Being unwilling to cough up the cost of the paywall, I haven't read the Rand report, but the second hand descriptions of it, as well as many of the comments, seem overly focused on the big names (Microsoft, Google) or reflections of the author's preconceptions.
I have worked in the medical interoperability industry for 15 years; here is my perspective: The medical industry has been working towards patient record interoperability for well over two decades. The first major accomplishment is there is now a firmly entrenched, ubiquitous standard for medical images. That format, DICOM, allows medical transfer between medical scanners, display, and long term storage systems. It is a complicated standard, and has evolved as medical imaging devices have become more sophisticated, so transferring images between systems is not always painless, but if you can transport DICOM images from one system to another, the receiving system can nearly always use them.
The bigger hurdle is to transfer a patient's diagnostic reports and medical history between medical providers, for example, two different doctor's offices. That's a difficult problem for numerous reasons, and for nearly a decade, the medical industry has been working of approaches to make that happen. An international cooperative effort, called Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), has been working on standards and approaches, the flagship of which is Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS), although technically that is just one of a number of related sets of standards.
It's taken time to define the pieces of this, and has changed over this time thanks to trial and experience. Product vendors meet for multi-day cooperative testing and evaluation held once a year in the United States (near Chicago in the dead of winter – now that's dedication) and once a year elsewhere in the world at varying locations.
Either XDS (and its related "profiles") or some local variation has gained acceptance in many parts of the world; the United States is a trailing adopter. That's largely because the USA was a leader in establishing medical systems, so there is now a large, established infrastructure that predates these efforts; countries that modernized their healthcare more recently have been able to just adopt the new standards.
The key piece of this, as RAND correctly points out, is having a format for patient history that all systems can understand. But, rather than being a missing piece, this is a success in the making. Different organizations have tried to define a common format; in 2007 HL7 and ASTM, the organizations between the two major contenders, joined forces to define a harmonized Continuity of Care Document (CCD), which is based on HL7's Clinical Document Architecture (CDA). It is used in numerous countries, and is part of the US effort for "Meaningful Use".
Recognizing the costs of replacing systems, the government has a program providing financial assistance and incentives for medical organizations to adopt interoperability standards. The money comes with strings: they have to use systems that have been certified to support these standards, and they have to show that they are actually using these systems in ways that promote interoperability, hence the common term "Meaningful Use" for this program. Recognizing the difficulty of replacing systems, this is a multi-year effort that we are still in the middle of.
In addition, many states and regions are experimenting with regional health information exchanges, and the Federal government has a national health information network backbone. These may grow into the systems that will provide better medical information exchange, or they may help provide experience and information for whatever will come to replace them.
It's slow. For a very long time, medical reports came by mail, by FAX, or by other physical delivery. Electronic reports today tend to be either PDF or a barely formatted text approach (HL7 ORU). Not great, but good enough to slo
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month
(reserving the option to remember and add to this list after I hit "Submit")
People where I work have been using CKEditor since before the name change to make it English-friendly. (That change made it much easier to describe to upper management.) It's very nice, and I'm looking forward to checking out the newest version.
Still, I can't help but look at the latest trend to blocky monochrome icons and flash back to Mac 64 and Windows 2.
Thank you for making one of best, most important sites on the Internet. Seriously. No sarcasm. I have spent more time here than almost anywhere else on the Web, and unlike other places, none of the time spent here was wasted.
Also, this site was a pioneer in how to use crowd content review effectively, something that Reddit, Digg, etc., still have not caught up with.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I'll add my voice to the others who recommended Scott Berkun's "The Art of Project Management".
I wish, wish, wish that this book existed several years ago when I was in exactly the same situation. This book is brilliant.
Just try to imagine a book on management that - is devoid of hype and self-promotion - is filled with genuinely useful information - has no stupid slogans - is enjoyable reading - has exactly the stuff you need to know to transition from software programmer to manager - prepares you for when things go wrong as well as right
I want to join those expressing their regret to hear of Don Herbert's passing. He was probably the one who first awakened my interest in science. As someone else already said, he was one of the greats in the truest sense.
Just about every argument I've heard about global warming can be summarized by a few talking points:
Liberal talking points * Because of over a century of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the average temperature in Earth is increasing. * This has foreseeable negative impacts. * The scariest impacts are from subtle effects that we can't even predict. * Models say we are approaching a tipping point where the changes become self-sustaining and self-feeding. * We can slow or stop this, but we're running out of time, and must act now.
Conservative talking points * Global warming is not happening. It's a liberal myth. * It's a normal cycle, not caused by man. * It's pointless for us to try to slow global warming because India and China are putting much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than the United States is, and they won't stop. * What's the big deal? It's only a few degrees change, and will make life better on Earth. Don't you like nicer weather? * It's too late to stop the major effects of global warming. Better for the the government to encourage and subsidize business to adapt to and profit from the major changes that will inevitably occur.
The medical industry has already worked very, very hard on standardized schemas to represent medical information, and the work has been ongoing for at least 20 years. Support for these is, literally, world-wide.
HL7 (Health Level 7) is the industry standard for the management of medical information in a hospital or other medical institution. The currently popular version is 2.x (typically 2.3.1 or 2.5), and is a transaction-based ASCII protocol. The newer version 3.0 is XML based, and introduces a new, sophisticated and object-based (specifically, inheritance) set of entities and relationships.
DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is the industry standard for medical images. It also has E-R relationships for patients, studies, etc., albeit in an intentionally smaller domain. DICOM's and HL7's models are somewhat different, but the industry has worked very hard to reconcile the differences to support interoperability.
IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Environment) is an initiative of healthcare professionals organization that seeks to coordinate the uses of DICOM and HL7, and define which to use in those places where they overlap.
XDS (Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing) is an emerging standard for integrating the medical information from multiple providers into an accessible, usable, unified electronic patient medical record. It is part of IHE, and has governmental backing.
These efforts operate largely together, and the same key people tend to be involved in all of these. (I don't know how they find the time.) Industry organizations (HL7, NEMA, RSNA, HIMSS,...) and vendors operate together in an impressively cooperative manner, including an annual interoperability test (the IHE Connectathon) and trade show demonstrations.
The worldwide open-source community has been heavily, heavily involved, and there is plenty of opportunity for more.
Those interested can read much more information on the IHE web site, which is a good way to start: http://www.ihe.net/
This is idle speculation, but I'm really curious about this...
I think that astrophysicists have determined that the universe is open, but for a long time it seemed like it could go either way. Hypothetically, if there were enough mass for the universe to be closed, wouldn't that mean it meets the mathematical definition of a black hole (diameter less than Schwarszchild radius)? Playing with a calculator, they come out in the right ballpark, give or take a few orders of magnitude.
No one, to my knowledge, has used an anthropic principle argument to say that the universe has to be open. So, the consensus is that life is possible inside of a closed universe.
If I haven't fallen on my face so far, then that suggests: 1) life is possible inside of a black hole, and 2) black holes can be nested (since the universe contains black holes)
Washington, D.C. 2:00 PM - The Department of Homeland Security is pleased to announce the successful test of an anti-satellite missile, designed to destroy terrorist communications satellites and space-based platforms for weapons of mass destruction.
The DART missile located and destroyed a mock terrorist satellite, disguised as an experimental communications satellite.
For national security purposes, the test was not announced until after the DART crashed into the satellite. Spokespeople did not answer questions about why NASA long described this as an attempt to harmlessly rendezvous with the satellite, referring instead to "Democrats who want America to be attacked by terrorists instead of supporting our troops".
I was lucky enough to find Scott Berkun's book a few weeks ago (we have a great technical book store in the neighborhood), and I only wish I could have read it years ago. I like Scott's writing style - informative and friendly, and devoid of the self-hype that some other management books wallow in. He also provides the benefit of his experience, without the notion that he has the one golden formula.
I'm finding it a truly useful survey course book - a solid introduction to many areas, with the understanding that other books can go into more depth into each one.
I would recommend this to anyone who has suddenly found himself or herself suddenly in the role of Project Manager, and needs to quickly get some bearings on the job.
Your question should be "Why would the want to store images in XML?"
And the answer is that, much more often than not, you need to store meta-information or additional information related to the the image; and that is typically in an extensible, self-defining, hierarchial, tag-value format.
Note, by the way, that the question applies equally well to audio.
There are several completely different formats in which to store a picture or audio along with additional information. It's been often noted that this information is exactly the kind of information that XML holds quite nicely. The actual pixel or audio data, however, does not fit in XML well. These are typically stored in binary, because they tend to vary from large to gigantic; for this reason compression is quite common. Size is very much a concern for these data. To store in XML, these need to be converted to character, adding an often-unacceptable increase in size. XML is not an option.
There is a lot of attractiveness in having a single, format that could be used for binary data with much of the benefits that XML has for text. Experience with existing applications point out viability and benefits for future uses, even if existing applications remain with the current standards.
Note: I've heard the suggestion that the additional or meta-content could be in XML, and have the XML reference the binary content. Although that works for the relationship of HTML and images on the web, for this purpose it's a non-starter. These formats are designed to contain the data, not just describe it; in this model, you would still need to define some format to hold the data. (And, then, why not just stick with the current?) Managing the two parts separately introduces possible mismatch risks not possible when they are a single unit; they could get separated, become different versions, etc. An absolute location reference mechanism can prevent copying the data from place-to-place, and even a relative reference mechanism complicates using an instance. Just not going to fly.
I have read claim 1, in detail. I encourage others to do so, to, rather than just accept someone else's description of it. (It's not very long.)
It seems to me that the only things distinguishing it from the kind of promotions that have been performed for decades are:
1) the use of e-mail rather than normal mail or telephone call from the viewer,
2) a rather vague reference that the viewers "select" the reward notice - something that could be interpreted as specifically as when a computer user "selects" a menu option or dialog button, or as loosely as selecting to respond the notice by sending e-mail, and
3) an even more vague reference to the "reward notice triggers" which have timestamps; which possibly could consist of announcing the contest at specific times and varying the announcement so that you know which announcement the viewer is responding to, or even having the viewer identify what time they saw the announcement.
The rest of the "specifics" strike me as pretty conventional, classical promotion. So, if you let people enter by e-mail AND you can tell which announcement they respond to by time, have you met all of the requirements of Claim 1?
Slashdot Mirror
Being unwilling to cough up the cost of the paywall, I haven't read the Rand report, but the second hand descriptions of it, as well as many of the comments, seem overly focused on the big names (Microsoft, Google) or reflections of the author's preconceptions.
I have worked in the medical interoperability industry for 15 years; here is my perspective: The medical industry has been working towards patient record interoperability for well over two decades. The first major accomplishment is there is now a firmly entrenched, ubiquitous standard for medical images. That format, DICOM, allows medical transfer between medical scanners, display, and long term storage systems. It is a complicated standard, and has evolved as medical imaging devices have become more sophisticated, so transferring images between systems is not always painless, but if you can transport DICOM images from one system to another, the receiving system can nearly always use them.
The bigger hurdle is to transfer a patient's diagnostic reports and medical history between medical providers, for example, two different doctor's offices. That's a difficult problem for numerous reasons, and for nearly a decade, the medical industry has been working of approaches to make that happen. An international cooperative effort, called Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), has been working on standards and approaches, the flagship of which is Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS), although technically that is just one of a number of related sets of standards.
It's taken time to define the pieces of this, and has changed over this time thanks to trial and experience. Product vendors meet for multi-day cooperative testing and evaluation held once a year in the United States (near Chicago in the dead of winter – now that's dedication) and once a year elsewhere in the world at varying locations.
Either XDS (and its related "profiles") or some local variation has gained acceptance in many parts of the world; the United States is a trailing adopter. That's largely because the USA was a leader in establishing medical systems, so there is now a large, established infrastructure that predates these efforts; countries that modernized their healthcare more recently have been able to just adopt the new standards.
The key piece of this, as RAND correctly points out, is having a format for patient history that all systems can understand. But, rather than being a missing piece, this is a success in the making. Different organizations have tried to define a common format; in 2007 HL7 and ASTM, the organizations between the two major contenders, joined forces to define a harmonized Continuity of Care Document (CCD), which is based on HL7's Clinical Document Architecture (CDA). It is used in numerous countries, and is part of the US effort for "Meaningful Use".
Recognizing the costs of replacing systems, the government has a program providing financial assistance and incentives for medical organizations to adopt interoperability standards. The money comes with strings: they have to use systems that have been certified to support these standards, and they have to show that they are actually using these systems in ways that promote interoperability, hence the common term "Meaningful Use" for this program. Recognizing the difficulty of replacing systems, this is a multi-year effort that we are still in the middle of.
In addition, many states and regions are experimenting with regional health information exchanges, and the Federal government has a national health information network backbone. These may grow into the systems that will provide better medical information exchange, or they may help provide experience and information for whatever will come to replace them.
It's slow. For a very long time, medical reports came by mail, by FAX, or by other physical delivery. Electronic reports today tend to be either PDF or a barely formatted text approach (HL7 ORU). Not great, but good enough to slo
Is that the building that used to be the Allied Chemical tower? I remember seeing some very cool science exhibits there when I was young.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month
(reserving the option to remember and add to this list after I hit "Submit")
Um, I meant to say "his initials did not work so well...'
It happened when the editor's author, Frederico Caldeira Knabben, did not work so well as a product name in English.
People where I work have been using CKEditor since before the name change to make it English-friendly. (That change made it much easier to describe to upper management.) It's very nice, and I'm looking forward to checking out the newest version.
Still, I can't help but look at the latest trend to blocky monochrome icons and flash back to Mac 64 and Windows 2.
Not if they are unsure whether the kid swallowed metal.
Thank you for making one of best, most important sites on the Internet. Seriously. No sarcasm. I have spent more time here than almost anywhere else on the Web, and unlike other places, none of the time spent here was wasted. Also, this site was a pioneer in how to use crowd content review effectively, something that Reddit, Digg, etc., still have not caught up with. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
That's one small step for a space agency, ...
We may have a new front runner in the "Incoherent Rant" category.
I'll add my voice to the others who recommended Scott Berkun's "The Art of Project Management".
I wish, wish, wish that this book existed several years ago when I was in exactly the same situation. This book is brilliant.
Just try to imagine a book on management that
- is devoid of hype and self-promotion
- is filled with genuinely useful information
- has no stupid slogans
- is enjoyable reading
- has exactly the stuff you need to know to transition from software programmer to manager
- prepares you for when things go wrong as well as right
Get and read this book!
...have just gone through the roof
I want to join those expressing their regret to hear of Don Herbert's passing. He was probably the one who first awakened my interest in science. As someone else already said, he was one of the greats in the truest sense.
Interestingly, it's also high in lycopene, works well on French Fries, and according to the package comes in 57 varieties.
Just about every argument I've heard about global warming can be summarized by a few talking points:
Liberal talking points
* Because of over a century of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the average temperature in Earth is increasing.
* This has foreseeable negative impacts.
* The scariest impacts are from subtle effects that we can't even predict.
* Models say we are approaching a tipping point where the changes become self-sustaining and self-feeding.
* We can slow or stop this, but we're running out of time, and must act now.
Conservative talking points
* Global warming is not happening. It's a liberal myth.
* It's a normal cycle, not caused by man.
* It's pointless for us to try to slow global warming because India and China are putting much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than the United States is, and they won't stop.
* What's the big deal? It's only a few degrees change, and will make life better on Earth. Don't you like nicer weather?
* It's too late to stop the major effects of global warming. Better for the the government to encourage and subsidize business to adapt to and profit from the major changes that will inevitably occur.
The medical industry has already worked very, very hard on standardized schemas to represent medical information, and the work has been ongoing for at least 20 years. Support for these is, literally, world-wide.
...) and vendors operate together in an impressively cooperative manner, including an annual interoperability test (the IHE Connectathon) and trade show demonstrations.
HL7 (Health Level 7) is the industry standard for the management of medical information in a hospital or other medical institution. The currently popular version is 2.x (typically 2.3.1 or 2.5), and is a transaction-based ASCII protocol. The newer version 3.0 is XML based, and introduces a new, sophisticated and object-based (specifically, inheritance) set of entities and relationships.
DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is the industry standard for medical images. It also has E-R relationships for patients, studies, etc., albeit in an intentionally smaller domain. DICOM's and HL7's models are somewhat different, but the industry has worked very hard to reconcile the differences to support interoperability.
IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Environment) is an initiative of healthcare professionals organization that seeks to coordinate the uses of DICOM and HL7, and define which to use in those places where they overlap.
XDS (Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing) is an emerging standard for integrating the medical information from multiple providers into an accessible, usable, unified electronic patient medical record. It is part of IHE, and has governmental backing.
These efforts operate largely together, and the same key people tend to be involved in all of these. (I don't know how they find the time.) Industry organizations (HL7, NEMA, RSNA, HIMSS,
The worldwide open-source community has been heavily, heavily involved, and there is plenty of opportunity for more.
Those interested can read much more information on the IHE web site, which is a good way to start: http://www.ihe.net/
Gee! And I thought Velikovsky was dead!
This is idle speculation, but I'm really curious about this...
I think that astrophysicists have determined that the universe is open, but for a long time it seemed like it could go either way. Hypothetically, if there were enough mass for the universe to be closed, wouldn't that mean it meets the mathematical definition of a black hole (diameter less than Schwarszchild radius)? Playing with a calculator, they come out in the right ballpark, give or take a few orders of magnitude.
No one, to my knowledge, has used an anthropic principle argument to say that the universe has to be open. So, the consensus is that life is possible inside of a closed universe.
If I haven't fallen on my face so far, then that suggests:
1) life is possible inside of a black hole, and
2) black holes can be nested (since the universe contains black holes)
Fire away...
For those who don't believe in evolution, I fully support their right to continue not to practice it.
Washington, D.C. 2:00 PM - The Department of Homeland Security is pleased to announce the successful test of an anti-satellite missile, designed to destroy terrorist communications satellites and space-based platforms for weapons of mass destruction.
The DART missile located and destroyed a mock terrorist satellite, disguised as an experimental communications satellite.
For national security purposes, the test was not announced until after the DART crashed into the satellite. Spokespeople did not answer questions about why NASA long described this as an attempt to harmlessly rendezvous with the satellite, referring instead to "Democrats who want America to be attacked by terrorists instead of supporting our troops".
I was lucky enough to find Scott Berkun's book a few weeks ago (we have a great technical book store in the neighborhood), and I only wish I could have read it years ago. I like Scott's writing style - informative and friendly, and devoid of the self-hype that some other management books wallow in. He also provides the benefit of his experience, without the notion that he has the one golden formula.
I'm finding it a truly useful survey course book - a solid introduction to many areas, with the understanding that other books can go into more depth into each one.
I would recommend this to anyone who has suddenly found himself or herself suddenly in the role of Project Manager, and needs to quickly get some bearings on the job.
If this technology is applicable, what are the chances Microsoft will consider "install only once" DVDs for distributing software?
Paranoid? I'm from New York, where it's normal to be paranoid!
I'm unsure whether Google's including "Ask Yahoo!" is class or chutzpah.
Your question should be "Why would the want to store images in XML?"
And the answer is that, much more often than not, you need to store meta-information or additional information related to the the image; and that is typically in an extensible, self-defining, hierarchial, tag-value format.
Note, by the way, that the question applies equally well to audio.
There are several completely different formats in which to store a picture or audio along with additional information. It's been often noted that this information is exactly the kind of information that XML holds quite nicely. The actual pixel or audio data, however, does not fit in XML well. These are typically stored in binary, because they tend to vary from large to gigantic; for this reason compression is quite common. Size is very much a concern for these data. To store in XML, these need to be converted to character, adding an often-unacceptable increase in size. XML is not an option.
There is a lot of attractiveness in having a single, format that could be used for binary data with much of the benefits that XML has for text. Experience with existing applications point out viability and benefits for future uses, even if existing applications remain with the current standards.
Note: I've heard the suggestion that the additional or meta-content could be in XML, and have the XML reference the binary content. Although that works for the relationship of HTML and images on the web, for this purpose it's a non-starter. These formats are designed to contain the data, not just describe it; in this model, you would still need to define some format to hold the data. (And, then, why not just stick with the current?) Managing the two parts separately introduces possible mismatch risks not possible when they are a single unit; they could get separated, become different versions, etc. An absolute location reference mechanism can prevent copying the data from place-to-place, and even a relative reference mechanism complicates using an instance. Just not going to fly.
I have read claim 1, in detail. I encourage others to do so, to, rather than just accept someone else's description of it. (It's not very long.)
It seems to me that the only things distinguishing it from the kind of promotions that have been performed for decades are:
1) the use of e-mail rather than normal mail or telephone call from the viewer,
2) a rather vague reference that the viewers "select" the reward notice - something that could be interpreted as specifically as when a computer user "selects" a menu option or dialog button, or as loosely as selecting to respond the notice by sending e-mail, and
3) an even more vague reference to the "reward notice triggers" which have timestamps; which possibly could consist of announcing the contest at specific times and varying the announcement so that you know which announcement the viewer is responding to, or even having the viewer identify what time they saw the announcement.
The rest of the "specifics" strike me as pretty conventional, classical promotion. So, if you let people enter by e-mail AND you can tell which announcement they respond to by time, have you met all of the requirements of Claim 1?
Read it and decide for yourself.