Complaining about health care prices is nothing new. The medical component of CPI has been higher than the overall CPI for decades. As far back as 1989 Gerry Anderson and colleagues showed "It's the Prices, Stupid" that explained why our national spending was so high compared to other countries. More recently, Elizabeth Rosenthal detailed those prices in an series of reports in The New York Times. She recently followed those up with her incisive book An American Sickness. Dr. Rosenthal also illustrated some of the clever techniques used to wring the most money out of our pockets, such as the upcoding industry and tacking facility fees onto visits. As the saying goes, if you're sitting at a poker table and you can't figure out who the sucker is, it's you.
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How to Use Libraries.io Data from Millions of Open Source Projects
What if we applied the techniques Google applied to index the internet back in 1998 to the world of open source software? That's exactly the thought Andrew Nesbitt had in 2014 which lead to the creation of Libraries.io, an open source project for indexing other open source projects. This month Libraries.io released metadata on over 25 million open source projects. You can download it right now from Zenodo, but what can you do with it? To understand what is contained within this dataset, I'll take a quick look at how it's collected. Everything in Libraries.io begins with package managers. We index project metadata from 33 package managers, filling in gaps from their source repositories where we can. We parse project manifests—a gemfile, package.json, or similar—that includes code from other projects and stores the links between them...
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A Free, Open Resource to Solve Our Third World Problems
Corruption, poverty, war, hunger, healthcare, education, safety. These are only a few of the problems faced by people in developing countries. Many of these problems are caused by exclusion, fear, intimidation, broken infrastructure, and lack of money, resources, access to information, and tools. These are hard problems to solve but, as Theodore Roosevelt said: "Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty." At the core of open source are communities. Communities of like-minded individuals, working together, openly and freely sharing ideas and solutions for the benefit of others...
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How Linux and Makerspaces Can Strengthen Our Social Fabric
In recent years, we've seen the rise of makerspaces, a new social invention where people with shared interests, especially in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math), gather to work on projects and share ideas. I was intrigued when I learned about a makerspace in my community, because I had never heard of such a concept before. I've since learned that makerspaces offer so much more than just a place to learn and build. A well-run makerspace also knits together a community and its social fabric—and, most importantly, invites in people who might otherwise be marginalized...
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Kangaroos, Insurance Companies, and the Rising Cost of Healthcare
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When the Hacker Ethic Meets Old Ideas About Brand
Open organizations apply principles from open source software development more broadly. Existing organizations find the open approach appealing because it promises gains in productivity and efficiency—but openness may have farther-reaching consequences than we anticipate or intend. One influential set of open principles comes from Steven Levy's book about the early history of the computing revolution, Hackers. Levy lays out what he calls "the Hacker Ethic," and it begins with "the Hands-On Imperative"...
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A Left-Handed Software User's Plea
Left-handed people face many challenges in a right-hand dominated world. For the 10% of us who live under their oppression, it can be maddening. In the early 20th century, my left-handed grandfather was forced to write with his right hand in school, making his handwriting completely illegible. What would great lefties like George H.W. Bush, Bart Simpson, Lt. Cmdr. Data, Barack Obama, or Bill Gates think? At least we have advanced a little... but not enough...
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CoderDojo merges with the Raspberry Pi Foundation
In late May, CoderDojo Foundation, which runs a volunteer-led network of coding clubs for children around the world, announced that it was merging with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. This is a significant development that has tremendous potential to impact education, the maker movement, and the growth of coding around the world. By working together, Raspberry Pi and CoderDojo will create the world's largest effort to involve young people in computing. "This merger presents a huge amount of opportunity to learn from one another, share opportunities, and became a more robust and sustainable movement that is supporting safe spaces for children of all ages to get creative with technology," says CoderDojo executive director Giustina Mizzoni...
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What Does it Mean to Have an Open Mindset?
Successful companies are those that grow and expand. But bigger companies often need more managers. Excessive layers of management can instill cumbersome bureaucracy in a company, and bureaucracy can become a significant problem for companies when it can causes wasteful resource allocation, decreases productivity, and decelerates innovation. We can observe that open thinking can challenge or overcome potential problems of bureaucracy. Even if your company isn't a software company, it's still possible to adopt the mindset prevalent in free and open source software communities and instill openness within your company's culture...
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Tips and Top Presentations from Write the Docs Portland 2017
Imagine a room full of smart, funny, and quirky people who all love documentation, technology, and... food. Put all that together and you have Write the Docs (WTD) in Portland—a community conference where documentarians meet to discuss the things we love the most. WTD is a direct descendant of Read the Docs, a site that hosts documentation of open source software. Because of its origin in the open source movement, WTD is open to a variety of job titles who all care about documentation and clear communication. This year, we had QA people, librarians, software developers, and, of course, technical writers and editors, with some User eXperience (UX) people thrown in for good measure...
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4 Easy Ways to Work Toward a Zero Trust Security Model
There has been a lot of talk about zero trust networks lately, but little consensus about what they actually are. Similar to DevOps or software defined networking, that zero trust means something a little different to everyone is becoming clear. That said, there is one thing we can all agree on: The network cannot be trusted. At its core, zero trust is a security model. Any system operating in a way that completely removes trust from the underlying network is said to be conformant to the model. As you might imagine, there are many ways to accomplish this goal, some more robust than others. All zero trust implementations, however, rely on extensive authentication and authorization processes that can be sprinkled liberally throughout the infrastructure...
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