Latest news with #Higginbotham
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Progressive Health of Houston sees healthy buy-in since opening a year ago
TUPELO — One year after reestablishing emergency services in Chickasaw County, health care officials at Progressive Health of Houston say they hope to continue their growing momentum and ensure the rural hospital lasts generations. In March of last year, Progressive Health of Houston opened its doors under its new name and new ownership after being closed for a decade. Director of Operations Jennifer Higginbotham said she was proud of the progress the hospital made over its first year and hopes to expand services into the next year. 'The year has been very challenging but also very rewarding,' she said, noting that services started slow but have grown over time. 'There is hope for the future. There is no going back. 'We want to make sure this is here for our grandchildren,' Higginbotham said. The emergency room averages about 400 patients a month in a county of nearly 17,000, Higginbotham said, noting that of that 400, they average 25 transfers to larger systems, including transfers to Oxford, Tupelo, Columbus and out-of-state hospitals. The system's new fiscal year begins in July, and Higginbotham and Progressive Health of Houston have multiple goals for the coming year, including increasing outpatient care and observation. Observation comes in many forms but typically is a level of care that health care professionals use to monitor symptoms. The example Higginbotham used was an individual needing intravenous therapy. While the plan is to increase observation capacity over the next year, she said that goal has already been started. Higginbotham, who worked in the hospital for 28 years, also noted the buy-in with other services in the region. She said airlift companies have been very cooperative throughout the year. She said being a 45 minute drive to a larger system is a challenge, but those nerves can be alleviated by knowing that air services are a phone call away. Oxford-based health care company Progressive Health Group purchased the rural emergency hospital, formerly known as Trace Regional Medical Center, in November 2023. An emergency room that went from closed to open within three months is a remarkable thing, Higginbotham said. She added the rural emergency hospital is also staffed with ancillary medical services around the clock, which speeds up the process and helps those in need. 'The buy-in is growing each month,' she said. 'Health care's changing every day. Meeting those (needs) here, it is amazing to be able to do that.'
WIRED
13-03-2025
- WIRED
Companies Might Soon Have to Tell You When Their Products Will Die
If everything's computer, it would be nice to know how long computer last. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Losing access to a device sucks. Whether it's a laptop still running Windows 10, a router that's been phased out by your internet provider, or an expensive AI gadget that has suddenly been bricked, it's a bummer to be permanently disconnected from a thing you paid money for. That's where a group of consumer advocates hope to help, by calling on US lawmakers to create policies that support connected products at the end of their lives. Stacey Higginbotham, a Policy Fellow at Consumer Reports and former journalist who covered internet-of-things devices for more than a decade, has been through the dead device gauntlet more than a few times. She's used every weird, swiftly forgotten gadget since the Quirky Egg Minder—a smart egg carton that was meant to keep you appraised of how many eggs you had, but ultimately failed to capture a market. (Though you can still buy one if you really want to.) Turns out, lots of stuff has gone this route. 'I had hundreds—I'm not kidding, hundreds —of devices that have died over these decades,' Higginbotham says. 'I have lived through hundreds of poorly thought out, poorly executed IoT products that have come into the market, failed and then left a trail of e-waste and unhappy consumers behind them.' Higginbotham helped put together a new joint report by the consumer advocacy groups Consumer Reports, US PIRG, and the nonprofit Secure Resilient Future Foundation. The report suggests language for potential legislation that it hopes will be picked up and championed by lawmakers at the state or federal level. The Connected Consumer Products End of Life Disclosure Act, as they call it, would require device manufacturers to indicate how long they plan to support the devices they sell, and give users fair warning when their devices are headed toward the end of their lifespan. It's a problem that some consumers will be more familiar with than others. The US Federal Trade Commission, in response to a public letter put out by US PIRG, reviewed the websites of 184 products and found that 89 percent of them did not disclose how long the manufacturer intended to support its product. Lucas Rockett Gutterman, director of PIRG's Designed to Last campaign, says that legislation like this could affect more people than just the early adopters of out-there gadgets like the Quirky Egg Minder or the recently deceased Humane AI Pin. It would apply to people's phones, laptops, fitness trackers, fridges, stoves, printers, microwaves, cars—nearly every device in your house, office, and driveway that can (or probably will someday) connect to the internet. 'I mean, President Trump just said it,' Gutterman says, referencing the US leader's reaction to seeing the dashboard of a Tesla during a recent publicity stunt at the White House: ' 'Everything's computer.' That's true, it is all computer.' When the online services that power a connected device go away, either because a company collapses or just stops supporting certain products, those devices can wind up bricked and broken. They can also remain mostly functional for years, even if the user doesn't realize that software support has ended. That means devices may no longer have access to regular security updates, which can make them vulnerable to cyberattacks or use as an insidious node in a wider botnet of zombie devices. The proposed act would require companies to disclose a 'reasonable' support timeframe on a product's packaging and online where it is sold, letting users know how long they can expect a device to have access to those connected features. It would also require companies to notify customers when their devices are approaching the end of their support lifespans, and inform them of what features are going away. Finally, there's the cybersecurity angle, which would require internet providers to remove and exchange company-provided broadband routers from consumer homes when they reach their end of life. 'The cybersecurity piece really coalesces around the requirement that internet service providers that lease or sell smart connected devices to their customers take responsibility for managing end-of-life devices on their networks,' says Paul Roberts, the president of the Secure Resilient Future Foundation (SRFF), an advocacy non-profit that focuses on cybersecurity. If the router-specific thing feels a little out of left field, that's because Roberts says it is a deliberate two-pronged approach. 'Those are two somewhat distinct issues, but they're all part of the bigger problem,' Roberts says, 'which is putting some guardrails and definition around this smart-device marketplace. Saying to manufacturers, there are rules you need to abide by if you want to sell a smart connected product. It's not the wild west.' Roberts hopes that if the law gets support from lawmakers, and is eventually turned into real legislation, it will create market incentives for companies looking to make more secure software products, similar to how seatbelts and airbags became widely accepted in motor vehicles. However, it's less clear whether that legislation will ever get any traction at the federal level in the US in a political climate dominated by wanton, whirlwind deregulation. While the European Union has led the way on regulation about product repairability, and end-of-life treatment for vehicles and e-waste recycling, the US hasn't made similar moves. 'We are in a place where the FTC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are not really going to do anything that's pro consumer,' says Anshel Sag, a principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategies. 'I don't see any real appetite for regulation.' Sag also feels there's a possibility that such legislation has the potential to dampen the thirst for innovation that drives startups. If companies know they have to support a product for a set amount of time, it could limit the kind of risks they're willing to take. 'I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing,' Sag says. 'I just think there's a lot of startups out there that aren't willing to take on that risk. And I think, because of that, it could impede innovation in some ways.' Higginbotham is far less worried about this. She points back to her vast collection of dead devices—what has amounted to a veritable pile of e-waste. 'I don't know if that really counts as innovation,' Higginbotham says. 'We need to recalibrate our default setting based on the last decade and a half of experience. Maybe you don't have to just throw a bunch of stuff out into the ether and see what sticks.'
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
A Man and his Linotype machine
City officials unearthed a piece of history Monday when they discovered an old 1,100-pound Linotype machine in the vacant Higginbotham Printing building that was demolished by city crews on Moore Avenue. Like a rusting steam engine in a rail yard, the old Linotype machine—coated in dust and rust—stood as a relic of an era when hot lead was used to set type for printing presses. Before the wrecking ball sent the old machine to its final resting place photos were taken to document the retired behemoth. The Anniston Star visited Higginbotham Printing in March 2001 for a feature article on Eugene Burnham, the business's Linotype machine operator at the time. Burnham, 71 then, passed away at age 72 in June 2002. The machine was a Mergenthaler Linotype NY, Model 31. The Linotype is named after its inventor, a German immigrant named Ottmar Mergenthaler. In 1884, he patented a machine that allowed printers to set an entire line of type at once—hence the name Linotype. Before then, type was set by hand, one character at a time, much as it had been when Gutenberg invented the printing press 400 years earlier. The Linotype quickly became the standard for newspapers and printing shops, remaining in widespread use into the 1960s. 'When I go, it'll go,' Burnham said in 2001. The Linotype had been at Higginbotham since 1957, and Burnham was probably its last operator. Higginbotham Building BW This is a photo from 2001 of Eugene Burnham operating the Linotype machine for the business. Photo by Bill Wilson, The Anniston Star When Burnham turned on the massive machine, the steady, smooth spinning of rubber belts made the Linotype sound a bit like an old sewing machine. Burnham had 54 years of experience with the Linotype in 2001. He learned the craft at The Jacksonville News in the 1940s and took a job at Higginbotham in 1960. He sat in a battered chair that was surely as old as the machine itself. A built-in lamp illuminated the keyboard. Lowercase letters were on black keys to the left, numerals and punctuation in blue in the middle, and capital letters in white on the right. Each keystroke moved a small brass matrix, or mat, into position; the mats contained the mold for the required letter. A magazine above Burnham's head held upwards of 1,500 mats. 'That T is doubling,' he said. 'I heard it that time.' He was ever-vigilant against typos. 'We don't have spell-check on this machine,' he said. Years of focusing on individual letters, numbers, and punctuation marks had ruined him for reading normally. 'I've set the type so long, I read everything in a line,' he said. At full speed, the machine came to life like one of those contraptions in a Dr. Seuss book. Higginbotham Building BW This is a photo from 2001 of Eugene Burnham operating the Linotype machine for the business. Photo by Bill Wilson, The Anniston Star Elevators, cranks, mold discs, levers, dogs, pins, clutches, and pots worked in speedy synchronicity—all to produce a single metal slug. All that for a slender strip of metal a few inches long, with tiny, perfectly formed letters rising from its surface. 'It's an amazing machine,' Burnham said. As a classic Linotype operator's gag, Burnham made a slug for The Anniston Star reporter and handed it to him while it was still warm—just seconds before it cooled from its 550-degree molten state. White scars on Burnham's forearm marked his own encounters with the hot metal. Globs of metal on the ceiling above the machine served as evidence of near misses. Such encounters explained why many Linotype operators weren't sad to see the machines go. In 2001, Phillip Sanguinetti, president of Consolidated Publishing, which owned The Star, recalled the day in 1970 when the paper shipped off the last of its 13 Linotypes. One of the operators gave the departing machine a swift kick, Sanguinetti remembered. 'You S.O.B., you won't spit on me anymore,' the worker said. Paper and print shop owners weren't sorry, either. The Linotype's immediate replacement, cold-type offset printing, was far faster and cleaner. Higginbotham once had four Linotypes and four operators. By 2001, demand for Linotype printing was rare, but the machine was still useful for jobs on pre-printed paper or paper with multiple thicknesses. When the Linotype was needed at Higginbotham, they called Burnham. He was the only one left who could run it. Burnham said in 2001 that he and the Linotype would leave together. Higginbotham Building BW An old Linotype machine was discovered by city officials that had been in place since the 1950s. Photo by Bill Wilson, The Anniston Star Now, as city crews prepare to haul away the rusting Linotype to an unknown fate, it marks the final end to Burnham's long kinship with the old letterpress machine.
