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Virtualizing Health And Disease
Roland Piquepaille writes "In "'Dr. Data' Digitizes Medical Care," Karen Southwick says that "David Eddy's Archimedes software dares to turn human heartbeats into the ones and zeros of the digital age -- and, just maybe, the nation's healthcare system on its ear." It sounds pretty ambitious, so let's look at some details. David Eddy has built a complex software program he calls Archimedes, named for the ancient Greek mathematician who boasted he could move the world with a single lever. The software model, for the first time in medical history, uses mathematical algorithms and equations to translate the beat of a heart or the twitch of a muscle into the ones and zeros of the Digital Age, replicating in numbers the behavior of a disease and creating a "virtual reality" in which patients, providers and institutions interact as they would in the real world. Southwick also wrote a companion story, "How Archimedes Works," which gives more technical explanations about this software developed by the Biomathematics Unit of Kaiser Permanente's Care Management Institute. Check this column for a summary of these two articles."
The timeline covers all domains, not just medical, but there's lots of related sims, and medical models going back to 800 BC.
This intro doesn't really do the subject justice. Anybody with even an AOL email address can probably digest something a bit more technical than this...any reference to "virtual reality" pretty much gives it away. Here's a better one:
Archimedes lets researchers try different treatments or change the processes of care for a disease and then explore the effects. For the four diseases it models so far, Archimedes creates thousands of simulated "people" at risk of getting or who already have a condition. These "people," each with different characteristics, grow older, get diseases, interact with the healthcare system, and live with (or die of) their diseases in similar fashion to populations in the real world. "If you're looking at evaluating any kind of care management program with different protocols, you can program them into Archimedes and see what the results are in both outcomes and costs," explains Matt Stiefel, associate executive director of the Care Management Institute.
>David Eddy's Archimedes software dares to turn human heartbeats into the ones and zeros of the digital age --
:)
but could be useful as a new form of ID ?
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
...such classics as Sim City and Bureaucracy , then you'll love the riveting experience of building your own healthcare system!
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
My dad works for a trauma center in the US. They have recently outsourced thier nighttime xray reading to a firm in Australia because the radiologists dont want to be on call all night or be stuck in the hospital. He said the number of incorrect readings is astounding. I don't know the details(perhaps lossless vs. lossy compression). He recommended they stop, but they are saving money and the radiologists aren't as cranky .. but its only your health
So, does that mean that if I look pr0n, my heart will beat faster and cause a buffer overflow?
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying