In my ongoing quest to track The Popularity of Data Science Software, I've just updated my analysis of the job market. To save you from reading the entire tome, I'm reproducing that section here.One of the best ways to measure the popularity or market share of software for data science is to count the number of job advertisements that highlight knowledge of each as a requirement. Job ads are rich in information and are backed by money, so they are perhaps the best measure of how popular each software is now. Plots of change in job demand give us a good idea of what is likely to become more popular in the future. Read More »

We are, it appears, shocked -- shocked! -- that there are "surprise" bills in healthcare. That is, bills from out-of-network healthcare professionals, even when patients thought they were going to in-network professionals/facilities. The problem is bad enough that even our deeply divided Congress has bipartisan agreement that it should act (although whether it will, of course, remains to be seen). Of course, surprise billing shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows much about healthcare; it is more of a symptom of problems with our healthcare system than a problem itself. Kaiser Health News/NPR deserve much credit for getting more attention for the issue, with their Bill of the Month crowdsourced investigation.

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A key element of public health surveillance is the reporting of infectious and certain non-infectious conditions to state, local, and tribal public health agencies (PHA) around the United States. Historically, there have been a number of key challenges with the process of case reporting that is pervasive in the United States today. To help overcome some of these barriers, an effort has been underway to move the process of case reporting to electronic. A key component of the emerging electronic care reporting (eCR) strategy is the use of clinical decision support (CDS) to help clinical care organizations determine if a reportable condition is present in a patient's record. Multiple approaches have been identified for this CDS service, including a centralized model being implemented today, and several distributed options which will likely become equally viable. Given the size, diversity, and decentralized nature of healthcare enterprises, it is likely that all three approaches for CDS discussed in this article will be deployed simultaneously.

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We were able to leverage a number of open source geospatial tools, such as QGIS, GDAL/OGR, and the PostGIS extension to the PostgreSQL open source relational database, in order to control the quality of the geospatial data at hand. These tools also helped us carry out the types of spatial analysis necessary to determine relationships between the various objects of value and, on the one hand, the potential hydropower projects, and on the other, the possible alternative transmission corridors. The key to hydroelectric capacity planning in Chile is the ability to generate the maximum amount of electricity, given certain restrictions, while assuring a fixed level of interaction with objects of value.

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