The questions of who we are and where we came from can often be answered, not by looking inward, but by looking backward. While nature and nurture certainly play the primary roles in our development as individuals, it’s only through the study of one’s ancestry that we develop a more complete view of ourselves as how we fit into the larger scope of human history. Luckily, tracing one’s roots is easier than ever thanks to the Internet. Read more…
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Climb Your Family Tree With These Online Genealogy Tools
An anonymous reader writes with news that the Obama administration has appointed Jeffrey Zients to lead the effort to revamp Healthcare.gov after its trouble rollout earlier this month. Zients said, “By the end of November, healthcare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users.” Obama created a position for Zients within the government in 2009, when he was made the OMB’s Chief Performance Officer. The purpose of his position was to analyze and streamline the government’s budget concerns. “Healthcare.gov covers people in the 36 states that declined to run their own health-insurance exchanges. About 700, 000 applications have been begun nationwide, and half of them have come in through the website. The White House aims to have 7M uninsured Americans covered by the scheme by the end of March.” Zients’s appointment came after a contentious House Committee hearing about the healthcare website, in which many were blamed and few took responsibility. The government also said that contractor Quality Software Services Inc., a subsidiary of UnitedHealth group, would “oversee the entire operation” of Healthcare.gov. QSSI has already done work on the website, building the pipeline that transfers data between the insurance exchanges and the federal agencies. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
