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Is Open Source A Development Model, Business Model, Or Something Else?
The OSD gives a clear definition of what open source software is, but doesn't provide much insight into how the adoption of open source affects a company's ability to build and deliver products or services that people want and need. Stated another way, there's still tremendous debate about the best ways to build a business based on open source. In this first of a multi-part series, I will lay the groundwork for understanding what products are, what product managers do, and how open source can be considered a supply chain. In future articles, I will go deeper into each of these topics, but I'll start by dissecting some common, but fundamentally confusing vocabulary.
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Open Source Tools Provide An Economic Advantage For Science
Free and open source software (FOSS) and the distributed digital manufacturing of free and open source hardware (FOSH) have shown great promise for developing custom scientific tools. For some time now, FOSH has provided scientists a high return on investment. In fact, my previous research in the Open Source Labreported substantial economic savings from using these technologies. However, the open source design paradigm has since grown by orders of magnitude; now, there are examples of open source technology for science in the vast majority of disciplines, and several resources, including the Journal of Open Hardware, are dedicated to publishing them.
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How Breaking My Back Led Me To Open Source
Open source gave a voice and a community to someone coping with the aftermath of a major injury, and eventually led to a new career...Breaking my back was a pivotal experience on many fronts. It scared the hell out of me. But the road to recovery helped me become a more resilient, courageous, and patient human being. Interestingly, it was this incident that also led me to the world of open source. Living with chronic pain is lonely, but I found my voice and a community via WordPress. Now, nearly eight years later, I'm working for the number one open source company in the world.
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Data Management for Large-scale COVID-19 Immunization: This is all not as simple as it seems
There is a global race for the development of a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Finding a vaccine that works and receives approval is only part of the process. There are a series of other steps that need to be taken so that the vaccine can be delivered. These include the mass production of the vaccine, shipment, administration and record-keeping. This may be even more complex as there may be several vaccines. In this article we review some of these issues with a particular focus on the United States.
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Extreme Wildfires Can Create Their Own Dangerous Weather, Including Fire Tornadoes - Here's How
It might sound like a bad movie, but extreme wildfires can create their own weather - including fire tornadoes. It happened in California as a heat wave helped to fuel hundreds of wildfires across the region, many of them sparked by lightning. One fiery funnel cloud on Aug. 15 was so powerful, the National Weather Service issued what's believed to be its first fire tornado warning. So, what has to happen for a wildfire to get so extreme that it spins off tornadoes? As professors who study wildfires and weather, we can offer some insights.
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Report on ONC’s Working Session on Patient Identity and Matching
On Monday, August 31, I attended the final Working Session on Patient Identity and Matching. This virtual event was hosted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC). This Working Session was a followup to an earlier session back in June 2020. The event last week had over 300 attendees and covered a wide range of topics and technologies related to patient identity and matching. These ONC Working Sessions are being driven by requirements that are part of the 21st Century Cures Act as well as a Congressional request from December 2019 to continue to "...evaluate the effectiveness of current [patient identity and matching] methods and recommend actions that increase the likelihood of an accurate match of patients to their health care data." Much of the focus of this study has been on whether a national patient identifier should be implemented in the US.
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The Strengths and Weaknesses of the HL7 FHIR Messaging Standard
It has been several years since we reviewed the progress of the HL7 FHIR standards adoption rate. Health Level Seven's (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is an emerging standard that has rapidly captured the mind-share of the Health Information Technology (HIT) standards community. FHIR is a standard that enables healthcare data sharing between systems in a manner that is more easily implemented and more expressive than previous HL7 standards such as HL7 Version 2, 3 and Clinical Document Architecture (CDA). Regardless of the version of HL7 standard used, the purpose of these standards is to send clinical data in messages, whether to a party inside or outside your organization. HL7 devises flexible message formats so the receiver of the message can open it up, know who sent it and why, and break it down into understandable segments and data fields.
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What Western States Can Learn From Native American Wildfire Management Strategies
News media coverage of wildfires commonly frames them as "natural disasters" - dangerous elements of the natural world over which humans have little control. The language of climate change, fear of fire and the sense that it has become inevitable can be overwhelming, leaving people with the view that little can be done to manage these events. But in fact, people aren't helpless. While fires can be dangerous, they are inevitable and necessary in many ecosystems, and humans have long adapted to them. Across North America, indigenous peoples have actively managed forest ecosystems through the use of fire. Euro-American settlers were struck by the rich biodiversity of California's forests, woodlands and prairies, but they didn't understand that indigenous people's use of fire was responsible for them.
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The Wrong Legacies of Health Information Technology
I read two articles this week that got me thinking, Robert Charette's "Inside the Hidden World of Legacy IT Systems" (IEEE Spectrum) and Douglas Holt's "Cultural Innovation" (Harvard Business Review). Both deal with what I'll call legacy thinking. It's a particular problem for healthcare...If you are in healthcare and rely on legacy systems, you're in trouble. If you are in healthcare and are not acutely aware of what your Achilles heel is, someone else is going to exploit it. Even if you are a new healthcare entrant with more modern technologies but still based on the current ideology, your impact is going to be limited.
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Approval Of A Coronavirus Vaccine Would Be Just The Beginning - Huge Production Challenges Could Cause Long Delays
The race for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine is well underway. It's tempting to assume that once the first vaccine is approved for human use, all the problems of this pandemic will be immediately solved. Unfortunately, that is not exactly the case. Developing a new vaccine is only the first part of the complex journey that's supposed to end with a return to some sort of normal life. Producing hundreds of millions of vaccines for the U.S. - and billions for the world as a whole - will be no small feat. There are many technical and economic challenges that will need to be overcome somehow to produce millions of vaccines as fast as possible.
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