Evidence that Amazon's elastic computing cloud is beginning to appear on the big computing horizon: dimdim Partners with SugarCRM
Monday, December 31, 2007
Saturday, December 29, 2007
2008 - peak oil?
Evan Davis was predicting a lot more discussion about peak oil in 2008 - this map is interesting.
Spicebird - Open Source Collaboration
Synovel Technologies: "Spicebird is an open-source platform for collaboration. To start with, we integrated e-mail, calendar and instant messaging into one suite. The features available on the website are for Version 1.0, but we do have plans to release intermediate versions (one of which will be available really soon. Our roadmap and anonymous access to SVN will accompany the release)
Spicebird is based on the Mozilla Platform and shares code with Thunderbird and Sunbird. In the process we do contribute to the Thunderbird and Sunbird. We are not competing with Thunderbird or any other open source product. Using Spicebird does imply using the same code base! The number of email users is huge and they have varying needs. We are here to provide more choice to the users of email and collaboration suites."
Friday, December 28, 2007
Roll your own
According to a recent survey About 38% of U.S. consumers are watching TV shows online, 36% use their cell phones as entertainment devices and 45% are creating online content like Web sites, music, videos and blogs for others
NEJM edges towards open access
news here of the move towards open access being made by the New England Jurnal of Medicine, regarded by most peole as the most prestigous medical journal. Comng in the same week as the ratification of the NIH OA mandate, this should get 2008 off to a good start.
MySQL scales
YouTube uses MySQL and has served 100m videos in a day. From IT Conversations:
"To maintain a website of that scale, one would imagine YouTube has hundreds of DBAs. But in fact, there are just three people that make it all work. Paul Tuckfield, the MySQL DBA at YouTube shares horror stories about scalability at YouTube and how he coped with them to keep the show going everyday, while learning important lessons along the way.
YouTube uses MySQL as the back-end. When Paul joined YouTube, he had 15 years of experience solving database scalability problems and administering computer networks. However, he was completely new to MySQL. Within weeks, the set of challenges he faced about scaling MySQL taught him so much more than one could learn over years. He's all excited about sharing his insights.
According to him, the three important reasons for YouTube's scalability are Python, Memcache and MySQL replication, the last having the most impact. Most people think that the answer to scalability is in upgrading hardware and CPU power. Adding CPUs doesn't work on its own; wisdom is in getting the maximum amount of RAM for the CPU and then fine tuning."
Monday, December 24, 2007
Outsourcing overruns cost billions
News that outsourcing is often an expensive failure is not all that surprising, since in-house and out-sourced approaches are broadly the same. The report itself is short on analysis, but does suggest a lack of skills design beforehand, too much complexity, too much reliance on procurement, and a bias against in-house solutions.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Mozilla Weave
Mozilla Weave looks interesting - here are some use cases. I think it's an example of software above a single device; the device in question being Firefox.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Post Blogger Comments Using Your Own Domain
A bit more detail on how to Post Blogger Comments Using Your Own Domain
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Test
Testing Amazon S3. If it's working you should be able to download this file from a public folder on Amazon
RTM+GMail=GTD happiness
From Remember The Milk - Blog comes news that the popular web based task manager can now be slotted into GMail.
Data sharing across Government
As I was ploughing dutifully through the guidelines for data sharing schemas (PDF)
in the UK public sector it suddenly struck me that maybe not everyone in HMRC and the Audit Commission is using them. Why bother when a database dump and a CD in the post will suffice?
Scientific American: "The Semantic Web in Action"
follow up to Tim Berners Lee's 2001 paper. Covers health care examples, but behind a paywall: Scientific American: "The Semantic Web in Action"
Kick start the public sector IT debate
Michael Cross wants to see a proper debate about public sector IT: "To jolly things along, here's a modest suggestion. It involves an old IT management technique called the 'scream test': the way to find out what a rambling old IT system is really being used for is to turn it off and see who screams. To kick-start the e-government debate, we should do the same. That's right: turn it all off, from your council's webcam to NHS Healthspace to the DVLA's car tax online service. The whole shooting match, off. The screams, I suspect, will be louder than the chattering classes would have us believe."
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
new survey of US physician use of the Internet
Jupiter Research has just published an updated survey of Internet use by US physicians. Looking at the figures, US doctors are well past the tipping point at which the Internet/Web has become part of their daily experience, even if they are not using EMRs.
What Are LOINC Codes?
In case you need to know - What Are LOINC Codes? I'm still not sure how best to pronounce LOINC.
The rapid evolution of Social Software
2007 has been a furious year for social software. The early contender was Ning, but its innovation has been rapidly gobbled up by API opening at Facebook and Google's OpenSocial. Now comes Shindig
“Shindig is a new project in the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator (as per the formal proposal) that aims to provide an open source reference implementation of the entire OpenSocial stack — Shindig’s goal is to allow new sites to start hosting social apps in well under an hour’s worth of work.”
This piece too, by David Recordon.
A couple of years ago Mark Greenhalgh and I were looking for a cheap way to establish a social software service for the NHS and there was nothing except expensive bespoke systems. Now we would almost have an embarrassment of choice.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
H20 - report from the front line
A report from the WHIT conference; emphasises the keynote speech from Tim Berners Lee.
A blog for Christmas?
Not the manic elfs, but Philip Greenspun, of Philip and Alex fame, who is currently on frothy fine form: "If you didn’t know better, the experience might lead you to believe that the average Google employee knew more about building software than the average professor of Computer Science…" Just imagine if he'd invented Facebook!
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Saturday, December 15, 2007
OpenID Commenting for Blogspot
OpenID Commenting Update - commenting for OpenID users is now an option on Blogger. Does this start the beginning of OpenID across Google? I'll turn it on here to see what happens.
Google Knol Vs Wikipedia - the impact on health information Constructive Medicine 2.0
speculation about Google Knol Vs Wikipedia-impact on health information
Enterprise search - are taxonomies useful in practice?
Enterprise Search Practice Blog: Enterprise Search: Leveraging and Learning From Web Search and Content Tools: "Among the other noteworthy comments in this session was a negative about taxonomies. The gist of it was that they require so much discipline that they might work for a while but can’t really be sustained. If this attitude becomes the norm, many of the semantic search engines which depend on some type of classification and categorization according to industry terminologies or locally maintained lists will be challenged to deliver enhanced search results. This is a subject to be taken up in a later blog entry."
Biomedical Digital Libraries leaves BMC
As reported on Peter Suber's weblog Biomedical Digital Libraries is leaving BMC and adopting a no submission fee approach.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Personal Health Records
John Halamka has done something brave and noteworthy - he has posted his health record on the Web
Why brave? Because of the almost paranoid level of concern about the privacy of these documents. Why noteworthy - because this post is about the opportunity for standardized personal health records and more generally the need to shift the locus of control on disclosure to the owner of the record.
There is also a paper by Halamka and colleagues in the lastest JAMIA - Early experiences with Personal Health Records
patientslikeme
PatientsLikeMe provides an innovative Health 2.0 style service - it seems to be having some success:
2008 - push and pull
2008 could be the year for getting to grips with the difference between push and pull in the browser. Wikipedia has an article on Push technology which sets out the basic position, making it clear that RSS is a pull technology despite appearances, as is AJAX. The HTML 5 specification will support push. But what applications will emerge, given that pulling can emulate push? Much speculation, along with the maturation of REST and the opening up of the Facebook platform. With OpenID developing quickly and semantic web experts getting interested there is more than enough technology to take web applications to the next level of sophistication and end user value through event driven web applications.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Logging on to the Web with Verisign
Verisign's Personal Identity Provider is working very well so far. It starts when I go onto the Web and the integration with Firefox is neat.
It also work very well with MyExperiment, which takes OpenIDs seamlessly. On a couple of occasions when I've gone to MyExperiment without logging in it has suggested I go to Verisign to logon to the Web.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Some doubts about HINARI
The editorial Denying open access to published health-care research: WHO has the password?
contains some little publicised analysis of the HINARI programme:
The World Health Organization (WHO) has demonstrated exemplary foresight in highlighting that access to biomedical journals is a critical issue in developing countries and one of the many obstacles to improving health. In the year 2002, WHO initiated a unique program, HINARI, with the support of several major publishers. HINARI is presently providing open access to over 3,750 journal titles to institutions in 113 developing countries. Institutions in countries with GNI per capita (World Bank figures, 2006) below $1,000 are eligible for free access and those in countries with GNI per capita between $1,000 and $3,000 can gain access by paying a very reasonable fee of $1,000 per year / institution. However, clinicians and researchers in some very populous developing countries like India have been greatly disappointed that they are not considered eligible for HINARI. The GNI per capita as per the World Bank 2006 figures for some of the countries that have been excluded by HINARI, range from $770 for Pakistan, $820 for India, $1420 for Indonesia and $2010 for China. The HINARI website acknowledges that some developing countries with per capita GNP of less than US$3,000 have been denied open access through HINARI as 'the publishers participating in HINARI have not, for the time being, extended their offer to countries where they have significant levels of existing subscriptions and, in some cases, local sales staff.' It is unfortunate that business interests of western publishers has taken away the gloss from HINARI by denying open access to clinicians catering to the health needs of half of the world population. While the long list of 113 countries covered under HINARI looks very impressive, most of these are very small countries, with the combined population of countries in Band 1 being 1.2 billion; and in Band 2 as 0.3 billion. In contrast, the total population of China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan, the 4 most populous countries with a per capita GNI of less than $3000 but excluded from HINARI is 3 billion.
LinkedIn gets a social and platform make-over
The LinkedIn Blog has details of LinkedIn developments, partly via Google's OpenSocial
Putting people first: where's the information strategy?
Putting people first: a shared vision and commitment to the transformation of adult social care is looking for system wide transformation and contains some great ideas. But there's NO information strategy, and no reference to Single Assessment, NHS Choices or HealthSpace.
ICU checklists
Annals of Medicine: The Checklist: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker: "I called Pronovost recently at Johns Hopkins, where he was on duty in an I.C.U. I asked him how long it would be before the average doctor or nurse is as apt to have a checklist in hand as a stethoscope (which, unlike checklists, has never been proved to make a difference to patient care). “At the current rate, it will never happen,” he said, as monitors beeped in the background. “The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It’s viewed as the art of medicine. That’s a mistake, a huge mistake. And from a taxpayer’s perspective it’s outrageous.” We have a thirty-billion-dollar-a-year National Institutes of Health, he pointed out, which has been a remarkable powerhouse of discovery. But we have no billion-dollar National Institute of Health Care Delivery studying how best to incorporate those discoveries into daily practice."
From ruthless to toothless
Once upon a time it seemed as if there might be a consistent interface to clinical data across the NHS. That might still be the goal but now CfH tells PCT it can’t mandate LSP solution so it looks as if we are back to accreditation and reliance on standards such as the NHS Data Dictionary. Can it be long before some suggests a Common Basic Specification?
Monday, December 10, 2007
The Health 2.0 Blog: Health 2.0 Community Present and Vocal as Markle Foundation Policy Meeting Discusses "Consumer Access Practices for Networked Hea
Saturday, December 08, 2007
What (US) consumers want from PHRs
Barbara Massoudi: What Consumers want from personal health records (pdf)
- Provide a mechanism for tracking health information to empower consumers to take more active control of their own health
- Build a user-friendly but familiar interface
- Ensure consumer controlled access
- Create PHRs that are flexible and customizable to the individual users needs (easy for all and upgradeable for advanced users)
- Enhance the relationship and communication between consumers and their healthcare providers
- Protect consumer data
- Meet practical needs in helping consumers plan, track, review and change their physical activity behavior
Voluntary Universal Healthcare Identifier
The Voluntary Universal Healthcare Identifier tries to overcome some of the barriers in the US to a identity system. But it's going to provide for different levels of privacy by allowing multiple identifiers with different levels of security. Sounds complicated and messy.
Friday, December 07, 2007
MOU on PHR portability
HL& is working with several leading health providers in the US on portability standards for PHRs
US - growing interest in digital personal health records
WSJ.com/Harris Interactive Survey:
"One key concept is that patients would have control over an Internet-based medical record and they would decide with whom and when to share that information. But, as when banking or shopping first went online, there have been issues of privacy concerns regarding healthcare data as well. As things become more common though, these concerns tend to wane, evidenced by a 10-point drop this year (from 61% in 2006 to 51%) in those who say electronic records make it difficult to ensure privacy. When it comes to other online medical services, three-fourths of adults feel that patients should be able to schedule an appointment with their physician via email or the Internet (77%) and communicate with their physician via email (75%). These online applications are big first steps in overcoming privacy concerns. More adults (60%) feel that the benefits outweigh the privacy risks than those who do not (40%). Majorities agree that electronic medical records could reduce healthcare costs (55%), decrease medical errors (63%), and reduce redundant tests (67%) – similar to 2006 results. Even more (74%) believe that patients could receive better care if doctors and researchers were able to share information more easily. "
Woman found canoeist photo via Google | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited
The Guardian reports that woman found canoeist photo via Google. Note the badly formed boolean search expression.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
OpenID vs. Shibboleth
Vince Smith: OpenID vs. Shibboleth:
OpenID’s user centric approach reflects the process of scholarly communication and collaboration, in a way that Shibboleth does not. For this reason we will be using and promoting OpenID in the tools we create (notably the Scratchpads).
Help Andrew Meyer Decode His Genome by Christmas
The 23AndMe genetic service is only available in the US at the moment. So I have made a small donation to Help Me Decode My Genome by Christmas whose author is promising to blog the experience.
mixxt - connecting cultures
mixxt
has some nice features but has a few rough edges (the registration page choice of country for example).
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Usability of library web sites - circa 2002
This paper - a usability case study on how students use a library web site has just popped up in delicious.
The STate of the NHS
The Health Care Commission has just published its anual report and concludes that improvements have been made, but services must do more to be world class
One of the eye catching findings is about long term conditions. Why GPs don't maintain a register of people with diabetes is hard to understand:
"Where there is a known need, PCTs are not always providing the services required. Some 60,000 people with serious long-term conditions did not get the care from community matrons that was originally planned. Forty-one per cent of PCTs failed to purchase sufficient crisis services for people who are seriously mentally ill, resulting in 5,000 fewer people receiving the service than planned. Some 85% of PCTs did not have arrangements for providing education programmes for patients with diabetes in their area. And 2,000 GP practices did not fulfil their PCT's plans to establish registers for those people at risk of coronary heart disease, designed to help prevent these patients from becoming seriously ill."
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Pew report - ePatients - Chronic Conditions
The latest Pew report on Health and the Internet concerns ePatients with chronic conditions (pdf)
Google Testing OpenID With Blogger
The rumour has it that Google is testing OpenID With Blogger and it may look to implement OpenID more widely.
NHS to continue to pay for data quality initiatives
E Health Insider: Verbal agreement on IM&T DES payments: "The DES has four components intended to reward GPs for compliance with National Programme for IT (NPfIT) initiatives. Component one pays 40p per patient to practices that agree a practice plan with their PCT for complying with NPfIT and component two offers 44p per patient for achieving data accreditation in preparation for uploading summary records to the spine. The third component, worth 27p per patient, is paid to practices who regularly validate patients’ addresses and comply with release one of the Electronic Prescription Service. Component four, worth 22 p per patient, can be claimed by practices using a Connecting for Health accredited hosted solution. So far only one system, INPS’s Vision 3 provided by local service provider BT in London, has been approved as a hosted solution."
what problems do you have when searching for information?
Andy Oram is asking what problems do you have when searching for information?
Monday, December 03, 2007
Interview with Richard Smith
Mansbridge One on One features an interview with Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and a severe critic of peer review (and brother of Arthur) (Windows) video here
Interview with Kim Cameron
Gartner's Interview with Kim Cameron:
"In terms of the problems being solved, they [Enterprise and Consumer identity management] come together. What happens on the Internet always predominates over what happens inside the enterprise and then moves into the enterprise over time. Look inside the enterprise – we have SAP over here and we have SharePoint over there. As a user, is my identity in SAP or is it in SharePoint? Suppose I'm Kim Cameron and I'm here and I want to take all the people from this list, let's say within SAP, and give them access to my SharePoint site. Today, I have to synchronize list membership and attributes out of SAP and stick them into SharePoint. It becomes very convoluted. What if I could transparently get visitors to go to SAP and pick up a claim that they're on the list and then use that claim in SharePoint? That's the end of the problem. All of the complexity goes away. And what you're solving is really the same thing as I want to use my information from Facebook over at MSN. "
Eat yourself fitter
A lessons learned meeting at Stanford, following their Facebook hosted course on creating Facebook apps.
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Sponsored scientific research
Link Buying Crimes vs Sponsored Scientific Research: "If everything becomes free then hidden costs will pop up everywhere."
Add Cardspace in 30 lines of code
CardSpace demo shows how to add CardSpace Support. At the recent Eduserv workshop on Identity Management David Recordon from SixApart showed how he added OpenID in a couple of lines. The Internet Identity layer is getting easier to implement as Jon Udell notes
Zotero and the research eco-system
One of my first jobs was to do a feature comparison between Pro-Cite and Ref-Man because each was strongly advocated by professors at Frenchay Hospital. That was a long time ago. In the end we realised they both did more or less the same thing and since each prof had their own budget and thousands of papers in their preferred system it wasn't worth trying to adopt a common system.
Fifteen years on theenvironment is very different. Most scientists are using the Web as a constant backdrop to their research. If anyone knows of a comprehensive review of reference management 2.0 let me know. For now I can mention 2 - Zotero - Firefox based, open source and now Public Library of Science Ready
and Notate , which has been developed by a couple of Scottish academics and is cross-browser.
Both are part of the research eco-system - a set of tools to help researchers do their work.
Market review - end user website creation
This review of Doodlekit is also a useful mini-review of the state of the end user website creation market.
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