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Twitter announced yesterday that it would finally be adding location support and, while they certainly appear to be doing it right, we have to wonder about the new feature.

Twitter seems like it's a bit late to the game on this one, even though we've all been talking of the "location-based wars" lately. We already have Gowalla, Foursquare, MyTown, BrightKite and more - do we really need Twitter too?

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First, we have to say that we're quite happy with the opt-in, "back out at any moment" method that Twitter is taking on including location into its service. Not only do its users have to opt in, they can even set the function to check every time they tweet as to whether or not they want to include location information. The specificity of the location data can also be chosen, whether you're including exact longitude and latitude coordinates or just letting everyone know you're in the hood.

So, on these points, we say "hurrah!" for doing the location thing right. Now, on to why we really won't be using it much, nonetheless.

When Twitter first came out, it was both a protocol and a place. That is, it was a website, Twitter.com, based on the 140 character message backbone. While the website was our only choice for a while, outside of text messaging, we quickly moved on to third-party clients that did it all much better. And now we have smartphone apps, web apps and desktop apps. Nowadays, Twitter feels much more like a protocol than place.

We've already moved on and separated out our location-based tweeting into a completely separate part of our brains. We have Gowalla, Foursquare, MyTown and Brightkite. We have our Twitter interaction where we just say something and we have our Twitter interaction where we mean to share our location. It just seems that, for those moments where we want to share our location in a useful manner, we already have a way and, much like the third-party clients out there, these other apps already do it better.

All of this isn't to say that including location data isn't a great idea. It could be followed up with some seriously interesting uses as more and more location data becomes available in the Twitter stream for outside apps to use. Too bad Twitter went the honorable route, however, and gave people a choice. For most of the tech savvy crowd out there, who use Twitter the most, we' re not sure that the Twitter homepage is going to be where we choose to include our GPS data. Most services have already found a way to include that data, by using Twitter in the way its been used best - as a simple messaging protocol that lays at the heart of some very cool interaction. Why would we want to enable the core to track us? That's just throwing our location data out there in the wind, to be gathered and used by whoever wants and that's not really the point. Context is what makes location important.

Where will all this location based tweeting come in handy? Real life situations like Haiti and Iran. And in some cases, maybe for good and maybe for bad. There is surely something to be done with all this data, but we can tell you one thing - in our day to day tweets, we will not be turning the GPS on.

But enough about us - will you be using Twitter's new location feature? Will you say yes when it asks or are you already satisfied with sharing your location with third-party apps?

Oven-fresh bread is one of life’s simple joys. Ciabatta, a crisp-crusted Italian bread with hints of sourdough and loads of crannies longing for butter, is one of the easiest breads to make at home.

Why are we talking about baking bread on Lifehack? Because kitchen hacks aren’t just impressive, they often have very tasty results! In this instance, I’m going to show you how to make ciabatta with less than one minute of prep time. How is that possible? Like many great hacks, this one uses simple ingredients and as few steps as possible to get the job done.

You may have heard of “no-knead” bread before. Mark Bittman and many others have promoted their versions of an artisan bread that doesn’t require any heavy labor. While those recipes also create delicious results, they involve too many steps to be considered a real hack.

I wanted something very, very simple that delivered great results in 60 seconds of prep time or less. It may take you a few tries to get below the one-minute mark, but I think you’ll enjoy the results every time!

For your ciabatta you’ll need:

• 4 cups of all-purpose flour
• 2 cups of warm water
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 1/4 teaspoon of granulated yeast (or equivalent)

You’ll also need a medium-size mixing bowl, a 10×15 cookie sheet or baking stone, a hand towel or plastic wrap, and whatever you’d like to keep your bread from sticking (if you’re using a pan, I use flour and corn meal).

Have everything handy? Good. Let’s do this!

1. Mix Water & Yeast

Pour the warm water into the medium-size mixing bowl and stir in the yeast with a spoon. No need to be particular, just dump and slosh.

2. Add Flour And Salt

Add flour and salt to your bowl of yeasty water. This, after measuring out the flour, presents another prime opportunity to get flour on your person. This will be regarded by many as a sign of your culinary determination. You’ll need such signs because anybody who actually watches you make the bread will think you’re one of the laziest bakers in existence.

3. Stir Into A Heavy Batter

Use a spoon. You could use your hands if you wanted but you probably didn’t wash your hands before starting this anyhow. Start with a quick run about around the perimeter of the bowl with your spoon. A few quick strokes through the middle and you should have a heavy batter. If it looks too thick to be pancake batter and not thick enough to be playdough, you’re right on target.

4. Set It And Nearly Forget It

Cover your project with a hand towel or plastic wrap and set in a safe place for a few hours. After the dough has rested for 8 to 12 hours, it will have nearly doubled in size. (If you add a bit of sugar at the start and you’re in a hurry, you can rush this process but I don’t recommend it for your first try.)

5. Preheat Oven & Prepare Your Pan

There’s a lot of room for variation at this stage. The goal is to place the dough onto a surface that will keep it from falling through the oven rack and not stick on. I use an old cookie sheet sprinkled with flour and corn meal. You can use a buttered pan, pizza stone, or baking paper. It’s up to you. The flour/cornmeal method takes only a few seconds.

Before you start prepping your pan/stone, set your oven to 400F. (For those of you using wood stoves, don’t stress the particulars. Pull a few cedar shingles off the back porch roof and get that fire burning hot!)

6. Pour Out The Batter

This is the fun part! Uncover the bowl of dough and slowly pour it out onto the pan you just prepared for it. You’ll want to use a spoon to guide the dough into place and get the last bits out of the bowl. The dough will be very wet and sticky. That’s okay! Get the dough out onto the pan and if you’re lucky, it’ll look something like this:

7. Add Spices (If Needed) & Place Bread Into 400F Oven

If you’re trying to stay within the one-minute prep, you probably won’t have time to sprinkle some of your favorite herbs onto your ciabatta before baking. If you’re not worried about time, some dried oregano, basil, and rosemary make a nice addition.

8. Remove Your Ciabatta From The Oven

Check on your ciabatta after about 25 minutes. Once it’s golden brown on top and looks good to eat, take it out of the oven and set it aside to cool for at least 10 minutes. You can cut into it immediately but if you do it’ll collapse and won’t look as pretty.

Wait! You really thought I wanted you to take a hot pan out of a 400F oven without some sort of protection? Craziness! If you don’t have an oven mitt handy, take off your shirt, fold it so there will be at least 6 layers of cloth protecting your hand, remove the pan from the oven and place in a safe spot to cool.

9. Slice & Enjoy

Move your ciabatta off the pan or baking stone and onto a proper cutting board for demolition and devouring. Ciabatta is famous as a sandwich bread but, like most breads, it’s absolutely delicious right out of the oven.

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Today, the California Health and Human Services convened a summit with an expected three hundred people in the interest of a state HIE (Health Information Exchange). This project has been tasked by volunteers and state groups and led by Jonah Frolich, deputy secretary of California Health and Human Services. The teams formed have met a series of hurdles already in preparation for the next big phase of executing the next generation system and raising an initial seed of $38.8m to move the effort forward.

At stake is at least $3 billion by connecting to these services for doctors and hospitals that qualify by using the HIE as built. This means that doctors can bill for more Medi-Cal and Medicare payments that are expected to be available in coming years from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds while using HIE services. Additionally, the services being created will need to support applications that engage consumers as they play a role.

We see the opportunity for California's investment to touch many interesting areas of cloud computing, identity management, and mobile - right as it is getting interesting.

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Last week, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and California Health and Human Services Agency Secretary Kim Belshé named a new nonprofit entity called Cal eConnect to oversee the development of Health Information Exchange services. One of the first tasks at hand is to finish the CA HIE Operational plan and to finalize details in budget, technical, and engagement plans to execute with the recent first grant by ONC for $38.8m.

Today's meeting and web conference is part of a process kicked off last July and offers monthly reports towards a state plan to direct funding for building a next generation model of HIE.

Leading up to this point, the CHHS efforts were led by Jonah Frohlich and comprised of many organizations and individuals contributing time to the effort to get the funding for the state. In addition to work group updates, the meeting included major parts of the organizations impacted the most, including quick fire discussion with CalPSAB's Bobbie Holm, Medi-Cal's Kim Ortiz, and for Public Health, Linette Scott.

Internet of Services, or, a Big Private Pub/Sub/Hub/Sub Cloud?

Shown here is the different core services that exist and how they provide links through HIE secure practices. And, how secondary services are build from there. This framework is focused on simplifying the overlay with existing services in a complex environment.

Here are some of the goals for the technical architecture:

• Provide a trust infrastructure for the electronic exchange of health information across organizations that have no pre-existing data-sharing arrangements


• Provide a directory infrastructure for providers to locate each other and to determine the format(s) that they mutually support for health information exchanges


• Assist organizations to match exchanged health information to the correct patient records


• Address gaps in the NHIN (Nationwide Health Information Network) specifications with respect to achieving HIE for meaningful use

Core, Context, and You

Determining what to offer and model the core services was a major part of the discussions in the technical work group.

One challenge the group faces in how to straddle this difficult issue is that identity and assertions for a person to live at the edge today, they are embedded in each application today in the form of passwords or tokens. Therefore, the CA HIE wants to be pragmatic in approach and have the first phases of architecture mirror the situation today.

At the same time, it was noted in the meeting today that the absence of a citizen registry is absent from the core services may be fatal. In this model, authorization, access, and consent is dealt with in the architectures as being "best effort" to integrate the patient data, but not "guaranteed". This is due to the practical challenge that all the endpoints aren't perfectly aligned in data, nor practices. And, that the HIE itself isn't a panacea for identity on the Internet.

On high level, the question becomes: Is the HIE a services where citizens are registered "agents" and have a requirement to be joined directly to each message about themselves, or is there information about people in the system being exchanged is by agents? We think the more people are engaged the better and solving for this will lead to a citizen registry concept in the future.

Here we show the planned services, networks, registries and directories architecture view.

A New Network Forms Around Providers and Documents

The CA HIE project aligns with the work at the federal level with NHIN.

We got a briefing from Brian Behlendorf on the recent work from the NHIN Connect project. He gave some context of the base thinking going into the models.

The NHIN standards are, in a way, DNS (who has records for this patient? etc) and HTTP (transfer this data, securely) for health IT. Building as much as possible upon pre-existing components (SOAP standards, HL7, etc), using a document-exchange-oriented paradigm that matches the use cases closely. It encourages the use of information models for health IT, to make the data as computable as possible, but it does not require it. It is being used for needs as diverse as patient record search, public health reporting, and disability determinations. The trust model is the least well developed portion of it - every node on the network signs an agreement called the DURSA that sets a high bar for patient privacy, consent, auditing, and such - but it is agnostic to who a node is.

Shown here CA HIE is both a supporter of NHIN and also has several suggestions for modifying the scope to include a tighter link to Provider registries and communication practices, for the practical reasons of insuring end-to-end provider to provider communications.

This seems like a good balance where the state is more focused on the entities doing business and should have a tighter link with these entities and the business they conduct on HIE.

People: The Hardest Service

While moving forward with HIE for California, an important question is being raised. Do clouds consist information about citizens, or do they contain user identity services that join and connect individuals?

This is something that is somewhat hard to grasp, but we feel it will play a role in how the experience of HIE is for the person who is coming into the system. We'd like to see third party authorizations and trusted identity federation for citizens evolve and HIE seems liek the right backdrop to get it done. As reported earlier, third party logon can work, with the right incentives.

Jokingly, we ask ourselves will HIE work with RSS for all my provider feeds.

And with a more critical eye, we ask the same question. Shouldn't all the services of HIE be using the best sharing technologies and patterns already in use? If I have a health concern, it seems that it should be as easy as "following" "Mike's ashtma" to get every update from providers in a real time feed. It should be mash it up with other personal data, devices, and social forces.

We hope that the architecture gives extra consideration to the person, so they can do just as much, if not more, "mashing" of their own data streams.

We Worked Extra Hard to Weave in Lady Gaga

Celebrities, even ones not from California, are people with trials and tribulations too. In fact, in her recent video released today, "Telephone", she addresses the access and issue of too much interruption and the benefits of both glamor and lifestyle.

She was spotted in California recently. The pictures of her hanging out at a SoCal mall reminded us that she is very much human.

Considering Gaga, we have added a few practical questions that the health cloud will need to manage as final food for thought.

• Will it work for traveling citizens and non-citizens alike that may have different records, languages, and locations.


• How will it enable care providers who manage children or elderly and will sign in and out of systems to pick up medications, for example.


• Does it work with mobile communications and social networks?


• Can it really offer true privacy for superstars, and everyday citizens with their health information? Is this even the right question?

We bet Jonah, the work groups, and the new team at Cal eConnect will be working hard to find answers.

Those answers may us to a next evolution. A health cloud - that powers the Internet at large.

Why does Health Information Exchange seem harder than colonizing Mars?

Reporters Without Borders released its annual report [PDF] on online access today. They call it Enemies of the Internet, and it shows a world where online censorship, intimidation and worse is increasing.

It's not surprising that as access to the Internet expands, more and more dictators and tyrants will try to suppress it. But what's troubling about this year's report is the inclusion of two democratic countries: Australia and South Korea.

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Both countries were included in the report's Under Surveillance list - a sub group of the main Enemies list.

Australia's proposed online filtering system is something RWB says it has "never before seen in a democracy." Additionally, in the state of South Australia it's now against the law to be anonymous online if it's in the context of an election.

In South Korea, a new censorship law allows for five-year prison sentences for anyone found using the Internet "to disseminate false news intended to damage the public interest." The same law requires online visitors to register their real name and national ID card number when visiting sites with more than 100,000 members.

Here are a handful of the worst violators of online freedom of expression on the Enemies of the Internet list:

Burma

Two high-ranking government officials have been sentenced to death for having e-mailed documents abroad. Net censorship is a serious matter in Burma. Massive filtering of websites and extensive slowdowns during times of unrest are daily occurrences for the country's Internet users. The legislation governing Internet use - the Electronic Act - is one of the most liberticidal laws in the world.

China

As its polemic with Google and the United States on the Internet's future unfolds, China continues to intensify Web censorship, faced with an increasingly forceful online community.The much-vaunted promises made by organizers at the open ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have proven to be mere illusions for the world's biggest netizen prison. Expanded dissemination of propaganda, generalized surveillance and crackdowns on Charter 08 signatories are commonplace on what has become the Chinese Intranet - with significant consequences for trade.

Egypt

More than a mere virtual communications tool, the Egyptian Internet has become a mobilization and dissension platform. Although website blocking remains limited, authorities are striving to regain control over bloggers who are more and more organized, despite all the harassment and arrests.

Iran

Iran, one of cyber-censorship's record-holding countries, has stepped up its crackdown and online surveillance since the protests over the disputed presidential reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, 2009. The regime is demonizing the new media, which it is accusing of serving foreign interest.While a dozen netizens are serving out their terms in Evin Prison, bold Internet users are continuing to mobilize.

Saudi Arabia

An emerging bloggers' community is up against harsh censorship. These bloggers are confronting the traditional forces of Saudi society, which are attempting to prevent the Internet from becoming a forum for free discussions. Saudi Arabia is one of the first countries to have been authorized to write Internet domain names in Arabic.The Internet penetration rate, currently estimated at about 38% of the population, is rising. How- ever, it is still one of the most repressive countries with regard to the Internet.

Syria is reinforcing its censorship of troublesome topics on the Web and tracking netizens who dare to express themselves freely on it. As a result, social networks have been particularly targeted by omnipresent surveillance. The promised technological improvements are slow to materialize. The authorities' distrust of the potential for dissident online mobilization may be playing a role in this delay.

The progress made by Vietnam in the domain of human rights, which allowed the country to become a member of the World Trade Organization in 2007, is nothing but a distant memory. As the 2011 Communist Party Congress draws nearer, the regime is muffling dissident views on the Internet, and its first target is critics of the country's policy toward China.