In Washington DC last week Google CEO Eric Schmidt defended the company’s business practices when he appeared before a Senate antitrust panel. Down the road at Georgetown University the following day, his colleague Darcy Dapra was doing a similar thing to an audience of scholarly publishers.

Mr Schmidt’s appearance was to reject claims that Google, which celebrates its 13th birthday this week, gives its growing portfolio of online business preferred placements in search results. more…

On my first ever hospital placement the thing that most struck me was just how antiquated the records system was. Junior staff were writing with pen and paper; the grander ones used a tape (an actual magnetic tape!) to dictate letters to a secretary. To find something in a patient record you couldn’t type a few terms into a search box, you had to flip through the pages and decipher scrawl. more…