of words she's made up

speaking

of
words

she's made

up


and

waking
through

dreams

she's

breathing
alive

singing
through
songs

she's
sung

-ision

I'm going to get into this once, and then hope it takes on a life of its own. I believe it is important to put this down in words; how not to suck at things. Precision, concision, vision, decision. This is like asking "is this measurable, is this actionable?" But this is easier, I have found.

Precision
When you describe a thing, are you accurate? Are your facts correct?

Concision
Have you used ten words where five are required? Is your argument more complete when you say less?

Vision
Do you have a clear and compelling message?

Decision
Are you able to act on the information available?

TermInfo Discussion at HL7 WGM Atlanta 2013 (SIM&A)

Okay, HL7's RIMBAA Working Group hasn't changed their name to SIM&A yet ("Simba"), but it looks like that is the name that is going to stick to reflect the group's broadened scope.

One issue that this and other working groups are determined to put to bed is that of negation, particularly with TermInfo vocabulary sets like SNOMED CT. The problem is that not all vocabulary sets support negation implicitly, by providing vocabulary terms that are already negated. SNOMED CT does. The big question then is, should you always use the implied negation in the vocabulary set if it is available; or should you sometimes, or never use it.

The alternative, for HL7 v3 at least, is to use a negation indicator, messaged as a negationInd attribute on the element in question... so this is effectively metadata, and the problem with metadata is that there is no guarantee that the receiver interprets it correctly, if at all. For many use cases, this probably doesn't matter much, but for clinical diagnosis and decision making, for allergies, for drug interactions, and even in the context of non-health applications like Corrections and Defense, Person-of-Interest queries need to properly take into account null flavours and negations; so there is a strong Public Health and Public Safety aspect to this discussion as well.

So it is an important concept, and people need to reach agreement on the correct way to do this; however, this issue goes back a number of years, so I'm curious to see where it goes. My own thoughts are that a better way to do this from the start would have been to use a tri-state negation indicator, which indicates "positive", "requires negation", or "implictly negated"... but it's too late for that now, and it always has been.

Here are the details from the RIMBAA forum (via Rob Hausum, MD, Hausum Consulting):

The TermInfo negation discussion at the Atlanta WGM will be held in Q1 Tuesday (tomorrow).  Following a brief introduction, we intend to devote the remainder of the quarter to this topic.  We would like to come away from the quarter with a concrete plan to create and provide guidance on this important topic.  That may involve a focused TermInfo ballot on negation, but the specific form and scope is still open for discussion.

For those who aren't in Atlanta, we expect to have remote participation capability via GoToMeeting (details below).  Please join the discussion, or, if you are unable to attend either in person or remotely, feel free to pass along any comments/questions/concerns.

Rob

GTM details:

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Loose boats and gliders

loose boats and gliders
children floating
away over rocks
under supervision still
throwing stones at the
waves over time
here they come; there they go
turn and they play
face down the ocean
now overconfident
perhaps, tiny creatures
intertidal safety zones
safe in untidy interzones
carrying with them
nets and shrimp
pockets and stones

Great interview with John Resig, discussing jQuery, Khan Academy, and the ubiquity of Selectors API.

http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/where-in-the-world-is-john-resig/

This is really quite perceptive...

BriteSnow - The Five Software Architecture Generations: From Mainframe to Mobile Apps to HTML5

My Review of JavaScript Enlightenment

Originally submitted at O'Reilly

From Library User to JavaScript Developer

JavaScript Enlightenment

Absolutely essential reading

By Piers Hollott from Victoria, BC on 3/24/2013

 

5out of 5

Pros: Helpful examples, Well-written

Best Uses: Intermediate, Expert

Describe Yourself: Developer

If you work with JavaScript, maybe you love it, maybe you hate it. Cody's book is a constant reminder for me why I love working with JavaScript. It's a unique language, and this is a unique book. As soon as I finished, I went back to the beginning and started again.

(legalese)

I mean, it's almost with sadness that I am uninstalling Opera, but something happened a while back, and all political arguments aside, I'm just as happy with Firefox. You see, I really liked Opera Unite, which embedded a web server inside the Opera browser. All sorts of potential in that idea, although realistically, this allows you to operate an intermittent file server. For testing purposes, however, it meant I didn't need to run a separate web server. Anyway, water under the bridge, Opera is no longer supporting this feature.

At a time when people appear to be switching back to Firefox from Chrome because newer builds of Chrome are apparently slower... I might start running the Aurora stable nightly builds of Firefox. I have a love/hate relationship with Firefox. At the moment, because Firefox is providing the only decent SVG support for mobile devices, I love it again, even though the only mobile device I have is Android, and I like Chrome for Android a lot. I just have no room for Opera.

Firefox OS and Mobile Health

I have to say, I am very excited about Mozilla's Firefox OS, formerly Boot to Gecko, a Mobile OS built on web standards like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, powered by a small Linux kernel. The OS is going to target less expensive phones, without requiring the power that Android or iOS do. If you were thinking PhoneGap, a Firefox OS app is much simpler than that. Why am I embedding in WebKit when I can boot to Gecko?

So the downside will be market penetration. In Canada or the States, or the UK. In Brazil, in Mexico, in eastern Europe, these phones could hit a sweet spot and build a strong developer community.

And this is why I'm excited. The real strength of mobile health is not going to be iPhone apps for American Doctors; it's going to be useful tools for areas that aren't already serviced by Epic or Meditech... In LMIC countries, a suite of mobile medical tools, and particularly one you might modify or extend yourself, that will be invaluable.

The developer phones are cool and orange as well.

Android FaceDetection

How could a book application interact with facial detection?

If Harry Potter has taught me anything, it is that any book can conceal a rotten core of evil, or a path to enlightenment. And yes, your typical book will not communicate by talking, or bleeding...

On the other hand, I've been experimenting with the FaceDetection capabilities which Android ICS introduced. A front facing camera can take a snapshot, say, each time you advance a page while you are reading. FaceDetection can do several things; for instance, count faces, track eyes and mouthes to see who is smiling, and register when a reader is new.

So the book can recognize the audience, as a proxy for the author. Consider this: as you are reading a book, it could refuse to go to the next page until you shared the text with another set of eyes. Perhaps more useful, a book app could track progress for a number of readers, based on their faces.

Wheels within wheels - well we're at it, the more I work with Firefox OS and Gaia, the more I want to use it as a platform to build a more interactive ePub reader, leveraging the Web Activity model. See below. Think books which can talk to each other using Web Activity sharing.

The thing is, FacialDetection may be easily fooled by a photograph... Might not be as secure as exchanging secure tokens, but once an application has authenticated that token, it can remain authenticated until the status of the detected face or faces changes, based on periodic snapshots.

Once authenticated with a single face, an app could drop authentication when this face goes away or a face is added. As long as your face is associated with a secure token, and your face does not change, this should be satisfactory to maintain authentication.

What are some ways a book app could interact differently if it could recognize its audience?

Tom Riddle me this.

Android orientation observations

I really really enjoy my Nexus 7, and I'm excited about the prospect of a 10" Android tablet from Google. At first blush, the tablet appears to be a personal device, but I have to say, it's so easy to share... I can hand it to you and say, "look at this": shared. I can sit down on the couch with one of my children on each side and we can watch cooking videos together: shared.

This is not OLPC... this is One Tablet per Couch, and I think that's a really important distinction, until the tablet supports local development, which I don't think it ever will.

I like the portrait-centred form factor, and I am frustrated by applications that flop around when I lay the tablet flat. I've talked about this before; when I look at the tablet I see a perfect place to prototype and play board games, for which you need to lay the tablet flat. A Monopoly board doesn't have portrait or landscape orientation. People sit around it and interact with it equally. This should also be true of a table when it is laid flat, and it can never be true of a mouse-driven device. Never. That's the power of touch.

At this point, I see the tablet having 3 basic modes, and I hope application design moves in this direction: portrait mode is for typical operation, like reading books or web pages, etc; certain types of content (video, text annotation, high quality images) break out into landscape automatically - I'll re-orient the device and share with the people around me when this happens; and laid flat, any other orientation is inconsequential - it's a free for all.

Please comment... this makes absolute sense to me, but maybe differs from other people's tablet experience.

My other quibble at this point, coming from a board game lover: SVG support in Ice Cream Sandwich and Jellybean is good, but not great. I would love to see an Android OS that provides better support for SVG filters and SVG DOM manipulation using WG XPath - but that's a subject for another day.

HL7: Open Standard

Monumental news this morning - the HL7 standard for healthcare messaging is becoming a much more free and open standard, providing standards and IP at no cost to implementers. I started to suspect this was in the works when Graham Grieve negotiated with HL7 to make the HL7 FHIR standard available at no cost for the draft edition, and then "we'll see about the normative edition". The discussions to make this happen go back at least two years, but of course this has been a common complaint about HL7, that cost of IP may be an impediment to implementation.

Not entirely sure I agree with that, since I see evidence suggesting this has not happened; however, for new initiatives like FHIR to gain traction on smaller local projects, and in particular in the growing area of mobile health, any such impediments need to be lowered.

I love working with HL7 and I love working with the members of both HL7 International and HL7 Canada/ Canada Health Infoway, and I have to say, this is truly fantastic news.

Keith Boone's post

The real honeypot is in the Google Docs link...

Piers Hollott shared Keith Boone's post with you. Wow! This is some radical transparency... Including Meaningful Use Common Data Sets

Keith Boone The real honeypot is in the Google Docs link... Healthcare Standards: Stage2 Final Rule Crosswalk from MeaningfulUse Objectives to Standards Last time around, I put together a crosswalk from Objectives to Certification, and from Certification to Standards. This time, it's all in one spreadsheet. Sorry for the tiny type, it's quite a bit of... View or comment on Piers Hollott's post »

My Review of Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS, 2nd Edition

Originally submitted at O'Reilly

A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites

Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS, 2nd Edition

Great intro to key web technologies

By phollott from Vancouver Island, BC on 9/1/2012

4out of 5

Pros: Easy to understand, Clear
Best Uses: Intermediate
Describe Yourself: Developer

I recently read two books from O'Reilly Books dealing with JavaScript: "Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS" and "Learning JavaScript Design Patterns" by Addy Osmani. The first book is a great introduction to four often essential technologies for getting things done on the web - I only wish this book covered managing XSLT using Sablotron in PHP 5.0 in more depth, but this is due to personal bias - in a past life, I built some cool things using these 5 technologies.

The design patterns book was also a very good read, though, I used it more of a refresher of design patterns in general - the patterns in this book were for the most part based on the standard Java design patterns, covering some of the nuances of classical vs. prototypal inheritance.

But let's face it, Object-based Development using JavaScript is obscure subject matter, and Osmani's book has some really indispensable advice: see how these patterns are applied within the JQuery library, which contains the best application of JavaScript Design Patterns you will find. This is truly great advice.

Which brings me circuitously to JQuery creator John Resig, for whom I have immense respect; and his latest foray into simplifying JavaScript to make it easier to use as a readily available first language, which I endorse completely. One thing I appreciated in "Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS"... no semicolons!

Heresy!

But really, as long as you put separate statements on separate lines, there are virtually no situations where semicolons are essential. And in fact, I found the example code in Robin Nixon's book Much easier to read than the example code in Osmani's book. I may just have been converted to the darkside.

I highly recommend both of these books.

(legalese)

JavaScript: Your New Overlord

Piers Hollott shared J. Albert Bowden's post with you. Shared due to presence of Crockford #javascript

J. Albert Bowden JavaScript: Your New Overlord Javascript: Your New Overlord In this keynote presentation at JAXConf 2012, Douglas "The JavaScript Guy" Crockford asserts that JavaScript has become the most important programming langua... View or comment on Piers Hollott's post » Google+ makes sharing on the web more like sharing in real life. Learn more. Join Google+

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Yet another odd idea

Here's an idea, combining the Intent-based event model in Android with Infinite Jest style hyperfiction. What if you wrote a short novel, or rather series of short novels, and instead of using ePub or PDF or whatever, you used an Android application, targeting people's Android devices. Each novella would be say, 15,000 words long, but they would communicate with each other using intents to create footnotes out of a shared index, distributed over multiple texts. So you install one book and you get a 15,000 word novel. You install two books, and you get two 15,000 word novel, each of which has 5,000 words worth of footnotes. You install a third book and you get three 15,000 word novels, each with 10,000 words worth of footnotes.

Would you have to write all 4 concurrently, though?

HL7 FHIR Aggregation

Really good explanations recently on Grahame Grieve's weblog recently describing HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) from the perspective of v2, CDA and v3 implementation.


FHIR for v3 and CDA implementers
FHIR for v2 implementers

One thing I am still trying to understand is the issue of aggregation, which is accomplished using Atom feeds, which in itself makes a lot of sense, and may have all sorts of side benefits, though it is a little frustrating if your browser (ie Opera) tries to handle the aggregation as though it were a blog feed... but there are two kinds of aggregation we must consider here one when we aggregate a number of like resources, for instance as the result of a non-deterministic search, and the other when multiple types of resource are aggregation into a Message (for v3) or Document (for CDA) Resource.

I find this confusing because it appears that position is used within the Atom syndication to determine which Resource to use as the transport wrapper. Still trying to wrap my head around this. Should prove to get interesting very quickly.

My Review of Mobile JavaScript Application Development

Originally submitted at O'Reilly

Bringing Web Programming to Mobile Devices

Mobile JavaScript Application Development

Mobile JavaScript Hybridization

By Piers Hollott from Victoria, BC on 7/10/2012

 

4out of 5

Pros: Well-written, Easy to understand

Best Uses: Intermediate

Describe Yourself: Developer

I have just finished reading a review copy of Adrian Kosmaczewski's book on Mobile Development using JavaScript, and I highly recommend it, particularly if you are faced with a decision about mobile development frameworks and you have a team which is already familiar with hybridized JavaScript approaches like JQuery or GWT.

After dealing with some basic groundwork, Kosmaczewski devotes a solid chapter to each of the prevailing uses of JavaScript in the mobile arena: HTML5 with JavaScript, JQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, and PhoneGap. While there are advantages to all of these approaches, the prevailing wind seems to indicate use of JQuery Mobile if you are already invested in JQuery, and Sencha Touch if you are building an enterprise-size solution.

Either of these approaches - actually, all of these approaches - will allow you to deploy to multiple platforms, which is a key component of JavaScript hybridization: ubiquity. The difficulty I have personally encountered is the flip side of the ubiquity coin, flexibility. JavaScript may be everywhere, but can also become everything, and this can lead to paralysis.

An example of this: I have recently been working on some development in with mobile SVG, which is becoming more and better supported on various mobile platforms. SVG is not hard to work with, and rolling your own application to do exciting things is enjoyable if you like that sort of thing; however... do you use HTML with embedded SVG? HTML5? Just SVG with E4X/EcmaScript (which is just JavaScript, really)? or Raphael.js, or Sencha Touch, which encapsulates it?

At some point, you just need to stick your paddle in the water and see which way the current takes you. And Kosmaczewski's book is a good starting point.

(legalese)

Promoting health? It's all in the game | ...

I really want to see this sort of technology succeed, in part because it demonstrates so much the principle of  "genius of the and" - gamification of health not involves the patient more with his own diagnosis and care, it can also provide his healthcare team with better, more regular check in points, as well as an access point for delivery of timely information. For healthcare to be successful, it needs to follow a pattern like this. Okay, I'm a techie, and I can't help thinking on that level... this approach to delivery of information follows an, albeit loose, Model View Control (MVC) pattern - identifying what information is required to trace healthcare needs, then coordinating between patients' and practitioners' ability to view this information and respond to it, and formalizing a channel of communication between patient and practitioner, outside office hours.

Bertalan Meskó, MD Promoting health? It's all in the game | Reuters LONDON (Reuters) - Meet Roxxi - a feisty and fully-armed virtual nanobot. Billed as medicine's mightiest warrior, she's fighting an epic battle deep inside the human body where she launches rapid-fire...

3,001 THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW!!!

I firmly believe that most internet memes are quite silly, but the bit about Windows and "Con" is kind of spooky.

3,001 THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW!!! - 1) The moon smells like gunpowder. 2) The creator of the Nike Swoosh symbol (Caroline Davidson) was paid only $35 for the design. 3) You can't create a folder called "Con" in Microsoft Windows. 4) The formula for Coca-Cola has never been patented. 5) Al Capone once said, I am like any other man, all I do is supply a demand. 6) There are five states in United States with no sales tax. They are Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon. 7) Calcium in bones absorbs X-Rays the most, so bones look white on the radiograph. Fat and other soft tissues absorb less, and look gray. 8) Bruce Lee was the Hong Kong 'cha cha' dance champion in 1958. 9) Erotica is sexually oriented material that is not considered "pornographic" to the viewer. 10) Elvis Presley was a black belt in karate. 11) Amphetamines are similar to cocaine, the main difference being that they are synthetic, longer acting, and cheaper to buy. 12) A DVD has an about 100 year life span. 13) Every person, including identical twins, has a unique eye and tongue print along with their finger print. 14) It takes six months to build a Rolls Royce, and 13 hours to build a Toyota. 15) The words "naked" and "nude" are not the same thing. Naked implies unprotected. Nude means unclothed. 16) James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, was a real spy for the British Navy during the World War II. 17) You're born with 300 bones, but when you get to be an adult, you only have 206, why? Because they fusion one to another. 18) A shrimp's heart is in its head. 19) All the numbers on a roulette wheel add up to 666. 20) A lump of pure gold, the size of a matchbox, can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court. 21) Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel with over 50,000 words, none of which containing the letter "E". 22) Birds are largely unaffected by spicy things, like chilies, as they are not sensitive to capsaicin, the hot stuff in chilies. 23) The Bible devotes some 500 verses on prayer, less than 500 verses on faith, but over 2000 verses on money and possessions. 24) Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated. 25) Americans, on average, eat 18 acres of pizza every day. 26) The White House has 35 bathrooms, 3 elevators, 132 rooms, and 412 doors in it. 27) The ashes of the average cremated person weigh 9 pounds. 28) Identify a fake: The second hand on an authentic Rolex watch doesn't tick, it moves smoothly. 29) Pluto is no longer considered a planet, it is now known as a 'Dwarf Planet'. 30) Months that begin on a Sunday will always have a "Friday the 13th." 31) The Leaning Tower of Pisa has never been straight. 32) Alcohol can be detected in the blood as quickly as 40 minutes after your 1st drink. 33) The Olympic gold medal must contain at least six grams of gold. 34) Breasts contain no muscle tissue, so there's no exercise that can change their shape. 35) A Boeing 747 airliner contains 6,000,000 parts. 36) U.S. bills are 2.61 inches wide, 6.14 inches long, and are .0043 inches thick and weigh 1 gram. 37) The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket. 38) Apples are more effective at keeping people awake in the morning than caffeine. 39) Believe it or not but during the average human life, you will consume 70 assorted bugs as well as 10 spiders as you sleep. 40) Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer. 41) Cellulitis is a bacterial infection of the deepest layer of your skin. 42) Warm up before exercise. Cold, stiff muscles and ligaments are more susceptible to injury. 43) Footprints of the astronauts who landed on the moon should last at least 10 million years since the moon has no atmosphere. 44) Alfred Hitchcock had no belly button as it was eliminated during surgery. 45) The Titanic was the first ship to use the S.O.S signal. 46) It cost $7 million dollars to build the Titanic, and $200 million to make a film about it. 47) Every day 200 million couples make love, 400,000 babies are born, and 140,000 people die. 48) In 1980, a Las Vegas hospital suspended workers for betting on when patients would die. 49) Antarctica is the only land on our planet that is not owned by any country. 50) Jewelers Tiffany & Co., based in New York, is responsible for making the Super Bowl trophy. 51) The first credit card was issued by American Express in 1951. 52) Prince Charles and Prince William never travel on the same airplane as a precaution. 53) Paraskavedekatriaphobia is the fear of Friday the 13th. 54) The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. It was the fashion in Renaissance Florence to shave them off. 55) It takes glass one million years to decompose, which means it never wears out and can be recycled an infinite amount of times. 56) One ragweed plant can release as many as one billion grains of pollen. 57) Heavy marijuana use lowers men's testosterone levels and sperm count and quality. Pot could decrease libido and fertility in some heavy smoking men. 58) Dogs...