Category Archives: New Media

The Future of Health Applications

I had an interesting conversation with my med student daughter in law today. I proposed the question: what if your hospital had the opportunity to order everything it needed to meet the needs of everyone it serves? We wondered how much boost to economic ecology such an order would create. Twenty thousand jobs perhaps. We didn’t know. Of course, the problem is that hospitals are not self-sustaining (they could never be). Or is this incorrect?

I’ve had my fill of health care over the last few months. The care was fantastic. But I have excellent coverage and don’t really worry about how to pay, as I’ve been paying into my coverage for almost 15 years month after month, month after month. I’ve had to tell several stories over and over to incredibly intelligent strangers: medical histories, drug reactions, aches and pains, habits (how much a wine?). With the relevant and appropriate application, a technician or nurse could click a button and answer a question. If something comes up, that same person could add to the identity of the patient and somewhere along the way things would flesh themselves out with the right notifications. We need to get over privacy and legal roadblocks.

When will my PCP learn about a concerning polyp? I could call him tomorrow and tell him. But he’d have questions I couldn’t answer. We conclude this: good care is about good information and even better systems for users. This should be a guide for health applications, iPad or no iPad.

New Media project: let’s build care applications.

Back to Multiplatform Publishing: Question for Writers and Developers

One of the qualms of instruction is that often you must depart an ongoing project and return to it asking, “What was I doing? What had I planned?”

This is why persistent weblog use is a good thing. (And Literary Arts journals. I thank Jesse Abbot for the use of that term in order to tank the term “creative writing”). In any event I’ll be digging back into the frameworks issue by creating templates in Tinderbox for output across the publishing ecology and considering the validity of Objective C in the project and available XML Android adaptation. Then there’s jQuery.

The big question is this and if you have suggestions I’d love to hear them. Let’s say you’re a writer or a developer and you want to make your project available to readers and users of multiple devices:

1. Is the solution to build on the web?
2. Is the solution to build on the device specific paradigm?
3. What’s the essential question as it would seem that application developing appears to be crunching toward androgyny?

Marie Bjerede on Phones in the Classroom

Practically speaking, I’m finding verification and term and concept searching in the classroom quite handy. I encourage laptop and smart device use. Today we had to look up some questionable statists in an article from a student paper, finding interesting issues to spring from. The laptops and the cell phones are an interesting addition to student participation as this technology is much more ergonomic than a big screen at the front of the room. The inclusion issue, which is still questionable, I think, also augments realtime discussion: So this at O’Reilly:

A final observation is that having a digitally mediated component to the learning environment can be surprisingly inclusive. As teachers in Project K-Nect began to experiment with using the blogs and instant messaging for discussing math in the classroom, an unexpected (to us) dynamic emerged. It turns out that many kids who don’t like speaking up in class are completely comfortable speaking up online. Students who don’t like to raise their hands use the devices to ask questions or participate in collaborative problem solving. There appears to be something democratizing about having a “back channel” as part of the learning environment.

I find it interesting that not one of my Contemporary Fiction students has brought a laptop to class.

Health Care and Narrative

This is a typical (real) story. S goes to the PCP for Ailment A and Ailment A proves too much for the PCP (Primary Care Physician). So the PCP refers S to a Specialist. Maybe it’s a hernia, maybe some strange growth inside or out. S goes to the Specialist and must tell the story from start to finish, with all the inaccuracies and hearsay (I say what I heard) this portends, as what’s really being conveyed (and this is the important part) are the observations of the PCP through the medium of the patient.

S wonders (not, where are the hypertexts) but where are the records and why weren’t they provided to all the people who need to know or should know.

The PCP’s Observations
The PCP knows the story and the narrative. The PCP has seen the evidence and has worked through a diagnosis. Diagnosis (Greek) means to discern, distinguish, and, more specifically, to take something apart for the purposes of knowing (gnosis). It implies, in medical application, lots of work and responsibility in the form of a narrative. It’s not conjecture, which is a toss, or interpretation, which is a specific kind of structured utterance, which is what patient’s bring the PCP in the first place, like a driver pushing their auto into the shop and sounding out the problem to the mechanic and the mechanic responding with nods.

The Patient’s Observations
The patient doesn’t really observe anything, as Ailment A is inside and can’t be seen.

The Solution
The PCP clicks a button and shoots “the narrative” to the Specialist with “backstory” in tow, so that simple questions, such as “what are you allergic to,” are ready at hand on the reading machine.

We don’t need to strive for efficiency. We just need to think with a healthy dose of theory, practicality, and humanism, and use the tools we have.

Disagreements?

Multiplatform Publishing

This semester (as time for me is broken into semesters) I’ll be working on taking a few documents through a multiplatform publishing work flow. The first objective will be take all the Leon stories from the 100 Days project and make them available on mobile, e-reader, and standard screen.

The core technologies are HTML, XML, CSS3, and javascript, with some dipping into Objective C for experiments with applications. I have mixed feelings about building device-specific apps but working with Xcode is fairly straightforward and the time spent won’t be wasted.

I was a little surprised at the ease with which EPUB handled html documents. Tinderbox, therefore, will play a key role in producing hypertext content. The content will then be tailored for mobile, iPad, web, and other reading devices. The territory looks pretty interesting at the moment.

Clay Shirky on how has the internet changed thinking

Clay Shirky writes

As we know from arXiv.org, the 20th century model of publishing is inadequate to the kind of sharing possible today. As we know from Wikipedia, post-hoc peer review can support astonishing creations of shared value. As we know from the search for Mersenne Primes, whole branches of mathematical exploration are now best taken on by groups. As we know from Open Source efforts like Linux, collaboration between loosely joined parties can work at scales and over timeframes previously unimagined. As we know from NASA clickworkers, groups of amateurs can sometimes replace single experts. As we know from Patients Like Me, patient involvement accelerates medical research. And so on.

The beneficiaries of the system where making things public was a privileged activity, whether academics or politicians, reporters or doctors, will complain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake; the change they fear is already in the past. The real action is elsewhere.

The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will only reveal itself when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of ‘comes from everyone’ and ‘goes everywhere.’) We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won’t matter much, but the norms we set will.

Laments, Forecasts, and Logic

Over the past several weeks I’ve been watching Journalism, the Humanities, and the Marketplace wonder about itself. We have Tiger Woods to watch and now a variety of gripes about the Edwards’ and “what was really going on.” The news this morning is a round table expressing justifications for the story. Nothing about trivia.

In the larger context, we need to think hard about markets in their broadest sense: ideas, goods and services, information, energy. The jobs figures still suck but in my estimation this has a lot to do with players sitting on their hands wondering what Mr/Ms Entertainment will do next, what new revelations will come, or about the fate of Google’s new phone. Google and Apple are apparently doing something, while, according to one speaker on a Sunday morning show, “businesses are reluctant . . . . and for good reason.” Nobody asked: what the hell are you talking about?

Kindle, Nook or Apple tablet? Should we wonder about the device already or about what goes in the thing: convention, links, other media. This headline from the Washington Post is an instance of a problem in logic: “U.S. job loss report is blow to still-fragile recovery” link. How does this make sense? The “report” is “blowing” the “recovery.”

One trend I’ve noticed in the camp who launched Obama into office is to kick back and wait for him to do something, to solve several pressing matters. A powerful narrative in the press (for most people this means TV World) at the moment is that Democrats will not come out for Congressional voting. Wow do we have short memories. Really, since when is everything Obama’s problem?

Can Hypertext Narrative Translate?

Stacey Mason at HTLit asks an interesting question:

And then it occurred to me: Perhaps for the first time, we’re moving into narrative media that are not backwards-compatible. The written word can be spoken, the printed word written, movies can be translated to books, but games and hypertext narrative don’t go backwards.

I disagree but on nuanced questions.

I would submit that

1. The dramatic questions are different: what story would we tell with the latest rendering of Prince of Persia, given the game?

2. What path would we follow creating a script for the film version of Patchwork Girl? Or would we local a generalized core?

I would suggest that compatibility would work fine, if we synthesize PG and reconsider the narrative arc of the game. But these films would not “be” the original, as I disagree with the notion of adaptation by definition. There are no adaptations. There are narrative versions, however.

On Digital Vision

Physorg on the question of computer vision:

“Reverse engineering a biological visual system—a system with hundreds of millions of processing units—and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task,” says Cox. “It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out how to put all the parts together so that they can do what our brains can do.”

“While studying the brain has yielded critical information about how the brain is wired, we currently don’t have enough information to build a computer system that works like the brain does,” adds Pinto. “Even if we take all of the clues that we have available from experimental neuroscience, there is still an enormous range of possible models for us to explore.”