- What Tim Berners-Lee Doesn’t Know About HTML DRM (Guardian) — Cory Doctorow lays it out straight. HTML DRM is a bad idea, no two ways. The future of the Web is the future of the world, because everything we do today involves the net and everything we’ll do tomorrow will require it. Now it proposes to sell out that trust, on the grounds that Big Content will lock up its “content” in Flash if it doesn’t get a veto over Web-innovation. […] The W3C has a duty to send the DRM-peddlers packing, just as the US courts did in the case of digital TV.
- Visualizing the Topical Structure of the Medical Sciences: A Self-Organizing Map Approach (PLOSone) — a high-resolution visualization of the medical knowledge domain using the self-organizing map (SOM) method, based on a corpus of over two million publications.
- What Teens Get About The Internet That Parents Don’t (The Atlantic) — the Internet has been a lifeline for self-directed learning and connection to peers. In our research, we found that parents more often than not have a negative view of the role of the Internet in learning, but young people almost always have a positive one. (via Clive Thompson)
- Portable C64 — beautiful piece of C64 hardware hacking to embed a screen and battery in it. (via Hackaday)
"standards" entries
Four short links: 13 March 2013
HTML DRM, Visualizing Medical Sciences, Lifelong Learning, and Hardware Hackery
Saint James Infirmary: checking the pulse of health IT at HIMSS
Signs of the field's potential along with self-imposed limits
I spent most of the past week on my annual assessment of the progress that the field of health information technology is making toward culling the benefits offered by computers and Internet connectivity: instant access to data anywhere; a leveling of access for different patient populations and for health care providers big and small; the use of analytics to direct resources and attack problems better.
The big HIMSS conference in New Orleans, a crossroads for doctors, technologists, and policy-makers, provided a one-stop check-in. I already covered several aspects of the conference in two earlier postings, Singin’ the Blues: visions deferred at HIMSS health IT conference and Slow & Steady: looking toward a better health IT future at HIMSS. Here I’ll summarize a couple more trends in data exchange and basic functions of health IT systems.
Singin’ the Blues: visions deferred at HIMSS health IT conference
The main concerns of health reformers don't rise to the top of health provider agendas
HIMSS, the leading health IT conference in the US, drew over 32,000 people to New Orleans this year (with another thousand or two expected to register by the end of the conference). High as this turn-out sounds, it represents a drop from last year, which exceeded 37,000.
Maybe HIMSS could do even better by adding a “Clueless” or “I don’t believe in health IT” track. Talking to the people who promote health IT issues to the doctors and their managers, I sense a gap–and to some extent, a spectrum of belief–in the recognition of the value of gathering and analyzing data about health care.
I do believe that American health care providers have evolved to accept computerization, if only in response to the HITECH act (passed with bipartisan Congressional support) and the law’s requirements for Meaningful Use of eleectronic records. Privately, many providers may still feel that electronic health records are a bad dream that will go away. This article presents a radically different view. I think electronic health records are a bad dream that will go on for many years to come. I’ll expand on this angle when blogging from HIMSS this year.
Developer Week in Review: A pause to consider patents
There was good news and bad news on the intellectual property front this week.
We take a look at two major events that rocked the technology intellectual property wars, centered on a courtroom in Texas and a standards body a continent away.
Promoting Open Source Software in Government: The Challenges of Motivation and Follow-Through
I have posted a prepublication draft of my article “Promoting Open Source Software in Government: The Challenges of Motivation and Follow-Through,” published by the Journal of Information Technology & Politics.
4G is a moving target
The official definition of 4G is different from the marketing term.
The "4G" mobile companies are touting isn't necessarily in line with the formal specification. The big question is: Do consumers really care?
Four short links: 1 March 2011
Controlling Standards, Async Persistence, Javascript Patterns, Social Mechanics
- Implementing Open Standards in Open Source (Larry Rosen) — Companies try to control specifications because they want to control software that implements those specifications. This is often incompatible with the freedom promised by open source principles that allow anyone to create and distribute copies and derivative works without restriction. This article explores ways that are available to compromise that incompatibility and to make open standards work for open source. (via Sam Ruby)
- Easy WebSocket — simple Javascript client for WebSockets. (via Lucas Gonze on Twitter)
- Essential Javascript Design Patterns — updated book of Javascript design patterns.
- Social Mechanics (Raph Koster) — a taxonomy of social mechanics in games. See also Alice Taylor’s notes. (via BoingBoing)
ePayments Week: Does Apple deserve a bigger bite?
Google offers publishers a sweeter deal, telcos rally around a payment standard, and Bling Nation embraces Facebook
Apple's plan to charge publishers 30% of in-app subscriptions was undercut by Google's 10% One Pass program the next day. But is Apple's service worth a premium? Plus: Giant companies mull a mobile payment standard and Bling Nation shifts its website to Facebook.
Report from Health Information Technology in Massachusetts
When politicians organize a conference, there’s obviously an
agenda–beyond the published program–but I suspect that it differed
from the impressions left by speakers and break-out session attendees
at Health
Information Technology: Creating Jobs, Reducing Costs, & Improving
Quality.
What's going on with OAuth?
WRAP attempts to simplify the OAuth protocol, primarily by dropping the signatures, and replacing them with a requirement to acquire short lived tokens over SSL. It is not an even trade-off, and the new proposal has a different set of security characteristics, benefits, and shortcomings.