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The Not-Created-Equal Edition Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Screens Might Be As Bad For Mental Health As ... Potatoes, by Robbie Gonzalez, Wired

Not all screen time is created equal, but most studies to date treat it as monolithic. "That's like asking if food is good or bad for you, and in the end, questions like that will never help us," says Orben. "We need to stop the debate about the effect of generic tech-use on well-being, and open space for more and better research about the kind of technologies people are using, who's using them, and how."

Personal Health Records—More Promising In The Smartphone Era?, by Christian Dameff, Brian Clay, Christopher A. Longhurst, JAMA

Improvements in mobile hardware and sensors, digital communication standards, and accessible software have changed significantly since the initial efforts at creating personal health records. Although it remains too soon to draw firm conclusions, the continued development of patient-facing health care technologies by well-established technology companies suggests that the digital health care landscape may now be sufficiently mature to foster the broad adoption of personal health records. Whether these technological advances ultimately improve patient outcomes, lower costs, and improve quality remain the most important unanswered questions.

Stuff

TD Ameritrade Taps Apple Pay For Instant Fund Transfers To Accounts, by Stephen Nellis, Reuters

Tuteja said TD Ameritrade chose Apple Pay to start with because of its ease of use, security and the fact that about three-quarters of the brokerage’s clients use the iOS operating system.

An iOS-only Video Workflow: Surprises, Challenges, And Hopes For The Future, by Michael Steeber, 9to5Mac

With another CES in the books, I can say with confidence that switching to an iOS-only video workflow for simple projects greatly improved my productivity and helped complete time-sensitive edits without a hitch. Less waiting for rendering, less fumbling with cables, and lighter gear all meant more time on the show floor. I wouldn’t return to CES without my iPad.

Develop

Apple’s FoundationDB Open Sources The Database Layer Behind CloudKit, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

Apple originally acquired FoundationDB in 2015, and last April it announced that it was making the cloud database open source. Now, things are being taken a step further as FoundationDB has announced it is open sourcing Foundation DB Record Layer, which powers CloudKit.

Notes

On Apple’s $29 iPhone Battery Replacement Program And Its Role In Their Earnings Miss, by John Gruber, Daring Fireball

During Apple’s all-hands meeting January 3, Tim Cook said Apple replaced 11 million batteries under the $29 replacement program, and they’d have only anticipated about 1-2 million battery replacements normally.

In The Shadow Of The CMS, by Kyle Chayka, The Nation

CMSs are like digital printing presses: They determine how journalism gets published online. But unlike the printing press, CMSs also increasingly influence not just how stories look but how they are produced, discovered, read, and monetized. To attempt another comparison: If an article is like a bag of chips for the consumer, then a CMS is like the vending machine. CMSs shape every media company from top to bottom, publisher to reader. They use adaptive algorithms to recommend certain stories to certain audiences, put up paywalls at particular points in articles, help control the flow of traffic, measure reader engagement through specific metrics, and regulate which ad networks the publications profit from most. When a title outsources its publishing technology to another media company, it gives up some control over how its stories are distributed—for better or worse.

With Google, Facebook, and other social-media platforms having taken over so much of digital publishing and reader consumption, the independent CMS is a matter of survival. Media companies and journalists alike are reclaiming the means of distribution and monetization from the few tech companies that dominated the space over the past decade. Thus, as readers, we also need to evaluate a publication’s CMS just as we judge the stories themselves.