29 research outputs found
An Autoethnographic Account of Innovation at the US Department of Veterans Affairs
The history of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health information technology (HIT) has been characterized by both enormous successes and catastrophic failures. While the VA was once hailed as the way to the future of twenty-first-century health care, many programs have been mismanaged, delayed, or flawed, resulting in the waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. Since 2015 the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has designated HIT at the VA as being susceptible to waste, fraud, and mismanagement. The timely central research question I ask in this study is, can healthcare IT at the VA be healed? To address this question, I investigate a HIT case study at the VA Center of Innovation (VACI), originally designed to be the flagship initiative of the open government transformation at the VA. The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) was designed to promote the open innovation ecosystem public-private-academic partnership. Based on my fifteen years of experience at the VA, I use an autoethnographic methodology to make a significant value-added contribution to understanding and modeling the VAâs approach to innovation. I use several theoretical information system framework models including People, Process, and Technology (PPT), Technology, Organization and Environment (TOE), and Technology Adaptive Model (TAM) and propose a new adaptive theory to understand the inability of VA HIT to innovate. From the perspective of people and culture, I study retaliation against whistleblowers, organization behavioral integrity, and lack of transparency in communications. I examine the VA processes, including the different software development methodologies used, the development and operations process (DevOps) of an open-source application developed at VACI, the Radiology Protocol Tool Recorder (RAPTOR), a Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) radiology workflow module. I find that the VA has chosen to migrate away from inhouse application software and buy commercial software. The impact of these People, Process, and Technology findings are representative of larger systemic failings and are appropriate examples to illustrate systemic issues associated with IT innovation at the VA. This autoethnographic account builds on first-hand project experience and literature-based insights
Constraining the bright-end of the UV luminosity function for z 7-9 galaxies: results from CANDELS/GOODS-South
The recent Hubble Space Telescope near-infrared imaging with the Wide-Field Camera #3 (WFC 3) of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey South (GOODS-S) field in the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) programme covering nearly 100âarcmin2, along with already existing Advanced Camera for Surveys optical data, makes possible the search for bright galaxy candidates at redshift z â 7â9 using the Lyman break technique. We present the first analysis of zâČ-drop z â 7 candidate galaxies in this area, finding 19 objects. We also analyse Y-drops at z â 8, trebling the number of bright (HAB < 27 mag) Y-drops from our previous work, and compare our results with those of other groups based on the same data. The bright high-redshift galaxy candidates we find serve to better constrain the bright end of the luminosity function at those redshift, and may also be more amenable to spectroscopic confirmation than the fainter ones presented in various previous work on the smaller fields (the Hubble Ultra Deep Field and the WFC 3 Early Release Science observations). We also look at the agreement with previous luminosity functions derived from WFC 3 drop-out counts, finding a generally good agreement, except for the luminosity function of Yan et al. at z â 8, which is strongly ruled out
On the Continuous Formation of Field Spheroidal Galaxies in Hierarchical Models of Structure Formation
We re-examine the assembly history of field spheroidals as a potentially
powerful discriminant of galaxy formation models. Whereas monolithic collapse
and hierarchical, merger-driven, models suggest radically different histories
for these galaxies, neither the theoretical predictions nor the observational
data for field galaxies have been sufficiently reliable for precise conclusions
to be drawn. A major difficulty in interpreting the observations, reviewed
here, concerns the taxonomic definition of spheroidals in merger-based models.
Using quantitative measures of recent star formation activity drawn from the
internal properties of a sample of distant field galaxies in the Hubble Deep
Fields, we undertake a new analysis to assess the continuous formation of
spheroidal galaxies. Whereas abundances and redshift distributions of modelled
spheroidals are fairly insensitive to their formation path, we demonstrate that
the distribution and amount of blue light arising from recent mergers provides
a more sensitive approach. With the limited resolved data currently available,
the rate of mass assembly implied by the observed colour inhomogeneities is
compared to that expected in popular Lambda-dominated cold dark matter models
of structure formation. These models produce as many highly inhomogeneous
spheroidals as observed, but underpredict the proportion of homogeneous,
passive objects. We conclude that colour inhomogeneities, particularly when
combined with spectroscopic diagnostics for large, representative samples of
field spheroidals, will be a more valuable test of their physical assembly
history than basic source counts and redshift distributions. Securing such data
should be a high priority for the Advanced Camera for Surveys on Hubble Space
Telescope.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, submitted to MNRA
WFPC2 Observations of the Hubble Deep Field-South
The Hubble Deep Field-South observations targeted a high-galactic-latitude
field near QSO J2233-606. We present WFPC2 observations of the field in four
wide bandpasses centered at roughly 300, 450, 606, and 814 nm. Observations,
data reduction procedures, and noise properties of the final images are
discussed in detail. A catalog of sources is presented, and the number counts
and color distributions of the galaxies are compared to a new catalog of the
HDF-N that has been constructed in an identical manner. The two fields are
qualitatively similar, with the galaxy number counts for the two fields
agreeing to within 20%. The HDF-S has more candidate Lyman-break galaxies at z
> 2 than the HDF-N. The star-formation rate per unit volume computed from the
HDF-S, based on the UV luminosity of high-redshift candidates, is a factor of
1.9 higher than from the HDF-N at z ~ 2.7, and a factor of 1.3 higher at z ~ 4.Comment: 93 pages, 25 figures; contains very long table
The Hubble Deep Field South Flanking Fields
As part of the Hubble Deep Field South program, a set of shorter 2-orbit
observations were obtained of the area adjacent to the deep fields. The WFPC2
flanking fields cover a contiguous solid angle of 48 square arcminutes.
Parallel observations with the STIS and NICMOS instruments produce a patchwork
of additional fields with optical and near-infrared (1.6 micron) response.
Deeper parallel exposures with WFPC2 and NICMOS were obtained when STIS
observed the NICMOS deep field. These deeper fields are offset from the rest,
and an extended low surface brightness object is visible in the deeper WFPC2
flanking field. In this data paper, which serves as an archival record of the
project, we discuss the observations and data reduction, and present SExtractor
source catalogs and number counts derived from the data. Number counts are
broadly consistent with previous surveys from both ground and space. Among
other things, these flanking field observations are useful for defining slit
masks for spectroscopic follow-up over a wider area around the deep fields, for
studying large-scale structure that extends beyond the deep fields, for future
supernova searches, and for number counts and morphological studies, but their
ultimate utility will be defined by the astronomical community.Comment: 46 pages, 15 figures. Images and full catalogs available via the
HDF-S at http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdfsouth/hdfs.html at present. The
paper is accepted for the February 2003 Astronomical Journal. Full versions
of the catalogs will also be available on-line from AJ after publicatio
Spitzer IRS 16 micron Observations of the GOODS Fields
We present Spitzer 16 micron imaging of the Great Observatories Origins Deep
Survey (GOODS) fields. We survey 150 square arcminutes in each of the two GOODS
fields (North and South), to an average 3 sigma depth of 40 and 65 micro-Jy
respectively. We detect about 1300 sources in both fields combined. We validate
the photometry using the 3-24 micron spectral energy distribution of stars in
the fields compared to Spitzer spectroscopic templates. Comparison with ISOCAM
and AKARI observations in the same fields show reasonable agreement, though the
uncertainties are large. We provide a catalog of photometry, with sources cross
correlated with available Spitzer, Chandra, and HST data. Galaxy number counts
show good agreement with previous results from ISOCAM and AKARI, with improved
uncertainties. We examine the 16 to 24 micron flux ratio and find that for most
sources it lies within the expected locus for starbursts and infrared luminous
galaxies. A color cut of S_{16}/S_{24}>1.4 selects mostly sources which lie at
1.1<z<1.6, where the 24 micron passband contains both the redshifted 9.7 micron
silicate absorption and the minimum between PAH emission peaks. We measure the
integrated galaxy light of 16 micron sources, and find a lower limit on the
galaxy contribution to the extragalactic background light at this wavelength to
be 2.2\pm 0.2$ nW m^{-2} sr^{-1}.Comment: Accepted for Publication in the AJ. 53 preprint pages, including 15
figures and 8 tables. Table 1-4 are truncated in the ms.tex but are included
in full in the tar file (and will be available in the online version of the
AJ
Far-Ultraviolet Imaging of the Large Magellanic Cloud Populous Cluster NGC 1978 with WFPC2
We have imaged the ~2.2 billion-year-old Large Magellanic Cloud populous cluster NGC 1978 in the far-ultraviolet and visible with the second Wide Field/Planetary Camera (WFPC2) on the Hubble Space Telescope. The far-ultraviolet images show a sparse stellar field with little apparent density enhancement in the cluster core. The visible images are dominated by the cluster's first-ascent and second-ascent red giants, which are completely invisible to the far-ultraviolet filter. No evidence for a hot horizontal branch population of core-helium-burning stars is seen; nor is there any apparent indication of a significant blue
straggler population. These results suggest that the presence of a rich, young population of field stars in the
NGC 1978 region is responsible for the unusual location of the cluster in the integrated light color-color plots produced by IUE
CANDELS: The Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey - The Hubble Space Telescope Observations, Imaging Data Products and Mosaics
This paper describes the Hubble Space Telescope imaging data products and
data reduction procedures for the Cosmic Assembly Near-IR Deep Extragalactic
Legacy Survey (CANDELS). This survey is designed to document the evolution of
galaxies and black holes at , and to study Type Ia SNe beyond
. Five premier multi-wavelength sky regions are selected, each with
extensive multiwavelength observations. The primary CANDELS data consist of
imaging obtained in the Wide Field Camera 3 / infrared channel (WFC3/IR) and
UVIS channel, along with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The
CANDELS/Deep survey covers \sim125 square arcminutes within GOODS-N and
GOODS-S, while the remainder consists of the CANDELS/Wide survey, achieving a
total of \sim800 square arcminutes across GOODS and three additional fields
(EGS, COSMOS, and UDS). We summarize the observational aspects of the survey as
motivated by the scientific goals and present a detailed description of the
data reduction procedures and products from the survey. Our data reduction
methods utilize the most up to date calibration files and image combination
procedures. We have paid special attention to correcting a range of
instrumental effects, including CTE degradation for ACS, removal of electronic
bias-striping present in ACS data after SM4, and persistence effects and other
artifacts in WFC3/IR. For each field, we release mosaics for individual epochs
and eventual mosaics containing data from all epochs combined, to facilitate
photometric variability studies and the deepest possible photometry. A more
detailed overview of the science goals and observational design of the survey
are presented in a companion paper.Comment: 39 pages, 25 figure
An autoethnographic account of innovation at the department of veterans affairs
What is influencing the direction of innovation at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)? I explore challenges at the VA Center of Innovation (VACI) as the US Government Accounting Office (GAO) has designated the VA at high-risk for being susceptible to waste, fraud, and mismanagement. My autoethnographic lens is applied to the VACI open source software application, the Radiology Protocol Tool Recorder (RAPTOR) that my team and I designed and developed from 2010 to 2017. RAPTOR is designed to work with the VistA Electronic Health Record (EHR), considered one of the most important open source healthcare software applications ever. The failure to launch RAPTOR is representative of these susceptibilities and an appropriate example to illustrate VA institutional issues. This poster advances a novel approach of understanding institutional culture and change, using autoethnographic methods to retrospectively analyze over ten years of experience at the VA. I propose three new research questions based on my understanding of VA innovation. The poster provides a structure to understand the major issues influencing information directions; identifies sources and determinants and categorizes attributes into organization, process, technology, and culture. My research is supplemented by the information literature, and I use a conceptual framework explaining the relationships between these factors and the direction of VA IT innovation. The proposed framework serves as a means by which government and public sector information systems managers / Chief Information Officers / Technology and business managers can conduct an introspective exercise within their organization