Dan Geer:

I am particularly fond of the late Peter Bernstein’s definition of
 risk: “More things can happen than will.”[PB] I like that definition
 not because it tells me what to do, but rather because it tells me
 what comes with any new expansion of possibilities. Put differently,
 it tells me that with the new, the realm of the possible expands
 and, as we know, when the realm of the possible expands, prediction
 is somewhere between difficult and undoable. The dynamic is that
 we now regularly, quickly expand our dependence on new things, and
 that added dependence matters because the way in which we each and
 severally add risk to our portfolio is by way of dependence on
 things for which their very newness makes risk estimation, and thus
 risk management, neither predictable nor perhaps even estimable.
 
 The Gordian Knot of such tradeoffs — our tradeoffs — is this: As
 society becomes more technologic, even the mundane comes to depend
 on distant digital perfection. Our food pipeline contains less
 than a week’s supply, just to take one example, and that pipeline
 depends on digital services for everything from GPS driven tractors
 to robot vegetable sorting machinery to coast-to-coast logistics
 to RFID-tagged livestock. Is all the technologic dependency, and
 the data that fuels it, making us more resilient or more fragile?

Amy Thuong:

When Scratch polled 3,500 millennials to find out which industry was most prime for disruption, the results were clear: Not only did banks make up four of their top 10 most hated brands, but millennials increasingly viewed these financial institutions as irrelevant.

The three-year study from Scratch, an in-house unit of Viacom that consults with brands, found that a third of millennials believed they’ll be able to live a bank-free existence in the future. In the age of Simple, Square, and Bitcoin, these millennials, defined as those born between 1981 and 2000, overwhelmingly believed that the way they access money and pay for things will be completely different in five years.

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Randeep Ramesh:

A prominent Tory MP on the powerful health select committee has questioned how the entire NHS hospital patient database for England was handed over to management consultants who uploaded it to Google servers based outside the UK.
 
 Sarah Wollaston, who is also a family doctor and Conservative backbencher, tweeted: “So HES [hospital episode statistics] data uploaded to ‘google’s immense army of servers’, who consented to that?”
 
 The patient information had been obtained by PA Consulting, which claimed to have secured the “entire start-to-finish HES dataset across all three areas of collection – inpatient, outpatient and A&E”.
 
 The data set was so large it took up 27 DVDs and took a couple of weeks to upload. The management consultants said: “Within two weeks of starting to use the Google tools we were able to produce interactive maps directly from HES queries in seconds.”

Uwe E. Reinhardt:

About half a century ago, organized medicine and the hospital industry in this country struck a deal with Congress that in retrospect seems as audacious as it seems incredible: Congress was asked to surrender to these industries the keys to the United States Treasury.
 
 In return, the industries would allow Congress to pass a 1965 amendment to the Social Security Act, described as “an act to provide a hospital insurance program for the aged under the Social Security Act with a supplementary health benefits program and an expanded program of medical assistance, to increase benefits under the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance System, to improve the Federal-State public assistance programs, and for other purposes.” We have come to know it as Medicare.

Nikki Gamm:

Medicine in the Islamic world can trace its roots back to the Greeks and such famous physicians as Hippocrates, Galen and Discorides. To this was added medicine as practiced in Persia, India and Byzantium. “The result was the creation of an extensive field embracing nearly every branch of the medical sciences, some 14 centuries of history and a vast geographical area stretching from southern Spain to Bengal, for in this particular field nearly all the regions of the Islamic world made some contributions.” (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Islamic Science”)
 
 Medicine was generally taught in medreses along with the Qur’an and the shariyah and often the medreses had hospitals attached where practical lessons were taught. Sometimes there were separate medical schools that also had hospitals that included pharmacological studies and surgery.