Author Archives: bredemarket
Marketing and writing services.
Graber Olive House GoFundMe Reaches 58% Of Goal…But It’s Bankrupt
Remember the Graber Olive House fundraiser from last September, trying to keep the property out of foreclosure?
https://www.gofundme.com/f/dont-let-ontario-lose-its-oldest-landmark
As of today it has reached 58% of its goal.
Not sure what that means, since the company filed for bankruptcy in December with estimated assets of less than $50,000 and estimated liabilities of over $500,000.
Ambient Clinical Intelligence in Healthcare
Another topic raised by Nadaa Taiyab during today’s SoCal Tech Forum meeting was ambient clinical intelligence. See her comments on how AI benefits diametrically opposing healthcare entities here.
There are three ways that a health professional can create records during, and/or after, a patient visit.
- Typing. The professional has their hands on the keyboard during the meeting, which doesn’t make a good impression on the patient.
- Structured dictation. The professional can actually look at the patient, but the dictation is unnatural. As Bredebot characterizes it: “where you have to speak specific commands like ‘Period’ or ‘New Paragraph.’”
- Ambient clinical intelligence.
Here is how DeepScribe defines ambient clinical intelligence:
“Ambient clinical intelligence, or ACI, is advanced, AI-powered voice recognizing technology that quietly listens in on clinical encounters and aids the medical documentation process by automating medical transcription and note taking. This all-encompassing technology has the ability to totally transform the lives of clinicians, and thus healthcare on every level.”
Like any generative AI model, ambient clinical intelligence has to provide my four standard benefits: accuracy, ease of use, security, and speed.
- Accuracy is critically important in any health application, since inaccurate coding could literally affect life or death.
- Ease of use is of course the whole point of ambient clinical intelligence, since it replaces harder-to-use methods.
- Security and privacy are necessary when dealing with personal health information (PHI).
- Speed is essential also. As Taiyab noted elsewhere in her talk, the work is increasing and the workforce not increasing as rapidly.
But if the medical professional and patient benefit from the accuracy, ease of use, security, and speed of ambient clinical intelligence, we all win.
Health AI Battle Bots
In this morning’s SoCal Tech Forum meeting, Nadaa Taiyab noted that generative AI can aid both sides of healthcare funding battles.
- Medical providers and patients benefit when AI speeds authorization approvals.
- Insurance companies benefit when AI speeds authorization denials.
Who will win?
(Also see my related post on ambient clinical intelligence in healthcare.)
Inclusion
Despite external pressures to the contrary, some U.S. companies continue to promote inclusion.
But are they truly inclusive?
If your company champions inclusion, then you won’t object to publishing this information:
- The percentage of your employees over the age of 50.
- The percentage over the age of 60.
- The percentage over the age of 70.
If you think this information is ridiculous, then your company is exclusive, not inclusive.
Fact: Cities Must Disclose Responsible Uses of Biometric Data
“Fact: Cities must disclose responsible uses of biometric data” is a parody of the title of my May 2025 guest post for Biometric Update, “Opinion: Vendors must disclose responsible uses of biometric data.”
But I could have chosen another title: “Fact: lack of deadlines sinks behavior.” That’s a mixture of two quotes from Tracy “Trace” Wilkins and Chris Burt, as we will see.
Whether Vanilla Ice and Gordon Lightfoot would agree with the sentiment is not known.
But back to my Biometric Update guest post (expect my next appearance in Biometric Update in 2035).
That guest post touched on Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but had nothing to do with ICE.
One of the “responsible uses” questions was one that Biometric Update had raised in the previous month: whether it was proper for the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) to share information with facial recognition vendor Biometrica.
Milwaukee needed a policy
But the conversation subsequently redirected to another topic, as I noted in August. Before Milwaukee’s “Common Council” could approve any use of facial recognition, with or without Biometrica data sharing, MPD needed to develop a facial recognition policy.
According to a quote from MPD, it agreed.
“Should MPD move forward with acquiring FRT, a policy will be drafted based upon best practices and public input.”
It was clear that the policy would come first, facial recognition use afterward.
Well, until last night, when a fact was revealed that caused Chris Burt to write an article entitled “Milwaukee police sink efforts to contract facial recognition with unsanctioned use.”
Sounds like the biggest wreck since the one Gordon Lightfoot sang about. (A different lake, but bear with me here.)
Milwaukee didn’t get a policy
The details are in an article by WUWM, Milwaukee’s NPR station, which took a break from ICE coverage to report on a Thursday night Fire and Police Commission meeting.
“Commissioner Krissie Fung pressed MPD inspector Paul Lao on the department’s past use of facial recognition.
““Just to clarify,” asked Fung, “Is the practice still continuing?”
““As needed right now, we are still using [FRT],” Lao responded.”
It was after 10:00 pm Central time, but the commissioner pressed the issue.
Fung asked Lao if the department was currently still using FRT without an SOP in place.
“As we said that’s correct and we’re trying to work on getting an SOP,” Lao said.
That brought the wolves out, because SOP or no SOP, there are people who hate facial recognition, especially because of other things going on in the city that have nothing to do with MPD. Add the “facial recognition is racist” claims, and MPD was (in Burt’s words) sunk.
Yes, a follow-up meeting will be held, but Burt notes (via WISN) that MPD has imposed its own moratorium on facial recognition technology use.
“Despite our belief that this is useful technology to assist in generating leads for apprehending violent criminals, we recognize that the public trust is far more valuable.”
Milwaukee should have asked, then acted
From Bredemarket’s self-interested perspective this is a content problem.
- Back in August 2025, Milwaukee knew that it needed a facial recognition policy.
- Several months later, in February 2026, it didn’t have one, and didn’t have a timeframe regarding when a policy would be ready for review.
Now I appreciate that a facial recognition policy is not a short writing job. I’ve worked on policies, and you can’t complete one in a couple of days.
But couldn’t you at least come up with a DRAFT in six months?
To create a policy, you need a process.
Deadlines drive behavior
Coincidentally, I live-blogged a Never Search Alone webinar this morning at which Tracy “Trace” Wilkins made this statement.
“Deadlines drive behavior.”
Frankly, I see this a lot. Companies (or governments) require content, but don’t set a deadline for finalizing that content.
And when you don’t set a deadline, then it never gets done.
And no, “as soon as possible” is not a deadline, because “as soon as possible” REALLY means “within a year, if we feel like it.”
Lack of deadlines sinks behavior.
Organ
Some services Bredemarket does not provide.
My Favorite Knowledge-Based Authentication (KBA) Failure
If the identity you’re protecting is important, knowledge-based authentication (KBA) isn’t sufficient to protect it. There’s an example of a KBA failure that I originally discussed in 2024 in a “The Wildebeest Speaks” article, but since I’m citing it again on LinkedIn I might as well mention it here.
Consider the following four criteria:
- The person is a famous musician.
- The person uses a particular first and last name.
- The person is of a particular nationality.
- The person plays a particular musical instrument.
That’s not enough to identify an individual.
Just ask the famous musician Mick Jones, the English guitarist.
Here he is (on the left) playing guitar for the song “Urgent.” (Or, more accurately miming to a previous recording. The recording included Junior Walker and Thomas Dolby, but the video did not.)
And here is Jones again, playing guitar and singing “Should I Stay Or Should I Go.”
“Wait a minute, John!” you’re saying. “Those are two different bands and two different people!”
Right.
And for those who thought all the members of Foreigner were American…
“By 1974 we found in Spooky [Tooth] that we were getting a better reception in the States than back home in Britain, so made a collective decision to relocate to New York….
“[After Gary Wright quit Spooky Tooth] I [Mick Jones the English guitarist] was left high and dry in New York, and without a clue as to what my next move was going to be. I seriously considered returning to England and starting over a whole new career, such as going to medical school or becoming a dentist. The second option was the most attractive to me, because it took less time to qualify and paid good money.”
But dentistry’s loss was music’s gain, as Jones assembled two other British people and three Americans into a band called Foreigner.
And considering that the other Mick Jones was kicked out of the Clash, we can figure out how THAT band got its name.
Anyway, “Mick Jones the English guitarist” remains my favorite example of a knowledge-based authentication failure.
Because you need multiple ways to verify and authenticate identities. I should know.
Impressionable Bots?
Update to my prior post: Google Analytics shows lower numbers for February 5.
Why?
Google Gemini suggests bots may be to blame.
The internet is full of “bots” (automated scripts from search engines or malicious actors).
Google Analytics has an industry-leading database of known bots and filters them out very aggressively to give you “human” data.
Jetpack also filters bots, but its list is different. Jetpack often catches fewer bots than Google, which usually results in Jetpack showing higher traffic numbers than GA.
Still unanswered: why did the bots swarm on that particular day?
Looks like disregarding the traffic is the correct choice.
When I Get Impressionable
Even with thousands of pages of blog posts, the Bredemarket website doesn’t get a ton of traffic.
But once a month or so, traffic jumps up dramatically for a single day.
For example:
- On February 4, the site had 36 visitors and 50 views of 24 posts/pages.
- The next day, February 5, site stats zoomed up to 436 visitors and 817 views of hundreds of posts/pages.
No idea why. Unlike April-May 2025, it wasn’t any individual post/page. No individual page had more than 16 views. And no identified source (Facebook, search engines, etc.) accounts for the jump.
If I knew why these surges happened, I’d try to make it happen more than once a month.
But for now I disregard them.
(All times Pacific.)
Update here.
Bredemarket 