While looking for a good way to visualize ActiveRecord models, I stumbled upon Rails ERD. I followed the painless install process which is essentially involves adding a one-liner in bundler and installing Graphviz via the DMG, and fired off the associated Rails ERD rake task. 5 seconds later I had a readable, dynamically generated PDF of the database schema for my project. Hats off to Rolf Timmermans for this useful utility.
Last year I enrolled in a new graduate program being offered by the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
The Master of Management in Clinical Informatics (MMCi) degree is a “one-year Management in Clinical Informatics program is the only interdisciplinary management program of its kind in the United States—leveraging Duke’s world-renowned track record in medicine, business, and health informatics. Through access to the finest faculty and resources across health care, IT, and management education, students will acquire the knowledge and skills to merge technology and patient care and help improve human health.”
I am incredibly proud of my involvement with this exciting new program, and I recently shared the story of how I came to choose MMCi over other graduate school options. I hope that this post will be part of a larger series of articles for Healthcare IT Today, if you have any questions or comments about the series please feel free to contact me via the feedback link to the right.
Late last year drop.io was purchased by Facebook. I had been using drop.io to provide a public “drop box” (not related to the other drop box service) where folks could upload files, as well as a (rarely used) chat area that lived at the bottom of the main page at justintylerwiley.com.
These canned services were really just the tip of the drop.io API stack iceberg, which was Google Wave-like in scope and technical complexity. Drop.io had some really talented and creative developers working for them and came up with a number of innovative features that as far as I know were never really fully utilized in the web community. They were one of the first to pioneer Javascript based XMPP transfer functionality, and I remember when Katie and I first ran across them in 2009 we were pretty convinced that we were seeing Web 3.0.
Dropbox and chat services have been discontinued, and I’m not sure what Facebook has in store for the team, but I hope it’s as original and interesting as drop.io.
After evaluating Dropbox for several months, I decided to go all in and sign-up for a paid account. Easy, seamless backup, sharing and syncing. It’s handled storing my school assignments flawlessly, allowing my documents to live through one catastrophic operating system upgrade snafu. Check it out via the link above (full disclosure: it’s a referral link, so apparently I get some space, and you do too).
Intel and GE create joint venture for IT Healthcare -
“Intel and GE have announced a joint healthcare venture that marks a major step in the progress of Intel’s healthcare IT efforts…The new Intel/GE spinoff company has yet to be named, but the two companies will split ownership of it 50/50. The company will combine GE Healthcare’s Home Health division and Intel’s Digital Health Group, and it will launch later this year pending regulatory approval.”
Last week I was lucky enough to be able to attend a presentation by Grant Ingersoll to the RTP Semantic Web Group on Apache Mahout. Mahout is set of technologies designed to tackle machine learning problems in various clever ways, one of which is by using Apache Hadoop (hence the name, Mahout apparently means “elephant driver”).
Grant did a great job explaining the use cases for Mahout, describing how Google news, Netflix recommendations, Amazon suggestions and virtually every other feature advanced web applications have come to rely on machine learning.
While HTML5 has been widely touted as “the future of the web”, I think it’s important to remember that the content has to come from somewhere, no matter how beautifully rendered, and that increasingly the content will be the result of inferences created by software like Mahout. This is yet more incentive for me to continue plowing through Algorithms of the Intelligent Web.
Grant also spoke briefly about his new book Taming Text, which is all about extracting inferences from blobs of text, which strikes me as a highly useful set of related techniques to have on hand, given the amount of data-munging typical software development jobs inevitably require.
Thanks to Phil Rhodes for putting together this excellent presentation.
As someone who gets gadget fever on a regular basis, I found OSNews’s article describing the state of computer “recycling”, or what passes for it, very disturbing. Low or no safety standards for workers, shell charity organizations, and complete disregard for the environmental impact of discarded toxic waste are the norm in the foreign countries that receive our mountains iTrash.
The article mentions legal solutions to fix regulatory loopholes that allow this to go on in the United States, but more importantly it makes a solid argument for using refurbished equipment. Something I will have to consider before wandering the isles at Best Buy.
These pictures are courtesy of Basel Action Network