Looking at the problems on the healthcare.gov site

You may have heard the news about people in the U.S. experiencing problems trying to sign up for healthcare on the new healthcare.gov site.  This site is perhaps the most visible manifestation of the Affordable Care Act, aka "Obamacare."  On healthcare.gov, users can search the "Health Insurance Marketplace" for coverage.  However, the site has been plagued by reports of slowness and poor user experience. 

Several online articles attempt to surmise what is going wrong with the site from a technical perspective.  Regardless of your personal views on the Affordable Care Act, I think these are relevant for us to read because they provide us a chance to avoid making the same (apparent) technical mistakes in our projects.  I'd like to highlight some general points that I have read so far:

• Load test both the interface _and_ the back end functionality. 
• User experience (UX) should not be an afterthought
• Poor validation logic (eg requiring numbers as part of username/password but not informing user of this beforehand or in error messages) leads to extremely poor UX

For more on the technical issues with healthcare.gov, see the following articles:

Why HealthCare.gov is still a mess - JavaWorld

What Developers Can Learn from healthcare.gov - Programming - O'Reilly Media

You Can’t Legislate Away the Time, Money and Features Law - Programming - O'Reilly Media

And here is a contrarian opinion, stating that the architecture of healthcare.gov is sound, but that the project was rushed:

Why The Experts Are Probably Wrong About The Healthcare.gov Crack-Up | John Pavley

Google updates its search algorithm

Google has updated its search algorithm for the first time since 2010.  According to this post in the Bits Blog on the New York Times site, this is the most extensive overhaul of the algorithm since 2000.

Although Google is not revealing specific details of the new algorithm, code named "Hummingbird," the main thrust of the changes are geared toward understanding longer and more complex queries.  To that end, Google is employing its Knowledge graph, which is a map of semantic relationships.

One of the drivers for understanding longer queries is that more people are speaking queries into their phones using natural language, which is by its nature more complex than a simple keyword query typed into a search box.

For more information, see:

Forbes article:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/09/26/google-just-revamped-search-to-handle-your-long-questions/

Search Engine Land FAQ on Hummingbird:
http://searchengineland.com/google-hummingbird-172816

Google "15th anniversary" blog post (includes a great "Google Search Timeline" graphic):
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2013/09/fifteen-years-onand-were-just-getting.html

Google post on the Knowledge graph (2012):
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not.html

YouTube trends map

YouTube Trends map

YouTube has a new feature called "Trends Map" that allows you to see what people in different parts of the country are watching.

Here is the YouTube trendsmap site:
http://www.youtube.com/trendsmap

And here is an article describing the new feature:
http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2013/05/11/youtubes-trends-map-shows-popular-videos-by-geographic-location/

"Predatory journals" in science

Interesting NYTimes article today about a disturbing phenomenon in academic research:  "predatory" journals and conferences that charge (unadvertised) fees for publication.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html?smid=pl-share

David Brooks' "The Philosophy of Data"

David Brooks says "the philosophy of the day is data-ism."

Read more at

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/opinion/brooks-the-philosophy-of-data.html?smid=pl-share