When I was a kid, it was guaranteed we would get at the very least one good school-closing snowfall a year. It was like a bonus holiday, where all the neighborhood kids would come out for snowball fights, sledding, and maple-syrup snow cones. The snow was always gone in a day or two, leaving a few sad-looking snowmen to wither away into green lawns, but there was always the promise of next year.

In 1980, when I was 7, we had two record snowfalls, 12.4 inches in February and then 13.7 inches a month later. The snowdrifts were so huge, we made forts out of them that towered over the cars in our apartment complex’s parking lot. In February of 1989 we got 15.4 inches, but then I was 16 and snow was just a nuisance that kept me from exercising my newfound driving privileges.

In my last seven years of living here, I’ve gotten maybe two days off of work for snow, but I paid it no mind. It was only when I actively started looking for that yearly snowfall that I realized it was missing. It didn’t snow at all this last year, and it only snowed once the year before that, and that all melted away in just a few hours. I remember that, because I went outside to film my cats’ reaction to the alien landscape, but by the time I got my camera set up, the snow was gone.

Droop Credit: caldecott_rose

When I mention this absence of snow to my friends, they say there’s never been much snow in this area and that I’m making a big deal out of nothing. So why do I remember snow being a yearly event in my childhood? I have the photographs of my siblings and I playing in more than a foot of snow as children, evidence that I’m not imagining this.

I also have the climate record. Between 1990 and 2006 the National Arbor Day Foundation shifted the U.S. Hardiness Zones, the zones where different species of plants thrive, northward. I grew up in Zone 7 as a kid, but when I moved back to my hometown after college, it had become Zone 8.

Nobody living here noticed that it had stopped snowing. In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond referred to this phenomenon as “Landscape Amnesia,” we don’t remember the past in the setting in which it took place, but recreate it in the landscape we live in currently. That’s why we have to trust the temperature records and not our fallible memories.

It’s not fair that my kids won’t have snow days, unplanned vacations where the whole neighborhood comes out for snowball fights and snowmen, and to retire to warm dry clothes and hot chocolate at the end of the day. It’s not fair they’ll have to learn about it from my childhood photo albums.

With final exams, school projects due, work projects due, and the rest of life, I’ve been stressing and slacking on uploading science photos to my flickr account. I’m glad I took the time to get to it tonight for an hour or so of naturalist zen. Lacking anything more profound, I’ll just say this:

Butterflies are pretty.

Spicebush Swallowtail Papilio troilus Credit: Moi

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. ~Rabindranath Tagore

Butterflies are self propelled flowers. ~R.H. Heinlein

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly. ~Richard Buckminster Fuller

Love is like a butterfly: It goes where it pleases and it pleases wherever it goes. ~Author Unknown

See the complete flickr set here

PDF of the Butterfly species at the exhibit here

For seven years, I wrote computer programs in Visual Basic Script (VBScript), a Microsoft programming language used in building WebPages from information in a database. As part of a paradigm shift where I work to open-source software, in the last six months I have had to learn and develop software in Hypertext Preprocessor script (PHP).

For the most part, the shift has gone smoothly. My thinking has evolved from a procedural paradigm to a more object-oriented one, and everything I could do in VBScript I can do in PHP and much more; however, months into this shift, I was still wrestling conceptually with the different way the two programming languages deal with arrays.

An array is a “data structure consisting of a group of elements that are accessed by indexing” according to Wikipedia. A phone book is an array, with names serving as the indexes to phone numbers. A spreadsheet table is an array, with column headers and row numbers acting as indexes to data cells.

Spreadsheet

In VBScript, I always thought of arrays in terms of lists, tables, or cube of data, referencing information within the array using coordinates:

Visualizing VBScript Arrays

If I want to know what the value for the sixth row third column, I simply referenced x,y coordinates as array(3,6). Looping through the arrays involves incrementing the coordinates. I can get all the values for the third column with {array(3,0), array(3,1), array(3,2)… array(3,n)}. The point is that the third column is always going to be the same column.

PHP uses a very different paradigm for storing arrays. An array in PHP is always a collection of key/value pairs, a row. A multi-dimensional array in PHP is created by putting an array within an array, sets within sets.

Visualizing PHP Arrays

Looping through the arrays involves recursive iteration. I loop through the first array, and if I come across an item that is an array, I loop through that too. If I want to locate an item in the array, I key directly into with something like array(Laws of Thermodynamics(Zeroeth Law)) or array(3(0)). With 0 representing the first item in each array, Laws of Thermodynamics(2) refers to its second law and Laws of Motion(2) refers to its third.

The advantage of the VBScript method is that column two always represents the same kind of item. The advantage of the PHP method is that it saves memory by not storing empty elements, unless specifically told to. It could be argued that databases store things the VBScript way in tables, and it also be argued that a highly-normalized database more closely resembles the PHP way.

For programmers who started out working with PHP, this is no problem; they know how to accomplish everything I could accomplish in VBScript. I, on the other hand, had to unlearn everything I have taken for granted over the last seven years and learn a whole new strategy for getting data out of arrays.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! In celebration of Ada Lovelace, only child to Lord Byron and author of the world’s first computer program in 1843 for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, bloggers everywhere are running posts about one of their favorite women in tech.

So this year I’d like to introduce everyone to Esther Dyson:

Esther Dyson Credit: Esther

Dyson attended Harvard at the age of 16, was reporting for Forbes at 25, and was analyzing technology stocks for Wall Street by the age of 30. She co-established the publication Release 1.0, which continues today as Release 2.0 and sells for $130 a single issue. She has backed some of the best start-ups online, including Flickr, del.icio.us, and many others.

She was chairwoman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and boardmember of the Long Now Foundation, blogger for the Huffington Post, and columnist for the New York Times. At the time of my writing this, Esther Dyson is living just outside of Moscow, training to be a cosmonaut.

While TV talking heads ramble on their mostly-wrong predictions, Esther Dyson is a futurist who has put her money where her mouth is. Her article for Wired Intellectual Value, where she talks about companies needing to post content online for free and have to rely on other methods to make money off it, is so much common sense today, but she made the prediction in 1995. Esther Dyson may not be a name the average person will recognize, and that’s because instead of focusing on being famous like so many modern pundits, she has focused on being right.

Esther Dyson Patch Always Make New Mistakes Credit: Gisela Giardino

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Other Ada Lovelace Day Posts and events.

More Women in Computer Science

This incredible propensity for Esther Dyson’s over-achievement appears to run in the family, as her father is physicist Freeman Dyson, mother is mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, and brother is digital technology historian George Dyson.

A PDF of this Paper is available here.

I. Introduction

The book Systems Architecture describes the function of the systems analyst as performing “activities of the business modeling and requirements disciplines,” and goes on to expand the possible responsibilities into “business modeling, requirements, design, and management of a development project (Burd, 2006).” As this paper shall illustrate, this short description is an incredible understatement of the functions performed by the systems analyst on a project, which requires skills and methodologies that venture far outside the traditional fields of knowledge needed in business.

The systems analyst must have a fundamental understanding of computers, from storage hardware and software, to networks and protocols, to hardware and software inputs and outputs, programming languages, operating systems, and utilities, as well as communications and collaboration technologies. Additionally, they must possess knowledge and skills of the organization’s business environment in which they are operating, including the organization’s business functions, structure, management, and type of work. Finally, they must also have finely-developed interpersonal skills, which includes the ability to communicate with managers, users, programmers, technical specialists, customers, and vendors, translating functional and technical requirements from one group into verbiage and context that another group can understand (Satzinger, 2009).

It is impossible for a single person to possess expertise in all of these things; otherwise, there would be no need for managers, programmers, and the wide variety of users performing their specialized tasks. There would only be the systems analyst, or an army of systems analysts, running all aspects of the system. The specialization of labor, having individuals concentrate on and become experts at a specific area of knowledge, leads to the most efficient execution of business (Smith, 1776).

The systems analyst supplements existing business roles and functions, examining the processes and exploring ways to optimize and automate them, improving quality and performance along the way. The role of the systems analyst is that of an investigator. Within the boundaries of the organization’s system, they are historian, anthropologist, and cyberneticist, immersing themselves in the organization’s complexities; as well as a gardener of sorts, managing the organization’s existing resources to grow a solution from the infrastructure. The systems analyst’s primary talent and responsibility, therefore, is understanding.

II. Managing Complexity

Edsgar Dijkstra, in his 1972 ACM Turing lecture, captured the incredible scope of what someone working on an information system must understand in detail:

In computer programming our basic building block has an associated time grain of less than a microsecond, but our program may take hours of computation time. I do not know of any other technology covering a ratio of 1010 or more: the computer, by virtue of its fantastic speed, seems to be the first to provide us with an environment where highly hierarchical artefacts are both possible and necessary. This challenge, viz. the confrontation with the programming task, is so unique that this novel experience can teach us a lot about ourselves. It should deepen our understanding of the processes of design and creation, it should give us better control over the task of organizing our thoughts (Dijkstra, 1972).

Dijkstra speaks to computer programming specifically, but the systems analyst’s understanding must exceed even these ten orders of magnitude. True, they do not need to know the technical details of how the system’s clock synchronizes with the execution of software, but they do need to understand how the megahertz of the processor impacts the performance of the application. They don’t need to know the specifics of how free-form entry field complicates the algorithms required to pull meaningful summarization information out of database records for executive reports, but they do need to know how the data-entry and reporting requirements can conflict and overly-complicate the programmers’ tasks.

As was mentioned in the previous section, the systems analyst cannot and should not attempt to become an expert in all aspects of the organization; however, they do need to understand enough of the system to speak intelligently to all levels of operations, from manager to user to technician. One of the most effective devices in the systems analyst’s cognitive toolbox for managing complexity is functional decomposition, “dividing a system into components based on subsystems that are further divided into smaller subsystems (Satzinger, 2009).” Rather than become an expert in the entire organization at all levels at once, the systems analyst instead strives to become an expert at a specific subset of the system. Through this technique, a highly-complex system may be understood by reducing the scope of what the analyst needs to understand.

III. Systems Analyst as Cyberneticist

Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics as “the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine (Wiener, 1948).” Whether the type of information system is a customer relationship, supply chain, accounting and financial, human resource, manufacturing, or knowledge management system, they all involve an information system running on machines interacting with human animals. There is a reciprocal relationship between users and the system, where users input data to the system, the system outputs information in reports to users, and a feedback loop is generated.

We tend to think of cyborgs as humans augmented with artificial prostheses, and an organization’s information system serves as a cognitive prosthesis, augmenting what its human users are capable of remembering with databases and file storage, and enhancing the information they may derive from the stored data with algorithms to produce reports. The systems analyst, in working to understand these interactions between users and the information system as a complete system, is working within the discipline of cybernetics.

IV. Systems Analyst as Historian

“It takes years of experience working for a company to really understand what is going on,” the fifth edition of the textbook Systems Analysis & Design explains, “The more an analyst knows about how an organization works, the more effective he can be (Satzinger, 2009).” Before a systems analyst may dare seek to express any conclusions about where the system should go, they must ensure that they understand where the system exists in the present, with all of its idiosyncrasies and the reasons for them:

One of the most common errors of young, impetuous analysts is loudly to castigate the developers of the existing system, only to discover that:

1.There were, at the time, good and sufficient reasons for decisions that seem idiotic today.

2.The original developer is now the analyst’s manager, or manager’s manager. (Weinberg, 1982)

To avoid this blunder, the systems analyst must exercise the methods and skills of the historian, principally going to primary sources and documents.

Systems analysts must review existing reports, forms, and procedure descriptions. This includes forms that have been filled out, in order to ensure the data entered into the form matches the form’s structure. They must interview stakeholders in order to understand the system, as it exists today, and the history of how it came to exist the way it does (Satzinger, 2009).

V. Systems Analyst as Anthropologist

In the academia, there is often a reference to “the two cultures,” the humanities and the sciences, and the very different ways these two areas of knowledge approach understanding the world. Similarly, in the business world:

We are likewise faced with two cultures in developing a computer system. Guy Kawasaki in The Macintosh Way calls them “T-Shirts” and “Ties” for their sartorial preferences: T-Shirt are commonly worn by Technologists such as programmers; Ties are de rigueur in the business departments in typical companies and marketing departments in high-tech firms… As a systems analyst, a critical part of your job is to provide a bridge between these two cultures; you must be a bicultural to bring the two disciplines together (McDermott, 2002).

Even these two cultures could be further divided into sub-cultures. The technologists form tribes, with systems engineers having a culture distinct from software developers distinct from help desk workers. Although all these silos will end up working with the same information system, they have very distinct perspectives of their responsibilities to it and how they will use it, and the systems analyst must understand them.

“Anthropologists have a lot in common with systems analysis, for both of them have to enter unfamiliar worlds and extract reliable information (Weinberg, 1982).” Like Jane Goodall, who lived with chimpanzees in the wild, immersing herself in their way of life in order to understand their culture, the systems analyst must embed his or herself in the organization’s business culture. The systems analyst must perform a walkthrough of where the organization’s work is performed in order to gain a general understanding of the business process. They must embed themselves with the users, spending several hours observing them at their jobs, even going so far as to become one of them by being trained as a user and performing the tasks themselves (Satzlinger, 2009).

VI. Systems Analyst as Educator

In one sense, the systems analyst must stand outside of the system that they are studying, taking the role of a dispassionate observer. At the same time, system analyst is a part of the system in which they are operating, part of the organization for which they are developing a solution. All of this research for the purpose of problem solving is worthless if the systems analyst cannot communicate it to all levels of the organization.

The metaphor is one of the most powerful tools at the systems analyst’s disposal for communicating concepts to various silos within an organization. The Operating System desktop is a metaphor for the machine-level operations occurring way down inside the hardware of the physical computer system. An organization chart is a metaphor for how teams and individuals are structured to work together within an organization. For the systems analyst, DFDs, ERDs, use case diagrams, class diagrams, sequence diagrams, and others are models used to describe the abstract aspects of the system into a visual metaphor more easily understandable across cultures within the organization (Satzinger, 2009).

VII. Systems Analyst as Gardener

In the traditional waterfall model of the systems development lifecycle, the assumption was made “that the various phases of a project can be carried out and completed entirely sequentially (Satzinger, 2009).” This highly structured approach to the SDLC requires a great deal of planning and prediction, as each phase must be completed before the next phase can begin. As a result of this strict and stringent approach to development, adaptability is lost. Each phase must get things right the first time, because the subsequent phases, depending on where they fall in the process, demand completeness in the preceding phase, be it planning, analysis, design, or implementation. Because such a strict approach to SDLC attempts to manage a very high degree of complexity, it is also subject to a much higher degree of failure.

In contrast, an iterative approach to SDLC, such as the spiral model, evolves a system incrementally, growing closer and closer to what the customer needs by degrees. Development methodologies such as Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum are lightweight, adaptive, and self-organizing (Satzinger, 2009). The systems analyst must understand and take advantage of the self-organizing character of these approaches. The analyst is not the systems engineer; he or she is not the one who will be writing the code or setting up the hardware.

The systems analyst must complement the development process by providing the necessary requirements to the engineers, but that is all they can do. They must allow the engineers, who are the experts in how the logical models will be physically executed, to execute the systems construction. The systems analyst must understand the boundaries of their role so that they may stand back and allow the emergent phenomenon to develop on its own, like a gardener watching their flowers grow, only interceding to nurture the process with requirements and the seeds of information.

VIII. Conclusion

As Frederick Brooks noted in his historic essay, No Silver Bullet, there is no escaping the complexity of software development because:

The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence. For three centuries, mathematics and the physical sciences made great strides by constructing simplified models of complex phenomena, deriving properties from the models, and verifying those properties by experiment. This paradigm worked because the complexities ignored in the models were not the essential properties of the phenomena. It does not work when the complexities are the essence (Brooks, 1987).

The best the systems analyst can do then is to reduce the scope of what they are attempting to understand to a subset of the whole system. While this technique reduces the scope of the complexity, they must still seek to understand the system the way a Cyberneticist understands it, as a feedback loop between artificial construct and human users. Two crucial techniques to understanding the system cybernetically is to research its history, how it came to exist in its present form, and to study it as an anthropologist, embedding oneself in the organizations culture to understand its business practices.

Once the system analyst has and understanding of the system, they must be able to educate others on it. They must sell solutions to management, communicate technical requirements to engineers, and instruct users on how to best integrate the system into their daily activities. They must communicate different aspects of the system to different cultures within the organization without over-simplifying or avoiding the complexity:

The designer is human, and the human mind is limited in its ability to predict the behavior of an unbuilt system. To overcome this limitation, we often aid the mind with analytical tools, such as diagrams and equations. But more often we use the opposite approach, often unconsciously. Instead of increasing the power of our mind, we decrease the complexity of the problem. Instead of considering all potential variations of a design, we omit certain cases because we cannot analyze them with our limited minds and tools (Weinberg, 1982).

An important aspect of not excluding design variations is to allow the experts to act on their own knowledge. The system analyst must understand their personal limits and the boundaries of their expertise, allowing software and systems engineers to do their jobs and meet the defined requirements with the technical solution they believe is best. The systems analyst, in this regard, is like a gardener, guiding and monitoring an emergent phenomenon, understanding what they can do to foster it, and where they must leave the process to another kind of expert.

The systems analyst, therefore, is not a “jack of all trades, master of none,” but rather a polymath. They must be well educated and excel in a variety of fields. The systems analyst is an expert at many different, highly intellectual disciplines. They are academics on a variety of levels, teachers to a variety of aptitudes, and a very unique type of expert in their own right.

IX. References

Brooks, Frederick P., Jr. (April 1987). No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering, Computer Magazine.

Burd , Stephen D. (2006). Systems Architecture Fifth Edition, Thomson Course Technology.

Dijkstra, Edsger W. (1972). The Humble Programmer, ACM Turing Lecture.

McDermott, Patrick (2002). Zen and the Art of Systems Analysis, Writers Club Press, Lincoln, NE.

Satzinger, John W., Jackson, Robert B., Burd, Stephen D. (2009). Systems Analysis and Design in a Changing World, Fifth Edition, Course Technology, Boston, MA.

Smith, Adam (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, W. Strahan and T. Cadell, London.

Wiener, Norbert (1948). Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,.

Weinberg, Gerald M. (1982). Rethinking Systems Analysis & Design, Dorset House Publishing Co. Inc., New York.

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Other assignments from CIS510 Advanced Systems Analysis and Design:

CIS510 Advanced Systems Analysis and Design: 20090123 Discussion

CIS510 Advanced Systems Analysis and Design: 20090125 Discussion

CIS510 Advanced Systems Analysis and Design: 20090201 Discussion

CIS510 Advanced Systems Analysis and Design: 20090308 Discussion

When you make the finding yourself – even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light – you’ll never forget it.
– Carl Sagan

Inspired by Oranchak’s post on Genetic Algorithms, I decided to revisit a project I left off on a few months back, the end result of which is to attempt to evolve static noise into digital images. As a preliminary step to this, I wanted to write a script where I could draw images, pixel by pixel. So I wrote a decimal to hexadecimal converter, and then incremented the RGB values in HTML to render a table in shifting colors.

Blue and Green Color Pallet (Red is set to 00)

The above image is an html table, 256 cells wide and 256 rows high, each cell with a different bgcolor and a transparent single-pixel GIF to show the color. It’s slow for the browser to display, and, in fact, IE won’t finish rendering it, but it gives me full control over every pixel’s RGB value in the image. So it’s perfect for reading images into it as an array of RGB values, and then trying to evolve another array of RGB values to match it.

The next step was to test randomizing the value of all RGB values. Easy enough, I simply plugged PHP’s rand() function into the values and refreshed the page.

Image Generated with PHP’s rand(0,255) Function

Waitaminute. It’s static-y, as expected, but what are those lines? There are numerous, distinctly unrandom-looking lines in this image. The most distinct appear to be half green on top and half purple on bottom.

I decided to copy and paste a sampling of nine of these pixel-wide 150-something pixel-high patterns into Photoshop. They don’t quite line up, but they all exhibit the same distinct pattern (rotated clockwise to conserve space).

Sample of Nine Line Patterns

Each time I render the random static, I get a new pattern, but these green-purple lines come back in different places. I took some measurements of the hexadecimal values of several lines, looking for exact matches between lines. I quickly found some, because the exact same line pattern repeats in the exact same column

Pattern A 38F2E4 02F40E CCF6E8 96f8C2 60FA9C 2AFC76 F4FE50

Pattern B 86F2FE 50F4D8 1AF6B2 E4F88C AEFA66 78FC40 F2FE1A

Pattern A and Pattern B were both repeated in the column where they were found, and appeared to continue repeating past this sampling.

Here there’s another piece of the puzzle. I tried changing the image dimensions from 256 by 256 to 128 by 128 and 512 by 512, in both cases, the lines appeared. Changing the image dimensions to 72X72, 154X154, or any other non-binary power appears to remove the patterns completely.

So far, what I’ve been able to find on this is that the geeks at php.net have discussed the shortcomings of the rand() function, the function uses a pseudorandom number generator algorithm (probably something called libc, which is a “multiplicative congruential algorithm”), so it is expected to produce these patterns. For a much more random, but still pseudorandom, number generator, it is best to use mt_rand, which uses the Mersenne twister pseudorandom number generator, based on “matrix linear recurrence.”

I understand what I’ve read well enough to know that I presently lack even the foundational knowledge to appreciate this subject. At this point, I am content to know that human minds out there are aware of the phenomenon, and appreciate them for settling down to become experts in a subject as obscure, yet very important, as the process for generating random numbers, which are crucial to cryptography and playing Dungeons & Dragons.

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You can play with a demo of what I’m talking about here. Word of warning though, it takes time for the table to render, could cause weaker systems to slow down, and I’ve had IE quit rendering it halfway down the table.

You can download the PHP file here. There’s an empty single-pixel transparent gif included that holds the table cells open to display the background color.

Chriggy played with this on facebook, and the meme is totally something I can support:

This can be a quick one! Don’t take too long to think about it! Ten books you’ve read that will always stick with you! First ten you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. Principia Discordia, Malclypse the Younger
2. The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
3. Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
4. The Roving Mind, Isaac Asimov
5. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
6. The Critical Tradition, Various
7. The Postman, David Brin
8. Blood Music, Greg Bear
9. Zen Teachings of the Bohdidharma
10. The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine

General Jan Christiaan Smuts is probably equally remembered for his support of apartheid in South Africa and for originating the concept of holism, understanding systems as a whole, as opposed to reductionism, understanding them as the sum of their parts, in his book Holism and Evolution. Einstein found the work as impressive philosophically as his own Theory of Relativity was scientifically. Einstein referred to Smuts as “one of only eleven men in the world” who understood Relativity.

It’s always fascinating to watch the interplay of influence between science and philosophy, from John Locke’s philosophical influence on science to Charles Darwin’s influence on philosophy. Reading about Smuts, I find a man whose personal philosophy was enlightened by science, and whose personal philosophy inspires philosophical debate among scientists. There is something very thought provoking in these passages:

If matter is essentially immaterial structure or organization, it cannot fundamentally be so different from organism or life, which is best envisaged as a principle of organization; nor from mind, which is an active organizer. Matter, life and mind thus translate roughly into organization, organism, organizer.

Smuts uses the term “matter,” but today we would use “physics” or possibly “mathematics” as the base concept, with matter and life phenomena emergent from the base rules of our Universe (before the concept of emergence was articulated). Smuts articulated another hierarchy in the layers of this emergent process. Life is matter with the power to command matter. Mind is life with the power to command matter with purpose.

We can also see how the concept of entropy, and the idea of life swimming against its current, influenced Smuts’ ideas:

[While the] stream of physical tendency throughout the universe is on the whole downward, toward disintegration and dissipation, the organic movement, on this planet at least, is upward, and life structures on the whole becoming more complex throughout the course of organic evolution.

This quote reminded me of my favorite passage from Principa Discordia:

The whirlpools that swirl in a direction opposed to the main current are called “enclaves.” And one of them is life, especially human life, which in a universe moving inexorably towards chaos moves towards increased order. [sic]

We are a phenomena emergent from the basic laws of our universe, swimming against the tide of inert uniformity which everything not alive is moving toward.

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I realize this is meandering, seemingly aimless post, but so is the subject matter. : )

A PDF of this Paper is available here.

I. Organization Environment and Requirements

A. Hospice Care

Although Hospice Care makes no attempt to prolong life or cure patients, the service of caring for individuals in their final days is an extremely demanding profession. Hospice Care volunteers provide basic medical care, including prescription medicines and non-invasive medical procedures to alleviate patient symptoms and manage pain. Hospice services also include counseling, meal preparation, errand running, and guidance (HFA, 2009).

Although the degree to which the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 applies to Hospice Center Volunteers is poorly understood, it is a best practice ethically and legally to adhere to HIPAA Requirements to ensure patient privacy (Kasprak, 2003). Complicating the issue of protecting patient privacy, is the need for Hospice Organizations to submit patient care documents and health statuses to health insurers, and, in order to conduct health care operations, use patient treatment activities for quality reviews, training programs, credentials, and auditing (Capital Hospice, 2003).

B. Assumptions

One very important unknown in performing this analysis is the physical geography of the central office and the four housing facilities. Are these five locations on the same campus, or are they located miles away from one another? This information is crucial for deciding a proper network infrastructure for the organization.

For the purposes of this analysis, it is assumed that the five locations are miles away from one another, so that networking lines would have to cross properties not owned by XYZ Hospice. The advantage of this assumption is that a solution that technically satisfies networking buildings scattered across a city will also work for buildings scattered across a campus; although, there will certainly be more efficient solutions for the campus model to consider in network topology and web hosting.

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II. Inputs and Outputs

A . Inputs

Hospice volunteers meet with patients and are responsible for recording “observations accurately and concisely in patient’s medical record (Overlook, 2009).” Volunteers are required to monitor and document changes in patient health while visiting with them; therefore, volunteers would be best served with discreet, lightweight portable data capture devices. Such devices “combine a keyboard, mark or bar-code scanner, and wireless connections to a wired base station or computer system (Burd, 2006).”

As was mentioned in section I, Hospice managers are responsible for ensuring volunteer training, that accreditation standards are met, submitting claims to insurance companies for reimbursement (HFA, 2009), as well as standard management responsibilities such as accounting, quality assurance, and general operations. While in-house operations will be best-served with a completely paperless office environment, interactions with outside organizations will necessitate dealing with paper forms that can be digitized through optical character recognition technologies, which, “combine optical scanning technology with a special-purpose processor or software to interpret bitmap content (Burd, 2006).”

B. Outputs

Multiple volunteers assisting the same patient need to know what services have been provided by the other volunteers and be kept up to date on the statuses of their shared patients. Volunteers, therefore, need access to the observations of other volunteers.

Similarly, managers need access to a wide variety of high-level reporting functions. They need to monitor physician and nursing certifications offered online (NBCHPN, 2009), and organization certifications in keeping in compliance with Medicaid requirements (CMS, 2009). While all of this data could be stored in paper records, the advantages of storing it electronically, being able to search, sort, and drill down through data, stresses the advantages of communicating as much as possible through electronic means. Professional-looking print outs are still mandatory for communicating with external organizations that continue to use written correspondence.

C. Distributed Objects

Distributed objects are included with inputs and outputs in the context of communications between systems within the organization as well as exchanging data with systems outside of it. While it is possible all interactions with outside organizations, such as insurance companies, will be paper-based, some companies, such as drugstore.com, offer APIs for their online catalogs making use of XML to allow other companies to offer and order their products through customized web interfaces (drugstore, 2009). As more organizations go paperless, the need for Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) grows; therefore, XYZ Hospice’s application systems should have the capability to communicate with other systems running on any potential platform or architecture.

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III. System Hardware

A. Client Systems

In order to meet the needs of the 15 volunteers working at the facilities to have portable data capture devices, lightweight laptops, which they can easily carry around with them for recording observations make for the best, most flexible choice, specifically the new generation of “netbooks:”

Netbooks make the perfect fit for many field service operations — transportation and logistics, repair and servicing, surveying, even medical care — thanks to their small size, low price, and the fact you can create or run custom applications quickly and cheaply because they use standard desktop operating systems (unlike handhelds). (Schwartz, 2009)

While netbooks are lacking in processing power and secondary storage, to support XYZ Hospice’s software requirements these features are unnecessary. As will be outlined in the next section, the netbooks will act as portals to online applications that will serve as a central repository for data entry and retrieval. Netbooks have an advantage over normal laptops in their mobility. For example, Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Laptops are the cheapest at $249 each, and run four hours on a battery charge and weighs 2.28 lbs (Dell, 2009).

The 8.9 inch LCD on the netbooks, and their smaller keyboards are acceptable for volunteers who must use them for intermittent data entry and minor reporting functions throughout the day, but for managers, who must often sit at a desk for long hours performing administrative tasks, these systems are ergonomically unsound:

…portability comes at a price: a compromise in the screen and keyboard size that can be fairly taxing on some netbook models. If you have a netbook and have noticed that your wrists are often achy and your eyes get bleary more often than in the past, you may have “netbook fatigue.” (Kendtrick, 2009)

Managers need systems equipped with more storage and diversity of applications. Netbooks for volunteers are not personalized, and may be transferred from volunteer to volunteer. This is not the case for managers, who need dedicated systems that can run a wide variety of customized software, media, and peripherals. For this reason, a standard-size notebook pc is recommended, with a larger screen size, keyboard, DVD player, Intel Pentium dual-core processing (2.16GHz), and 160GB of hard drive storage. A variety of such laptops are available for around $449 each (newegg, 2009).

B. Peripherals

As was outlined in Section II, professional-looking printouts are required in order for XYZ Hospice to communicate with outside organizations that are still paper-based. Also outlined in Section II, was the need for XYZ Hospice to digitize paper records from outside organizations into their electronic management systems.

Both of these functions and more can be covered in a single multifunction laser printer. For instance, the Brother MFC-9440CN Color Laser Multifunction Center is a color laser printer, scanner, copier, and fax in a single compact device with network capability available for $479 (OfficeMax, 2009). Installing this single device at the central office would cover a multitude of standard office needs.

C. Server

As will be covered in the next section, XYZ Hospice will not have need of an in-house system to act as a server, as all server functionality will be outsourced to online service providers.

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IV. Software

A. Operating System

The netbooks can come with either Ubuntu or Windows Vista pre-installed. Windows has the advantage of better hardware support, as Ubuntu often “involves manual hacking to accomplish things that ought to be trivial (and in Windows usually are) (Yegulalp, 2007).” Hardware installation is less of a problem for the basic systems, as the manufacturer will pre-install the operating systems; however, as non Plug and Play (PnP) peripherals are added to these systems, getting them to work with Ubuntu can become problematic. Ubuntu does have the advantage of offering a wide variety of easily installed software applications at no cost, while adding Windows XP to the Dell Inspirion Mini 9 laptop increases its cost per unit by $50 (Dell, 2009).

B. Client Applications

Whether the organization ops for Windows or Linux operating systems, Sun Microsystem’s Open Office suite of desktop productivity software is highly recommended over Microsoft’s Office suite. Both Microsoft’s and Sun’s suites offer Word Processing, XML, Web Publishing, Spread Sheets, Charting, Presentation, and Database services; however, Open Office’s database software can interface with a MySQL database, while MS Office cannot, and Open Office is free, open-source software, saving the organization between $239 and $499 per installation compared with MS Office (Koll, 2007).

C. Server Applications

In Section V. Data Storage, a need for centralized data that is not duplicated will be covered; however, in order to support a centralized data store without data being duplicated across systems, a server will be required to host applications for data entry and share files. As was discussed in section I. Inputs and Outputs, applications must be capable of sharing information and providing services to other applications in standard protocols such as SOAP and in standard information-sharing formats, such as XML.

Both the .NET and PHP web application platforms have built in components for supporting these standards (Shepherd, 2004) (PHP, 2009); however, because these applications require an Internet connection and a running server to work, in the event of a system or ISP outage, the online application would be inaccessible. At the same time, while a .NET, PHP, or JSP solution offers a high-degree of customization if built in-house, a fully-customized application also comes at a great cost in initial development and continued maintenance in comparison to a Customizable Off-the-Shelf product (Talbert, 1998).

Luckily, there is a COTS product that appears to meet all of XYZ Hospice’s needs. The mumms Hospice Software offers a comprehensive applications package that includes administrative, inter-organizational services, patient tracking, insurance management, and certification tracking. Additionally, the software aids in keeping hospice organizations in compliance with Medicare CoPs to develop QAPI programs and assumes responsibility for HIPAA compliance (mumms, 2008). The application is hosted on a server, keeping data centralized; however, client computers do not require a working Internet connection to record and retrieve data, only to update the central repository:

The architecture of CP/C is a hybrid of web and stand alone application architectures. It is designed to allow care provider users location flexibility by having the capacity to work while the user is unconnected from the Internet as well as when they are online. Although the user interacts with the application through a web browser, CP/C differs from most web applications in that it does not rely on constant communication between PC and server in order to function. The server generates patient medical records as XML documents, which are downloaded to the client on demand. As the user interacts with CP/C, completing patient visits, modifying patient care plans, performing assessments, prescribing medications, the patient’s medical record is modified accordingly, relayed back to the centralized data storage server and synchronized with changes in the patient’s medical information record made by other care provider users. Hence multiple care patient users can work on the same patient simultaneously

without conflict and still retain up-to-date medical information on that patient. (Hospice Software, 2004)

Secure Computing Systems, Inc hosts the mumms software on their servers, eliminating the need for an in-house web server to host the application. Should XYZ Hospice need a brochure-style website to advertise their services, this also could be hosted through an online company such as Bluehost, which offers Apache hosting for $6.95 a month (Bluehost, 2009), or Go Daddy, which offers IIS hosting for $4.74 a month (Go Daddy, 2009).

With application hosting and website hosting outsourced to other companies, the issue of file and print hosting is left for determination. There are numerous free, open-source Document Management Software, which allow for hosting online repositories of documents with user access controls, available for free in PHP or JSP, such as Epiware (Epiware, 2007) and xinco DMS (xinco, 2008). These free software can be hosted on the same service provider account hosting the XYZ website. As the majority of open source solutions run on Apache server software, which is also free, it appears cost effective to sign up with Bluehost as a service provider.

As of January 2009, Apache servers were hosting 52.26 percent of all Domains, with Microsoft hosting 32.91 percent (Netcraft, 2009); however, Microsoft has been gaining marketshare, and should therefore not be dismissed as a potential server software. Observing the trends in hosting over the last decade, we can clearly see an inversely proportional relationship between Apache and Microsoft, stressing their combined domination of the server market:

Even should this trend of Microsoft gaining market share continue and Microsoft even eventually overtakes Apache, it seems very unlikely that Apache would disappear from the market anytime in the foreseeable future.

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V. Networking

A. WAN Network Topology

As was covered in section I, the assumption is being made for this analysis that facilities are located miles apart from one another, with properties owned by external organizations separating them. Were the four houses and their central office located on the same campus, the recommendation would be made to balance cost and reliability with a tree network, where star topologies are used for collections of nodes in close proximity and a linear bus topology is used to connect the star topologies over long distances is best (FCIT, 2009).

As the signal-to-noise ratio increases with distance and the network backbone bus topology would need to run a physical cable across the properties (Burd, 2006), such a network architecture is unfeasible across properties not owned by XYZ Hospice. Instead, the Internet will serve as the backbone for the Wide Area Network (WAN), providing a central point for accessing applications and documents rather than providing Peer-to-Peer connections on the network.

B. LAN Network Topology

The four houses and central office constitute the need for five LAN setups. Each facility will have an Internet Service Provider (ISP) provide them with an Internet connection, with a central hub or router at each location to manage all systems accessing the Internet. In order to support the portability of the netbooks, the hub or router will support IEEE 802.11g wireless standards (Burd, 2006). The D-Link Wireless N Router fits this need with five ports at a very low cost for $59.99 (OfficeMax, 2009). This router will need to be configured so as not to conflict with the non-wireless router that will be provided by the ISP to access their Internet services.

Using a WiFi router/hub as a central access point for each location reduces the number of failure points to the router, Internet connection, and laptops. If one laptop can’t access the network, but others can, then the single laptop is the culprit. If laptops can see each other on the network, but cannot access the Internet, then the Internet service provider is the issue. If laptops cannot access neither each other nor the Internet, then the router is at fault.

C. Additional Considerations

If XYZ Hospice does not currently offer at-home hospice care, they may wish to expand their services to provide this in the future; therefore, wireless broadband network cards might be useful in providing internet services to volunteers on-site providing care at the patient’s home. These are available from AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint for a variety of price ranges and needs.

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VI. Data Storage

A. Centralization

It is the intention to have XYZ store all data and documents in a central location, accessible to anyone with the proper credentials with an Internet connection. Although it is important to avoid data redundancy for the sake of efficiency and to avoid having to maintain the same data in multiple locations (Gross, 2004), as was mentioned in section IV. Software, the mumms application uses local data that is redundant to the central application in order to allow clients to continue operations without an Internet connection. Additionally, managers will temporarily have redundant copies of documents on their local machines as they check them out from the DMS for modifications.

B. Backups

For data that is hosted by mumms or Bluehost, the service providers will assume the responsibility for backing up data:

mumms® CPC and PAS data is backed nightly to magnetic tape. Tapes are bit-level verified immediately after the backup is complete. The data is also mirrored to an additional off-site server at least once per day. These tapes are removed and taken to an off-site HIPAA compliant storage facility every Friday. The tapes are rotated every three weeks with one monthly backup being kept for one calendar year. (mumms, 2009)

There is a brief window of time between when a manager is working on a document locally and when they upload it to the DMS that their work can be lost through a hard drive failure. Because redundant data will occur as a temporary phenomenon will occur, and managers may have documents and media that are for personal reference and do not need DMS services, there is a need for providing some protection against hard drive failure and offsite backup.

While normally a RAID system that has level 1 for mirroring would be appropriate for protecting against hard drive failure, few laptops come with RAID capabilities; therefore, each manager’s laptop will be supplemented with an external hard drive for backing up data using automated file synchronization software that will run in the background while the system is powered on. Because volunteer data is meant to be uploaded regularly and netbook systems are not intended for mass data and application storage, a hard drive failure on such a system would result in a minimal loss of data that does not justify the cost of backups.

C. Security

Security concerns will be dealt with more thoroughly in the next section; however, it is important here to make volunteers and manager aware that, due to the way the mumms software allows their client machines to operate independent of the online application, their local computers will contain a great deal of patient information in the form of XML documents. Because file deletion normally does not immediately remove files from secondary storage, but rather marks the file’s storage allocation units as free and its directory entry as unused, these XML documents may be visible to intruders who bypass the storage allocation table and read the allocation units directly. It also means that, should the organization ever decide to sell the laptops, they will need to ensure the hard drives are thoroughly scrubbed of their data to ensure patient data is not accidentally sold to another party (McDowell, 2008).

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VII. Security

A. System Security

As was covered in Section I, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 emphasizes the importance of securing patient privacy, and as was covered in the previous section, laptops will have sensitive data about patients stored on them, even if such data is deleted.

However, this data can also be compromised through unauthorized access to the client systems through spyware or a virus. For this reason, running the Ubuntu Operating System is highly recommended over Windows, as Ubuntu outperforms Windows Vista on Network Security, Secured Default Configuration and Installation, Spyware Solutions, Administrator Accounts, Data Protection, and Permanent Deletion (VirtualHosting, 2007). To supplement Ubuntu’s or Window’s security features, the free Anti-Virus Software, AVG, will also be maintained on systems (AVG, 2009).

B. Online Security

Secure Computing Systems, Inc hosts the mumms software on their servers, assuming responsibility for access control and SSL maintenance; however, it is up to client systems to maintain security as well. For this reason, online applications will be accessed via Mozilla Firefox, as an “independent study shows that, in 2006, IE users were vulnerable to online threats 78% of the time. Firefox users? Only 2% (Krebs, 2007).” Both AVG and Firefox can run on either the Ubuntu or Windows OS.

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VIII. Maintenance and Support

A. Maintenance

Once deployed, XYZ Hospice’s IT solution will not be left to simply run independently:

Over time, various problems with the system can and do arise. Errors that escaped detection during testing and deployment might appear. For example, the system may become overloaded because of inadequate estimates of processing volume. Information needs can change, necessitating additional data collection, storage and/or processing (Burd, 2006).

While large portions of XYZ’s solution have been outsourced to Bluehost and Secure Computing Systems, Inc, who will provide continuing support for the online applications, the client systems, the netbooks and laptops, will require routine maintenance such as scan disk, disk defragmenter, disk cleanup, and virus scans, which can be scheduled to run on each system at regular intervals. Systems should be analyzed regularly to ensure they are supporting the business needs as well.

B. Support

Technical assistance will be provided by someone with an understanding of the software installed on the systems and their hardware configurations. Additionally, assistance will be provided with helping XYZ Hospice employees communicate with peripheral service providers, such as Bluehost, Secure Computing Systems, Inc, and the Internet Service Provider so that technical issues are properly communicated.

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IX. Estimated Costs

Item	Quantity	Cost Per Unit	Total Cost
Hardware
Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Laptop / Netbook for Volunteers	15	$249.00	$3,735.00
Acer Extensa EX4630 NoteBook for House and Day Managers	8	$449.00	$3,592.00
Brother MFC-9440CN Color Laser Multifunction Center	1	$479.00	$479.00
D-Link Wireless N Router	5	$59.99	$299.95
Eagle Tech ET 80GB 5400 RP External Hard Drive w/ built-in USB Cable	8	$45.99	$367.92
Software
Open Office	24	Free	Free
Bluehost.com Web Hosting	12 Months	$6.95	$83.40
Apache Server	1	Free	Free
Epiware Document Management System	1	Free	Free
Mumms Hospice Software		Unknown	Unknown
Windows XP for Volunteers*	15	$50.00	$750.00
Windows XP for House and Day Mangers*	8	$50.00	$400.00
Allway Sync Pro File Synchronization Software, first license	1	$19.95	$19.95
Allway Sync Pro File Synchronization Software, additional licenses	7	$9.95	$69.65
AVG Anti Virus Software	23	Free	Free
Mozilla Firefox	23	Free	Free
Estimated Total:			$8,646.87**

* Optional
** Does not include the cost of Windows Vista.

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X. References

AVG, AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition – Trusted by 80 Million Users. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009: http://free.avg.com/download-avg-anti-virus-free-edition

Bluehost, Web Hosting Provider, Bluehost.com 2009. Retrieved Mar 15, 2009:
http://www.bluehost.com/

Burd , Stephen D., Systems Architecture Fifth Edition, Thomson Course Technology, 2006.

Capital Hospice (Apr 14, 2003). HIPAA and Patient Privacy, Capital Hospice,.
http://www.capitalhospice.org/privacy/

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Medicare Survey & Certification
Enforcement, Department of Health & Human Services, 2009. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009: http://www.cms.hhs.gov/SurveyCertificationEnforcement/01_Overview.asp

Dell, Inspirion Mini 9 Laptop / Netbook, Dell.com, 2009. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009:
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-inspiron-9?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

Drugstore, drugstore.com Syndicated Content API, drugstore.com, 2009. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009 at: http://www.drugstore.com/qxc88007_333181_sespider/api/api.htm

Epiware, Epiware Document Management Software, epiware.com, 2007. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009: http://www.epiware.com/

Florida Center for Instructional Technology, Topology, University of South Florida, 1995-2009. Retrieved from fcit.usf.edu on Feb 18, 2009 at: http://fcit.usf.edu/Network/chap5/chap5.htm

Go Daddy, Domain Names, Web Hosting, and SSL Certificates. Retrieved Mar 15, 2009: http://www.godaddy.com/default.aspx

Gross, Mark (Jul 20, 2004). Beating Data Redundancy with Content Reuse, Data
Conversion Laboratory. Retrieved Mar 2, 2009: http://www.dclab.com/contentreuse.asp

HFA, Choosing Hospice Care and Selecting a Hospice, Hospice Foundation of America, 2009. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009 at http://www.hospicefoundation.org/hospiceInfo/faq.asp#choosing

HFA, What is Hospice? , Hospice Foundation of America, 2009. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009: http://www.hospicefoundation.org/hospiceInfo/

Hospice Software, mumms Software Announces New Product Launch. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009:http://www.hospicesoftware.com/

Kasprak, John (Jun 20, 2003). HIPPA and Hospice, OLR Research Report, State of Conneticut General Assembly. Retrieved Mar 2, 2009:http://www.cga.ct.gov/2003/olrdata/ph/rpt/2003-R-0496.htm

Kendtrick, James (Mar 4, 2009). Achy wrists, bleary-eyed? You may have “netbook fatigue,” jkOnTheRun,.http://jkontherun.com/2009/03/04/achy-wrists-bleary-eyed-you-may-have-netbook-fatigue/

Koll, Kay (Mar 2007) OpenOffice.org 2.x and Microsoft Office 2007 Feature Comparison, Sun Microsystems Inc. Retrieved Feb 20, 2009. http://www.openoffice.org/product/docs/ms2007vsooo2.pdf

Krebs , Brian (Jan 4, 2007), Internet Explorer Unsafe for 284 Days in 2006, The Washington Post. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/01/internet_explorer_unsafe_for_2.html

McDowell , Mindi and Lytle, Matt, National Cyber Alert System, Effectively Erasing Files, United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, 2008. Retrieved Mar 8, 2009 at: http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/tips/ST05-011.html

Mumms, Frequently Asked Questions, mumms Software. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009:http://www.mumms.com/products/faq

mumms Software (2008.) Medicare CoPs and QAPI, Secure Computing Systems, Inc. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009:http://www.mumms.com/component/content/article/58

NBCHPN, Welcome! , National Board for Certification of Hospice & Palliative Nurses, 2009. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009 at:http://www.nbchpn.org/DisplayPage.aspx?Title=Welcome!

Netcraft, February 2009 Web Server Survey, Netcraft Ltd. 2009. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009:http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/02/18/february_2009_web_server_survey.html

Newegg.com, Laptops / Notebooks > Price: $400 – $500, NewEgg.com. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2004940032%204020&bop=And&Order=PRICE

OfficeMax, Brother MFC-9440CN Color Laser Multifunction Center. Retrieved Mar 2, 2009: http://www.officemax.com/technology/printers/multifunction-printers/laser-multifunction/product-prod280038

OfficeMax, D-Link Wireless N Router, OfficeMax.com, 2009. Retrieved Mar 2, 2009: http://officemax.com/catalog/sku.jsp?productId=ARS23830&history=j4eym90j|prodPage~15^freeText~wireless+router^paramValue~true^refine~1^region~1^param~return_skus^return_skus~Y

Overlook, Hospice Volunteer Job Description, Overlook Visiting Nurse Associate, Inc & Hospice Services. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009: http://www.masonichealthsystem.org/documents/Hospice%20Volunteer.pdf

PHP, SOAP, php.net, Mar 13, 2009. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009: http://us3.php.net/soap

Schwartz, Ephraim, Netbooks in the Business: Do They Make Sense? , InfoWorld, Feb 18, 2009. Retrieved Feb 20, 2009: http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/02/18/07FE-netbooks-business_1.html

Shepherd, George (Mar 2004). Using SOAP Extensions in ASP.NET, Microsoft Developers Network Magazine. Retrieved on Mar 2, 2008: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164007.aspx#

Talbert, Nancy (Jun 1998). The Cost of COTS, Computer, Vol 31, Issue 6, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA .

VirtualHosting (Oct 29, 2007). OSX Tiger vs. Vista vs Ubuntu Security: a 15 Point Report Card. Retrieved Mar 2, 2009: http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2007/osx-tiger-vs-vista-vs-ubuntu-security-a-15-point-report-card/

Xinco, xinco DMS Open Source Document Management, blueCubs.com, 2009. Retrieved Mar 14, 2009:http://www.xinco.org/

Yegulalp, Serdar (Apr 27, 2007). Ubuntu Linux Vs. Windows Vista: The Battle for Your Desktop, InformationWeek,. Retrieved Mar 15, 2009: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199201179

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