Interactive voice response (IVR) systems are useful tools for healthcare providers. They help doctors’ offices remind patients about appointments, yearly checkups and the like.

IVR is also proving to be a useful tool for patients as well, both in treatment and outside of treatment. At Plum, we’ve already seen it applied to smoking cessation efforts, for example.

A study by researchers from the University of Vermont, Duke University Medical School and University of Vermont College of Medicine has shown that IVR systems can work for patients with chronic pain after they complete their therapy.

Research shows that group cognitive-behavioral therapy can help patients with chronic, untreatable pain to cope with their pain and the stress associated with it to improve their daily functioning.

But what happens when patients leave their treatment? It can be hard for them to keep up with the skills learned in group therapy when going from “initially learning skills, while working with a therapist and with considerable group support, to mastering and maintaining those skills on one’s own…”

In their study—Therapeutic Interactive Voice Response for Chronic Pain Reduction and Relapse Prevention—the researchers from Duke and Vermont added IVR to treatment of 26 subjects.

The treatment included a four-part IVR element with “a daily self-monitoring questionnaire, a [teaching] review of coping skills, pre-recorded behavioral rehearsals of coping skills, and monthly personalized feedback messages from the [cognitive behavioral] therapist based on a review of the patient’s daily reports.”

The researchers found that therapeutic IVR treatment greatly helped all 26 subjects after they left their therapy, both in strengthening their coping skills in the short term (4-month follow-up) and maintaining those skills in the longer term (8-month follow-up).

“We believe that if our findings are replicable,” the researchers wrote. “Then using the [therapeutic IVR] as a coping skill consolidation and relapse prevention program could be an efficacious and cost-effective addition to any health care program.”

Much of what’s out there as news today is uninformed, rhetorical and biased. And the blog posts and the comments attached to those blog posts are downright alarming.

Although I don’t entirely blame the bloggers or the commenters. They’re only following the line of the media they read. Except for the obvious cranks, bigots, haters, et cetera.

First of all, what happened to the media just reporting the facts objectively? Didn’t they used to do that, or am I just being naïve? I thought they did, years ago. I thought the media’s entire purpose was to report on the world how it actually is—to show us what’s really happening out there, to ferret out injustices, et cetera.

Silly me, I thought the mission of the media was to discover and tell the truth. At least that’s how I went about it when I was a reporter. But there again, maybe I was just being naïve.

Times have changed, just in the last few years it seems. The media have found themselves fighting for survival, competing against Jersey Shore and Keeping Up with the Kardashians for our attention. And I don’t just mean the tabloids.

To survive, the mainstream media have, in many cases, resorted to catering to an audience for readership/viewership. They’ve become editorial, opinionated. They pick and choose their data to suit their needs, et cetera.

Yet they still report their stories as whole truths, which makes them dangerous.

If someone reads a trusted news source, they’ll believe what they read, whether it’s true or not. And if millions of people read it, millions of people will walk around misinformed.

With misguided news agencies as their examples, it’s not surprising that many bloggers go astray. If a respected news agency slants a story, they will too. But they influence even more readers.

And some of these readers commenting on news stories and blog posts today go even further—they’re shockingly ignorant.

But with misguided bloggers and misguided news agencies giving legitimacy to their uninformed views, it’s not surprising that commenters say what they say. Disappointing, but not surprising.

Here we go again…still…whatever. The squabbling over patents to handset technologies continues among the tech companies. Like wild turkeys, blue in the face (literally). I need to accept this is happening, but I do feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Apple just won a legal battle against Motorola that may (or may not) halt sales of Motorola Android handsets in Germany. Déjà vu. Except delete Motorola, insert Samsung.

You know what this one was about? The ‘slide to unlock’ feature that Apple introduced with the iPhone in 2007, which pretty much every smartphone out there uses, including several of Motorola’s handsets.

According to the Wall Street Journal, this latest ruling prevents Motorola from “further producing and selling the affected products” and requires (should Apple ask for it) Motorola to pay damages “of an as yet undetermined amount against a bond of EUR25 million per ruling.” (There were two rulings in the case.)

Apple sought a third ruling against Motorola over the unlocking tool in Motorola’s Xoom tablet, but the court ruled against that one, according to the Wall Street Journal.

You know what Motorola’s response to the ruling was? They basically said: yeah, whatever, we don’t need the stupid sliding lock anyway.

Here’s what they told the Guardian:

Today’s ruling in the patent litigation brought by Apple in Munich, Germany, concerns a software feature related to select Motorola devices sold in Germany.

Motorola has implemented a new design for the feature. Therefore, we expect no impact on current supply or future sales.

The Guardian speculated that either Motorola has implemented a new feature, or they’re just rolling out Android 4.0, which has a different kind of unlocking feature from the one that got Apple worked up. Either way, it doesn’t seem like it’ll be a problem for Motorola, even with potential damages.

So, here’s my question. What was the point?

This is the latest in a long line of disputes that doesn’t seem to have an end. How much is all this costing? I’d love to know the total cost of all the patent suits by every company over handheld devices when this is all said and done.

I mean, crazy pills.

I’m just saying—from a purely scientific perspective—we don’t know everything yet, not by a long shot.

According to Wikipedia, Stephen Hawking said we can’t prove any single theory with absolute certainty because we can’t do the infinite number of calculations that would require. Because it only takes one calculation that counters the theory, and the theory is gonzo.

“Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions, the theory survives,” he said. “And our confidence in it is increased. But if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.”

American physicist Richard Feynman felt the same way, according to Wikiquotes.

“Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty,” he said. “Some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.”

I like that quote. I also like this one from Feynman:

“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”

Not knowing is a problem for some people, but it’s not for me. I gave up trying to figure out our existence (in the larger sense—I’m still working on my own personal existence) when I read Wittgenstein in college. He pointed out the our mind can’t understand its own existence thing.

Personally, I think the journey of discovery is far more important than the end result, anyway. We may never be able to explain our existence or even understand half of what the universe has to tell us.

But I’m okay with that. In fact, how would we know the difference, anyway? We might think we understand 98%of our universe but really only understand 8%.

Besides, it’s like anything else—the anticipation of the thing is often better than the thing itself. In other words, if you reach the pinnacle or end, where do you go from there? The only option is on to another journey of discovery.

Which is fine with me. I mean, what else are we going to do with ourselves in this life?

What we don’t know might fill another universe.

That is, if you ascribe to the multiverse theory that there could be an endless number of universes existing at the same time…actually, at different times in history but at the same time…well, time doesn’t really come into play, actually…never mind.

The universe is a mystery, there’s no doubt about it. For millennia, philosophers, theologians and scientists have theorized about the biggest questions of our existence.

In the last century, much of that theorization has centered on the universe’s expansion. For a while, astrophysicists thought that the universe’s rate of expansion was slowing as the mass of the bodies within it (galaxies, suns, planets, et cetera) pulled on each other.

Not so anymore. Since 1998, scientists have amassed evidence that the universe’s expansion rate is actually increasing, which is counterintuitive based on observation of the physical universe.

It doesn’t make sense. Unless you consider antimatter and the newly theorized dark energy (repulsive gravity). Dark energy refers to the possible counteracting forces of matter and antimatter (dark energy).

In a nutshell, we know that matter acts on itself because we measure it with gravity. That’s easy. But we also now know that something else that we can’t see is acting on matter as well—possibly antimatter. It may be dark energy that’s speeding up the universe’s expansion.

Or it may not. I mean, doesn’t it sound like something scientists would have said 200 years ago? “We don’t know what this thing is or exactly how it works…let’s just call it antigravity.”

The whole notion is up there with quantum mechanics and multiverses for sheer mind-blowing potential.

(Not that I would expect anything different. I mean, our mind is something that exists within the universe—should we really expect it to be able to understand the universe?)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not for a second doubting that these latest theories might prove correct.

Stay tuned for more in Journey of Discovery.

Police cruisers are equipped with cameras to provide irrefutable evidence about what goes down when police and suspects interact. They’re an easy way to catch suspects doing and saying things they’re not supposed to, and an easy way to keep tabs on officers.

This is a perfect example of where technology can provide a clear benefit. But like anything, it’s one thing to have the technology, another thing to get people to use it.

I’m referring to the story of a Seattle police officer and two Seattle residents that’s in the news right now. The purpose of this post isn’t to take sides; it’s just to make a point.

According to ABC News, Josh Lawson, 23, and Christopher Franklin, 22, claim they were unlawfully arrested and even physically abused by Officer Brad Richardson on November 16 of last year.

Part of the arrest was captured on tape, but not all of it. There’s a lot that may or may not have happened, and it’s most of that stuff that’s at the center of the controversy.

A taste—

Richardson says he stopped the two men, telling them to get down on the ground, but they kept approaching his car—they refute that last bit. Franklin and Lawson say they immediately got down because Richardson was pointing his gun at them, and then Richardson assaulted them, although Richardson refutes all that.

It’s impossible to say without seeing the entire arrest video.

There’s a lot more to this story, and you can learn about it at ABCNews.com. I’m not going to comment on the other aspects—I just want to make my point.

Which is that we have the technology, let’s use it. If the cameras in police cruisers are always on (officers aren’t necessarily required to run them), there won’t be a question about what happened. Done and done.

Multimodal is a hot buzzword in the interactive voice response (IVR) community. It means connecting to people using a variety of communication tools, such as phone, email and social media.

Multimodal is important because it’s how we communicate with each other these days. We don’t just call or send letters by mail anymore—in fact, most of us don’t send letters by mail at all anymore.

Those of us in the IVR community are particularly interested in multimodal as it affects the success of polls and surveys in particular—the real-world application of much of our technologies.

Which is why a 2008 study of multimodal surveys by Washington State University (WSU) and Gallup is so compelling. Researchers from WSU and Gallup studied how combining contact techniques (IVR combined with email, for example) could improve response rates in surveys.

The study is titled (get ready, it’s a long one) Response Rate and Measurement Differences in Mixed-Mode Surveys Using Mail, Telephone, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and the Internet. Its results are conclusive and informative.

Results from this analysis leave little doubt that a mixed-mode strategy of following a complete data collection strategy by one mode, with a short pause, followed by an attempt to collect data by another mode, can increase response rates substantially.

However, those improvements may come at the cost of obtaining different answers to the survey questions asked of respondents. The cost involved is that it is very likely to obtain different answers to each mode.

That’s interesting. The researchers found that, on average, people responded more positively on the phone than they did in written form (either a paper survey delivered by mail or an Internet survey, for example).

They also found that greater success came from combining modes that differed in their channel of communication (e.g., visual versus aural), although that can result in different measures (of satisfaction, in particular).

Saturday Night Live’s Nasim Pedrad as Arianna Huffington on Weekend Update, discussing women’s issues:

“You know, the New York Times has great coverage of this, Seth. And you can read all of it on the Huffington Post…because we copied it and we pasted it.”

I didn’t include that quote as a knock against the Huffington Post (which I read along with every other news source I can find), I just thought it was funny. It’s more of a joke about the state of news on the Internet today as a whole, anyway.

Back in the day (B.I.—Before Internet), it would have been harder for news sources to reprint each other’s stories and get any real benefit. At best, daily newspapers could report the same story a day later.

Today, though, news can break on one site one minute and show up on another’s the next. As long as credit is given where credit is due, that’s just how it works these days.

With the sheer size of the Internet, however, it’s hard for news agencies to keep tabs on their competitors to make sure people aren’t cribbing their stuff.

Today, the web is buzzing with the latest lawsuit over news piracy. According to reports, the Associated Press (AP) is suing Meltwater News for reposting AP content without paying licensing fees.

No surprise here. I mean, recently the BBC even had to tell its own journalists not to break news on Twitter before the BBC got ahold of it (check out BBC: Not on Twitter for more on that).

According to the Guardian, the AP is claiming that Meltwater’s scraping of its news directly affects the media giant because the scraped news competes directly with the original news.

“Meltwater builds its parasitic business on the back[s] of news agencies and the content we produce without making any investment in our content,” AP counsel Elizabeth McNamara told the Guardian.

Parasitic. Ouch. That makes SNL’s Huffington Post skit look like a little gentle ribbing.

“I was like, ‘Could you be serious?’”

Pinterest users can follow the activities of other Pinterest users and can discover new content via recommendations provided by the website itself.  The website launched in closed beta in March of 2010 and is still currently in open beta.  New users must register and log in to Pinterest accounts using either their current Facebook or Twitter accounts.  Users must either receive an invitation from a current user or request an invitation directly from the website.

The founders of the website started it in order to connect people everywhere based on their interests.  You can buy a gift on the website, promote your small business (cautiously, there is an anti-spamming policy), or find and link to other people who have similar interests or noteworthy, thought-provoking pages.

As I have said many times, I have never quite understood the appeal of social networks on a personal level (140 character updates, virtually “liking” someone’s “status” updates), and Pinterest is no different.  I recently received my invite and have been able to look around.  To the website’s credit, it is visually enticing and has established a potentially brilliant business model.

If those behind Pinterest can find a way to analyze the user data that is constantly being pinned to its pages, they will have a highly profitable business on their hands, and a very enticing product for myriad global companies.  Companies spend millions upon millions of dollars trying to collect the type of information and statistics Pinterest users are providing willingly, frequently, and for free.  Pinterest could offer companies nuanced market research statistics that allow them an extremely comprehensive picture of their target markets.

Queue the lawyers, this sounds like a privacy lawsuit just waiting to happen, but in the mean time we can all rest assured that Pinterest will be cashing in on its ever-expanding data goldmine while it has the chance.

Here at Plum, we are a software engineering and technology firm that knows the market we operate within (interactive voice response or IVR) inside and out.  We have been in operation for about 12 years now, and we have expert operational knowledge of our product.  In addition, we stay abreast of emerging trends in technology that may influence the future of our product so that we may implement the newest technologies to the greatest effectiveness (Thanks A Lot, Siri).

In addition, we do our best to not only stay informed regarding current and upcoming technology, but to write about it so that our clients and readers may benefit from our knowledge and understand our perspectives.

With that said, even as early adopters who constantly and consistently keep an eye on new and exciting events and opportunities, sometimes things do slip through the cracks.  From time to time you can’t help but wonder how you missed the rise of the latest and greatest networking trend, but it happens to the best of us.  In a sense, this is a testament to the sheer amount of information available, and the absolute rapidity of technology’s evolution.

One of those trends that I completely missed but has now become more or less a cultural phenomenon is Pinterest.  One day everyone was sending me links, recommendations and other tidbits they had discovered on Pinterest.  My reaction was, what is Pinterest?

Well, for those of you who sympathize with me and have never heard of Pinterest, I will offer a quick overview.  According to Wikipedia, the website is a social information sharing website that collects and amasses data (pictures, videos, discussion threads, blogs, etc.) that users have found online or uploaded from their computer and have deemed interesting enough to “pin.”

Stay tuned for the second part of this post, Oh, That’s Pinterest…