Open source medicine

Open sourcing can be related to the idea of sharing information. The best information sources of out time are the open content medias of the internet like Wikis and social medias  where people can come and edit the contents posted by some one some other time in order to in-reach the information regarding specific topics.

since the Internet open sourcing has been used in many other industries than software production. Industries like product design, furniture design, graphics design, architectural design and fashion design. And recently the idea is starting to appear in fields like urban design. many big institution like MIT are making deep researches on how to make open sourcing an alternative for the planning industry. They have came up with open source software products to help make better urban design model.

Open source furniture

The Open Source Urban Planning Platform I want to talk about on this article is not like the one mentioned above. The plat form is an on-line media of collaboration between professional and ordinary citizens which will allow people to come together virtually and design communities. It is like Wikipedia of urban design (community Planning) where professionals can add and edit contents to enhance the final out put. It will allow visions to be developed in to a sound master plans which have so many layers. It could have discussion forums to help people and decision makers gather ideas and comments on topics of specific concerns. The platform could also be used to collect data for different researches and experimentation on an urban scale. For example: planners could post two different ideas to make choices and have perspectives form other professionals and other people.

pysalgraph

This kinds of platforms could help other professionals like economists and politicians contribute polices and reform ideas that would support the planner’s idea to be buy-able by decision makers. It would be a way to harvest the most bright minds in all the fields involved. It is a way to bring the most sustainable ideas in to our cities. If this kind of collaboration is possible it will make sure our cities would have a more sustainable, realistic master plans that are proven before they are realized.

Who knows may be the future of urbanization may is in open sourcing.

Open Source Medicine is a group dedicated to technology-based improvements within the community and medical school. One of major current projects is WikiNotes: a wikipedia for all of our notes, and a way for students to clarify poorly assembled lectures. Don’t act like you’ve never come across a poorly prepared professor or guest lecturer.

Because this is the 21st century, and the internet is by far the easiest and fastest way to share information, we created WikiNotes for students to have a hand in their education. This summer we’ve been recruiting more students to put up lectures.

Unfortunately I can’t share the website with you- well, I can, but you can’t log in unless you’re a WSU SOM kid- because of copyright issues on the material. But, if you’re a WSU SOM student you can contribute this summer. For example, I am working on uploading the M2 curriculum right now. It’s completely over my head, but I just need to enter the text onto the page.

Or, if you’re at another medical school and you think this is something that would benefit you and your classmates, you can talk to us about starting an Open Source Medicine group at your school. We believe all innovations in medicine should be open source and shared. We’ll give you the format for our WikiNotes and you can improve not only your education, but for other students who come. Who doesn’t want to leave their medical school a better place than they found it?

WikiNotes home page

Perhaps the most interesting article from the point of view of this blog is called Open prediction – How sports fans can help save the world. It’s about On the Record Sports, a sports prediction site where sports fans make open predictions, visible to all. The idea is that by aggregating predictions from lots of users (you could call it crowdsourced predictions), you are likely to get a better prediction than if you had asked a single, though knowledgeable, person. However, since the predictions are all open, you can also track your own (and others’) prediction performance and relate it to everyone else’s.

The fact that large groups of people tend to to well when their guesses are combined is well-known and has been discussed at length in, for example, Ian Ayres’ book Supercrunchers. Even aggregations of different prediction algorithms (such as in the machine learning techniques bagging and boosting) usually work well – as evidenced by the recently completed NetFlix competition – presumably because algorithms (like people) make prediction errors due to slightly different biases, which can be smoothed out in a combined approach.

On The Record Sports may therefore soon be sitting on a very interesting database of aggregated predictions. (At what point will they just go to the bookmaker and bet the farm using the crowdsourced predictions?) The h+ article mentions that the company has a pending patent related to the notion of prediction as entertainment, which sounds intriguing. Of course, prediction can be a sport in itself, as the article points out.

All in all, worth checking out.

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Patients aren’t learning from Web sites — they’re learning from each other. The shift is nothing less than “the democratization of health care”- The New York Times

They have a whole special edition on decoding our health and how information technology is playing a more and more important role. It’s a worthwhile read. Sorry, I couldn’t come up with anything more original today. Busy day at school, I guess it’s expected.