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Steven Potash is President and CEO of OverDrive, Inc., a digital media company he founded in 1986. Under his leadership, OverDrive has become a leading digital media distributor and Digital Rights Management (DRM) clearinghouse for hundreds of leading publishers, studios, and media producers in the US and abroad. OverDrive distributes over 100,000 premium eBook, audiobook, music, and video titles to a network of over 6,000 libraries and online retail websites.

Mr. Potash has led OverDrive into strategic relationships with Microsoft Corporation, Adobe Systems, Inc., and hundreds of leading media companies and retailers. During the 90's, OverDrive began offering print-to-digital conversion services to publishers, and eCommerce solutions for retailers in the trade, academic, and consumer markets. Since 2000, Mr. Potash launched Content Reserve, which has grown to become the world's leading distribution network for eBooks and digital media with over 100,000 products from 500 publishers. During 2002 OverDrive expanded its digital content services to public, academic, and corporate libraries with the launch of Digital Library Reserve. Mr. Potash has served as President and as a Board member for the International Digital Publishing Forum (www.idpf.org), an international standards body and trade association for digital book applications.

Prior to OverDrive, Mr. Potash was active in the practice of law, served as Special Counsel to the Ohio Attorney General, served as an acting Municipal Judge, and authored technology columns for the American Bar Association Journal. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, he earned a B.A. in Journalism from Ohio State and his J.D. from the Cleveland Marshall College of Law. He is currently licensed to practice law in Ohio and federal courts. He lives in Cleveland with his wife Loree.

Lewis & Hand, LLP lawyers represent authors, publishers and distributors and advise clients on all aspects of traditional, electronic and digital publishing. We review, draft, and negotiate all types of publishing related agreements, including: Author Agreements Option and Purchase Agreements Publishing Agreements Agent Agreements

Alexander S. Szalay is a well-regarded astronomer, but he hasn't peered through a telescope in nearly a decade. Instead, the professor of physics and astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University learned how to write software code, build computer servers, and stitch millions of digital telescope images into a sweeping panorama of the universe.

Today, data sharing in astronomy isn't just among professors. Amateurs are invited into the data sets through friendly Web interfaces, and a schoolteacher in Holland recently made a major discovery, of an unusual gas cloud that might help explain the life cycle of quasars—bright centers of distant galaxies—after spending part of her summer vacation gazing at the objects on her computer screen. Crowd Science, as it might be called, is taking hold in several other disciplines, such as biology, and is rising rapidly in oceanography and a range of environmental sciences. "Crowdsourcing is a natural solution to many of the problems that scientists are dealing with that involve massive amounts of data," says Haym Hirsh, director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation.

Mr. Szalay's unusual career began with a stint as a rock star. While in graduate school in Hungary, he played lead guitar in the band Panta Rhei, which released two albums and several singles in the 1970s.

The Entertainment, Media and Technology Industry Team at Sheppard Mullin is a full-service multi-disciplinary group representing the major motion picture studios, television networks and other domestic and international entertainment, media and communications companies in all areas, including: motion picture and television development finance, production and distribution advertising/sweepstakes branded entertainment games intellectual property licensing and merchandising mergers, corporate finance, acquisitions and other strategic corporate transactions music First Amendment convergence, online/technology publishing sports

The conceptual framework and value chain analysis methodology developed for this study are being refined in light of the lessons learned by the research team, and applied to further studies in other sectors, not all of which are as buoyant as bagged salad! Co-innovation is a concept in which we firmly believe and in which Houston's Farm is now firmly engaged. However, there remains much to learn about how to do it and how to research it. The value chain innovation research initiative at the University of Tasmania will, we hope, provide more valuable insights for academics and practitioners in the future.

Varying the types of skills you work on in practice sessions engages a different part of the brain than the one you use when focusing on a single task, researchers say. The finding explains why variable practice improves the brain's memory of most skills better than working on just one type of task, according to the research team from the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles.In their study, published online recently in Nature Neuroscience, the investigators divided 59 volunteers into different groups. Some were asked to practice a challenging arm movement, while others did the arm movement and related tasks in a variable practice structure.The participants in the variable practice group learned the arm movement better than those who practiced only the arm movement, the study authors found.Among those in the variable practice group, the process of consolidating memory of the skill engaged a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with higher level planning. Among those who practiced only the arm movement, the engaged part of the brain was the primary motor cortex, which is associated with simple motor learning, the authors explained."In the variable practice structure condition, you're basically solving the motor problem anew each time. If I'm just repeating the same thing over and over again as in the constant practice condition, I don't have to process it very deeply," study senior author Carolee Winstein, a professor of biokinesiology and physical therapy at the University of Southern California, said in a university news release.

A new study published on August 26 in the journal Science explains the old adage that two heads are better than one is not always true. Professors Chris Frith of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at the University College London (UCL) and Niels Bohr at the University of Aarhus in Denmark and colleagues discovered that two heads work best when they are equals and can speak freely with one another.Bahador Bahrami, MD, researcher at UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and lead author of the study, explained, "When we are trying to solve problems, we usually put our heads together in teams, calling on each other's opinions. "For our study, we wanted to see if two people could combine information from each other in a difficult judgement task and how much this would improve their performance."Frith noted, "When two people working together can discuss their disagreements, two heads can be better than one. But, when one person is working with flawed information - or perhaps is less able at their job - then this can have a very negative effect on the outcome.

The systematic review of published research studies is a major method used for evaluating particular treatments. The Cochrane Collaboration is one of the best-known, respected examples of systematic reviews. Like other collections of systematic reviews, it requires authors to provide a detailed and repeatable plan of their literature search and evaluations of the evidence. Once all the best evidence is assessed, treatment is categoried as "likely to be beneficial", "likely to be harmful", or "evidence did not support either benefit or harm".

Evidence-based medicine categorizes different types of clinical evidence and ranks them according to the strength of their freedom from the various biases that beset medical research. For example, the strongest evidence for therapeutic interventions is provided by systematic review of randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials involving a homogeneous patient population and medical condition. In contrast, patient testimonials, case reports, and even expert opinion have little value as proof because of the placebo effect, the biases inherent in observation and reporting of cases, difficulties in ascertaining who is an expert, and more.

The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) has determined that DynaMed may be of assistance to family physicians in answering clinical questions with high-quality evidence.

A survey of 600 developers by Mashery reported that 69% of respondents said Amazon, Google, and Twitter were the most popular API’s they were using.

Amazon and Netflix jointly published a great case study and announced Netflix would move more infrastructure into Amazon’s Cloud.

A wonderful post on CNet talks about Goldman Sachs’ findings for the Cloud.  There were a ton of them including:           – A ranked list of apps moving into the Cloud.  Web Conferencing and Salesforce Automation were #1 and #2. 

Gartner, Inc. has examined the maturity of 1,650 technologies and trends in 79 technology, topic, and industry areas, and these findings have been published in “Gartner’s Hype Cycle Special Report for 2009." Each Hype Cycle provides a snapshot of key technologies and trends in a specific technology, topic, geographic region, or industry domain.

Security organization ISACA has launched a new risk management qualification for information security professionals. The Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC) certification targets professionals in the IT area who use information security controls to manage risk in technology environments.

ISACA, which focuses on audit, risk, and governance disciplines, will administer the first CRISC examination next year

This is the fourth certification launched by ISACA. It also offers the Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), Certified Information Security Manager (CISM), and the Certified in the Governance of Enterprise IT (CGEIT), which is its most recent certification, launched in 2006.ISACA is also the publisher of the Risk IT standard for managing risk in IT, and the COBIT standard for IT governance.