Richard's Blog

The following is train and bus information to the Ramada in East Hanover, NJ where the Therap conference is being held. If you contact the hotel in advance, they will pick attendees up from the train or bus stops.

And the train information is as follows.

We use the Morris Plains Train Station

Route 202 intersection of Speedwell Ave. and Rt. 53, Morris Plains NJ 07950

It is 6.4 miles from the hotel, about 14 minutes away.

The Bus information is as follows.

From New York you need to take Community Coach Bus – Route 77.

That will take you to the Whippany Diner stop about 2 miles down the road from us and just ask them to keep going to the Loews movie theater stop.

Naim received his PMP certification after passing the PMP (Project Management Professional) certification exam. The certification is issued by the PMI Institute (Project Management Institute).

Naim is one of our lead programmers. Naim has met many Therap users on his meetings with developmental disabilities agencies around the country. Naim will also be at the National Conference next week.

Greetings to the Participants of the 2012 Therap Services Conference:

Here it is Winter 2012.  For some it means snow and cold weather.  For me it is Therap Services time in NYC.  Welcome back to those of you who have visited us before.  For the first timers it is my pleasure to meet and greet you to our city.  New York City rolls out the Welcome mat twelve months a year and there is something and a Season for it all year around.

On February 8, you will meet three Licensed Professional Tours guides.  Each one will board your bus and take you on the adventure that you have signed up for.  Some will shop, some will Tour for the first time. For those who  are seasoned New York Tourists I will conduct a special tour of some attractions and places that you haven’t seen before.  Of course I will make my usual stops for Italian pastry and maybe a trip to Brooklyn.  So sign up and get on board to come to New York City and enjoy and evening of food, sites and fun.  It will be our pleasure to welcome you!

We were just notified the conference hotel is full. We are working on finding a backup to the Ramada in East Hanover, NJ. We will post the information as soon as we have it.

5:08pm – Just heard that we have rooms at the Parsippany Holiday Inn. Phone is 973-263-2000.  They said hotel is 10-15 minutes away. There will be a shuttle in the morning and evening between the hotels. If anyone has any questions let us know.

I attended a webinar today called

Black Hat Webcast Series – Faces of Facebook: Privacy in the Age of Augmented Reality

In addition to the name of the webinar being quite trendy – I found the information interesting.

Essentially the talk was about combining public information from places like facebook and match.com with face recognition technology and figuring out what sort of re-identification they could come up with.

The talk covered using un-identified information such as open webcams and cctv’s and publicly available information information from government databases and sites like facebook – and showing how you could figure out names and social security information and more.

They started with the fact that most people have their pictures on facebook and facebook names are visable as a default.

In one study, they figured out the first 5 digits of social security numbers 27% of the time within  4 attempts starting with just a face and no name.

Essentially the track is anonymous face => matching face => presumptive name => online available information => inferable sensitive information.

 Currently it would take 4 hours at a costs of $2 to find a photo match on 280 million Americans. (obviously it depend on power of computer and such). But it was for comparison to say in 10 years that will be  minutes at a fraction of that cost.

That means that photos can be used (and I think already are being used) for large real time public surveillance for security.

There are significant questions on what this means for privacy of information. With so much public, what can realistically be kept private. Or more likely – what will society decide should and should not be public or more transparent.

As the use of photos and cameras becomes more normal in society, it will be interesting to see what that means for various forms of documentation. For example, will it be acceptable to put a camera in a public location and just track who comes by based on facial and photo recognition? How will this affect government trying to cut down on medicaid fraud or billing for services which are not delivered.

I have felt for years that using Therap has so many benefits in terms of proof of service delivery and compliance – in addition to many areas where Therap helps improve care and support because of the sharing and flow of information.

It is hard to believe that some agencies and government agencies still require pen and ink signatures. When you see examples of people wearing contact lenses which have cameras and antennas attached – where does that take the ability to document what someone was doing and seeing.

I spoke with Joe Kovack who is the tour guide we have been using the last few years for the wednesday night NYC bus tour from the national conference.

Given the crowds at the pizza place when our 3 buses pulled up, we are thinking of providing a couple of tour options which will both give people who were on last years tour some new sites as well as spread out the rush at dinner.

We are thinking of adding a third option to the mostly walking tour of Times Square and the mostly driving tour of the city with stops possibly ranging from dessert in Little Italy to views of Manhattan from Brooklyn as well as the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building and more.

The new option would visit uptown Manhattan first – with possible stops at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem and to see Yankee Stadium. Afterwards the bus would travel around Manhattan with a focus on some new sights for people who were on last years tour.

We will wait for feedback before finalizing. This also depends on weather and what people want to see and visit.

At the annual Consumer Electronics Show  the Wall Street Journal reported that automobile companies showed off

a set of computer services that operate online, or through the “cloud,” and allow customers to remotely track their cars, diagnose what’s wrong with them and potentially avoid collisions

They also mentioned that there are

problems associated with accumulating so much consumer data, specifically how that information is used and protected.

There are so many levels of concern with regard to data. There are security issues which are different from HIPAA issues.

The article continues that

By interpreting data sent from the car’s sensors and engine readouts, app developers could create applications that can help track individual employees’ use of company cars, for example, or to gauge when a health-care worker showed up at a patient’s home and how long the worker stayed. 

If data showed that a health care worker who interacted with individuals with certain conditions arrived at a certain location, one might infer medical information. There is a growing sense that computer systems are now putting together public or quasi-public information from multiple sources to essentially figure out private information.

Would having more data from automobiles make it more difficult to keepdata and PHI information private.  Is it any more significant than all of the data on smartphones?

I have had many conversations with people to what extent PHI can be inferred from information such as automobile locations. If a car went from a residential location A to a medical clinic B which serves one type of medical condition, one could take this information and infer medical diagnoses. Would this make the tracking of the cars information PHI and subject to HIPAA.  Obviously there is a limit on what is subject to HIPAA. But I find it an interesting issue to think about what can be done with information and who should have what levels of access.

The National Conference is less than a month away now.  The schedule is basically complete – 16 simultaneous sessions over 3 days. In fact you don’t even have to take time off for lunch – you can just grab lunch and head back to a session as there are continuous sessions each day.

We have users coming from all over the county. There is even a large delegation coming from Alaska. The largest group is probably from New York and we have one complete track (out of 16) just for New York agencies.

There are so many little things we try to think about. The issues range from scheduling to internet access at the hotel to how quickly we can serve pizza in New York City to people taking the Wednesday night bus tour to New York.  We think we have it figured out by sending the buses at slightly different times.

There are more user presentations than ever. We are seeing many people come back to hear from other agencies how they are using Therap or interacting with their state surveyors or dealing with families or employees or a whole range of issues.

With over 300 individual sessions scheduled there are sure to be useful sessions for almost all agencies using Therap.

I recently visited the Museum of the City of New York exhibit on The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011.

As someone who grew up in New York I found it quite interesting given all of the changes in my lifetime in New York. Seeing pictures of New York in the 19th century when most of upper Manhattan was not yet built and how much the grid influenced the development of New York.

There was also a section of the exhibit on envisioning the future of New York.  There was one design which included almost a parallel city 70 floors high to alleviate congestion on the streets and another design which built over the current streets and avenues.

As I was walking around I was trying to compare the effect of building a street grid in 1811 and how much it has stayed the same and adapted with the concept of creating a database schema for Therap.  Initially the street grid seems rigid and inflexible, but then the exhibit showed that Central Park was created in the middle as well as other neighborhood parks (such Morningside Heights built where the landscape would have been difficult to level).

Perhaps the fundamental difference between the street grid design and the database as they both have evolved, is that as long as all of the data in the database is accessible and protected it can more easily evolve to new technologies and new data requirements. In the street grid there can only be one use for a specific piece of land at any time (not counting underground subways).  So if one person wants a cultural institution and another wants housing – they both cannot be in the same place at the same time. While with Therap it is hard to see how two people would really be in conflict if both really needed and wanted something – it is easier to just create more applications than creating more land.

Yesterday after reading Jeff Mau’s of Mosaic’s blogpost on the Certified Trainer Website – I clicked a link to a homemade video he linked to it after posting on picasaweb.

Jeff Case has also started incorporating video into his blogs. This recent post from Cole County included a video link.

The video gives a different feel than a written blogpost. They both are effective and interesting. But video opens a whole new area of expression and information.

I look forward to both seeing more video blogs from others. I also look forward to trying some myself.