Writing at Linux Journal, Glyn Moody reports that dozens of government IT systems are switching to open source software.

"The fact that this approach is not already the norm is something of a failure on the part of the Free Software community..." One factor driving this uptake by innovative government departments is the potential to cut costs by avoiding constant upgrade fees. But it's important not to overstate the "free as in beer" element here. All major software projects have associated costs of implementation and support. Departments choosing free software simply because they believe it will save lots of money in obvious ways are likely to be disappointed, and that will be bad for open source's reputation and future projects.

Arguably as important as any cost savings is the use of open standards. This ensures that there is no lock-in to a proprietary solution, and it makes the long-term access and preservation of files much easier. For governments with a broader responsibility to society than simply saving money, that should be a key consideration, even if it hasn't been in the past.... Another is transparency. Recently it emerged that Microsoft has been gathering personal information from 300,000 government users of Microsoft Office ProPlus in the Netherlands, without permission and without documentation.
He includes an inspiring quote from the Free Software Foundation Europe about code produced by the government: "If it is public money, it should be public code as well. But when it comes to the larger issue about the general usage of proprietary vs. non-proprietary software -- what do Slashdot's readers think?

Should all government IT systems be using open source software?

"Verily, Alphabet's life science division, is building a tech-focused rehab campus in Dayton, Ohio to combat the opioid crisis," reports CNBC. Verily will join two health networks, Kettering Health Network and Premier Health, to create a nonprofit named OneFifteen. Alexandria Real Estate Equities will design and develop the campus, which will offer both inpatient and outpatient services. There is no single solution to treating substance abuse, with strategies spanning from intensive rehabilitation programs to drop-in meetings. Verily hopes to get a better understanding of what works and what doesn't work in helping people get and stay sober....

Initially, Verily will focus on understanding what works in the clinic and then track patient behavior when they get out to see what sticks, Danielle Schlosser, senior clinical scientist of behavioral health at Verily, said in an interview. Verily will use a "variety of means" to track what works, she said, adding that patients would have to consent to being monitored... OneFifteen CEO Marti Taylor said "Because we will have facilities, an entire ecosystem and data, we'll be able to take a more holistic understanding of a person's health both inside and outside as we follow them long-term."
Verily's blog points out that Americans under 50 years old are more likely to die from unintentional overdoses than any other cause, and that two-thirds of those deaths involve an opioid. "In the face of one of the greatest public health crises the U.S. has seen, we feel compelled to act," they write, saying their company is "focused on making health information useful so people can live healthier lives."

Their blog says their team recognized "the absence of high quality information to guide individuals, communities, and legislators" for picking effective recovery treatements. "Leaning into our capabilities of building health platforms, we are setting out to create a 'learning health system' that aims to address this critical information gap in addiction medicine."

An anonymous reader quotes Forbes: A massive majority of consumers believe that using their data to personalize ads is unethical. And a further 76% believe that personalization to create tailored newsfeeds -- precisely what Facebook, Twitter, and other social applications do every day -- is unethical.

At least, that's what they say on surveys.

RSA surveyed 6,000 adults in Europe and America to evaluate how our attitudes are changing towards data, privacy, and personalization. The results don't look good for surveillance capitalism, or for the free services we rely on every day for social networking, news, and information-finding. "Less than half (48 percent) of consumers believe there are ethical ways companies can use their data," RSA, a fraud prevention and security company, said when releasing the survey results. Oh, and when a compan y gets hacked? Consumers blame the company, not the hacker, the report says.

An anonymous reader quotes CNBC: It is inevitable that artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation will take over some jobs, internet entrepreneur Arianna Huffington told CNBC in a recent email exchange, but that will place a premium on uniquely human qualities in the future labor market -- creativity, compassion, empathy and complex problem-solving. That's where Huffington sees a pressing problem to solve. She says these human qualities are at risk today and the cause is -- no surprise -- too much technology. Her advice: Reevaluate your relationship with technology before it is too late. "These are the very qualities that are diminished when we're burned out from being always on," Huffington said of human abilities like creativity. "One of the next frontiers in the tech world is technology that helps us disconnect from technology and create time and space to connect not with screens but with other people and with ourselves...."

Huffington, who is an executive producer on the new '90s tech-sector docudrama "Valley of the Boom," said the consumer relationship with technology is one of the most important issues of the modern era, and it is time to reevaluate the seeds that were planted back in the '90s during that first internet boom.... "Even for those of us old enough to remember the first boom and to have lived through it, it's sometimes hard to remember that there was a time before we were all hyperconnected and glued to our screens. And seeing the decisions that were made that led to our current moment makes us realize we can also make decisions about how we use this technology."
To this end Huffington has launched a startup called Thrive Global "to go beyond raising awareness and create something real and tangible that would help individuals, companies and communities improve their well-being and performance and unlock their greatest potential." CNBC reports that Huffington "sees a bright future for a new kind of technology -- the kind that helps individuals disconnect from the damage done by the internet's first generation."

In a related story, Bloomberg reports that the Ashton Kutcher-backed meditation app 'Calm' now has a valuation of $1 billion.

An anonymous reader quotes Variety: Sony Pictures Imageworks has contributed a software tool used to create movies like "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse," "Hotel Transylvania 3," "Alice in Wonderland" and "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" to the open source community. OpenColorIO, a tool used for color management during the production process, has become the second software project of the Academy Software Foundation, an industry-wide open source association spearheaded by the Linux Foundation.

Sony Pictures Imageworks has for some time given the industry free and open access to OpenColorIO under a modified BSD license. By contributing the tool to the Academy Software Foundation, the studio hopes to encourage the community to take charge of the future of the tool, said Sony Pictures Imageworks vice president and head of software development Michael Ford. "We want to contribute OpenColorIO back to the community that relies on it, and the Academy Software Foundation is the natural fit," he said.

Long-time Slashdot reader TheHawke writes that smoke at a data center triggered embarrassing an outage at America's third-largest bank. CBS News reports: Wells Fargo said that a systems outage prevented some customers from using its ATMs and mobile and online banking services, promising to reverse any fees people incurred because of the disruption. Although the bank said the issue was largely resolved on Thursday, customers said they were still having problems accessing their accounts on Friday, including their direct deposits.... The company blamed a "contained issue" at one data center, and said it wasn't a cybersecurity issue.

Wells Fargo said in a statement on Friday that "some transactions and balances were not visible in online banking or ATMs earlier today," but added that "the transactions were processed normally. This issue has now been corrected, and all transactions are now visible," it said. "We are experiencing higher than normal volumes so there still may be delays in online banking and contact center response times...." CEO Tim Sloan apologized for the outage, saying the recovery "was not as rapid as we or our customers would have expected."

UPI reports: Too little sleep. Not enough exercise. Far too much "screen time." That is the unhealthy lifestyle of nearly all U.S. high school students, new research finds. The study, of almost 60,000 teenagers nationwide, found that only 5 percent were meeting experts' recommendations on three critical health habits: sleep; exercise; and time spent gazing at digital media and television... "Five percent is a really low proportion," said study leader Gregory Knell, a research fellow at University of Texas School of Public Health, in Dallas. "We were a bit surprised by that...."

"If kids are viewing a screen at night -- staring at that blue light -- that may affect their ability to sleep," Knell said. "And if you're not getting enough sleep at night, you're going to be more tired during the day," he added, "and you're not going to be as physically active."
Experts recommend a minimum of 8 hours of sleep at night for teenagers, plus at least one hour every day of "moderate to vigorous" exercise.

One professor of adolescent medicine points out that some high school homework now even requires using a computer -- even though too much screen time can affect teenagers' abiity to sleep.

Titanium "has long been touted as the metal of the future," writes Dwell, "due to its strength, rust resistance, and amazing lightness." But can careful atom-stacking lead to something better?

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have discovered a way to create a new "metallic wood" material that is as strong as titanium, but five times lighter, reports Dwell. "So far, the researchers have built a sheet of nickel with nanoscale pores that is almost 70 percent empty space... It was created by building tiny plastic spheres, suspending them in water, allowing the water to evaporate, and then electroplating the spheres with nickel. Researchers then dissolved the plastic spheres, producing an incredibly strong, porous metal that floats on water."
Researchers are also considering the possibility of filling its empty space with an energy-storing material. "For example, a prosthetic leg made from this material and infused with anode and cathode materials, could also be a battery."

A burn surgeon at Loyola University Medical has treated eight different people for second and third-degree burns after they attempted to replicate the viral "boiling water challenge," according to one local news station. These people (like many others as seen across social media) heated water and threw it into the sub-zero air, expecting it to transform into a powder-like state and blow away in the wind. But that apparently didn't work out for everyone; sometimes the water stayed liquid and hit people. The youngest patient seen at Loyola is 3 years old. Sanford said that individual (like some of the other patients) was just standing next to someone else throwing the water.... Sanford said there are likely several others out there with first degree burns that didn't seek medical attention.
CNN Wire Services also reports at least three more "boiling water challenge" burn victims in Minneapolis and Iowa.

"While it's creepy to imagine companies are listening in to your conversations, it's perhaps more creepy that they can predict what you're talking about without actually listening," writes an NBC News technology correspondent, arguing that data, not privacy, is the real danger. Your data -- the abstract portrait of who you are, and, more importantly, of who you are compared to other people -- is your real vulnerability when it comes to the companies that make money offering ostensibly free services to millions of people. Not because your data will compromise your personal identity. But because it will compromise your personal autonomy. "Privacy as we normally think of it doesn't matter," said Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology [and a former Mozilla team leader]. "What these companies are doing is building little models, little avatars, little voodoo dolls of you. Your doll sits in the cloud, and they'll throw 100,000 videos at it to see what's effective to get you to stick around, or what ad with what messaging is uniquely good at getting you to do something...."

With 2.3 billion users, "Facebook has one of these models for one out of every four humans on earth. Every country, culture, behavior type, socio-economic background," said Raskin. With those models, and endless simulations, the company can predict your interests and intentions before you even know them.... Without having to attach your name or address to your data profile, a company can nonetheless compare you to other people who have exhibited similar online behavior...
A professor at Columbia law school decries the concentrated power of social media as "a single point of failure for democracy." But the article also warns about the dangers of health-related data collected from smartwatches. "How will people accidentally cursed with the wrong data profile get affordable insurance?"

"YouTube is no stranger to viewers weaponizing the dislike button, as seen by the company's recent Rewind video, but the product development team is working on a way to tackle the issue," writes the Verge.

Suren Enfiajyan shares their report on a new video by Tom Leung, YouTube's director of project management. "Dislike mobs" are the YouTube equivalent to review bombings on Steam -- a group of people who are upset with a certain creator or game decide to execute an organized attack and downvote or negatively review a game or video into oblivion. It's an issue on YouTube as well, and one that creators have spoken out against many times in the past.... Now, the company is planning to experiment with new ways to make it more difficult for organized attacks to be executed. Leung states that these are just "lightly being discussed" right now, and if none of the options are the correct approach, they may hold off until a better idea comes along.
Ironically, Leung's video itself drew 2,654 "dislike" votes -- nearly double its 1,377 upvotes.

Over 20,000 programmers from more than 150 different countries provided answers for the second annual Python Developers Survey (conducted by the Python Software Foundation and JeBrains).

An anonymous reader submitted this condensed version of their results: 84% of Python users in our survey use Python as their main language...up 5 percentage points from 79% in 2017. But half of all Python users in the survey also use JavaScript, and 47% more say they use HTML/CSS. Reported use of Bash/Shell has also grown from 36% in 2017 to 45% in 2018. [Later 93% of respondents said that their activities included Software testing/Writing automated tests.] Python users who report that they also use Go and SQL have both increased by 2 percentage points, while many other languages (including C/C++, Java, and C#) have decreased their share...

When asked "What do you use Python for?" data analysis has become more popular than Web development, growing from 50% in 2017 to 58% in 2018. Machine learning also grew by 7 percentage points. These types of development are experiencing faster growth than Web development, which has only increased by 2 percentage points when compared to the previous year...

Almost two-thirds of respondents selected Linux as their development environment OS. Most people are using free or open source databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite... Twenty-something was the prevalent age range among our respondents, with almost a third being in their thirties. [31% more were between the ages of 30 and 39.]

CBS News reports that as Washington state confronts a measles outbreak which has sickened at least 56 people, "hundreds rallied to preserve their right not to vaccinate their children."

They packed a public hearing for a new bill making it harder for families to opt out of vaccination requirements, reports The Washington Post: An estimated 700 people, most of them opposed to stricter requirements, lined up before dawn in the cold, toting strollers and hand-lettered signs, to sit in the hearing.... The Pacific Northwest is home to some of the nation's most vocal and organized anti-vaccination activists. That movement has helped drive down child immunizations in Washington, as well as in neighboring Oregon and Idaho, to some of the lowest rates in the country, with as many as 10.5 percent of kindergartners statewide in Idaho unvaccinated for measles. That is almost double the median rate nationally....

One activist who spoke Friday, Mary Holland, who teaches at New York University law school and said her son has a vaccine-related injury, warned lawmakers that if the bill passes, many vaccine opponents will "move out of the state, or go underground, but they will not comply."
The sponsor of a similar bill in Oregon says that anti-vaxxers "have every right to make a bad decision in the health of their child, but that does not give them the right to send an unprotected kid to public school. So if they want to homeschool their kid and keep them out of other environments, that's their decision."

But there are still 17 U.S. states that allow "personal or philosophic exemptions to vaccination requirements," reports the Post, "meaning virtually anyone can opt out." (Though some states are now considering changes.) "The enablers are state legislators in those states, that have allowed themselves to be played," complains Dr. Peter Hotez, a co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

The World Health Organization estimates that measles vaccines have saved over 21 million lives since 2000. But last year in the European region's population of nearly 900 million people, at least 82,600 people contracted measles, reports Reuters. "Of those, 72 cases were fatal."

schwit1 shares a report from Business Insider: Amazon declared in its 2018 annual filing that it competes against transportation and logistics companies, as CNBC first reported. It's a clear warning shot against UPS and FedEx, two companies that used to claim Amazon is simply their customer. Meanwhile, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told analysts last week that the retail giant will "continue to expand (its) Amazon logistics and (its) delivery capability" in 2019. Meanwhile, UPS CEO David Abney said the company "monitor(s) them (Amazon) as is if they were a competitor." And FedEx claimed, seemingly out of nowhere, last week that Amazon is not their largest competitor, claiming just 1.3% of the company's 2018 revenue.