Technology moves at the rate of Moore's Law...maybe faster these days. But do networks keep up? And with the reliance of more and more devices on networks, are humans in charge of security and performance able to keep up with bad actors? Here's hoping yes, but a commerical led to a rabbit hole, and this week is about connectedness and its effects on existing infrastructure. And then, is there truth? Does consensus exist in science?
Welcome to the April 2 Edition of The Digest.
This led me to then start counting how many devices I have, which then led me to thinking how many devices the average person may have, and then the network strength inside a football stadium during a soldout game. It just seems like we actually are *not* ready yet for so many devices uploading data in support of automating ordinary tasks (including cars). And what about security? And latency? I found a paper in my deep dive that presents the effects of connected vehicles on existing infrastructure very neatly and the authors present several options for successfully supporting autonomous vehicles and their massive datasets: MEC, network slicing and more. This paper is dense, in a good way, and the authors include a brief history of connected cars for anyone with a car affinity. Link.
Are networks ready for this? Can hospitals successfully mitigate cybersecurity risks and ensure their networks are fast enough to support so many devices? As Nicole Westman at The Verge wrote, "The most common type of internet-connected device in hospitals was an infusion pump. These devices can remotely connect to electronic medical records, pull the correct dosage of a medication or other fluid, and dispense it to the patient. Infusion pumps were also the devices most likely to have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers, the report found — 73 percent had a vulnerability."There is no turning back on smart devices...but how do hospitals get ahead of threats? Link.
Philosophy professor Peter Vickers sent his colleagues an email with, what he thought, was a straightforward question: "“Colors don’t exist in the external world, they’re just a way that human beings represent the world in their minds. Do you agree or disagree?”What happened next is where semantics can make fun, or chaos, depending on your appetite for playing with things such as inquiry, truth, and where science intersects independent interpretation. Link.