Health Informatics

Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has posted XML, HTML, JSON – Choosing the Right Format for Legislative Text, at Legix.info. Here are excerpts: I find I’m often talking about an information model and XML as if they’re the same thing. However, there is no reason to tie these two things together as one. Instead, we should look at the information model in terms of the information it represents and let the manner in which we express that information be a separate concern. In the last few weeks I have found myself discussing alternative forms of representing legislative information with three people – chatting with Eric Mill at the Sunlight Foundation about HTML microformats (look for a blog from him on this topic soon), Daniel Bennett regarding microdata, and Ari Hershowitz regarding JSON. I thought I would try and open up a discussion on this topic by shedding some light on it. If we can strip away the discussion of the information model and instead focus on the representation, perhaps we can agree on which formats are better for which applications. Is a format a good storage format, a good transport format, a good analysis/programming format, or a good all-around format? [...] Several examples are given. Then, Grant writes: [...] There are many different ways of representing the same legislative model – each with its own strength and weaknesses. Different consumers have different needs. While XML is a good all-around format, it also brings with it some degree of sophistication and complexity that many information consumers simply don’t need to tackle. It should be possible, as a consumer, to specify the form of the information that most closely fits my need and have the legislative data source deliver it to me in that format. [...] What do you think? For more details, please see the complete post. HT @arihersh Filed under: Applications Tagged: Ari Hershowitz, Daniel Bennett, Eric Mill, Grant Vergottini, HTML and legislative data, HTML for legislation, JSON and legal data, JSON and legal information, JSON and legislative data, JSON for legislation, Legal metadata, Legal structural metadata, Legal XML, Legislative data, Legislative HTML, Legislative metadata, Legislative structural metadata, Legislative XML, Legix.info, XML and legislative data, XML for legislation

Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation has posted Integrating the US’ Documents, at the Sunlight Foundation Blog. Here is an excerpt: A few weeks ago, we integrated the full text of federal bills and regulations into our alert system, Scout. Now, if you visit CISPA or a fascinating cotton rule, you’ll see the original document – nicely formatted, but also well-integrated into Scout’s layout. There are a lot of good reasons to integrate the text this way: we want you to see why we alerted you to a document without having to jump off-site, and without clunky iframes. As importantly, we wanted to do this in a way that would be easily reusable by other projects and people. So we built a tool called us-documents that makes it possible for anyone to do this with federal bills and regulations. It’s available as a Ruby gem, and comes with a command line tool so that you can use it with Python, Node, or any other language. It lives inside the unitedstates project at unitedstates/documents, and is entirely public domain. [..] For more details, including an example of the HTML, please see the complete post. HT @konklone Filed under: Applications, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Eric Mill, Formatting legislation, Formatting regulations, Formatting tools for legislation, Formatting tools for regulations, Free access to law, github/unitedstates, Integration tools for legislative data, Integration tools for regulations, Legislative information systems, Public access to legal information, Ruby gems for legislative data, Ruby gems for regulatory data, Ruby gems in regulatory information systems, Ruby in legislative information systems, Sunlight Foundation Blog

The U.S. House of Representatives will hold its second Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, 22 May 2013, in Washington, DC. Click here for the conference agenda. The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #ldtc Here is an excerpt from Daniel Schuman’s description of the event: The House of Representatives will hold its second annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference on Wednesday, May 22, in the Capitol Visitor Center Auditorium. Last year’s conference was a tremendous success, bringing together the government insiders that create and publish legislative data with the public that consumes and reuses the information. Here’s video from the 2012 conference. The 2013 conference is expected to address the “use and future of legislative data,” and will cover topics including electronic legislative archiving, XML and metadata standards, and updates on beta.congress.gov. Of course, like last year, the most important part of the conference will be the conversations that take place among the participants. The House’s leadership deserves real credit for holding the conference and inviting the public to participate. Like last year, this year’s all-day event is open to the public. [...] r Dr. Joshua Tauberer tells us: “I’ll be formally introducing my #OpenGovData Maturity Model at the conference.” After the conference, several organizations presenting at the conference, including the Sunlight Foundation, will hold a happy hour, for which you can RSVP here. HT @danielschuman Filed under: Conference Announcements, Conference resources, Data sets Tagged: #freeTHOMAS, Daniel Schuman, Free access to law, House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference 2013, Joshua Tauberer, LDTC, Legal open government data, Open legislative data, Public access to legal information, Public access to legislative data

A medical educator recently argued in her blog that medical school admissions requirements should minimize requirements in math and science topics, especially areas like calculus and physics. There is no question that medicine, and even informatics for that matter, require knowledge and competency in many areas beyond math and science.However, the problem with the math we teach to potential healthcare professionals and informaticians, indeed to everyone in society, is that we teach the wrong math. I took three semesters of calculus in college and can say that I have almost never used any of it. On the other hand, I had almost no education in statistics, a type of math I use not only in my work, but also in my function as an informed citizen. Indeed, most healthcare professionals, whether clinicians or researchers, use statistics daily. Likewise, as thoughtful citizens in society, we also encounter statistics daily in the news and other aspects of our lives.For these reasons, I believe that statistics should be a core competency of every citizen in the modern world.It is not even the mathematics in statistics that are most important, but rather the concepts and the thinking they engender. Every citizen in the world should understand the basic concepts of inferential statistics and be able to answer such questions as:What does statistical significance mean? How is it different from a clinical (not necessarily in the medical context) significance?What is the difference between absolute and relative risk? What is the meaning of large relative risk differences in the setting of small absolute risk?In health-related topics, how do we discern and compare different types of health risks?Also in health, what do sensitivity and specificity of diagnostic tests mean, and how does prevalence impact the risk of disease in the face of positive or negative diagnostic tests?One of the most articulate advocates of this view is John Allen Paulos, whose books Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper inform us why basic numeracy and statistical competency are so important. These kinds of engaging writings, and basic education about statistics, should be a part of every high school education, not to mention in education of clinicians and informaticians.

Boys win Lego award for medication reminder robot and app (Ireland) | Telehealth and Telecare Aware

Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media (where I’m a member of the External Advisory Board) just published their social media guidelines in a video.

Video from the UK Department of Health "Digital Challenge" project:

The Cardiff University Centre for Language and Communication has made available FuzzyLaw, an online collection of “lay-people’s explanations of legal terms.” Here is the description from the project’s Website: FuzzyLaw has gathered explanations of legal terms from members of the public in order to get a sense of what the ‘person on the street’ has in mind when they think of a legal term. By making lay-people’s explanations of legal terms available to interpreters, police and other legal professionals, we hope to stimulate debate and learning about word meaning, public understanding of law and the nature of explanation. The explanations gathered in FuzzyLaw are unusual in that they are provided by members of the public. These people, all aged over 18, regard themselves as ‘native speakers’, ‘first language speakers’ and ‘mother tongue’ speakers of English and have lived in England and/or Wales for 10 years or more. We might therefore expect that they will understand English legal terminology as well as any member of the public might. No one who has contributed has ever worked in the criminal law system or as an interpreter or translator. They therefore bring no special expertise to the task of explanation, beyond whatever their daily life has provided. We have gathered explanations for 37 words in total. You can see a sample of these explanations on FuzzyLaw. The sample of explanations is regularly updated. You can also read responses to the terms and the explanations from mainly interpreters, police officers and academics. You are warmly invited to add your own responses and join in the discussion of each and every word. Check back regularly to see how discussions develop and consider bookmarking the site for future visits. The site also contains commentaries on interesting phenomena which have emerged through the site. You can respond to the commentaries too on that page, contributing to the developing research project. FuzzyLaw is based in Cardiff, Wales, and explores English words as they are used in the criminal legal system of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The examples and discussions that you will find here are, however, also relevant to languages other than English, legal jurisdictions around the world, and legal settings beyond only criminal law. This is because these examples and discussions concern meaning and explore words in a variety of contexts of use in the law. [...] For more details please see the FuzzyLaw Website. HT @SquareLaw Filed under: Data sets Tagged: Cardiff University Centre for Language and Communication, Citizens' explanations of criminal law terms, Citizens' explanations of legal language, Citizens' explanations of legal words, Citizens' understanding of legal words, Citizens' understandings of criminal law terms, Citizens' understandings of legal language, Citizens' understandings of legal words, Criminal law terminology, Criminal law terms, Fuzzy Law, FuzzyLaw, Lay persons' explanations of criminal law terms, Lay persons' explanations of legal language, Lay persons' explanations of legal words, Lay persons' understandings of criminal law terms, Lay persons' understandings of legal language, Lay persons' understandings of legal words, Legal communication, Legal language

Dr. Rinke Hoekstra of the Leibniz Center for Law has posted a dataset entitled A Network Analysis of Dutch Regulations. Here is the description: This fileset contains two networks (CSV files) of citations between Dutch regulations stored on the MetaLex Document Server, at the document level, and at the article level. We ran several network analysis measures over these networks (stored again in two CSV files) and provide two visualisations of the networks (size is PageRank, color is given by Module). This is an accompaniment to a submission to the Network Analysis in Law workshop of ICAIL 2013. Filed under: Data sets Tagged: Citation Networks, ICAIL, ICAIL 2013, Legal citation networks, Legal citations, Legislative information systems, Network Analysis in Law Workshop, Network Analysis in Law Workshop 2013, Network Analysis of Dutch Regulations, Regulatory information systems, Rinke Hoekstra

Bhuvaneswari Raman of the French Institute of Pondicherry has published The Rhetoric and Reality of Transparency: Transparent Information, Opaque City Spaces and the Empowerment Question, Journal of Community Informatics, 8(2), article 866 (2012). The paper reports results of, among other things, an ethnographic study of an Indian project to digitize land title records. Here is the abstract: This paper examines the purported links between transparency, citizens’ participation and empowerment through a focus on the governance of spatial information in Indian cities. It suggests that the data transparency paradigm need to be critically examined as the effects of data visibility and mobility differ according to the nature of information disclosed and conflicts surrounding it. Both information and technology that supports it visibility are embedded in power relations. Three themes are elaborated in the paper namely, the continued difficulty with retrieving information on land and territory; the complexities involved in capturing and representing accurately the dynamics of territory use and ownership claims; and the emerging governmentality relating to spatial governance that renders power opaque. Filed under: Articles and papers Tagged: Bhuvaneswari Raman, Digital land records, Electronic land records, Ethnographic methods in legal informatics, Ethnographic studies of legal information, Journal of Community Informatics, Land registries, Qualitative methods in legal informatics, Qualitative methods in legal informatics research, Real property information systems