Problems With Health Care Technology
Michael Skolnik, EDS, Petaluma
02/12/2004
Can health care ever become truly automated to support quality and flawless healthcare delivery? Health care has remained at least ten to fifteen years behind othervertical markets in implementing technology solutions to their major clinical and management issues. Why has this been the case? Why do 60% of technology projectsfail in healthcare? How can technology become a catalyst leading to a new and better health care system? Is the embedded bureaucracy going to change its operating protocol to allow technology to work its miracles in the health industry? These and other issues regarding technology and the delivery of health care in the US will bediscussed.
The Hard Challenge Of Making Easy Software
Michael Slater, Adobe, Santa Rosa
02/19/2004
Creating an application to enable ordinary consumers to enjoy digital photographyturns out to be quite a challenging problem. The solution Adobe has developed, Photoshop Album, required some new paradigms and a lot of difficult design choices. The development process and experience with users provides a variety of lessons about the challenges of designing easy-to-use software and the hidden complexities that make what seem like simple problems sometimes very hard to solve simply.
Game Programmer: Engineer Or Artist?
Tim Innes & Jason Morales , S2 Games
02/26/2004
Even before computers, people dreamed of alternate worlds. While films like The Matrix are still purely fictional speculation, we're hard at work trying to improve thebelievability of our simulations. While engineers created the first games alone, overtime art assets have become the largest portion of development. However, as the laws and theories of physics, chemistry and even biology become ever more important factors in the presentation of games, it seems that engineers are once again becoming the artists.
Dot-Com War Stories: How (And How Not To) Run A Webstudio
Liz Warner, MadFish, San Francisco
03/04/2004
Liz Warner co-owned and managed a web studio during the dot-com boom and bust. Her presentation will include: Tips on self-employment for techies. How to thrive (orat least survive) in any economy. Client management for programmers. Hiring & firingcontractors, and choosing partners. The smartest and stupidest things I did as aconsultant, and why they're often the same.
Why Zombies Are Impossible
Teed Rockwell, Sonoma State University Philosophy Department
03/11/2004
Many Philosophers claim that there is no contradiction in the idea of a Philosopher's Zombie, i.e., a being which is physically identical to a conscious human, but which is not actually conscious. This claim rests on the widely held assumption that we have a direct awareness of our subjective, private experiences. But this assumption is false, because the idea of direct awareness is incoherent. Because there is no direct awareness of subjective experiences, Philosopher's Zombies are revealed to be as self-contradictory as Zagnets (i.e. objects which behave like magnets, but which have no inner "magnetizmo".) Does this mean that philosophers cannot be spoofed?