Friday, May 25, 2012

How do we heal medicine? @ TED.com

Atul Gawande: How do we heal medicine? | Video on TED.com:


... An aviation checklist, like this one for a single-engine plane, isn't a recipe for how to fly a plane, it's a reminder of the key things that get forgotten or missed if they're not checked.
...
We implemented this checklist in eight hospitals around the world, deliberately in places from rural Tanzania to the University of Washington in Seattle. We found that after they adopted it the complication rates fell 35 percent. It fell in every hospital it went into. The death rates fell 47 percent
...
We're all specialists now, even the primary care physicians. Everyone just has a piece of the care. But holding onto that structure we built around the daring, independence, self-sufficiency of each of those people has become a disaster. We have trained, hired and rewarded people to be cowboys. But it's pit crews that we need, pit crews for patients.
...
Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work — whether in healthcare, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty — is the great task of our generation as a whole.”

Building Windows 8 for the ARM processor architecture

A great and very detailed post about internals of Windows 8 by Steven Sinofsky, President of the Windows Division of Microsoft: Building Windows for the ARM processor architecture - Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs


"Windows on ARM, or WOA. WOA is a new member of the Windows family, much like Windows Server, Windows Embedded, or Windows Phone.

... Printer class driver. For Windows 8, we rearchitected the print infrastructure to add class driver support. The majority of printers selling today are supported using the class driver, which means you’ll be able to “plug and print” on WOA without additional drivers. While the new architecture was needed for many reasons, we had printing from WOA PCs in mind from the beginning."

Not only that new WinRT platfrom is "object oriented" (compared to Win32),
it transparently supports a few types of ARM CPUs in addition to variations of x86.

New Metro-style apps build by Visual Studio 11 will run on both x86 and ARM CPUs.
The "magic" happens before deploying trough Windows Store.
Apparently there will also be some limited "desktop mode" on ARM based devices,
with support for Office tools.

Download with self-paced training material used for Microsoft Windows 8 "Camps" Windows 8 Camp in a Box, Consumer Preview Edition

Suggestion by excellent Microsoft Evangelist Dave Isbitski on the camp: this is a great opportunity; forget everything you know, and learn this new great platform. By the way, out of 3 developers options

  • C++/XAML
  • .NET (C#)/XAML
  • HTML5/WinJS (JavaScript)
his proffered choice is WinJS, for flexibility of the language and wealth of libraries.

A brave new world of WinRT...