Abstract
The study of informatics must begin at the most elemental level. Only by understanding computer systems can we progress to understanding how they work and what they can do.
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Notes
- 1.
There are bugs in this “program.” Can you find them? Hint: what would happen if the blood glucose were exactly 60?
- 2.
Hence the old joke: Walking on water, like writing to a specification, is easy—as long as it’s frozen.
- 3.
It is important to remember that each of these documents could contain any number of other objects, including other documents. If this sounds complicated, it is. Too complicated for the boards, anyway.
- 4.
Health Level 7 (HL7), a group responsible for many messaging standards in healthcare got its name from the top layer of the OSI model.
- 5.
An example Business Associate Agreement (BAA) can be found at http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/coveredentities/contractprov.html
- 6.
Think of the secret decoder ring found in cereal boxes.
- 7.
The plaintext is: Informatics.
- 8.
For a great demonstration of a computer program to solve cryptoquotes, see http://quipqiup.com/. Note that this works for longer messages, but shorter messages are much harder to solve. For example, all the following are possible plaintexts to the ciphertext Lqirpdwlfv: Objections; Speciously; Spaciously; Operations; Exchangers.
- 9.
Truthfully, we could express this number using only 5 bits, since 25 = 32, but there is usually little benefit of using only part of an 8-bit byte for storage. It does not improve calculation time or storage requirements.
- 10.
Gangam Style by PSY is the most-watched video on Youtube. When the creators of Youtube initially created their video database they used an int to store the number of times a video is watched. In October, 2014, Gangam surpassed 2.1 billion views and exceeded the available storage capacity, resulting in data errors. Google (the owner of youtube) was forced to rework their database and change the storage capacity from int which is 4 bytes to bigint which is 8 bytes, effectively raising the limit to 1.8 × 1019 (one quintillion).
- 11.
Social Security Numbers (SSN) are commonly used to identify patients, but they have some drawbacks. Firstly, they are not always unique. Until the 1970s SSNs were not issued to non-workers, and the spouse of a worker would usually use the same number as the worker. In addition, SSN are commonly used in financial transactions such as applying for a credit card, and a data breach could lead to identity theft. For these reasons, many healthcare organizations (such as Kaiser Permanente) do not use SSN to identify patients.
- 12.
http://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/patient_identification_matching_final_report.pdf
- 13.
Although hardly a canonical reference, see http://names.whitepages.com/first/Muhammad
- 14.
Kravets D. An Intentional Mistake: The Anatomy of Google’s Wi-Fi Sniffing Debacle. WIRED 2012.
https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/
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Mankowitz, S. (2018). 3.1 Information Technology Systems. In: Mankowitz, S. (eds) Clinical Informatics Board Review and Self Assessment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63766-2_6
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