User talk:Niels Olson

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[edit] Hyper IGM Syndromes?

Is there any chance you could work on them on subpages of your userpage until they have appreciable content? --Improv 20:05, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, but two questions: 1) how do I do that? 2) They're rare. Who's going to go looking for them? At least the very few interested parties who might go look for them, people who are also matching wits with Death, will now have a prayer of finding them. Bytes are cheap. Why not just leave them in the backwaters of the search index that they're currently in?Niels Olson 20:12, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

  • You do that by making links like this and filling out the target. As for them being rare, let people use google or something. We're not meant to be primarily a medical resource -- people with these illnesses should presumably talk to their doctor. The present articles are very difficult to tell from nonsense, consisting solely of an external link. If you can provide some better content, they might be kosher, but right now they're questionable. --Improv 12:50, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
    • Okay, I'm working on expanding them.Niels Olson 02:01, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Whatup Niels - one o' yer classmates here. I think it's hilarious that I was reviewing the edit history of an article I had added some stuff to and saw your name... yeah, simply adding a link to an article that you create from someplace else does a lot toward making it accessible and unlikely to be deleted. When I create a new article I rarely give it more than a sentence or two, but over time they do grow so long as they're linked to. You can also make one word, say, "hormones" link to the article called "hormone" if you put the following inside double brackets: hormone|hormones. The second word will be the one that appears in blue on the page, but it'll link to the page that's specified by the first word. I don't know how to do redirects yet, but just as wikipedia continues to grow, so does our knowledge about how to tinker with it. -joey p (Cajolingwilhelm 03:49, 14 March 2007 (UTC))

[edit] Regarding empty articles

It is best to write the article or at least a sufficiently descriptive paragraph about the subject, before creating the page. Pages that consist only of links or have no context are likely to be summarily deleted. —Centrx→talk • 23:07, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Possible idea: list pages

One idea that might work is an aggregate list page containing the diseases and a sentence on each, with its reference. Then the content is in a referenced article large enough not to be deleted.

I write new articles every now and then (a few a week maybe) and they're short, but hardly ever get nominated for deletion. My skeletal article: intro para (name of thing), para about it, an at least theoretically checkable reference citation for the content, maybe an external link, and a {{stub}} template if it's just a starter. The shortest I've done lately was two sentences and a reference. Did I mention the reference yet? ;-) - David Gerard 23:15, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

For another example, see this edit to Hyper IgM Syndrome Type 2. I didn't add any content, I just gave an intro (for context) and formatted the references. (And I must say that is an impressive looking reference.) And now it's something no-one would think of deleting out of hand. If you write the stubs to be the shape of a Wikipedia article, even if a very short one, your work will stay and the encyclopedia will be improved by its presence - David Gerard 23:24, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
Oh - and I changed the {{OMIM}} template to say what it is in the article text. I don't know what it is, but I hope that doesn't make a nonsense of it - David Gerard 23:26, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bacteroides fragilis move

  • I've moved the info you added to the B. fragilis entry to the root Bacteroides entry - not because we don't need a good B. fragilis entry, but because the majority of specific info (versus general Bacteroides info) has, to date, been small. IMHO, once the root entry has matured, splitting makes sense - but better to have a solid root first. -- MarcoTolo 20:55, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
  • MarcoTolo, thanks for telling me. From a consequentalist standpoint, fragilis probably merits its own page because it's responsible for so many anearobic infections. If content is lacking, my sense is the emptiness should be there to prompt others to add what they know about it. Ontologically, taxonomically, does it make sense to put subordinate-specific information in the article of a superior grouping, in this case the genus? A multiplicity of subordinates, such as B. fragilis and B. feacium exist, so it's not like the page erroneously created excess categorization. I wonder if the redirect to the genus has caused any editors to have conflated some fragilis species-specific information into the genus's page because they don't know they can edit redirects? Finally, I made the page because, as a user, I saw a need for the page. 891,000 doctors in the US alone, are going to be looking, at one time or another, for information about B. fragilis, and getting a redirect to the genus is more that a smidge distracting. It runs the risk of being misleading and thus compromising patient care.
  • Again, I'm not against a full-scale B. fragilis entry, but many microbiology/ID pages here at Wikipedia tend to drift along for months-to-years with little active. In addition, while I'm apt to be a "splitter" myself sometimes, Bacteroides is a tricky case: most reference texts lump B. fragilis and a half-dozen other species together in a non-taxonomic group called something like "B. fragilis-like pathogens" (some of which have marginal pathogenicity). Much of the problem boils down to the fact that we are just beginning to understand the genetics of Bacteroides; IIRC there have been about 10-11 new species described since 2004..... [1].
B. fragilis will have its own entry - as, hopefully, will many of the other species; I'm just suggesting that we 'grow' it as a subsection first, then drop it into place when its matured enough to avoid looking anemic on its own (and/or just duplicating the text sections common to all species). -- MarcoTolo 01:40, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

epidermodysplasia verruciformis antimicrosomal antibody test

[edit] Sopitalism

A {{prod}} template has been added to the article Sopitalism, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but this article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice explains why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may contest the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page. Also, please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. If you endorse deletion of the article, and you are the only person who has made substantial edits to the page, please tag it with {{db-author}}. Rambutan (talk) 17:04, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] sopitalism

Socialism for the rich, practiced in the world today. The theory, coined by Boris Chikvashvili, goes that governments and business of the world got so closely aligned that they are in a position to treat the workers as slaves. And the method of enslavement is the printing machine. More money sloshing the world more of it goes to rich and devastates poor and (near) retired. The same concept is better illustrated by Robert Reich as a double standard with regard to moral hazard between rich and poor. References: Boris Chikvashvili, Robert Reich


Hello, Niels Olson. You have new messages at Toddst1's talk page.
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[edit] Brief history of software with emphasis on US Healthcare

[edit] Day 1: Philosophical development

[edit] Day 2: Historical and current development

handouts --> present timeline a la Lessig --> demos

[edit] Handouts

  • Ubuntu Hardy Heron CDs
  • Printed timelines

[edit] Timeline

(project headshots, trademarks, key images, key blurbs, a la Lessig, where appropriate)

  • Grand Union Flag of the East India Trading Company (see esp 1685, 1700, 1707, 1773)
  • Boston Tea Party response to the Tea Act, which was passed by efforts of Company lobby in Parliament to ease financial burden created by ongoing wars in the Company's vassal states of India. It's a tax-payer funded bailout of a monopoly that had become so powerful it influenced military affairs. Sound familiar?
  • 200 years pass . . .
  • 1958: John McCarthy discovers Lisp while at MIT. The syntactic structures bears great similarity to Noam Chomsky's syntactic structures of natural human language.
  • 1970: Dennis Ritchie developed UNIX at IBM in the early 1960s and IBM starts licensing it in 1970.
  • June 1971: Richard Stallman starts visiting the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in June 1971. Developing the still active EMACS text editor (it's main competitor for programmers is Vi).
  • January 1975: Microinstrumentation and Telemetry Systems produces the Altair 8800 microprocessor.
  • 1975: Bill Gates founds Microsoft, his product is Altair BASIC
  • February 1976: Bill Gates issues his famous Open Letter to Hobbyists in the newsletter of the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto, California.
  • April 1976: While working in the calculator division of HP, Steve Wozniak and his partner Steve Jobs demo the Apple I at the Homebrew Computer Club.
  • 1976: Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman publish Diffie-Hellman key exchange, a cryptographic protocol that allows two parties that have no prior knowledge of each other to jointly establish a shared secret key over an insecure communications channel.
  • 1977: The MIT Laboratory for Computer Science institutes password protection. Richard Stallman encourages users to use a blank password. Approximately 25% of the lab goes along.
  • 1977: The Apple II is released. Five to six million would be produced before 1993, becoming the de facto standard in schools.
  • 1977: AT&T licenses Unix code to Berkeley. The Berkley Software Distribution is born.
  • Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman publish their RSA public key encryption algorithm.
  • 1979: Novell founded in UTAH to develop Control Program for Microcomputer (CP/M) applications.
  • Steve Ballmer joins Microsoft in September, 1980.
  • In 1980 MIT hacker Richard Greenblatt founds Lisp Machines. Russ Noftsker, Bill Gosper, and other MIT hackers found Symbolics. Source code becomes privatized and lab workers are asked to sign non-disclosure agreements. Stallman spends his remaining years at the lab reproducing everything Symbolics does by hand, himself, to prevent their gaining a monopoly over the lab's software.
  • IBM awards Microsoft the contract for its operating system for the upcoming "Personal Computer", which would have an Intel processor. Microsoft develops DOS based on Digital Research's Control Program for Microprocessors.
  • 1983: Richard Stallman starts the GNU project in 1983.
  • 1984: DARPA funds Honeywell to develop a branch working on secure computing. The company was spun off as Secure Computing Corporation. Its SmartFilter product is now the basis of internet censorship in the UAE, Iran, and the Great Firewall of China.
  • 1985: Richard Stallman starts the Free Software Foundation in 1985.
  • 1986: The Apple board of directors fires Steve Jobs, who founds NEXT, where he develops a new operating system based on BSD.
  • 1989: Tim Berners Lee develops the first WWW server on a NEXT box at CERN.
  • [Richard Stallman] publishes the GNU General Public License (the GNU GPL) in 1989.
  • 1990: Windows 3.0 released.
  • 1991: Guido van Rossum releases a very high level dialect of Lisp called Python. Rapidly gains favor among university students and developers for ease of learning and powerful libraries.
  • Linus Torvalds releases version 0.01 of the [Linux] kernel in 1991 and adopts the [GPL] in 1992.
  • Phil Zimmerman developed PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) in 1991 using RSA encryption to help nuclear arms protestors organize without government interference. PGP Now uses RSA and [Diffie-Hellman] algorithms. PGP has been implemented under the GPL as GPG and provides a mechanism of trust for Free & Open Source Softwae (FOSS) software packages.
  • 1993: Ian Murdock releases Debian, a complete GNU/Linux system that strictly adheres to POSIX, and all software packages are FOSS.
  • 1993: Philip Greenspun, a former Symbolics programmer who went back to MIT to earn his PhD, founds [photo.net], one of the earliest database-backed websites and online communities. His software became the core of the [ArsDigita Community system].
  • 1994: Marc Ewing releases Red Hat Linux. Bob Young and Marc Ewing collaborate to build a corporation to provide services to businesses using Linux. The current market capitalization: $400M. Related distributions include Fedora, a community-maintained desktop version of Red Hat Linux, and CentOS, a free, de-branded clone of server-side Red Hat. Many web startups use CentOS. Linus Torvalds uses a Fedora desktop.
  • 1996: Windows 95 released.
  • 1996: Eric S Raymond and Perens, a Debian project leader, write the Open Source Definition and found the Open Source Initiative.
  • 1996: Health Insurace Portability Accountability Act is enacted in the US.
  • Late 1996: Apple purchases NeXT, bringing back Steve Jobs and acquiring his new BSD-based operating system, relabeled OS X.
  • 1997: Lawrence Lessig, a former clerk for Judges Richard Posner and Antonin Scalia, and at the time teaching the law of cyberspace at Harvard Law, is appointed Special Master over the United States vs Microsoft trial.
  • 1997: The VA's VistA EMR is released. The code is open source.
  • February 1998: Netscape publishes the source code of its browser under the [Mozilla project], the board being stimulated by ideas presented in a paper by [Eric S Raymond] on his software development model the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
  • 1998: Windows 98 released
  • 18 May 1998: Novell launches ZENworks, allowing administrators to completely control entire networks of computers, including loading entirely new disk images remotely.
  • 7 September 1998: Google, a new search engine running on Linux, launches.
  • 28 October 1998: Digital Millennium Copyright Act enacted. Copyrights everything at the moment of creation and prohibits circumvention of access control measures.
  • 22 December 2000: NSA releases Security Enhanced Linux, a Mandatory Access Control suite for Linux.
  • 2001: Philip Greenspun builds a website for Edward Tufte using his ArsDigita Community system.
  • 2001: AT&T collaborates with NSA to provide all internet traffic (email, web, etc) that goes through AT&T's San Francisco Network Operations Center to NSA via special hardware. Operation continues to the present day. ref
  • October 2001: Windows XP released.
  • SANA Security produces a visual comparison of FOSS Apache and Microsoft IIS web servers.
  • 1 May 2002: Sun Microsystems releases OpenOffice, a cross-platform, MS Office-compatible suite, under the GPL.
  • 23 September 2002: the Mozilla Foundation releases Firefox, a lean yet highly secure and extensible browser that runs on all major platforms. The Mozilla Foundation license is GPL-compatible.
  • 16 December 2002: The Creative Commons Foundation, founded by Lawrence Lessig, releases the first versions of the Creative Commons licenses, intended, like the GPL, to return certain rights to the commons. Now widely used by photographers and musicians. This has provided, especially photographers, some recourse with a number of less-than-forthright advertizers who have used images from Flickr without fulfilling the requirements of the CC licenses assigned by the photographers.
  • 15 January 2003: The Supreme Court ruled against Lessig in Eldred v Ashcroft, affirming the constitutionality of laws granting retroactive extension of copyright. Copyright in the US is now granted presumptively (everything is copyrighted, from creation), and all copyrighted works are copyrighted for the life of the creator plus 70 years.
  • 14 April 2004: The HIPAA Privacy Rule comes into force. The [HIPAA security rule] specifically includes PGP as acceptable encryption on an open network but allows for unencrypted electronic transmission on closed networks. (note: network administrators tend to assume all networks are open until proven otherwise).
  • October 2004: Mark Shuttleworth starts the Ubuntu fork of Debian.
  • Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab announces the One Laptop Per Child project, an education project intended to provide a constructivist learning environment for children in developing nations.
  • Fall 2005: Some doctors use ihealthrecord.org and related sites to create on-the-fly health records for Hurricane Katrina refugees. Later used in Hurricane Rita.
  • 2006: Google announces Google Health, to be launched in the future.
  • 9 January 2007: NSA "certifies" Windows Vista.
  • 30 January 2007: Windows Vista released after years of delays to tepid reviews. The French police force almost simultaneously announced its new computers will run Ubuntu.
  • 8 April 2007: Debian 4.0, Etch, released to wide acclaim.
  • 1 May 2007: Dell announced it will sell PCs with Ubuntu preinstalled.
  • 27 April 2007: First volley of a prolonged DDOS attack against the entire country of Estonia.
  • June 2007: Microsoft quietly distributes the COFEE thumbdrive to 350 law enforcement organizations, giving law enforcement backdoor access to Windows users' information. [ref]
  • 5 June 2007: DONCIO calls for more investment in FOSS software.
  • 18 October 2007: Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, based on Debian Etch, released to wide acclaim. This is the version currently sold on Dells.
  • 26 October 2007: OS X Leopard released, considerable acclaim.
  • November 2007: The first OLPC XO-1 laptops are produced. A raft of low-cost laptops begin to fill the market from other companies, including the Intel Classmate and the Asus Eee PC.
  • April 2008: WorldVistA developers meet OLPC developers at the Seattle healthjam to begin work on porting VistA to OLPC, potentially providing rapidly deployable, distributable, low-cost EMR with integrated diagnostics kits for developing nations and disaster response.
  • 24 April 2008: Ubuntu Hardy Heron released, stabilizing many of the bleeding edge innovations of Gutsy Gibbon in a "Long Term Support" release. Support garunteed for 3 years.
  • 15 May 2008: Queries submitted on the open-source status of the AHLTA client and CHCS on health.mil.
  • 19 May 2008: Based on last quarter sales, Apple has 66% of the $1000+ computer market.
  • 20 May 2008: Nicholas Negroponte announces the XO2 (a hint that the OLPC project may be fairing better than some pundits think)
  • 20 May 2008: Google Health comes online.

[edit] Demos

Hardy Heron: OpenOffice, Firefox, Synaptic, make, sign, and use a PGP key, SFTP, Install, Grub, play around, answer questions OLPC XO: play around, answer questions