- Publishers Who Don’t Know History … (Cory Ondrejka) — interesting thoughts on publishing. Friends share, borrow, and recommend books. Currently, publishers are generally being stupid about this.
- Regulating Distributed Work — should Mechanical Turk and so on have specific labour laws? This is the case in favour.
- We Are What We Choose — Jeff Bezos’s graduation speech to Princeton’s Class of 2010. Well worth reading.
- The Velluvial Matrix (New Yorker) — Atul Gawande’s graduation speech to Stanford’s School of Medicine. The truth is that the volume and complexity of the knowledge that we need to master has grown exponentially beyond our capacity as individuals. Worse, the fear is that the knowledge has grown beyond our capacity as a society. When we talk about the uncontrollable explosion in the costs of health care in America, for instance—about the reality that we in medicine are gradually bankrupting the country—we’re not talking about a problem rooted in economics. We’re talking about a problem rooted in scientific complexity. (via agpublic on Twitter)
"healthcare" entries
Four short links: 30 June 2010
Ebook Sharing, Distributed Labour Laws, and Two Graduation Speeches
What I like about the health care technology track at the Open Source convention
The health care technology track at the Open Source convention
touches on core areas for improvement: patient-centered care, the use of
mobile devices, administrative efficiencies, and the collection,
processing, and display of statistics to improve health care
Four short links: 18 May 2010
Multitouch Medical Errors, Scaling, Javascript Charts, and Fighting Credit Crunches with Open Data
- Tondo Interactive Table to Analyze Medical Errors (MedGadget) — use of a multitouch table to help clinical staff identify and track medical errors. (via IVLINE on Twitter)
- Steve Huffman Lessons Learned While at Reddit (SlideShare) — uptime and scale. It’s interesting that most everyone reinvents tuples as a way to scale databases, hence the popularity of NoSQL systems.
- HumbleFinance — JavaScript library to render dynamic charts as per Google Finance. (via carlos_d_hoy on Delicious)
- Hernando de Soto: Shadow Economies — de Soto is an economist, and this ends up talking about the need for transparency and open data. As long as you don’t know who owns the greatest amount of your assets, there’s no info as to who owns what, who is related to what, you have a shadow economy. We live in one, and it has as a characteristic a permanent credit crunch. We know more about it than you do. Credit crunch is where you don’t know who you’d be lending to, so you don’t lend. It’s permanent, we live with it, and now you’re going to have to learn to live with it too, because until you know who is solvent how can you give anybody credit? You’re flying blind. (via Jon Udell)
Four short links: 14 May 2010
Personalised Healthcare, Academic Link Shorteners, Journalism Futures, Security
- Genome Scan Gives Man Insight Into Future Health Risks — the first completely mapped genome of a healthy person aimed at predicting future health risks. The scan was conducted by a team of Stanford researchers and cost about $50,000. The researchers say they can now predict [his] risk for dozens of diseases and how he might respond to a number of widely used medicines. Personalized medicine takes a step closer, and all powered by massive computational power.
- Long Handle on Shorted Digital Object — digital object identifiers, and their relationship to shortener services like bit.ly (in which O’Reilly is an investor). The Handle System is relatively inexpensive, but the costs are now higher than the large scale URL shorteners. According to public tax returns, the DOI Foundation pays CNRI about $500,000 per year to run the DOI resolution system. That works out to about 0.7 cents per thousand resolutions. Compare this to Bit.ly, which has attracted $3.5 million of investment and has resolved about 20 billion shortened links- for a cost of about 0.2 cents per thousand. It remains to be seen whether bit.ly will find a sustainable business model; competing directly with DOI is not an impossibility.
- We Are In The Information Business — A well-architected news website leads to content that will keep on providing value, rather than leaving stories to wither away when their immediate news value has faded. Structured content is the stuff that makes a website malleable, rather than cementing you into certain ways of doing things. Structured content is like a big undo button that allows you to reverse decisions and change how your website looks and behaves. Since none of us can predict the future, the freedom to change course as often as we please and not having to worry about escalating legacy costs, well, that’s pretty close to heaven.
- Sacramento Credit Union FAQ — The answers to your Security Questions are case sensitive and cannot contain special characters like an apostrophe, or the words “insert,” “delete,” “drop,” “update,” “null,” or “select.” (via Simon Willison)
NHIN Direct: Open Healthcare Records and Government as a Platform
You’d never think it from the right-wing media hysteria around the administration’s health care initiatives, but some of the best thinking about minimal government intervention is happening right now in healthcare. In my advocacy around Government 2.0, I’ve been focused on the idea that government should act like a platform provider rather than a complete solution provider. That is, government should lay down rules of the road, create core functionality that others can build on, and then let the private sector compete to flesh out the offerings.
Open government examples from the ONC
The Office of the National Coordinator has implemented a host of initiatives aimed at transparency and involvement
With the sea change caused by the Open Government Directive I know that many federal agencies might be struggling with how to actually implement this new policy. This is a major cultural shift in government and there are always challenges when trying to bring such broad changes to any large organization. Government bureaucracy is certainly no exception. But this last…
Data not drugs
Taking control of your health in the age of genetics
We have access to more health information now than any time in history, yet this deluge of medical data may sometimes make health decisions more difficult. The Internet has opened a Pandora’s Box of data that can easily overwhelm us. We need a way to process all this information to assist us in making better healthcare decisions. Sifting through…
Four short links: 8 January 2010
Healthcare Data, GNU Econometrics Library, Visualizing Changes, View Source Under Attack
- Testing, Testing — at the end of an interesting article on health care reform comes this: The poverty of our health-care information is an embarrassment. At the end of each month, we have county-by-county data on unemployment, and we have prompt and detailed data on the price of goods and commodities; we can use these indicators to guide our economic policies. But try to look up information on your community’s medical costs and utilization—or simply try to find out how many people died from heart attacks or pneumonia or surgical complications—and you will discover that the most recent data are at least three years old, if they exist at all, and aren’t broken down to a county level that communities can learn from. It’s like driving a car with a speedometer that tells you only how fast all cars were driving, on average, three years ago.. (via auchmill on Twitter)
- Gretl: The GNU Regression, Econometrics, and Time-Series Library — GPLed cross-platform software package for econometric analysis, written in the C programming language. (via Hacker News)
- 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time (Flowing Data) — just what it says. (via mattb on Delicious)
- View Source is Good? Discuss (Alex Russell) — fantastic post, mandatory reading. View-source was necessary (but not sufficient) to make HTML the dominant application platform of our times. I also hold that it is under attack — not least of all from within — and that losing view-source poses a significant danger to the overall health of the web.
Four short links: 3 December 2009
History Lesson, Historic Science, Hospital IT, and Predicted Consumption
- How Robber Barons Hijacked the Victorian Internet (ArsTechnica) — cautionary tale of the exploitation of a monopoly. Once installed as the dominant proprietor of the nation’s telegraph system, public trust in the confidentiality of Western Union transmissions evaporated. Gould “scanned the telegraph, or manipulated it, as an open book to the secrets of all the marts,” Josephson wrote.
- 350 Years of Royal Society Correspondence Online — the concept is great, the content is great, the interface lacking. (via auchmill on Twitter)
- Harvard Study: Computers Don’t Save Hospitals Money — The recently released study evaluated data on 4,000 hospitals in the U.S over a four-year period and found that the immense cost of installing and running hospital IT systems is greater than any expected cost savings. And much of the software being written for use in clinics is aimed at administrators, not doctors, nurses and lab workers. […] He pointed to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Latter Day Saints Hospital in Salt Lake City and Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis as facilities with some success in deploying efficient e-health systems. That’s because they were intuitive and aimed at clinicians, not administrators. I’m not sure anyone, not even the study’s author, knows what success looks like. Lower costs, yes. Data to improve quality of care, yes. Data to contribute to population statistics, yes. Greater throughput, yes. Fewer lost patients, yes.
- Forecasting Private Consumption: Survey-based Indicators vs. Google Trends — turns out that Google search terms over time beat some of the traditional consumer sentiment indicators. (via 130)
Health gets personal in the cloud
Google Health Beta and Microsoft's My Health Info
Healthcare in the near future will be quite different than it is today. Web enabled technology is already changing the way medicine is practiced. As the digital nation comes of age we will see new opportunities, and new challenges, bringing healthcare in America into the 21st century. Health consumers will come to expect they will have control over their own health data. Having secure, interoperable access to clinical data will allow patients to partner with their care providers in new ways incorporating Web 2.0 principles.