The Hindu Business Line : Good technology is almost half of health

A healthy feeling is a happy one, as we recently saw, closer home. A few top-level statements about ‘health’ lifted the otherwise gloomy financial markets.

Wish something similar could happen to the health sector, which is constrained on many counts, including technology. “Nearly 50 per cent of the cost of setting up a new hospital goes into technology,” writes Joe Curian in one of the essays included in Strategic Issues and Challenges in Health Management edited by K.V. Ramani, Dileep Mavalankar, and Dipti Govil ( www.sagepublications.com).

“Over 80 per cent of technology has a very short lifespan, as expensive equipment such as linear accelerators, gamma knifes, or MRIs may need replacement within six to seven years,” Curian adds. Some of the largest costs in the healthcare industry are consumable and disposable goods.

He observes that information technology and computerisation have had a great influence on healthcare, so much so with telemedicine and robotic surgeries the distance between the patient and the doctor has become irrelevant.

“Previously, to diagnose symptoms, doctors would examine the whole body, then a particular organ and then the disease or infection within that organ,” the author describes. “Today, however, doctors can examine the particular cell, chromosome, gene and/or sequence of DNA or RNA and use nanotechnology to target drugs,” he distinguishes.

‘Healthy’ read.

No loose threads!

Designing and developing thread safe servlets is one of the chapters in Kunal Jaggi’s SCWCD Exam Guide ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com), a book to help you with the Sun Certified Web Component Developer study.

For a Web server, each client request is a thread, the author explains. “Threads are created as a result of executing even a simple standalone Java program… Thread safety mans that the integrity and consistency of an object’s fields are maintained.”

A box item in the chapter has a word of caution about background threads. “Your clients make a request for a resource, the container maps the request to an appropriate resource based on some URL mapping and the servicing methods generate the result or may forward the request to some other component for further request processing,” it begins.

“All this looks pretty fine, but, unfortunately the story doesn’t end there. Any thread started by a servlet can continue to execute even after the response has been sent.”

Jaggi mentions, as examples, background thread started in init() performing continuous work, and request handling threads displaying the current status with doGet() or doPost().

“In case you spawn background threads, make sure to exit them in the destroy() method,” he advises. It is important that no threads are missed and all those created by a servlet are stopped, he insists.

“Otherwise the JVM will have an orphaned thread that is using up valuable CPU cycles. Also, if the servlet is reloaded, even more orphaned threads will come out.”

A book for those who follow the thread of discussion.

The e-auditor

SA 230, the Standard on Auditing on ‘Audit Documentation,’ from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), defines documentation as “the working papers prepared or obtained by the auditor and retained by him, in connection with the performance of his audit.”

How does an auditor go about documentation in an electronic environment? A recent publication of the ICAI, titled Technical Guide on E-Commerce Considerations for Audit of Financial Statements ( www.icai.org) offers help in this regard.

Certain electronic information may exist only at a certain point of time, and such information may not be retrievable after a specified period of time if files are changed and if backup files do not exist. In such cases, the auditor may have to ask for retention of some information for audit review or for performing appropriate audit procedures, says the ICAI.

The book provides counsel on how auditors should preserve client’s electronic evidence on their computers for further reference. For instance, the auditor has to “protect the integrity of the information at all stages of the engagement, especially when the information is shared within the engagement team.” Another factor to be considered is the ability to retrieve and access the documentation during the retention period, “since the underlying technology may be upgraded or changed over time.”

Recommended addition to the professionals’ shelf.

Database disputes

Protection of computer-generated works was the subject of Express Newspapers vs Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, a case discussed in The Legal Protection of Databases by Simon Chalton ( www.vivagroupindia.com).

“Express Newspapers published a daily random word puzzle, the answers to which appeared in a subsequent issue of the same newspaper,” he begins.

“Liverpool Daily Post pre-empted Express’ publication of its answers by publishing them in their own newspaper, denying that there had been any sufficient exercise of skill or labour in the generation of the puzzle or its answers, which had been generated by computer.”

During arguments, Express Newspapers were able to show that the author of the program used to generate the puzzle was also the author of the puzzle and that he had used the computer as a tool to create the puzzle.

“On these particular facts he was accordingly entitled to copyright protection as having achieved the required criterion of originality in producing the puzzle and its answers,” Chalton informs.

Essential study for the database-avid.

Filling the long, fat pipe

One of the most significant challenges associated with TCP (transmission control protocol) is its inherent inability to fill a network link that is long in terms of distance (latency) and fat in terms of capacity (bandwidth), write Zach Seils and Joel Christner in Deploying Cisco Wide Area Application Services ( www.ciscopress.com). “Hence, the term long fat network (LFN) came into existence,” they add.

The challenge with filling LFNs is that the amount of memory allocated to TCP is less than the capacity of the network multiplied by the distance, the authors elaborate. “In short, TCP cannot receive enough data from the application to adequately saturate the network with data.”

How does TFO (transport flow optimisation), which uses an optimised implementation of TCP based on Binary Increase Congestion TCP (BIC-TCP), fare? It leverages TCP optimisations such as window scaling, selective acknowledgement, and large initial windows; but all that will not improve performance if buffer capacity is simply too small to fill the available network link, argue Seils and Christner.

They suggest that throughput can be improved for LFNs by allocating a larger amount of memory to TCP and also by compressing data.

“Consider a scenario where a T3 link connects a campus to a remote data centre over very long distance,” reads an example. “Although an increase to TCP memory (adjusting TFO buffers) may allow for near line-speed utilisation of this link, how much more throughput could be realised if the link was full of data that was compressed at a ratio of 5:1?” it asks. The answer is that ‘with a 45-Mbps link carrying streams of 5:1 compressed data at line rate, that equates to application throughput of 225 Mbps.”

Detailed discussion.

Tailpiece

“One suggestion to improve employee morale was that we do away with deadlines.”

“And it works?”

“It does! Only, we’re having problem convincing our customers.”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

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