ESRD
Renal Business Today reports a Rhode Island Hospital researcher has found that hemodialysis patients are at “increased risk of carrying methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in their nose.” The study appears in the June 2010 issue of the University of Chicago’s Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology (not yet available online). MRSA in the nose increases the risk of developing an invasive MRSA infection. In the US general population, about one percent of people carry nasal MRSA. The Rhode Island Hospital study found that 15% of outpatient hemodialysis patients carry nasal MRSA.
Internet
Facebook announced it will be using OAuth, an open source protocol that enables secure API authorization. That’s the big news. The little news is that Facebook is repositioning itself as an organizer of the web around relationships between people. As users click the “like” button for various websites for example, Facebook will aggregate that data, mapping it to individual recommendations. Facebook has a mistaken mind map of the internet and the web, as clearly exemplified in Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote: “Open Graph puts people at the center of the web. It means that the web can become a set of personally and semantically meaningful connections between people and things. ... We’re going to connect all of these graphs together to form the Open Graph. And when we connect all of our graphs together, the web is going to get a whole lot better.” Thanks but we don’t need—or want—Facebook intermediation for making our semantic connections. Nor do we need—or want—Facebook’s crappy widgets cluttering up our websites. Facebook’s “map of the graph” is not the web. I’ve been told I’m wrong about this by people I respect, but I can’t help it: Facebook 2010 = AOL 1991.
Dave Winer asked (and answered) a seemingly innocuous question: “What comes after location?” The answer is what Winer calls “vector-awareness.” It’s really simple in concept: Don’t give me information just about where I am; give me information about where I’m going. Winer expanded on the concept the next day. This is a Really Big Deal, folks.
