mHealth is widely regarded as the application of mobile technology to health. This is a useful simplification especially to the uninitiated and the unsuspecting…
It doesn’t do justice to what is ‘mobile’ and socially ‘mobilized’ in mhealth, thereby presupposing a simplistic technologically deterministic result.

I was just thinking that the key feature in the practice of mobile communication in health is connectivity rather than mobility, especially in the context of developing settings. Of course, connectivity becomes an issue when mobility arises.

But look back and think: haven’t individuals and communities been mobile from time immemorial? Haven’t technologies been mobile in themselves? walking around the surface of this crust we call the earth?
What mobiles and telecommunications introduce to use now is mainly connectivity, accessibility on the go. It is the increased individualized capacity to access global and local networks from any place and any time that is making much difference.

We need to begin to foster this phenomenon for health, allowing access to health-related information to everyone. That should move us closer to meeting the MDGs (if you don’t know what that means, chances are that you don’t need it…lol).

This is one of the major ways we should develop the mHealth space.

Ime Asangansi is an mHealth researcher based in Nigeria. He is a research fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway.

David Diop

Africa my Africa
Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs
Africa of whom my grandmother sings
On the banks of the distant river
I have never known you
But your blood flows in my veins
Your beautiful black blood that irrigates the fields
The blood of your sweat
The sweat of your work
The work of your slavery
Africa, tell me Africa
Is this your back that is unbent
This back that never breaks under the weight of humiliation
This back trembling with red scars
And saying no to the whip under the midday sun
But a grave voice answers me
Impetuous child that tree, young and strong
That tree over there
Splendidly alone amidst white and faded flowers
That is your Africa springing up anew
Springing up patiently, obstinately
Whose fruit bit by bit acquires
The bitter taste of liberty.

http://blogginginparis.wordpress.com/2004/08/22/afrique-africa-by-david-diop-1927-1960/

HISP Literature

4 links

IFI working papers
http://www.ifi.uio.no/research/groups/gi/working.html

GI Group Thesis – 20

HISP.info Research Papers

Design Group – Jens

I made some small list of call for papers I know of.
See at: http://tinyurl.com/iscall4papers

Please feel free to add and edit at: http://tinyurl.com/editIS Anyone can edit

Great overview of today’s web application world

http://www.laliluna.de/the-web-framework-evaluation.html

Look at your computer setup and imagine that you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you’re in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right – a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the parts up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn’t even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500). That way it’s accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can use it to make another and give that one to a friend…

Trying grails for an sms-based health data reporting web application. Lest I forget how I started playing around…

Groovy

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=org.codehaus.groovy.maven.archetypes
-DarchetypeArtifactId=gmaven-archetype-basic

http://groovy.codehaus.org/GMaven+-+Building+Groovy+Projects

Grails

http://forge.octo.com/maven/sites/mtg/grails-maven-plugin/

Interesting to see that some maven goals dont even require a pom.

GUI – Matisse Projects

http://wiki.netbeans.org/UsingNetbeansMatisseAndEclipseInParallel

http://www.ensode.net/netbeans_ivy.html

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/kohsuke/archive/2007/06/accessing_javan.html

Using your ant tasks in Maven

http://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-using-ant.html

…wondering how this would compare to using appfuse (spring-hibernate)

View the Dynamic Representation of the Framingham Study on Cardiovascular Risk here:

http://content.nejm.org/content/vol357/issue4/images/data/370/DC2/NEJM_Christakis_370v1.swf

Quantitative analysis of factors related to cardiovascular risk, especially obesity…

It will be nice to have such analysis automatically done on different disease conditions of public health significance at a high level, and perhaps with an underlying GIS layer…

“Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all”.

‘All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.’ Have we reached a time where all of our tool-sets are now made moot by vast clouds of information and strictly applied maths?”

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/25/146250

The main article is here: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory . The comments even appear to be more interesting.

A reaction to this is here:http://miningdrugs.blogspot.com/2008/08/data-models-or-both.html

And Geoff sent me this link on same matter early this week:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page1.php

It ends by saying this:

“Models are not perfect,” says Syd Levitus. “Data are not perfect. Theory isn’t perfect. We shouldn’t expect them to be. It’s the combination of models, data, and theory that lead to improvements in our science, in our understanding of phenomena.”

What is a model?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model

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