Technology professor says all you need to know is math.

Bruce Bukiet, associate professor and associate dean of mathematical sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, uses applied mathematics to determine which MLB teams will have the best year. After a wave of high-profile free agency moves including acquiring sluggers Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez, the Boston Red Sox are Bukiet's team of choice along with their archrivals, the New York Yankees, as both, he says will win 97 games apiece.

Along with the Red Sox and Yankees, Bukiet has the Tigers and Rangers each winning their divisions to earn a playoff spot. In the NL, he has the Phillies, Braves, Cardinals and last year's World Series champ, the Giants, in the playoffs.

Bukiet uses a linear algebra algorithm which works off the best batting order for a team and the likelihood each player will single, double, triple, hit a home run, strike out or make an infield out during an at-bat. For each batter, he computes the likelihood that batter will hit in certain situations. Using those numbers he can calculates how many runs the team will score. Then for entire teams he computes how their lineup would fare against others.

Once he factors in pitchers and the team's bench, he figures out how often one team will win against others, and factors in home-field advantage. At the end of his series of calculations he gets the team's total win count.

"For each team, to run through the whole season takes me about five minutes," Bukiet said. "My son, who started doing this with me when he was 15 and is now 26, has done a lot to help me automate it. He's written it on the internet, put in a file of each player's data, who is there and who is not there, etc. For the first few years, I was doing it by hand. Now it's automated."

While the idea to use math to predict the baseball season has been his head since 1988, Bukiet has been applying his methodology for 10 years and says for the most part it has been effective. Out of the 10 years, his method has been better than those of the oddsmakers seven of them. The other three years he was slightly off. Bukiet has published an enhanced model of the method in the International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sports.

Over the years, he has tinkered with the methodology, adding other factors along the way. For pitchers, he calculates their effectiveness through two-thirds of a game. He then applies the team's bullpen average for the rest of a game. Unlike other sports, Bukiet says baseball works very well.

"There's a lot of data associated with the sport and the one thing that makes baseball doable is there are a lot of one-on-one battles. In basketball, there are five guys. In football, there are 11 guys on each side," Bukiet said.

At the end of each season, Bukiet describes the probability for each postseason series. He doesn't do this in the beginning of the season because of the likelihood there will be trades. Or as Bukiet, a longtime Mets fan, said, "Teams like the Yankees will just buy people."

Unlike the regular season, he says his method is not as effective for the postseason. This is because the series are shorter and random factors play a larger role. All of his results, including how he has fared in the past, are published at http://www.egrandslam.com.

Over the past few years, numbers have become an increasingly important part of baseball. A 2003 book written by Michael Lewis called Moneyball detailed how Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane used number crunching to build his team. In addition, every year, MIT hosts the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, on the role statistics play in helping sports teams build a succesful franchise.