Quotes about Information Technology from the world's top natural health / natural living authors
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 "New Information Technology
The information technology revolution has a long history, dating back even before the invention of electronic computers in the 1940s. But the period since the stock market hit bottom in 1982, and particularly the period since the mid-1990s, has held particularly dramatic advances that have impressed people as never before.
The first cell phone system appeared in 1982, which corresponds exactly to the bottom of the stock market and the beginning of the market uptrend that lasted until 2000."- Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) |
 "Our first information technology was writing. Limited to speech alone, ideas could not travel far without distortion or loss. Writing enabled us to make more permanent records of our experiences.
Arnold Toynbee
Initially, we recorded our ideas on slabs of stone, but these were difficult to transport. The development of the pen and of papyrus overcame this handicap. Our learnings could then be shared with others in distant lands.
Convenient as they were, manuscripts had to be copied by hand—a process that was both slow and subject to error."- Peter Russell, Waking Up In Time: Finding Inner Peace In Times of Accelerating Change (Get the book.) |
 "The world is growing more and more dependent on information technology. Although it is a truism, if we fail to put in a modest effort to modernize, we will get left behind by the Zeitgeist. So challenge yourself to stay abreast of technology, and to obtain at least the minimum amount of knowledge necessary to be computer-literate. The Internet is a truly amazing social phenomenon and will continue to enrich our lives if we continue to grow with it. Do not be left behind!"- Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George, The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis (Get the book.) "I strongly urge the drug and health-care industry in general to enrich their business models by diversifying into the realm of information technology. Marketing products with clear consumer benefit will ultimately prove to be a more effective business plan than continuing to produce pills with only very modest benefit." - Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George, The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis (Get the book.) |
| "There is, however, no reason to suppose that information technology is our final technology; it is just the current focus of our development. I believe the next major transition will be the transition to what we might call the Consciousness Age —a period when the exploration and development of the human mind will become our major focus.
There are two principal reasons for believing this. First, this is the direction in which our current crises are pushing us." - Peter Russell, Waking Up In Time: Finding Inner Peace In Times of Accelerating Change (Get the book.) |
| "The world is growing more and more dependent on information technology. Although it is a truism, if we fail to put in a modest effort to modernize, we will get left behind by the Zeitgeist. So challenge yourself to stay abreast of technology, and to obtain at least the minimum amount of knowledge necessary to be computer-literate. The Internet is a truly amazing social phenomenon and will continue to enrich our lives if we continue to grow with it. Do not be left behind!" - Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George, The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis (Get the book.) |
| "In a similar way, the growth of information technology has been consistently underestimated. The TV series Star Trek was conceived as happening two hundred years in the future, by which time computers would no longer use magnetic tape and would synthesize human speech. We may not yet have boldly gone beyond our own solar system, but as far as computers are concerned, reality caught up with fantasy in less than twenty years.
There is no reason to believe that we are not making similar errors today." - Peter Russell, Waking Up In Time: Finding Inner Peace In Times of Accelerating Change (Get the book.) |
| "The system is not set up, [but] information technology can make a difference," he explains.
Asch notes that the Veterans Affairs system is already using upgraded information technology and "care has improved dramatically"— approximately two-thirds of veterans are now receiving the recommended care.
"We wouldn't tolerate this in almost any other sector of society," he continues. "We wouldn't tolerate it if a pilot had to memorize his pre-flight checklist before he flew cross-country. It's a complicated thing to give medical care, and to do it right you need assistance."
.." - Bottom Line Health, Bottom Line's Health Breakthroughs 2007 (Get the book.) |
| "Some of these factors exist in the background of the market, including the advance of capitalism, the increased emphasis on business success, the revolution in information technology, the demographics of the Baby Boom, the decline of inflation and the economics of money illusion, and the rise of gambling and pleasure in risk taking in general. Others operate in the foreground and shape the changing culture of investment." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) |
 "All the evidence suggests that these groups are more likely than doctors in solo practice or small groups to use evidence-based medicine and employ information technology to deliver more-effective care. Another model is the hospital chain that employs physicians. Intermountain Healthcare owns twenty-one hospitals and clinics and employs twenty-one thousand people, including its doctors. If every hospital in America achieved the same level of efficiency in caring for the chronically ill as Intermountain, Medicare would save more than ten billion dollars a year."- Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Use information technology to improve coordination among doctors. Make hospitals and doctors accountable by measuring their performance and the outcomes of their patients. And finally, gather evidence for what works and what doesn't. We could call this strategy CARE, for coordination, accountability, electronic medical records, and evidence. While the tasks are clear, implementing CARE around the country won't be simple. In order to do it, we have to rethink the way we pay doctors and hospitals." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "The doctors have implemented information technology to allow everyone involved in a patient's care to share medical records and support disease management. Pursuing Perfection has already improved the health of many patients. Rebecca Bryson suffers from both diabetes and congestive heart failure. Before enrolling in the program she was seeing fourteen different doctors and taking forty-two medications. When her lungs would fill with fluid from her congestive heart failure, she would call a doctor's office and tell the nurse what was happening." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Fewer than 1 o percent of hospitals in the country have instituted electronic medical records, and the health care industry as a whole spends less than 3 percent of its revenue on information technology, far less than the 10 percent that other information-intensive industries, like the airlines, spend. Some hospitals have put in systems only to pull the plug when doctors rebelled. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles, installed a thirty-four-million-dollar computerized physician ordering system to streamline drug prescriptions and reduce error rates." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) |
| "The rate of experimentation with and research on financial institutions has been increasing over the decades, and more and more use is being made of advanced information technology that exploits broader databases and reduces the cost of new financial services.
The Public Should Be Helped to Hedge Risks
In order to encourage proper risk management, the advice given by public authorities should stress more effective hedging of risks. I have argued in this book that people are ultimately highly influenced by the perceived wisdom of experts—the "they say that..." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) |
| "The exploration and development of human consciousness could take over from information technology as an even faster arena of quickening. If so, it would be spiritual evolution, not technological evolution, that takes us into the singularity.
To see how this might come about, and where it might lead, we must first go back and ask why it is that evolution tends to accelerate, and why, of all the creatures on this planet, human beings have created so much change so fast." - Peter Russell, Waking Up In Time: Finding Inner Peace In Times of Accelerating Change (Get the book.) |
| "Asch notes that the Veterans Affairs system is already using upgraded information technology and "care has improved dramatically"— approximately two-thirds of veterans are now receiving the recommended care.
"We wouldn't tolerate this in almost any other sector of society," he continues. "We wouldn't tolerate it if a pilot had to memorize his pre-flight checklist before he flew cross-country. It's a complicated thing to give medical care, and to do it right you need assistance."
..Q Visit the Agency for Healthcare Quality — and Research at www.ahrq." - Bottom Line Health, Bottom Line's Health Breakthroughs 2007 (Get the book.) |
 "Fewer than 1 o percent of hospitals in the country have instituted electronic medical records, and the health care industry as a whole spends less than 3 percent of its revenue on information technology, far less than the 10 percent that other information-intensive industries, like the airlines, spend. Some hospitals have put in systems only to pull the plug when doctors rebelled. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles, installed a thirty-four-million-dollar computerized physician ordering system to streamline drug prescriptions and reduce error rates."- Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) |
 "IBM, known for its information technology, has reduced energy consumption worldwide by 2 5 percent, through conservation, pocketing $527 million.
"While some assume that cutting C02 emissions costs businesses money, we have found just the opposite. Addressing climate change makes business sense," said Wayne Balta, vice president for Corporate Environmental Affairs and Product Safety. "We have saved more than one hundred million dollars since 1998 by conserving energy. When you consider the significant environmental benefits also achieved, cutting emissions is a win-win proposition."- David Steinman, Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown (Get the book.) |
 "In no other area in which science has transformed our lives, is its authority subject to such variance in how it is applied in daily life. information technology, for example, requires people to adapt to the protocols of the computer if they want the benefits, which are pretty standard. But they don't have to believe in either the Dell dealer or the underlying technology for it to work. With medicine, people do have to buy in at some level to the promise of what it purports to do, and the effects are far from standard."- Jacky Law, Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda (Get the book.) |
 "Unless an NGO focuses on information technology, chances are its computers and networks are a hodgepodge of donated hardware and off-the-shelf commercial software (which may or may not be legally acquired) —and far too much time is spent on technology hassles. That's where the NGO in a Box program from the Tactical Technology Collective comes in.
NGO-in-a-Box is a set of specially selected, high-quality free/open-source software chosen to meet the needs of NGOs."- Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.) "It is already a major part of the mainstream information technology economy, and it increasingly dominates aspects of that economy that will probably be the leading edge over the next decade." Open source, he argues, is more than software —it's a way of organizing production so that it can be used for works for public good, and that is definitely worldchanging. The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond (O'Reilly Media, 2001) Available as a free download at http://catb." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.) "People aren't moving to rural America to take traditional jobs like farming and mining, but to find new types of jobs made possible by improvements in infrastructure and transportation: jobs in information technology, service, manufacturing, and distribution. Retirees are leading the way for these workers, swelling the population of rural retirement destinations that come with beautiful scenery and low-cost living. But there's a dark side to this migration—some of the newer jobs are in problematic industries: meat-processing plants and prisons are two growth industries in rural America." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.) |
 "He often explained it to visiting analysts and journalists by rendering a version of a conversation he had with his mother: "Suddenly information technology was so essential that we realized we are an information company more than we are a pill company. Because it's the software — all the research, networking, marketing — that's important in that pill. The pill is a piece of software! I mean, when my mother would ask, 'Why is that pill so expensive?' I would say, 'But, Ma, it's not the pill that costs so much, it's the software!'"- Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.) |
 "And we love this: "Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities."
Translation: Subprime borrowers can now get all the credit they want.
And this: "Short of a significant fall in overall household income or in home prices, debt servicing is unlikely to become destabilizing."
But just there was the big issue. With 70 percent of the economy now based on consumption and dependent on inflated house prices, if house prices didn't rise, there would be no more equity to take out."- William Bonner, Lila Rajiva, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics (Agora Series) (Get the book.) |
| "All the evidence suggests that these groups are more likely than doctors in solo practice or small groups to use evidence-based medicine and employ information technology to deliver more-effective care. Another model is the hospital chain that employs physicians. Intermountain Healthcare owns twenty-one hospitals and clinics and employs twenty-one thousand people, including its doctors. If every hospital in America achieved the same level of efficiency in caring for the chronically ill as Intermountain, Medicare would save more than ten billion dollars a year." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "VHA primary care doctors are responsible for about fifteen hundred patients, at least five hundred fewer than the average internist or family physician.) Use information technology to improve coordination among doctors. Make hospitals and doctors accountable by measuring their performance and the outcomes of their patients. And finally, gather evidence for what works and what doesn't. We could call this strategy CARE, for coordination, accountability, electronic medical records, and evidence. While the tasks are clear, implementing CARE around the country won't be simple." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) |
 "New medications and fast-paced information technology undoubtedly afford us the capacity to confront new ailments, like looming pandemics of bird flu, providing that governments don't lie or cover up early reports.
But what about cancer? Can modern medicine, with its reliance on finding and treating diseases one at a time, alter the ways that the disease presents itself? We know how to cure relatively rare cancers, like those of children. We have made spectacular advances against many forms of the disease. That's why in the U.S. alone, there are more than 10 million cancer survivors."- Devra Davis, The Secret History of the War on Cancer (Get the book.) |
| "And when they do, we will have on our desk a machine that connects us to the world through information technology; that links us to a cycle of manufacturing that spews very little waste and reabsorbs what it does release; that is put out by companies mindful of the people who make their computers and, more important still, the people who take them apart—and all in a product that is lighter, sleeker, and more elegant than any we've seen yet." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.) |
| "The doctors have implemented information technology to allow everyone involved in a patient's care to share medical records and support disease management.
Pursuing Perfection has already improved the health of many patients. Rebecca Bryson suffers from both diabetes and congestive heart failure. Before enrolling in the program she was seeing fourteen different doctors and taking forty-two medications. When her lungs would fill with fluid from her congestive heart failure, she would call a doctor's office and tell the nurse what was happening." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) |
| "Billion-dollar firms like Infosys, Wipro, Sathyam, and Cognizant, as well as even second-string information technology players, have most of their people located in the south of India for one reason. The four southern states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh (home to India's "cybercity," Hyderabad) together account for about 64 percent of Indian software exports. Tamil Nadu state alone churns out 22,000 engineers every year. And the software industry's national association in India has rated Chennai as the best place for software development in the country." - William Bonner, Lila Rajiva, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics (Agora Series) (Get the book.) |
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