Getting the healing power of music to more patients

from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maroper_Music.jpg

 When Bob Marley said, "When good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain," he was on to something that researchers are now bringing to light.

In "Music as Medicine," the American Psychological Association named numerous studies that documented the benefits patients derive from music. It promotes healing in a number of ways: It can alleviate anxiety, reduce stress, lower blood pressure, mitigate pain, and even boost the immune system.

Given the obvious benefits to patients—as well as to caregivers and staff ,who also get a lift from hearing the music—Griffin says that hospitals want to be included in the organization's program. However, the organization's growth has been fairly slow due to the manual processes involved in recruiting volunteers and matching up musicians and guide volunteers with the hospitals.

Read more in Software Helps a Nonprofit Bring Music to Patients

Software a food bank can bank on

We've recently come off the holiday season—a time when most people are more likely to be charitable. While that's a boon for charities in general, it does create headaches for organizations like Second Harvest, which can be inundated with food donations in a relatively short span of time.

Some of the food donations—particularly cans and boxes of dry goods—can be kept for quite a while and distributed at times when donations are lighter. But some of the food is near the end of its shelf life, so it must be identified quickly so that it be given to people before it spoils. That's where accurate real-time tracking can make all the difference.

- Read more at A Food Bank Banks on Logistics Software

Analysis in light of the Pareto Principle

Many businesses who are not getting as much utility out of big data as they would like identify the source of the problem as their inadequate hardware, and inadequate finances. However, in a Smart Data Collective post, Paige Roberts argues that it's not the hardware, but the software that's to blame.

"Investing in better utilization of existing hardware is a far better, more sustainable, and cost-effective solution" for businesses who find their current setups inadequate. Roberts points to the inefficiency built into current "utilization rates of hardware [that] are around 15 percent worldwide." Even the most efficient data centers max out at only 20 percent, meaning that 80 percent is untapped.

Do those numbers ring a bell?

Read more: What's the real problem with the hardware? - FierceBigData