A "just price" might be acceptable, but the publishers have abused the market bundling thousands of journals together into packages for which they charge libraries millions of dollars a year and forbid the librarians from disclosing how much they paid. Charging $40+ per article when the reader cannot even determine in advance whether it will be a useful article and has no way to get their money back if it is not is also not a solution.
The proprietary publishers have established an elaborate co-dependency relationship with academics. Academics depend on journal editorships and citations for promotion. Editors get many perks and prestige as a result of being an editor, but the selection of who becomes the editor is up to the publisher. Reviewers get pre-publication access to results. Yes, the reviewers are supposed to hold the information in confidence, but does pre-publication access help them in thinking about which directions to take in their own work? Absolutely. An extensive web of co-dependence has evolved between the proprietary publishers and the academic community.
Academics generally do not receive royalties from journal articles, but they do from book publications. Who publishes those books? The same publishers that publish the proprietary journals. Who selects which authors will be invited to publish books? The publishers.
Elite institutions and large university systems negotiate discounted and preferred subscription agreements giving their researchers free access to a wide range of journals, which in turn makes it more attractive for academic "stars" to go to those institutions. The faculty at those schools benefit from these favorable access agreements. Are we surprised that University of California faculty voted against open access?
It is also not just speech and language research. The majority of work in fields like cancer research is also published in paywalled journals. Cancer patients may not be able to wait a year before articles appear in open access archives.
The vast majority of academic work is supported by public funding, and charitable foundations support most of what is not government supported. High time to require open access. The academics are not going to do it themselves.
And they will come back at you for a HIPAA privacy violation. Your scenario implies that to save IT complexity and expense, you are willing to risk patient confidentiality. You are not going to come across as a sympathetic defendant, especially when they say the only reason they were looking was to test the system security which they found wanting but were afraid to report to their greedy boss looking for an excuse to fire people.
Ah yes, the faultless red light camera ticketing the guaranteed to obey the law driverless car. Proof that machines are fallible. Of course, this would probably escalate into a lawsuit between the traffic cam vendor and the driverless car service, both claiming that the other was falsely impugning the reputation of their product...
Everyone wants to keep their data close to their chest, but only the Feds and Fortune 500 companies have the resources to actually do it. For a startup or small business, cloud services are a god send. Compared to the costs of building a data center and staffing an IT department, a good cloud provider gets you up instantly and expands seamlessly. Harris targeted the wrong audience and/or they could not compete with Amazon.
Agree. The IOM study cited in the article is more than a decade out of date and there are many causes of preventable adverse events. In some respects, electronic order entry systems actually confound the allergy and adverse reaction problem because comments about allergies accumulate and are never reviewed. An elderly patient may have mentioned a decade ago that they were "allergic" to some medication because they got a headache after they took it, but once that allergy is on the drug allergy list, no one is going to put themselves on the line and delete it. As a result, the lists of drug allergies tend to accumulate junk over time and may prevent physicians from using the most appropriate medication.
Copyrights are an increasing problem. Patents expire after 20 years. OK, 20 years is a long time in technology, but they do expire. Copyright is the better part of a century and the line between concept and copy is disappearing. In many areas of science, private multinational corporations hold copyright on almost all of the literature. It is literally impossible for a physician to practice medicine or an engineer to work without copying material from copyright texts in the form of medical orders or design procedures.
The fact that the tweets predict the sales in advance of the movies release or people actually seeing the movie raises an interesting question. Is it the content of the movie or the "buzz" that really matters?
Like the fact that the power consumption density is now so high that they need to go to a rack system with water cooling. Back to the good old days of the IBM 360.
Faculty at public universities still own their royalties. School teachers and university faculty are not so different. Both are professionals and both get tenure in most states. If a school district gave a teacher release time and specific instructions to develop a lesson plan, that would be work for hire. Much more frequently, the school district just assumes that the teacher will make preparations on their own time. In that case, it is not work for hire.
If you want to pay teachers overtime for all the work they put in at home preparing for class, I am sure a lot of teachers would be happy to see the additional pay. But if the teacher does work on their own time, they should own their intellectual property.
Bottom line on taxes is that the government has the right to tax anything in any amount even to the point of extinction. The logic of taxes is also simple, if you don't want people to do something, increase the tax on it. Europeans don't want to spend all their money importing oil so they tax gasoline out the wazoo and guess what, people do not drive SUVs. We do not want kids to start smoking so we increase the taxes on cigarettes to $4 per pack and guess what, kids are not smoking as much.
Association between the introduction of corn based high calorie sweeteners and the onset of the obesity epidemic is pretty strong, and there is a good scientific basis for linking the two (you eat more, you get fat, just like your mother told you). We do not want to pay lots of money taking care of diabetes, heart attack, stroke or kidney failure so it makes sense to tax calories. But don't stop with soda, also tax french fries, donuts and supersize whopper burgers.
BTW, the NEJM article specifically does not advocate taxing diet drinks like Fresca.
Actually, they are asking the stereo manufacturers to put Doppler radar and a credit card reader into speaker systems so that they can count the number of heart beats listening to a song and bill you accordingly. After all, the Barry Manilow Foundation needs to get paid every time your girlfriend listens to your CD with you.
Just because a trial failed to reach P<0.05 in testing efficacy does not mean the treatment has no benefit. As we learn more and more about patients, we realize that everyone really is unique. The problem is that to conduct a double blind prospective study with good statistical power to test a treatment gets harder and harder as we categorize patients into smaller and smaller groups. At some point, you need to use inference, i.e., doctors need to think hard about the available evidence and make a decision even though we have not had the luxury of accumulating a large cohort of patients to conduct and adequately powered clinical trial. Demanding that standard of care be restricted to only those treatments that have demonstrated efficacy in an adequately powered randomized clinical trial is going to leave anyone with a rare disorder out in the cold, and more importantly, untreated.
Second point. Conducting a randomized clinical trial takes years, sometimes decades. And then you need to replicate the result in an independent trial to be really sure. Restricting standard of care to only those treatments that have demonstrated efficacy is going to make the standard of care lag many years behind the current state of biomedical knowledge. Are you really willing to pass up your physician's best advice on care while you wait for it to work through the trials process?
Be careful what you ask for. Centralizing authority mean centralizing control and potentially restricting citizen access to open government. At one point, the Government Printing Office was arguing that it had a constitutional mandate to run all government websites because this was a form of publication. Anyone who ever had dealings with the GPO knows what a disaster this would have been.
The fundamental failure of the financial modelers is that they did not incorporate data reliability into their models. In a system where people have strong financial incentives to falsify data, you need to expect that there is going to be a certain amount of "garbage in". If you incorporate that into the model, you can down play the contribution of unreliable data appropriately. If you do not, garbage in leads to garbage out.
Similarly, when bond rating services compete with each other to be paid by a bond issuer to rate the bond, you have to anticipate that ratings will be systematically biased to overvalue the bond, i.e. to under estimate risk.
These concerns were known well in advance of the financial melt down, but there were too many financial incentives for banks to keep on using the same naive models so that they could continue collecting commissions.
It is one thing to release your genome sequence when you are wealthy and have tenure at Harvard. It is quite another thing to do this an ordinary citizen who might want to change jobs and is not in a position to personally endow their child's health care. At the moment medical genetics is much better at diagnosing conditions than it is at offering cures for those conditions. We are making progress in guaranteeing rights against discrimination on the basis of genetics, but we have a long way to go.
The reputation English winemaking needs to be taken into account in evaluating this invention. From a physicochemical perspective, the alcohol molecules are going to collide as a result of thermal motion, whether or not ultrasound is present. Ultrasound might help a bottle of wine approach equilibrium in dissolved oxygen slightly more quickly, but it is not going to change to equilibrium concentration of oxygen and therefore is not going to alter the rate of oxidation.
Don't forget the Google navy and the data centers on cargo ships. Both are using ambient temperature water to avoid the need to expensive air conditioners. And yes, this is really 100% humidity:).
Recognizing the difficulty in defining IT in the first place, does anyone have estimates as to the fraction of IT staff involved in innovation and development? I work in a large health care system with a large (600+) IT staff but completely lacking in plans to innovate and develop new approaches. To argue that this is crazy and short sighted, it would be useful to have data from other IT organizations.
First, a well functioning app should really not be generating any log file except what the application itself needs (e.g. usage logs for a web server).
Second, instead of wading through reams of log output, use exceptions and assert statements so that you only generate log output when something has gone wrong.
Finally, use your IDE. Instead of trying to infer state by combing through logs, set break points where you catch an exception. This lets you traceback to see why you ended up with the exception without suffering much if any of a performance hit.
As we move to increasingly distributed systems, log files become less useful. For many distributed apps, you may not even have access to all of the various file systems where a log might be written. Best solution is to rely on highly modular and thoroughly debugged code.
Oh my, oh my. You mean the TV companies alter reality for marketing purposes? I am shocked.
All those yellow lines that magically appear and disappear on the football fields?
All those "billboards" that are not really there on the stadium wall?
I bet those starlets are even where padded bras. Do you think that they might even have had surgery. Goodness gracious, I wonder if Barbara Walters uses botox?
And those wrestlers. Do you think that they might be using steroids?
I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
Actually, the MSNBC online video let's you pick what you want to see and caries a lot of obscure sports from end to end. Much better than listening to Pierre Salinger babble on about wine tasting in all the French villages while you are waiting to see actual athletes.
Slashdot Mirror
A "just price" might be acceptable, but the publishers have abused the market bundling thousands of journals together into packages for which they charge libraries millions of dollars a year and forbid the librarians from disclosing how much they paid. Charging $40+ per article when the reader cannot even determine in advance whether it will be a useful article and has no way to get their money back if it is not is also not a solution.
The proprietary publishers have established an elaborate co-dependency relationship with academics. Academics depend on journal editorships and citations for promotion. Editors get many perks and prestige as a result of being an editor, but the selection of who becomes the editor is up to the publisher. Reviewers get pre-publication access to results. Yes, the reviewers are supposed to hold the information in confidence, but does pre-publication access help them in thinking about which directions to take in their own work? Absolutely. An extensive web of co-dependence has evolved between the proprietary publishers and the academic community.
Academics generally do not receive royalties from journal articles, but they do from book publications. Who publishes those books? The same publishers that publish the proprietary journals. Who selects which authors will be invited to publish books? The publishers.
Elite institutions and large university systems negotiate discounted and preferred subscription agreements giving their researchers free access to a wide range of journals, which in turn makes it more attractive for academic "stars" to go to those institutions. The faculty at those schools benefit from these favorable access agreements. Are we surprised that University of California faculty voted against open access?
It is also not just speech and language research. The majority of work in fields like cancer research is also published in paywalled journals. Cancer patients may not be able to wait a year before articles appear in open access archives.
The vast majority of academic work is supported by public funding, and charitable foundations support most of what is not government supported. High time to require open access. The academics are not going to do it themselves.
Ask Mitt Romney about IT consultants. He may have actually outspent Obama on IT, and look where it got him.
And they will come back at you for a HIPAA privacy violation. Your scenario implies that to save IT complexity and expense, you are willing to risk patient confidentiality. You are not going to come across as a sympathetic defendant, especially when they say the only reason they were looking was to test the system security which they found wanting but were afraid to report to their greedy boss looking for an excuse to fire people.
Ah yes, the faultless red light camera ticketing the guaranteed to obey the law driverless car. Proof that machines are fallible. Of course, this would probably escalate into a lawsuit between the traffic cam vendor and the driverless car service, both claiming that the other was falsely impugning the reputation of their product...
Everyone wants to keep their data close to their chest, but only the Feds and Fortune 500 companies have the resources to actually do it. For a startup or small business, cloud services are a god send. Compared to the costs of building a data center and staffing an IT department, a good cloud provider gets you up instantly and expands seamlessly. Harris targeted the wrong audience and/or they could not compete with Amazon.
Agree. The IOM study cited in the article is more than a decade out of date and there are many causes of preventable adverse events. In some respects, electronic order entry systems actually confound the allergy and adverse reaction problem because comments about allergies accumulate and are never reviewed. An elderly patient may have mentioned a decade ago that they were "allergic" to some medication because they got a headache after they took it, but once that allergy is on the drug allergy list, no one is going to put themselves on the line and delete it. As a result, the lists of drug allergies tend to accumulate junk over time and may prevent physicians from using the most appropriate medication.
Copyrights are an increasing problem. Patents expire after 20 years. OK, 20 years is a long time in technology, but they do expire. Copyright is the better part of a century and the line between concept and copy is disappearing. In many areas of science, private multinational corporations hold copyright on almost all of the literature. It is literally impossible for a physician to practice medicine or an engineer to work without copying material from copyright texts in the form of medical orders or design procedures.
The fact that the tweets predict the sales in advance of the movies release or people actually seeing the movie raises an interesting question. Is it the content of the movie or the "buzz" that really matters?
Like the fact that the power consumption density is now so high that they need to go to a rack system with water cooling. Back to the good old days of the IBM 360.
Faculty at public universities still own their royalties. School teachers and university faculty are not so different. Both are professionals and both get tenure in most states. If a school district gave a teacher release time and specific instructions to develop a lesson plan, that would be work for hire. Much more frequently, the school district just assumes that the teacher will make preparations on their own time. In that case, it is not work for hire. If you want to pay teachers overtime for all the work they put in at home preparing for class, I am sure a lot of teachers would be happy to see the additional pay. But if the teacher does work on their own time, they should own their intellectual property.
Professors have been writing textbooks and getting royalties for centuries. What is the big deal?
Better question - why do I have to buy a $40 HDMI cable to connect my HDTV when a $1 Ethernet patch cable would do just fine?
Bottom line on taxes is that the government has the right to tax anything in any amount even to the point of extinction. The logic of taxes is also simple, if you don't want people to do something, increase the tax on it. Europeans don't want to spend all their money importing oil so they tax gasoline out the wazoo and guess what, people do not drive SUVs. We do not want kids to start smoking so we increase the taxes on cigarettes to $4 per pack and guess what, kids are not smoking as much. Association between the introduction of corn based high calorie sweeteners and the onset of the obesity epidemic is pretty strong, and there is a good scientific basis for linking the two (you eat more, you get fat, just like your mother told you). We do not want to pay lots of money taking care of diabetes, heart attack, stroke or kidney failure so it makes sense to tax calories. But don't stop with soda, also tax french fries, donuts and supersize whopper burgers. BTW, the NEJM article specifically does not advocate taxing diet drinks like Fresca.
Actually, they are asking the stereo manufacturers to put Doppler radar and a credit card reader into speaker systems so that they can count the number of heart beats listening to a song and bill you accordingly. After all, the Barry Manilow Foundation needs to get paid every time your girlfriend listens to your CD with you.
Just because a trial failed to reach P<0.05 in testing efficacy does not mean the treatment has no benefit. As we learn more and more about patients, we realize that everyone really is unique. The problem is that to conduct a double blind prospective study with good statistical power to test a treatment gets harder and harder as we categorize patients into smaller and smaller groups. At some point, you need to use inference, i.e., doctors need to think hard about the available evidence and make a decision even though we have not had the luxury of accumulating a large cohort of patients to conduct and adequately powered clinical trial. Demanding that standard of care be restricted to only those treatments that have demonstrated efficacy in an adequately powered randomized clinical trial is going to leave anyone with a rare disorder out in the cold, and more importantly, untreated.
Second point. Conducting a randomized clinical trial takes years, sometimes decades. And then you need to replicate the result in an independent trial to be really sure. Restricting standard of care to only those treatments that have demonstrated efficacy is going to make the standard of care lag many years behind the current state of biomedical knowledge. Are you really willing to pass up your physician's best advice on care while you wait for it to work through the trials process?
Be careful what you ask for. Centralizing authority mean centralizing control and potentially restricting citizen access to open government. At one point, the Government Printing Office was arguing that it had a constitutional mandate to run all government websites because this was a form of publication. Anyone who ever had dealings with the GPO knows what a disaster this would have been.
The fundamental failure of the financial modelers is that they did not incorporate data reliability into their models. In a system where people have strong financial incentives to falsify data, you need to expect that there is going to be a certain amount of "garbage in". If you incorporate that into the model, you can down play the contribution of unreliable data appropriately. If you do not, garbage in leads to garbage out.
Similarly, when bond rating services compete with each other to be paid by a bond issuer to rate the bond, you have to anticipate that ratings will be systematically biased to overvalue the bond, i.e. to under estimate risk.
These concerns were known well in advance of the financial melt down, but there were too many financial incentives for banks to keep on using the same naive models so that they could continue collecting commissions.
It is one thing to release your genome sequence when you are wealthy and have tenure at Harvard. It is quite another thing to do this an ordinary citizen who might want to change jobs and is not in a position to personally endow their child's health care. At the moment medical genetics is much better at diagnosing conditions than it is at offering cures for those conditions. We are making progress in guaranteeing rights against discrimination on the basis of genetics, but we have a long way to go.
The reputation English winemaking needs to be taken into account in evaluating this invention. From a physicochemical perspective, the alcohol molecules are going to collide as a result of thermal motion, whether or not ultrasound is present. Ultrasound might help a bottle of wine approach equilibrium in dissolved oxygen slightly more quickly, but it is not going to change to equilibrium concentration of oxygen and therefore is not going to alter the rate of oxidation.
For a list of interesting places to locate a data center, see data centers in strange places/
Recognizing the difficulty in defining IT in the first place, does anyone have estimates as to the fraction of IT staff involved in innovation and development? I work in a large health care system with a large (600+) IT staff but completely lacking in plans to innovate and develop new approaches. To argue that this is crazy and short sighted, it would be useful to have data from other IT organizations.
First, a well functioning app should really not be generating any log file except what the application itself needs (e.g. usage logs for a web server).
Second, instead of wading through reams of log output, use exceptions and assert statements so that you only generate log output when something has gone wrong.
Finally, use your IDE. Instead of trying to infer state by combing through logs, set break points where you catch an exception. This lets you traceback to see why you ended up with the exception without suffering much if any of a performance hit.
As we move to increasingly distributed systems, log files become less useful. For many distributed apps, you may not even have access to all of the various file systems where a log might be written. Best solution is to rely on highly modular and thoroughly debugged code.
IP fragmentation is also a huge problem in biotechnology. Golden Rice is a classic story of the anticommons.
Oh my, oh my. You mean the TV companies alter reality for marketing purposes? I am shocked.
All those yellow lines that magically appear and disappear on the football fields?
All those "billboards" that are not really there on the stadium wall?
I bet those starlets are even where padded bras. Do you think that they might even have had surgery. Goodness gracious, I wonder if Barbara Walters uses botox?
And those wrestlers. Do you think that they might be using steroids?
I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
Actually, the MSNBC online video let's you pick what you want to see and caries a lot of obscure sports from end to end. Much better than listening to Pierre Salinger babble on about wine tasting in all the French villages while you are waiting to see actual athletes.