Is EU changing its view on open standards?

By rmjlsea, on 3 November 2009

According to this piece from Glyn Moody, a leaked version of European Interoperability Framework is now describing openness as something that is a little bit closed compared to what previous version has described.

It appears the definition of openness is shifted more towards a personal and institutional behaviour, leaving the open source software out of the definition. This is quite the opposite of what I am seeing in UK and in medical informatics community. People seem to be demanding open source, even if they are not going to use the source code. Of course, the actual outcomes of this is another topic I’d like to handle in a seperate post, but this leaked report just does not seem to reflect the approach that I am seeing.

Instantiations donates WindowBuilder Pro licence to Opereffa project

By rmjlsea, on 20 October 2009

For those who have not heard about them, Instantiations is a software company which builds high quality development tools. Especially if you are using Eclipse for Java development, and you have to build user interfaces, their WindowBuilder Pro tool is quite likely the best tool you can buy. Also if you are developing Eclipse plugins with views and editors, you can earn yourself a lot of time using WindowBuilder Pro, since its SWT support lets you create Eclipse views much faster than hand crafting them.

I have lots of tooling to develop in Eclipse, in the context of Opereffa, and this is where Instantiations’ policy of donating licenses  to open source projects comes in really handy.  We now have a donated license for WindowBuilder pro, and the way it works allows us to release source code without any dependencies to any proprietary resources. It feels really good to have access to first class tools for critical tasks, and you don’t experience this feeling all the time if you are working in the open source domain. Thanks to Instantiations for their kind help to our research project.

Trouble in the Americas for electronic healthcare systems

By Henry W W Potts, on 16 October 2009

Big IT projects in health have a poor track record, as anyone following the UK’s Connecting for Health project knows. On the other side of the Atlantic, we’ve seen the same hopeful enthusiasm for big IT projects, and the same disappointments are following.

Two recent news articles make for valuable reading here. Justin Hunter in Canada’s Globe and Mail describes the scandals in British Columbia and Ontario with their e-health systems. Read her article here. “Governments can get into a “bagful of trouble” when they rush to embrace technology they don’t really understand,” she writes.

Meanwhile, Fred Schulte in the Huffington Post discusses spiralling cost estimates in the US. Read his article here. A familiar story?

School of Life & Medical Sciences Newsletter

By Henry W W Potts, on 8 October 2009

Issue 5 (Nov 2009) of UCL’s School of Life & Medical Sciences Newsletter is now out. There are mentions of CHIME’s Prof. Dipak Kalra (p. 10) and Dr Henry Potts (p. 13) with news of new grant awards. There’s also news of CHIME collaborators like Prof. Jane Dacre, Prof. Ann Blandford, Dr Rebeccah Slater, Dr Jayne Kavanagh and others.

UCL in top 5 in world’s top 100 universities

By rmjlsea, on 8 October 2009

It appears UCL’s trend in the last years has not changed. Guardian also wrote about the new Times Higher Education list, in which UCL has moved to 4th place, leaving Imperial College and Oxford behind.