A New and Improved Moore's Law

Researchers have, for the first time, shown that the energy efficiency of computers doubles roughly every 18 months.

The conclusion, backed up by six decades of data, mirrors Moore's law, the observation from Intel founder Gordon Moore that computer processing power doubles about every 18 months. But the power-consumption trend might have even greater relevance than Moore's law as battery-powered devices—phones, tablets, and sensors—proliferate.

"The idea is that at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half," says Jonathan Koomey, consulting professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and lead author of the study. More mobile computing and sensing applications become possible, Koomey says, as energy efficiency continues its steady improvement.

The research, conducted in collaboration with Intel and Microsoft, examined peak power consumption of electronic computing devices since the construction of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) in 1956. The first general purpose computer, the ENIAC was used to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army, and it could perform a few hundred calculations per second. It used vacuum tubes rather than transistors, took up 1,800 square feet, and consumed 150 kilowatts of power.

Even before the advent of discrete transistors, Koomey says, energy efficiency doubled every 18 months. "This is a fundamental characteristic of information technology that uses electrons for switching," he says. "It's not just a function of the components on a chip."

The sort of engineering considerations that go into improving computer performance—reducing component size, capacitance, and the communication time between them, among other things—also improves energy efficiency, Koomey says. The new research, coauthored by Stephen Berard of Microsoft, Marla Sanchez, at Carnegie Mellon University, and Henry Wong of Intel, was published in the July-September issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.

In July, Koomey released a report that showed, among other findings, that the electricity used in data centers worldwide increased by about 56 percent from 2005 to 2010—a much lower rate than the doubling that was observed from 2000 to 2005.

While better energy efficiency played a part in this change, the total electricity used in data centers was less than the forecast for 2010 in part because fewer new servers were installed than expected due to technologies such as virtualization, which allowed existing systems to run more programs simultaneously. Koomey notes that data center computers rarely run at peak power. Most computers are, in fact, "terribly underutilized," he says.

The information technology world has gradually been shifting its focus from computing capabilities to better energy efficiency, especially as people become more accustomed to using smart phones, laptops, tablets, and other battery-powered devices.

Since the Intel Core microarchitecture was introduced in 2006, the company has experienced "a sea change in terms of focus on power consumption," says Lorie Wigle, general manager of the eco-technology program at Intel. "Historically, we have focused on performance and battery life, and increasingly, we're seeing those two things come together," she says.

"Everyone's familiar with Moore's law and the remarkable improvements in the power of computers, and that's obviously important," says Erik Brynjolfsson, professor of the Sloan School of Management at MIT. But people are paying more attention to the battery life of their electronics as well as how fast they can run. "I think that's more and more the dimension that matters to consumers," Brynjolfsson says. "And in a sense, 'Koomey's law,' this trend of power consumption, is beginning to eclipse Moore's law for what matters to consumers in a lot of applications."

To Koomey, the most interesting aspect of the trend is thinking about the possibilities for computing. The theoretical limits are still so far away, he says. In 1985, the physicist Richard Feynman analyzed the electricity needs for computers and estimated that efficiency could theoretically improve by a factor of 100 billion before it hit a limit, excluding new technologies such as quantum computing. Since then, efficiency improvements have been about 40,000. "There's so far to go," says Koomey. "It's only limited by our cleverness, not the physics." (Technologyreview)

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Posted in: Computing

Apps for What Ails You

Could a mobile app save your life? Aza Raskin thinks so. Formerly in charge of design and user experience for Mozilla's Firefox Web browser, Raskin left the company last year to start Massive Health, a startup based in San Francisco that's pursuing secretive plans to launch a mobile health app later this year.

While Angry Birds and other addictive games may top the app charts today, Raskin is among a growing number of entrepreneurs who think that apps will be powerful tools for health care, too. (See six mobile health apps highlighted by Technology Review.) That is because mobile apps offer the sort of intimate interactions the health-care system doesn't: they are always connected, always by your side, and they can have a very personal feel.

"Health really happens in between doctor's visits," says Raskin, who at 27 is already an influential thinker on design and user experience in Silicon Valley. "We now have these always-on connections, rich interfaces, mobile devices, and people who are willing to share," he says. "All that creates a substrate on top of which you can create designs and interfaces to change behavior."

The market for smart-phone health apps is only a few years old, and market analyst IDC says that this year some 14 percent of adult Americans will use one. According to Nielsen, which tracks 5,000 smart-phone users in the United States, the most popular health app today on the Android phone is WebMD, a source for consumer medical news. It is followed by Instant Heart Rate, a 99-cent app that permits people to use their phone's camera to measure their pulse. In third place is Epocrates, a free quick-reference guide to prescriptions.

However, Raskin thinks that health apps have yet to reach the people who really need them. Most existing apps, such as those that track sleep or workouts, are what he calls "wellness" tools that attract people who already take a close interest in optimizing their health, rather than not-so-healthy people who must manage chronic diseases.

Raskin isn't ready to detail his own company's plans—Massive Health's app will remain under wraps until it is launched late this year—but he says he is taking on the challenge of helping just that population. The idea is to make health care a constant in people's lives, not something that occurs only during a checkup.

Using apps to encourage healthy behaviors could be particularly valuable as the population ages and more people develop chronic conditions that require active management, such as diabetes. By 2020, according to health insurer UnitedHealth, 52 percent of adult Americans will be diabetic or pre-diabetic. "That's terrifying, and our current health care system is not ready for that," says Raskin. Mobile apps could prompt or remind diabetics to manage their blood sugar and diets better and, in Raskin's words, become a sort of "computer interface to our bodies."

The prospect of hundreds of millions more people living with such diseases explains why, after helping create a browser used by half a billion people, Raskin decided that health technology was the next big user-design challenge. "What needs the most help? It's not social photo sharing, it's health," he says. "The U.S. has a growing problem with chronic health conditions, and the costs of managing them are going up. We need new tools to address that." (Technologyreview)

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Posted in: Business

ITT-Tech

ITT Technical Institute (often shortened to ITT Tech or ITTTI) is a for-profit technical institute with over 130 campuses in 37 states of the United States.[4] ITT Tech is owned and operated by ITT Educational Services, Inc. (NYSE: ESI), a publicly traded company. ITT Educational Services, Inc. (ESI) was spun off by ITT Corporation through an initial public offering (IPO) in 1994,

with parent company ITT as an 83% shareholder.[5] ITT Tech licenses the "ITT" name from ITT Corporation, which originates from the latter company's original name "International Telephone & Telegraph".

Company history

The company was founded in 1946 as Educational Services, Inc. and has been headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, since 1969. From 1965 until its IPO in 1994, ITT Tech was a wholly owned subsidiary of ITT Corporation (as "ITT/ESI"). By 1999, ITT Corp. (which had merged with Starwood the year before) divested itself completely of ITT Tech's shares but the schools still use the "ITT" name under license.[6] It operates over 130 ITT Technical Institutes in 37 states which primarily provide career-focused degree programs to approximately 80,000 students.

Academic services

ITT Tech offers AAS, bachelor's BAS, and master's (business-only, online) degrees. ITT Tech is nationally accredited by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools.[7] It may be impossible to transfer from ITT to a traditional university; per the ITT website, "it is unlikely that any credits earned at an ITT Technical Institute will be transferable to or accepted by any institution other than an ITT Technical Institute."[8]

Controversies

A two-year associate's degree at ITT Tech (which requires 96 credit hours, 12 credits per quarter, 3 classes every quarter, and 4 credits per class) costs approximately $47,328 and that cost comes out to $493.00 per credit hour. Out of concern that students at ITT Tech and other for-profit Technical Institutes are taking on unsustainable levels of debt, the Department of Education implemented new regulations that restricts students at for-profit Technical Institutes from taking out more debt than their future employment prospects would justify.[9]

ITT Technical Institute has been involved in several controversies over its business and academic practices, among them:

In August 1998, 15 former students alleged misrepresentation, fraud and concealment by ITT arising out of their recruitment and education at ITT campuses. In September 1998, ITT settled all of the claims of the 15 claimants.[10]

On February 25, 2004, federal agents raided the company's headquarters and 10 of its campuses.[11] The investigation negatively affected the company's stock and triggered several class action lawsuits by investors.

In October 2005, ITT agreed to pay $730,000 to settle a lawsuit with California in which employees alleged that it inflated students’ grade point averages so they qualified for more financial aid from the State of California.

An investigation by WGBA-TV (NBC26, Green Bay, WI) found evidence of widespread grade inflation. In one instance, a student got 100% on a computer forensics assignment by emailing the professor a noodle recipe. The station believes this to be a way to increase federal student aid funding.

In early March of 2011 WTMJ-TV (NBC4, Milwaukee, WI) ran an investigation finding teachers lying on attendance records so they could get cash bonuses paid by ITT Tech. ITT Tech uses an attendance policy as part of a requirement to get financial aid to show student progress. (Wikipedia.org)

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Posted in: ITT-Tech

Internet VCs Circle Health Care

Some prominent venture capitalists are betting that the Internet strategies that created giants such as eBay and PayPal could reshape the ailing U.S. health-care system. That system currently devours 18 percent of the world's largest GDP while delivering mediocre health results.

In August, the online health marketplace ZocDoc, which lets patients look up doctors by specialty and zip code and make appointments over the Internet, raised $50 million from the investment fund of Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, who in the past has backed companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon.

The idea behind ZocDoc and other startups getting funding is that our costly, paper-based health-care system is ripe for the same technological fixes—such as data visualization, cloud computing, and mass-market self-service concepts—that have transformed industries such as consumer banking and travel.

However, many venture investors say that investing in health-care IT (HIT) isn't as easy as putting money behind, say, the latest social-media company. Health care is more complicated, more regionalized, and subject to more government rules. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration surprised many software entrepreneurs this summer when it said it planned to regulate some health software apps for phones.

"A lot of venture capitalists say they are investing in HIT, but right now, there seems to be more education going on than investing," says Rebecca Lynn, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, based in Menlo Park, California.

According to Dow Jones VentureSource, venture investments in HIT rose about 20 percent in 2010, to $460 million, or about a fifth of the $2.3 billion that venture capitalists invested in all health companies, including biotech firms.

Jessica Canning, research director for VentureSource, says half the deals counted in 2010 were seed-stage or first-round financings. She called that "very promising at a time when VCs are struggling to keep their existing portfolios alive. It means a pipeline is being built in HIT."

Even so, many entrepreneurs are running into difficulty finding investors who understand both the heavily regulated health-care industry and software innovation, says Sonny Vu, cofounder of Agamatrix, which manufactures a diabetes monitor for the iPhone. "On the one hand, you have people raising money who know nothing about regulation or reimbursement codes; on the other, a bunch of health-care guys who think Zynga is some kind of fruit. There is truly a chasm between world views."

Some investors also question whether the venture capital model of plowing money into risky early-stage companies will pay off in HIT. "Relatively few VCs have sufficient depth of expertise with both the health system and IT," says Barbara Lubash, a managing director at Versant Ventures, also in Menlo Park. "But the usual reason HIT doesn't get funded is because the opportunities aren't large enough."

One reason is that most large hospitals have already sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into legacy IT systems built in-house or developed by dominant players such as Siemens, or Midwestern companies like Cerner or Epic, and are unlikely to move to new offerings. As a result, many entrepreneurs are looking for underserved niches in HIT, such as health apps meant to run on mobile devices. But those kind of inventions have limited appeal for professional investors, says Lubash: "We look for opportunities that are reasonably large, capital-efficient to pursue, and positioned to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. There aren't a lot of those models in HIT."

Some of the most aggressive investing in HIT is being done by specialized funds outside of Silicon Valley run by people with medical backgrounds. Among them is Santé Ventures, based in Austin, Texas. "I truly believe if you start with a massive pain point and provide a real-life solution, you'll be successful" as an investor, says Santé cofounder Joe Cunningham, who was formerly chief medical officer for the Providence Health System, part of Ascension Health, the country's largest nonprofit health provider.

One Santé investment is Rise Health, a startup that runs call centers where doctors and nurses with electronic medical records triage patients, treating some "virtually" while ensuring that others get basic care. Rise is targeting health systems that both insure patients and provide their health care, such as Kaiser Permanente, with promises to limit costs while improving patient care.

Other startups have been receiving investments from large IT companies who see health care as an important new market. In 2010, both Intel and mobile chipset maker Qualcomm participated in an $11 million funding round for Sotera Wireless, a San Diego company developing a wrist-watch-sized version of the wall-mounted medical monitors common in hospital rooms.

For Qualcomm, the investment was a bet on the growth of remote monitoring—the idea that people can use mobile devices to continuously monitor their well-being while at home, says Nagraj Kashyap, vice president of Qualcomm Ventures, a $500 million in-house venture fund established in 2000. While the remote monitoring market might take a decade or more to develop, Qualcomm doesn't face as much pressure as typical VC funds do to cash in on investments, Kashyap says: "We can take the long view and be patient. Our goal is to make sure that wireless technology gets embedded in health care."

Other investors believe HIT is now poised to explode. Among them is Robert Kocher, a former partner at consulting firm McKinsey & Company and one of the architects of President Obama's health-reform bill. This May Kocher signed on as an investor with venture capital firm Venrock Partners, in Palo Alto, California.

Kocher, who calls himself "wildly optimistic about the potential for positive change in the health-care system," believes changes will be largely driven by data.

Health-care reform legislation and other recent federal policies, Kocher says, are beginning to make a huge amount of medical data available for free to anyone who thinks they can use it. In 2012, for instance, the federal Medicare program plans to open its massive trove of claims and billing data. The impact of having more information on prices, drug use, and health outcomes is "game-changing and underappreciated," Kocher believes.

Venrock is investing in companies trying to leverage such data to help consumers and employers make rational health-care choices. For instance, Venrock is a backer of Castlight Health, a startup that offers Internet-based tools to help consumers compare prices offered for medical procedures using information it has culled from paper insurance forms.

Kocher thinks a transparency on medical pricing and results could have a big effect on health care. "Data is what creates functional markets. It lets suppliers differentiate offerings, and [buyers] understand relative trade-offs," he says. "The problem we've had in the medical system is that money has been made without value creation. That is finally at the point of changing." (Technologyreview)

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Posted in: Business