Fortnightly Mailing

Using a mobile phone for disease diagnosis

The 17 May Economist has  a piece about how simple accessories can turn mobile phones into useful medical devices. The prompt for the article is work led by Dan Fletcher at the University of California. Here is an extract from the Telemicroscopy for Disease Diagnosis web site, with a picture of the prototype mobile phone microscope and an image of a blood sample taken with the device. (Seeing these pictures led me successfully to use some small binoculars as a telephoto lens for the camera on a phone.)

"The goal of this project is to bring modern diagnostic testing to remote regions cheaply and efficiently with telemicroscopy. The ability to capture images of, for example, malarial blood samples, infected skin, or ulcerous lesions, and then to send those images for remote diagnosis could drastically reduce both the cost and time of performing critical disease diagnosis – as well as provide early warning of outbreaks – in poverty stricken regions of the globe. In many developing countries with the greatest health needs, the infrastructure for cellular phones is expanding rapidly, opening the door for greater use of cell-phone-based healthcare devices. The project is actively developing a second-generation device for field testing in 2008."

 

Blackboard v. Desire2Learn: The First Final Judgment

Long, fascinating (for me, anyway) post by Jim Farmer on Michael Feldstein's e-Literate, summarising the current state of "play" between Blackboard and Desire2Learn. You get the impression that several parties are on the hook in different ways. Desire2Learn, most obviously; a substantial number of Desire2Learn's clients in the US, who, to be free of risk will need to start using the revised (non infringing) version 8.3 of Desire2Learn's software, which may or may not be as functional as the (infringing) earlier version (this assumes that the revised version will not itself be judged to infringe); and Blackboard, which, without a settlement with Desire2Learn, will struggle to avoid being seen as the author of the misfortune of those Desire2Learn clients (and their students), as well as having used a software patent (viewed by many as dubious) to put the squeeze on its main non Open Source competitor.

Something "generative" to try at home with a Wii Controller

Johnny Chung Lee is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Following up on Donald Clark's "$50 whiteboard - honestly", here is Lee's Wii projects page, from which you can find out how to use a Wii Controller (£30 from Amazon, say - you do not need a Wii games console) in various ways, including as the sensor in an interactive white-board. Excerpt:

"As of September 2007, Nintendo has sold over 13 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated. It contains a 1024x768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC "webcam" available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an expansion port for even more capability. These projects are an effort to explore and demonstrate applications that the millions of Wii Remotes in world readily support."

In the continuation post is a lucid video-explanation by Johnny Lee of the white-board project. As an aside, what Lee is doing is a really good example of the "generativity" of the Internet and some of the devices that connect to it  (that is, devices being tinkered with, openly innovated with, and used generally in ways not envisaged by their suppliers, with the Internet used to spread know-how) which  Jonathan Zittrain describes, and defends, in "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It".

Understanding the Web a.k.a. Web Science - interesting article in a meaty issue of the ALT Newsletter

The Spring 2008 ALT* Newsletter has plenty of meat in it, including:

• a piece by Southampton University's Wendy Hall and Keiran O'Hara (from which a version of the above diagram is taken) discussing Web Science, and reporting in the Web Science Research Initiative;
• Dick Moore of Ufi's In-source, out-source, open-source, right-source - running a service not a system, about the heavyweight infrastructure underpinning learndirect’s learner management system (LMS), learndirect’s service characteristics, and the importance of what Dick calls ‘right sourcing’ in Ufi's technology choices;
• a piece by John Falchi, Chief Program Strategist with IMS, about student textbook use and pricing, and the role of the IMS "Common Cartridge" specification in enabling text book content to be (more cheaply) distributed digitally to students.

* I work for ALT half-time.

Web 2.0 Rights intellectual property toolkit

Here is a new and useful looking "IP Toolkit", part of a newish JISC-funded project that seeks to deal with the following sorts of questions:

• Do IP rights exist in a virtual world and, if so,  who owns them?
• Who owns the rights in works that are a result of collective collaboration?
• What happens if you can’t find the rights holders?
• Can rights be given up, and if so how?
• How can risks associated with content reuse be sensibly managed?

The toolkit provides extensive practical guidance under the following main headings:

1. Basic information about the IP and Web2.0 landscape
2. Practical IP tools for projects engaging with Web2.0
3. Template licences and model releases, covering “Rights in” and “Rights Out”)