August 26, 2006
Open Source Software: A Primer for Health Care Leaders
The California Healthcare Foundation has issued a report that examines the development and distribution of open source software, a well-established software development model—and a potential solution to the looming challenges of integration—characterized by collaboration among individuals and organizations with common interests, sharing intellectual property, and a commitment to standards.
It explores open source basics, including the advantages open source presents, and how it works. The report also offers industry perspectives, explores the potential impact on EMR systems and regional health information networks, and compares open source to traditional, proprietary software.
While not heralding the end of commercial software vendors, the report concludes that conditions are ripe for open source solutions to take root in health care, and that it will likely become the standard for capturing, sharing, and managing patient information to support quality care. It also notes that health care businesses have the opportunity to take the lead and drive the shift to this new model.
California Healthcare Link
Source Software: A Primer for Health Care Leaders (pdf)
August 25, 2006
New Robot Review
Forbes magazine this week present their 8th annual review of robots - a review of technology innovators to watch. According to the article, they are on the move--leaping, flying, rolling and climbing. More importantly, they are figuring out how to get here on their own. The group of scientists, entrepreneurs and researchers fuse advances in biomechanics, software, sensor technology, materials science and computing to create new generations of robotic assistants.
Learning has been key, both for robots and for their designers and making them more independent is the goal. Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the US Defense Department have been leaders in moving the field of robotics forward.
The winning robots for 2006 include:
Digital Tools:
BYOB: Build Your Own Bot Article
In pictures:
A History of Robotics
Meet the current robot winners
Taking Robots on the Road
This year the NOVA series on PBS produced a documentary about the DARPA Grand Challenge an intense vehicle race over desert roads that would herald a new era of vehicles that drive themselves.
August 22, 2006
A Study of Online Games and Addiction
In a recently completed study at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, results suggested that gamers’ activities and preferences within games could be linked to addiction. The study looked at players within massively multiplayer online games such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft or Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XI.
The study, which examined in-game behaviors on a number of levels, found that playing with real life friends, side activities like exploration or taking pictures, and membership to social guilds may be related to less harmful play. On the other hand, stealing from or otherwise manipulating players, along with membership to more goal-oriented “hardcore” raid guilds may be related to addiction. Player versus player activity was related to both less damaging and addictive behaviors on different levels of data analysis. While these relationships are present, it is not known whether games are actually the cause of this behavior, or if these are simply behaviors that already addicted players seek out.
Based on these relationships, the study suggested that the process of becoming addicted is likely very complex. It is suggested that more research connecting in-game activities and addiction is needed, and that determining whether games are to blame will most likely require a longitudinal study, looking at a group of gamers over a length of time. It is also noted that studying this link between gameplay and addiction could open doors for addicts generally. From the study:
There were also a number of suggestions on improving the ways in which future studies of videogames collect their data. After making the attempt at using one new method for getting data on gamers, the study made a number of observations on the technical and ethical limitations for data collection in videogame studies.
The sustained misuse of perceptions and stereotypes on the part of marketers will likely have an increasingly megative impact on game players that do have problems. Understanding the intersect between addiction and videogames is a necessary precursor toward first, understanding what to regard as addiction, and second, search for clues as to how we might begin to help the people whose play is having a clearly negative affect on their lives.
ADDICTION AND THE STRUCTURAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MASSIVELY
MULTIPLAYER ONLINE GAMES (PDF Format)
August 17, 2006
Online Intervention Helps At Risk for Eating Disorders
In a controlled trial of 480 college-age women in San Francisco and San Diego, Calif., those who were identified in preliminary interviews as being at risk for developing an eating disorder were included in an eight-week, Internet-based, cognitive-behavioral intervention program called "Student Bodies."
This CBT program had been shown to be effective in previous small-scale short-term studies. The intervention aimed to reduce the participants' concerns about body weight and shape, enhance body image, promote healthy eating and weight maintenance, and increase knowledge about the risks associated with eating disorders.
The online program included reading and other assignments such as keeping an online body-image journal. Participants also took part in an online discussion group, moderated by clinical psychologists. Participants were interviewed immediately following the end of the online program, and annually for up to three years thereafter to determine their attitudes toward their weight and shape, and measure the onset of any eating disorders.
This study is supported by NIMH and according to the press release, the intervention appeared to be most successful among overweight women who had elevated body mass indexes (BMIs) of 25 or more at the start of the program. In fact, among these women in the intervention group, none developed an eating disorder after two years, while 11.9 percent of the women with comparable baseline BMIs in the control group did develop an eating disorder during the same time frame. BMI is a reliable indicator of a person's body fat by measuring his or her weight and height.
The program also appeared to help women in the San Francisco Bay area who had some symptoms of an eating disorder at the start of the program, such as self-induced vomiting; laxative, diet pill or diuretic use; or excessive exercise. Of those in the intervention group with these characteristics, 14 percent developed an eating disorder within two years, while 30 percent of those with these characteristics in the control group developed an eating disorder during the same time frame.
The authors suggest that the intervention helped these high-risk women become less concerned about their weight and shape, while also helping them understand healthier eating and nutrition practices.
Journal Articles:
Taylor CB, et al. Prevention of Eating Disorders in At-risk College-age Women. Archives of General Psychiatry. August 2006.
An interactive internet-based intervention for women at risk of eating disorders: A pilot study
International Journal of Eating Disorders
An interactive internet-based intervention for women at risk of eating disorders: A pilot study
European Eating Disorders Review
Review Paper:
Eating Disorders and the Internet: The Therapeutic Possibilities
August 11, 2006
The IBM Personal Computer's 25th Anniversary
Twenty-five years ago, IBM changed the world. It wasn't intentional. When Big Blue announced a microcomputer called the IBM Personal Computer on August 12, 1981, it hoped only to make a nice profit.
An article in today's PCWorld magazine provides an interesting overview of the evolution of the IBM personal computer and how it made a significant impact on our culture. Today, for instance, we call our desktops and laptops PCs, not microcomputers. The vast majority of the ubiquitous machines scattered around our offices and homes are direct descendents of IBM's 25-year-old box.
The article includes some interesting history from the IBM-PC engineer David Bradley, Dan Bricklin, inventor of the spreadsheet and Mitch Kapor who gave us Lotus 1-2-3. It is always interesting to note things that we now take for granted. For example, the article points out "what impressed people in 1981 can seem laughable today. a review of the IBM PC in the October 1981 issue of Byte magazine, he was careful to note: "The system supports both uppercase and lowercase characters." (The original Apple II supported only uppercase characters)
Kapor states that The IBM PC is "clearly the lineal ancestor. Ninety-eight percent of the genes in its DNA are the same, but functionally today's PCs are different."
The best quote in the article came from Bradley when asked if he would have done anything differently? He said, "Yes, indeed. "I would have bought shares of Microsoft and Intel."
Download the original VisiCalc from author Dan Bricklin
A detailed history of the IBM Personal Computer
(from 2001 on its 20th anniversary)
Other Computing History Sites:
The Computing Revolution
(from the Boston Museum of Science)
Computing History 1968-Present
(including hardware, software, games etc)
PS David Bradley devised the "three finger salute" aka Control-Alt-Delete
August 08, 2006
Interactive Flash Program About Drug Abuse
Take a look inside the brains of mice on drugs. Every drug of abuse has its own unique molecular mechanism. You'll learn how these various drugs disrupt the synapse to make the user feel 'high.'
This clever and imaginative interactive flash program called Mouse Party from the University of Utah demonstrates how drugs of abuse work in the brain.
Other programs from The New Science of Addiction: Genetics and the Brain from the University of Utah Genetic Science Learning Center
August 06, 2006
Digital Artwork That Changes To Suit Your Mood
Computer scientists from the University of Bath in the UK in conjunction with Boston University have developed electronic artwork that changes to match the mood of the person who is looking at it.
It processes images collected through a web cam using special software that recognizes eight key facial features that characterise the emotional state of the person viewing the artwork. It then adapts the colors and brush strokes of the digital artwork to suit the changing mood of the viewer.
If the viewer is angry the colors are dark and appear to have been applied to the canvas with more aggressive brush strokes. If the viewer's expression changes to happy, the artwork adapts so that the colors are vibrant and more subtly applied.
The project forms part of on-going research looking to develop a range of advanced artwork tools for use in the computer graphics industry. This has already resulted in software which produces highly-detailed artistic versions of photographs, and allows designers to create animations directly from digital footage. The program analyzes the image for eight facial expressions, such as the position and shape of the mouth, the openness of the eyes, and the angle of the brows, to work out the emotional state of the viewer, This is done in 'real time' so when the viewer's emotions change the artwork responds accordingly.
According to the researchers, "this results in a digital canvas that smoothly varies its colors and style, and provides a novel interactive artistic experience. This kind of empathic painting only needs a desk top computer and a webcam to work, so once you have the program and have calibrated it for the individual viewer, you are ready to start creating personalised art based on your mood."
This type of digital painting is an experiment into the feasibility of using high level control parameters, such as emotional state, to replace the many low-level tools that users currently have at their disposal to affect the output of artistic rendering. The images used in the project were created by the researchers using advanced artistic rendering techniques which give the computer-generated artwork the appearance of having been painted onto canvas.
The research was recently presented at the fourth International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering conference in Annecy as part of the International Animation Festival. http://www.npar.org/2006/
Empathic Painting page at the University of Bath
Computer Science Department Boston University