Thought Leadership

Security breach into PharmaNet.

July 14, 2014
Thought Leadership
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Welcome to this week’s Technology Updates, a vibrant mix of hot topics and future trends. The future is – still – here, unfortunately Last Friday, CTV reported yet another security breach –> http://g3t.ca/aqcdF6 This time, the stolen information resides in PharmaNet. To provide context for the story, here is a description of PharmaNet provided by Medinet, the Integrated Electronic Health Solutions entity responsible for managing the system. Out-patient prescriptions filled in British Columbia are entered into PharmaNet, the province-wide pharmacy…

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Facebook is taking advantage of your emotions

July 7, 2014
Thought Leadership
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Welcome to this week’s Technology Updates, a vibrant mix of hot topics and future trends. The future is here Do you have a Facebook account? If so, you may be one of the almost 700,000 people Facebook used as their very own lab rats. Facebook decided to test how negative stories can influence your inclination to write negative posts. According to the authors of the study: “We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states…

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The Big Question About Big Data

May 12, 2014
Thought Leadership
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Predicting the future isn’t quite a mug’s game anymore. It was once the province of futurists who talked like evangelists and fortune-tellers who paradoxically could never seem to leverage their predictive abilities with a lottery ticket at their local convenience store. Today, lots of folks are into the prediction racket these days – “predictive analysis”, anyway, with an eerie degree of accuracy. It’s all thanks to Big Data – that ambiguous little term every vendor is using to sell their…

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Facebank

April 28, 2014
Thought Leadership
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Facebook, the place where you can find everything about your friends, is applying for permission from the Ireland’s central bank to allow its users to store and exchange money. There are few details to be worked out, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume they manage to satisfy the regulator requirements. It will mean that Facebook will know: who your friends are; your favourite things; your sentiment about causes you care; and provide you with an offer you won’t…

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The search – can we find the truth?

April 21, 2014
Thought Leadership
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Mathias Dopfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, raised the issue about the uneasy relationship between Google and publishing companies. Axel Springer, a German media powerhouse, publishes over 200 newspapers and magazines; and derives 62% of their profits from their digital business. As you can imagine, Axel Springer depends heavily on the traffic supplied by search engines, most notably Google. Mathias (quite rightly) points out that the search results and ads serving algorithms are not transparent; and anyone with a business…

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Bleeding Heart – The Pine Beetle edition, explained.

April 16, 2014
Thought Leadership
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By this time you read this, you will already heard about the latest security outbreak called ‘Bleeding Heart’. Don’t worry, we are not going to discuss the vulnerability in the OpenSSL code as that has been well covered in the media already. Rather, we’d like to draw your attention to commonalities between this outbreak, and… the Pine Beetle. As our world is slowly coming to terms with (and proven many times, even in the past few months), it is impossible…

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PCIS is a team of strategic business and IT consulting experts. We’re trusted technology advisers who’ve established long-term relationships built on trust, dependability, and know-how.