UPS has invested heavily in a new software project called ORION—On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation—that helps determine the best course from point A to point B, saving time, money, and fuel. It's already a success, and because it depends on heuristics, suggestions should only get better.
Beth Romanik is TechWell's online editor, managing everything you see published on our family of thought-leadership sites. She edits and publishes articles for TechWell Insights, StickyMinds, AgileConnection, CMCrossroads, and Better Software magazine. She has worked for several other newspapers, magazines, and sites of all kinds. Beth is excited about new developments in technology, but she'll always have a soft spot for paper and ink.
All Stories by Beth Romanik
It turns out that long wait times and persistent glitches aren’t the worst problems HealthCare.gov has experienced. A cyber security expert discovered that for the first few weeks the site existed, it was fairly easy for someone to hijack a user’s account. It was as easy as guessing a user name.
From Freakonomics coauthor Stephen Dubner: "A ‘sunk cost’ is just what it sounds like: time or money you've already spent. The sunk-cost fallacy is when you tell yourself that you can't quit because of all that time or money you spent. We shouldn't fall for this fallacy, but we do it all the time."
If you’re a civic-minded programmer who would like your government to be more open and more efficient, you now have the option to help make it happen. A recently launched portal called GitHub and Government lets users collaborate on projects to solve problems and make information more available.
"I had an idea to create a competition for high school students around the world, like me, who want to create something but don’t have a place to do it.” That was the motivation for Ethan Eirinberg, the sixteen-year-old founder of the CreateHS coding competition, which emphasizes—yes—creativity.
Yahoo decided to surprise its email users with a total redesign—and it was a disaster. Thousands of Yahoo Mail users are furious over the changes, and they’re being very vocal about it. Some users are upset about the elimination of key functions, but others are reporting serious technical problems.
The implementation of the Affordable Care Act on October 1, 2013, prompted the launch of a government website—HealthCare.gov—to help people purchase health insurance coverage. Almost immediately after going live, the website crashed. What went wrong isn't as simple as failing to do load testing.