Have a happy and safe Fourth of July !

Have a happy and safe Fourth of July !

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Tagged: Fourth of July, Holidays
Today is a great day to highlight the recent posts of two fellow medical bloggers: the first is from Laika’s MedLibLog, written by a Dutch research-scientist/medical-librarian; the second post is from Life in the Fast Lane, a blog written collectively by a group of Australian physicians.
Each author has written definitive posts about the mechanics – and utility – of searching the medical literature, and evaluating what has been found.
These posts should be seen as instant classics – and required reading for new graduate students in medicine, dental medicine or biomedical research or just about anyone with an interest in finding more-pertinent clinical information (in less time).
Their descriptive clarity in explaining what to search, and how to search is pitch-perfect.
Thank you – Laika and SandNSurf – for writing them!
Please read:
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Next: Following are several quite different compilations of medical information resources written by librarians.
Elena Giglia, a medical librarian from Central Library of Medicine, University of Turin, Italy, wrote in 2007 an excellent overview of the medical literature entitled “Beyond PubMed: Other Free Biomedical Databases“. This 11-page article was published in the European Journal of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (Europa Medicophysica) – Vol. 43(4):563-9 (Dec 2007). It is available online for anyone to read.
Ms. Giglia is the author of a very recent article, “Medline/PubMed revisited: new, semantic tools to explore the biomedical literature“, published June 2009 in Eur J Phys Rehabil Med – Vol. 45(2):293-7 (subscription required).
Law librarian Gloria Miccioli wrote a summary of medical sources targeted for legal professionals, entitled “Researching Medical Literature on the Web” (published Sept 22 2008), found on LLRX.com.
The LLRX website also offers a list of links for librarians (or others) doing legal research.
My own Home Week: Evidence Based Medicine Resources page on Libguides.com was created – and is updated annually – as a source-sheet for third-year medical students at UCHC as they rotate throug h their clinical clerkship year.
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Finally: Librarians working in academic health science libraries offer a variety of digital training tutorials or subject lists for orienting their students, residents and faculty to the technical aspects of searching the literature of medicine.
A quick search on Google for “tutorials searching medical literature” brings up an eclectic group of 968,000 retrievals.
The same search using Bing f0und 1,530,000 well-filtered retrievals.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Academic Medicine · Blogs or Wikis about Medicine · EBM/Clinical Decisionmaking · Educational Sites · Instruction · Libraries or Librarians · Library 2.0 · Medical Students · Medicine 2.0 · News & Medical News · Teaching-and-Learning in Medicine
Tagged: Alternative Medical Search Engines, Clinical Clerkship - Medical Students, Clinical Medicine-Information Resources, Graduate Medical Education, Graduate Medicine-Teaching and Learning, Medical Librarians, Medical Literature, Medline, PubMed, UCHC Libguides
Image credit: http://medbloggercode.com/ – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009.
My thanks to the good folks at Healthcare Blogger Code of Ethics who recently added the EBM and Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC blog to their lengthy list of medical bloggers.
Here is the written Code of Ethics promoted by this non-profit, volunteer group.
Link here to view the newest additions of medicine bloggers, or patient bloggers, endorsed by HBCE (updated June 26 2009).
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Blogs or Wikis about Medicine · Consumer/Patient Health · Educational Sites · Healthcare-Administration · Medicine 2.0 · News & Medical News · Teaching-and-Learning in Medicine
Blogging lately has taken a back-seat to real life, as the Creaky family continues to spawn brainy graduates.
Two ceremonies over the past weeks is truly something to celebrate!

Congratulations, KHam and PHam – You’ve worked hard and done well!
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Back to blogging next week!
→ 1 CommentCategories: News & Medical News
Tagged: Class of 2009, Creaky, Graduations, News
Medical student and artist Satre Stuelke creates illustrations using radiological techniques, such as this image of a Mac iBook.
It’s so pretty!
Photo-Source Credit: http://satre.itrnet.com/radiology_art/html/about.htm - All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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My computer at work has been way, way out of service lately.
More postings to follow after it is feeling better!
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And in the interim: It’s been raining practically every day in the Northeast. We are actually becoming grateful for 4 or 5 minutes of sunshine daily! One day last week I drove into my driveway and saw a spotted salamander clinging to the house. They like to play dead when you hold them, but after five minutes they slide away into the brush after your attention has waned.
This spring (in New England) has been excellent weather to observe vernal pool dwellers up close (like this site). It has also a great year for those who photograph mushrooms!
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That’s the Friday Post for Jun 19 2009! Stay dry, folks!
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Tagged: MacBooks, Salmanders, The Friday Post, Vernal Pools
This is the 300th post on the EBM & Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC blog. Woot… please drop me a line and let me know how I’m doing!
Medical and dental students have one more exam to complete, and then will have a few well-deserved weeks of vacation. They may even have time to read for pleasure.
A brief article entitled “Textbook Death Watch“ posted on Tech & Learning (May 1 2009) caught my eye, and that prompted an search-expedition for open access libraries of digital works available to anyone to use. The list below is not meant to be inclusive… only representative.
A related article on the Wired section (free to all) from the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 13 2009) discusses the migration from ‘real’ books to digital archives at University of Oklahoma: at this link. An article published in the Washington Post (May 19 2009) about the scope, reach and legal considerations of Google Books is worth a read.
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Digital Collections from Non-Academic Sources
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A Collection of Digital or E-Text Collections hosted by Academic Institutions
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A Few Audio Book-Sources
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Recommendations by Readers or Bloggers
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Hard to Describe Sites
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Finally, two sites not for enjoying literature as much as for savoring historical images.
Image Credit: http://www.lifeinwesternpa.org – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009.
→ 5 CommentsCategories: Educational Sites · Journalism · Libraries or Librarians · Library 2.0 · News & Medical News · Scholarly Publications · Scholarly Publishing & Open Access · Web 2.0 and Geek Stuff
Tagged: Blogs or Wikis about Medicine, Educational Sites, Electronic Textbooks, Library 2.0, News & Medical News, Open Access, Other Stuff
Sorry for the considerable absence of blogging lately – it’s the end of the academic year and things have been piling up.
Here’s the Friday Post #33 for May 29, 2009. And if it doesn’t stop raining every day here in Connecticut (and soon), more than a few of us are going to start to yell and scream!
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Part literary magazine/part interesting blog written by students from Northwestern University, here is an excerpt from a recent article on NorthbyNorthwestern, commenting on the precarious state of the current economy:
“ It comes as a huge surprise, then, that in the single most severe financial plunge since the Great Depression we, myself included, are more familiar with Facebook’s layout changes than with the principal events that truly affect our lives. It might not seem to matter to us just yet, but there will come a time when our own ignorance is going to bite us in the ass…. “
From “Stop Talking about the Recession and Start Understanding It” by Maura Brannigan (published on May 4 2009)
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Read Meet the Millenials on FLYP, a very stylish way to read news online.
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Another timely comic from xkcd:

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Is it hard to believe that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles turned 25 this year!? Woot.
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Finally, here’s two photos of the prison bus heading to UConn Health Center, in the rain:
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That’s the Friday Post for May 29 2009, folks.
Let’s hope for a sunny day – Have a great weekend!
Comments OffCategories: Humor · Journalism · The Friday Post
Tagged: flyp, The Friday Post, xkcd.com
You’ve worked hard.
Graduation Day is Sunday, May 17, 2009!
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Here is what one medical student did to get rid of his short white coat:
→ 2 CommentsCategories: Humor · Medical Students · Medical Students-Videos · News & Medical News · Other Stuff
Tagged: Class of 2009, Medical School - Graduation
Tradition has it that bad things might happen on Friday the 13th. So here’s the Friday (the 13th) Post #27 for Feb 13 2009:
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And that’s the Friday the 13th Post! Take care and stay safe over a long weekend.
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Tagged: Friday the 13th, The Friday Post
A physician-blogger from Argentina recently wrote to ask me to take a look at his site, called Pharmamotion: Pharmacology & Therapeutics Resources.
The purpose of his site is described as: “… to gather educational resources targeted to health professionals that are freely available on the web, for a better understanding of pharmacology. These resources include: animations and videos that illustrate mechanism of action of drugs (some of them developed by Dr. Guzman); definitions and concepts from reliable sources about the general principles of pharmacology; press releases and drug reviews from official agencies (FDA, EMEA, NHS, and many others).”
Here’s an example of the content: click here to read a recent post about Direct to Consumer Drug Advertising (Feb 23 2009).
These direct-marketing campaigns, which are aired relentlessly at 630 pm every night in the U.S. while folks are sitting down to dinner… drive me crazy, because who wants to hear a TV ad for mens’ urinary urgency, indigestion or an ad for Viagra when you’re eating with your family – yuck!
I did like his choice of videos.
Today I’ve added his site to add to the blogroll, and also created a new category under Links: Pharmacology and Clinical Therapeutics.
Thanks for the invite, Dr. Guzman!
→ 1 CommentCategories: Educational Sites · News & Medical News · Other Stuff · Pharmacology and Clinical Therapeutics · Videos & Podcasts
Tagged: Basic Pharmacology, Blog I Like: Pharmamotion, Clinical Pharmacology, Drug Advertising, Drug Marketing, Pharmaceutical Industry, Teaching-and-Learning in Medicine
An excellent, tongue-in-cheek essay about budget crises, managing cuts, faculty and finding alternative solutions was written by John Lombardi for the Inside Higher Ed blog on “Reality Check“ (Jan 8 2009). His fictional ‘fable’ does a good job at describing the many competing groups and forces operating within a large academic community.
This has been a difficult year for academic institutions. Buffeted by declining endowment income, scarcer donations from alumni, budget reduction (or rescission) requests from administrators, decreasing state tax revenues and a bleak long-term investment outlook face off against increasing pressure on college enrollments, recruitment (and retention) of talented faculty, expanding class size or teaching loads.
University of Connecticut, like other large state-supported universities, is experiencing these types of market influences. Following is an excerpt from the weekly digital newspaper, UConn Advance about cost saving initiatives, written by Karen Grava:
“ The University implemented an across-the-board 3.5 percent assessment in the fall – including a rescission of 3 percent and a 0.5 percent reallocation – and achieved substantial savings by placing strict limits on out-of-state travel and implementing a freeze on hiring, except for the most critical positions. “
Excerpt from http://advance.uconn.edu/2009/090217/09021701.htm
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As an academic librarian working with groups of recent college graduates now enrolled in medical or dental school, as an employee of the university and as a parent of a high school senior, I’d say I hold a variety of differing views of the current economic and enrollment challenges that colleges and universities in the U.S. are experiencing.
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One of the students I have known throughout four years of medical school, a former PBL student, recently told me about her meeting with the financial-aid counselor. She’ll be graduating in May with $190,000 in student loans (which represents a combination of undergraduate and medical school expenses). These loans turn out to be an “average amount” of U.S. medical or dental student debt, currently. The counselor worked out a ten-year repayment plan for her to think about. The monthly cost? $2,200. For a lot of folks, that figure is higher than the monthly mortgage payment on their home. That’s a scary way to begin a career. On the other hand, being an anesthesiologist pays well. Eventually.
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For an undergraduate viewpoint, this recent article outlining undergraduate college demographics, written by Lisa Foderaro for the New York Times (Mar 1 2009), gets to the heart of the question. Melissa Korn on the Wall Street Journal writes about how “dream schools” may be affected for the 2009-2010 academic year (Mar 2 2009).
Finally, my other perspective is as parent of a senior in high school. Recently I spoke with several local high school guidance counselors about college admissions this year. Each counselor in this group described 2009 as “… a very weird year for college applicants“. Following are several of their direct quotes:
“ Seniors who I would have thought would be likely to be admitted to top-tier private schools in other years either aren’t getting in, or if they are accepted, offers of scholarship money or financial aid hasn’t met their expectations [in 2009].”
“ Most students this year have applied to top-tier state universities in addition to private colleges… the average list of ’safety schools’ is longer this year. Several kids haven’t been accepted at any of the schools they’ve heard from, so far. There’s also a great deal of wait-listing.”
“ More than a few parents [of our seniors] have lost their jobs or been laid-off recently. Some whose parents can’t help them out financially simply won’t go to college next year or will sit out to work for one or two years. All in all – it’s been a very difficult year to predict who will go where.”
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I’m profoundly grateful to report that my kid was admitted to the college of his choice recently. What a relief it was the day that long-awaited letter showed up in the mailbox!
Now if the greater economy would please get going again…
→ 1 CommentCategories: Educational Sites · Medical Students · News & Medical News · Other Stuff
Tagged: Academia, Academic Institutions-Financial Management, Cost-of-an-Education, Student Debt, Student Demographics, Students-Demographics, World Economics
Biochemistry Questions Site is a teaching-and-learning blog whose author, Dr. H.D. Urquiza Hernandez, is a professor of biochemistry and holds a PhD in biological sciences.
This is a multi-layered Q & A site which could be useful for medical students who are immersed in micro human biochemistry, or preparing to take the USMLE. The site is free and open to anyone to use.
His work also exhibits a sense of humor, with a section for “Moviecular Biology” and “Biochemistry at the Movies“.
Plus, where else could one find a crossword puzzle all about Amino Acids!
Photo/Source Credit: http://biochemistryquestions.wordpress.com/biochemical-puzzles/ – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009_______________________
.Today, I’ve added the site to my Blogs I Like list.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Academic Medicine · EBM/Clinical Decisionmaking · Educational Sites · Instruction · Medical Students · Medicine 2.0 · News & Medical News · Teaching-and-Learning in Medicine
Tagged: Biochemistry-Study Sites, Molecular Biology, Teaching-and-Learning in Medicine, USMLE-Study Aids
Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) in January 2009 sponsored the first annual video contest for Aspiring Docs. Ten awards were made to undergraduate students who “… revealed their dreams of a career in medicine and were rewarded with financial assistance from the AAMC to help cover the costs of preparing for and applying to medical school. “
Winners were announced Feb 24, 2009 on the “Aspiring Docs” website. If you are interested, their videos are available to view on the AAMC Channel on YouTube.com.
Here is a link to one of them: Chanel Fischetti, a junior at University of Southern California, who learned American Sign Language in anticipation of caring for hearing-impaired patients, describing (and signing) why she wants to become a physician:
One of the ten finalists is an undergraduate from University of Connecticut, Benjamin Gruenbaum.
Note: Today I found a link to a great teaching-learning site for American Sign Language, with many demonstration videos of words being signed, at ASL University.com.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: News & Medical News
Tagged: Aspiring-Docs.org, Future Physicians, Pre-Medical Students
This is the Friday Post #29 for Apr 3 2009.
Heard of GigaPan? Here’s an excerpt from the About page:
” GigaPan is a collaborative project of Google, Carnegie Mellon University and NASA Ames Intelligent Systems Division’s Robotics Group. It is a robotic platform that attaches to a digital camera and some computer software. The robotic platform allows a user to take a photograph, then it will re-aim the camera with great precision, to take another photograph. After taking many photos, the software stitches all the pictures into a gigapixel image. Public beta-testing of a consumer version of the robotic platform and software has begun. Beta-testing and product platform development is being carried out by GigaPan Systems, who will eventually offer the unit for public sale.“
“ GigaPan is an open website – anyone can upload photographs to it, and anyone can place comments on those photographs. Authors have no editorial control over the comments which are placed on their photographs. “
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Below is a screenshot of a GigaPan photo taken on Jan 20 2009 in Washington DC at the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States. Photographer David Bergman created this 1,474-megapixel image of President Barack Obama’s inauguration: .
Photo credit: http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?auth=033ef14483ee899496648c2b4b06233c – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009For more information on how the images were created, visit David Bergman’s blog at http://www.davidbergman.net/blog/.
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Please set aside your notions about Librarians wearing sensible shoes and shushing people, because most of us do not Shush and have many stylish pairs of shoes in our closets!! Where’s the evidence? Right here on the Flickr group: Librarian Shoes, where this superb photograph was recently posted:
Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/groups/librarianshoes/ – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009Here another stereotype-busting link: Warrior Librarian!
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Graphic evidence of why many Americans really need to take Lipitor can be viewed on the blog This is Why You’re Fat… and while horrifying vegetarians daily, no doubt! Be prepared for wretched excess and lots of bacon. Here’s one recent artistic composition, made with elk meat, called Thunderdome (and submitted by a librarian):
Photo credits/Source: http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/post/90372468/the-thunderdome-three-stacks-of-bacon-sausage – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
That’s the Friday Post for Apr 3 2009, folks! Enjoy your weekend!
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March 17, 2009
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to You
Erin Go Bragh!
Photo Credit: http://www.clipartguide.com/_pages/0511-0902-1615-4658.html
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Tagged: Saint Patrick's Day
Here’s an example of what I’ve been looking at all week . month:

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March is the month to turn towards the annual task of updating the Reference collection in the library (which is my responsibility). The graduate students have their Spring Break this week, so it’s a good time to tackle this project.
When you were a little kid, did you hang around in the library, looking at books with no particular plan for researching anything specific? Maybe only born researchers or born librarians do that!
Now as a grown up librarian, it is still amazing to me the diversity of information that one can stumble over while on the way to looking something else entirely unrelated. Browsing and serendipity can play a part in pursuing research whether you’re surfing the net or standing in the book stacks, holding an actual book.
Librarians do hear this phrase occasionally: “If it’s not online, I don’t want it.“ A recent observation (in my problem-based learning class) is that this generation of Milleniums much prefer their research information online… and who are reluctant to walk into the “bricks and mortar” library to find a textbook in print.
As collection managers and archivists, one of our major responsibilities is to deliver current library materials and services in the manner in which our patrons best like to “consume” them. The shift from print to digital access does impact how librarians select (and store) their core collections.
A complex mix of collection management decisions weigh format and availability versus price and expected (potential or future) usage which also roughly indexes the librarians’ expectation about the longevity or lasting value of the material.
Thrown into these choices: Collection budgets (which are shrinking), and what our students, clinicians, pharmacists and the general library users prefer to use (print or online). Luckily, in this library there are librarians with decades of experience to muse with these decisions… and thanks for the advice, AD!
In other words, does it make better sense to buy one (physical, paper) textbook produced in 2009 for $450 (for example) when you could, as as alternative, purchase an electronic, perpetual version of the work for $1,000 which can be read simultaneously by up to five online readers and whose clinical content is updated monthly? Collection management, a bit like the practice of medicine, is both an art and a science.
The goal is to select the most cost-effective means to provide the essential resources needed by your particular community. As the migration of library collections continues away from print to digital access (i.e., always on, never checked out, 24 x 7 x 365 days per week… provided that the network is up and running), the next post in this series will explore concerns and decisions that academic-medical librarians in 2009 need to balance in order to offer the most complete collections available.
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I would like to welcome our newest reference librarian - JK -to the health science library this week.
We are so glad you joined us!
→ 1 CommentCategories: Libraries or Librarians · Library 2.0 · News & Medical News · Other Stuff
Tagged: Collection Management-Medical Libraries, Collections Management, Collections Management-Academic Libraries, User-centered Technologies
Today – Thursday, Mar 19 2009 – is Match Day 2009! Good luck and God speed to every medical student in the Class of 2009!
At 1:00pm (ET), fourth-year medical students will find out – simultaneously – where in the U.S. they will be spending the next year of their life as residents. This is a nervous phase of medical education, as these near-doctors wait to learn if they must make plans to move across the country (or across the street). Match Day is a day to look forward to for faculty and staff at UConn Health Center, as we stand by and witness our graduating seniors as they stand at the crux of a new life. This is their day of celebration, exhilaration, profound relief… and possibly for those few who didn’t get their first choices, some tears.
See the National Residency Matching Program (NRMP) site for more information.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Academic Medicine · Medical Students · News & Medical News · Other Stuff
Tagged: Match Day 2009, Medical Residencies, Medical Students
.MedEdPORTAL is an open-access archive of 1,300 educational or clinical training materials voluntarily submitted by medical or dental faculty from around the world, sponsored and produced by the Association of American Medical Colleges and American Dental Education Association. Here is the AAMC description of the site:
” MedEdPORTAL is a free online publication service… designed to promote educational collaboration by facilitating the open exchange of teaching resources such as clinical tutorials, virtual patients, simulation cases, tutorials, lab guides, videos, podcasts, assessment tools, etc. While MedEdPORTAL’s primary audiences include health educators and learners around the globe, it is open and available for free to the general public. Users can access quality, peer-reviewed teaching material and assessment tools in both the basic and clinical sciences in medicine and in oral health “.
Source: http://services.aamc.org/30/mededportal/servlet/segment/mededportal/information/
An upgrade to the content and searchability of the page was announced on Apr 7 2009 by AAMC, and the name is now MedEdPORTAL 2.0.

This is an important archive of peer-reviewed teaching and training tools for students, residents (and librarians). The architecture of the site has been made more functional, with the addition of subject/content links like this one:
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.Another way to search the site is to Browse by Discipline or Hot Topics in Medicine or Dentistry.
An example of featured content, added Mar 4 2009 by a faculty in Emergency Medicine from University of Minnesota, is entitled “Stab to Neck” (two screenshots from this video/tutorial):

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I like this site – it is created by physicians – for physicians (and students) in all disciplines. The brainpower and clinical experience of many are shared on MedEdPORTAL.
AAMC and ADEA have created a fine, free example of the power of cooperative resource-sharing distributed on an open-access platform. It should be on your list of teaching-and-training bookmarks.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Academic Medicine · Educational Sites · Instruction · Medical Students · Medicine 2.0 · News & Medical News · Teaching-and-Learning in Medicine · Videos & Podcasts
Tagged: AAMC, Association of American Medical Colleges, Clinical Teaching, Instructional Technologies-Medicine, MedEdPortal, Medical Videos, Teaching & Learning in Medicine
→ Leave a CommentCategories: News & Medical News · Other Stuff · The Friday Post
Tagged: Easter-2009, Happy Holidays, The Friday Post
Here’s the Friday Post #31 for Apr 24 2009.
First: A funny collection of One Hundred 404 Error Screens from the blog of Francesco Mugnai. I especially liked the guy with the long ponytail in the red cowboy bikini and the thigh-high leather boots (you know, the one holding the .357 magnum). In fact I think it may be Sean Connery.
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Next, more Anatomical Knitting found on BoingBoing, a Dissected Froggy:
Photo Credit: Courtesy of BoingBoing.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009_________________________________
Do Not Sulk or Cry
” Students who answer incorrectly should not become overly discouraged. Attendings rarely remember students who give wrong answers (especially to difficult questions); they often remember those who lose their composure. “
Excerpt from “The Art of Pimping” by Alan Detsky, MD – published in JAMA, Vol. 301 – issue 13, p. 1379-1381 (April 1 2009)
DB’s MedRants - and many other physician-bloggers – have already blogged about this article. Life in the Fast Lane wrote a multi-part post about pimping. Funny and cruel.
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Exams are finally wrapped up for awhile (after ten difficult days for the students), so get jiggy with Will Smith for a minute because 3.7 million views on YouTube can’t be wrong, and besides, those Egyptians are very handsome :
..
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And that’s the Friday Post for Apr 24 2009, folks. Enjoy our beautiful planet this weekend.
→ 3 CommentsCategories: Academic Medicine · Humor · Medical Students · News & Medical News · The Friday Post · Videos & Podcasts · Web 2.0 and Geek Stuff
Tagged: Anatomical Knitting, The Friday Post
National Library Week? (Oh… totally missed it because I spent all last week trying to get Twitter figured out and am making some progress with that).
Today (Apr 22 2009), Google informed me, is Earth Day. In an approximate way, a recent campaign by the non-profit group Adbusters.org is similar.
On their “About” page, Adbusters.org, a non-profit organization based in Vancouver, states: “ We are a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.”
The overarching message from Adbusters.org suggests some or all of the following: turning off your TV, unplugging your electronic devices, adopting a skeptical outlook about the culture of continual consumption. Their content fosters an attitude of anti-big business, anti-advertising, anti-obesity, staying off the grid, and in general advocates for using less stuff – both for the health of individual people, and for the greater good of the planet.
An example: the group declared November 28, 2008 as “Buy Nothing Day” and urged readers to cut up their credit cards, get out of debt, shop and spend less. (Many thousands of Americans did not do this.)
This week, Adbusters.org has declared Digital Detox Week (Apr 21-26, 2009) which urges readers to “go off-line for seven brain-restoring days” by unplugging all their digital devices. (Many thousands of Americans will not be doing this.)
Following is a screenshot of their campaign-logo, urging folks to get off the grid:
Photo credit: http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/digitaldetox – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009.
Here’s a list of recent tweets about the idea.
After looking around on their website (and chuckling over their SpoofAds), I came across the link to ABTV (AdbustersTV) and found this 2008 video called Information Deformation, which raises some enduring talking points about manipulation (or management) of our global attention-spans in this Digital Age:
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When my son was about seven years old, he asked me a number of important questions:
These are questions that only a digital native would ask, of course.
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Several medical bloggers posted items this week about Information Overload. Here are two I enjoyed reading:
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So, will you be unplugging your devices this week?
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→ Leave a CommentCategories: Blogs or Wikis about Medicine · Educational Sites · Journalism · Libraries or Librarians · Library 2.0 · Medicine 2.0 · News & Medical News · Videos & Podcasts · Virtual Environments · Web 2.0 and Geek Stuff
Tagged: Adbusters.org, Digital Natives, Information Overload, Information Technologies, Technology, Twitter, Web 2.0
Public health concerns dominate the news headlines this week, as evidence continues to unfold of a global outbreak of a novel strain of swine influenza A/H1N1.
Thanks to an active international group of Medical Bloggers and Librarians connected through social networking sites such as FriendFeed or Twitter, as I arrive at work on Monday morning, this connectedness becomes a great advantage for those of us in the United States, as our European colleagues have already scanned and posted many news or website links on items of vital concern, as emerging news continues to pour in from many places around the world.
Following are a brief set of links to global health information, disease-tracking and interactive-maps for the spread of Swine Influenza A/H1N1 (reported as of Monday, Apr 27 2009):
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International
United States
Tracking the Outbreaks
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I’d like to acknowledge the cooperative work of many European scientists and medical librarians – and in particular, bloggers Laikas, Berci and DigiCMB – who are always 6-8 hours ahead of me, both literally speaking in the real world and in many Web 2.0 innovations, who have posted scientific links and news about swine flu and steered me to several links for this post today. Thank you to these talented, and generous, colleagues.
→ 6 CommentsCategories: Epidemiology/Public Health · Medicine 2.0 · News & Medical News · Virtual Environments
Tagged: Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Disease Surveillance, Federation of American Scientists (FAS), FriendFeed, Global Disease, Global Epidemiology, Medical Librarians, PAHO: Pan American Health Organization, Pandemics-2009, Public Health, Social Media, TweetDeck, Twitter, World Health Organization (WHO)
It’s been a big news week. Global health developments have occurred with such rapidity that reporting the news of this week gives additional meaning to the use of the term “viral” as in… tracking the global spread of a novel virus: A/H1N1 – swine influenza.
After writing this post, I then noticed that only one of items on the list below refers to materials which are in print (that of the journal Public Health Reports). It is online that we are.
Photo/Source credit:http://xkcd.com/574/____________________________
IMHO: The option of becoming a vegetarian is growing more and more attractive.
→ 1 CommentCategories: EBM/Clinical Decisionmaking · Epidemiology/Public Health · Journalism · Library 2.0 · Medicine 2.0 · News & Medical News · Web 2.0 and Geek Stuff
Tagged: Digital Communications, DynaMed, Epidemiology, Global Health, Librarians-Bloggers, News-Reporting, Online-Communications, Public Health, Swine Influenza, Twitter, Viral Networks, XKCD
Here’s the Friday Post #32 for May 8 2009.
Sunday, May 3rd marked the birthday of an American original: musician, songwriter and dancer James Brown (1933-2006).
WoW… that man could dance. Here is the proof:
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Snowball is a sulphur-crested cockatoo (Cacatua galerita eleonora) who lives in Indiana with his bird rescuer Irena Schulz. The bird’s unique dancing and bopping-ability was featured on the ScienceNews blog (April 30 2009) which is where I first heard about him. A quick search on PubMed turned up the research report written by scientists Aniruddh Patel, John Iversen, Micah Bregman and Irena Schulz entitled “Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal” which published last week in the journal Current Biology 19 (May 14 2009).
Embedded in the article is a video of Snowball dancing to three segments of music with varying beats per minute (BPM): 106, 125 and 130 BPM, which you can watch at this link (media player popup).
YouTube.com offers two somewhat less officially scientific videos of Snowball grooving, the first to the music of Queen. Notice that he has to stop in the middle of the song and rest up a bit. But he really is sort of a cheerful Bird-Athlete, don’t you think?
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Finally, anyone who reads this blog knows that I love cephalopods. Do cephalopods dance? Dunno, but here’s a video of one clever Octopus filmed as she’s trying to get at a tasty treat which her human left for her in a sealed jar:
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And that’s the Friday Post for May 8 2009! Have a great weekend, folks.
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” The alarm around this particular strain [A-H1N1] has a couple of roots. First is, it’s new… it’s novel. And new is always cause for some amount of concern. Second, it does appear to have just recently jumped from one species, pigs, to another, humans. And very commonly, in the whole world of viruses – not just influenzas – when they first make the jump from one species to another is when they’re really hot viruses, dangerous viruses. That certainly was the case with SARS, which had just made the jump from bats to civets, civets to humans. So we always worry when we see a recent jump. ”
A quote from Laurie Garrett, during an interview with the Online News Hour (transcript link here) on May 1 2009.
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Ms. Garrett, author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (1994), and The Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (2000), is currently a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
How A/H1N1 influenza – identified in Mexico in March 2009 – continues to develop in human populations is still uncertain, as the virus spreads to every continent. The good news is that clinicians seem to think it is not as virulent as first feared; the bad news is that over time, the possibility still exists that we are witnessing a phenomena that every epidemiologist dreads in his or her lifetime: the emergence of an uncontainable virus in a human population who have little or no immunity against it.
While many people thought the media hype over this emerging virus was of hysterical proportions, and discounted the severity of the strain, a different way to view these events is as a sort of dress rehearsal which demonstrated that world-wide networks of disease surveillance, data-collection and cooperative intelligence sharing are functioning reasonably well. (But I’m not a virologist so maybe I know no more than the next guy on the street.)
If nothing else, it shows that swarm-intelligence and citizen-journalism is alive and well!
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You could say that some of my reactions to public health crises have been shaped in part by having lived in city of San Francisco in the early 1980’s, when a different public health crisis unfolded with the identification of a novel viral infection which came to be known as human immunodeficiency virus. If you haven’t already read And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts, who was a reporter at the time for the San Francisco Chronicle, it is truly worth the time. *
Let’s hear it for more dress rehearsals, and fewer real-life epidemics.
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Following are a few books or online resources for background information on epidemiological investigations, medical detective work and emerging infectious diseases, for your consideration:
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* Randy Shilts, who was a great journalist and a brave activist for gay rights, died of AIDS in 1994 at age 42.
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