Happy Birthday to Sesame Street which this week celebrates its 40th season on PBS! Here’s a video by beatboxing flutist Greg Pattillo playing the theme song:
Video Credit: Courtesy of YouTube.com and Greg Patillo – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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Sesame Street is full of interesting characters. The Yip Yips (Martian visitors) are two of my favorites. Here’s a classic segment as they discover what a Radio does:
Video Credit: Courtesy of Sesame Street – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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Finally… with multiple exams looming for the first-year medical students, it seems an apt moment to link to a classic medical student video called “Pancakes Every Day“:
Here’s the Friday Post #39 for Oct 16 2009. It snowed in Connecticut yesterday. It was a mucho-early start to the cold weather season. Let’s hope for no more snow for another few weeks.
Nice to learn that Graham Walker is still in fine form! He used to blog as a Medical Student on the Over My Med Body blog (which is still available to read but will have no new postings after June 22, 2008).
Dr. Walker is now a resident in Emergency Medicine in NYC. His current blog is The Central Line where he recently posted a list of indicators which will indicate just how sick you are (tongue in cheek of course). Read his post entitled “Non-Clinical Prognostic Indicators“.
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Next: An interesting scientific project from MIT called theChameleon Guitar, described by its’ creators as a “physical heart in a digital instrument”. Here is an excerpt from the About page:
“ The Chameleon Guitar, developed at the MIT Media Lab, presents a unique combination of traditional acoustic values and digital abilities. This is a real hybrid machine; a computer reads acoustic information from a wooden heart (resonator) to create new sound experience. This is an academic research project, and not a commercial one; hopefully it will influence others to explore what lies between our physical world and computers.“
Source Credit: YouTube.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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My kid the college-student sent me this video link which, while amusing, could also be viewed as a live demonstration of the perils of poly-substance abuse. He can hardly get up off the floor but, by golly, his grip on that carton of beer never slips.
Video credit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s_40rM_L0s – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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That’s the Friday Post #39 for Oct 16 2009
Have a great weekend.
* The first chameleon video I put in this post looked too photo-shopped… so I found a better rendition of what a real chameleonlooks like.
As a blog-administrator I get to filter all comments to the page before they are displayed publically. The majority of the spam is deleted by myself or caught by Askimet, the utility in WordPress that takes care of that function.
On Tuesday, Sept 29 there was a link in my Comments section referring to a post I’d written earlier this week about LigerCat, a new PubMed search tool. The in-coming link looked like this (screenshot shown below):
These videos come with a couple of caveats: Don’t try this at home. Some activities could result in serious bodily injury. Never jump off a roof, no matter what your friends say to you. In questionable taste.
Getting hit in the eye by a pair of flying sunglasses would be no laughing matter. These videos should remind us that there is, and will always be, a need for a new generation of Emergency Medicine physicians due in part to the poor coordination (or questionable judgment) of young people when it comes to acting like daredevils on (or with) sports equipment.
However, the young men in question have obviously practiced their sports often, are well-trained in them, and (admit it) it is creepily fascinating to observe their accuracy.
Tips for preventing the spread of influenza – by systematic hand-washing, for example, or using an antiseptic hand cleanser – is the core message of a series of humor-with-a-purpose videos currently being promoted by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services for their 2009 Flu Prevention PSA Contest which concludes today, Wednesday Sept 16 2009.
Please watch the short videos and then vote for your favorite Fight the Flu video.
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Today, Dr. John D. Clarkes’Flu Rap won my vote
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The HHS agency, in a joint effort with producers ofSesame Street, also has developed this fall a series of flu-prevention public service announcements for young children featuring Elmo:
And finally (getting way off topic): Am I the only one confused by the Public Service Announcementacronym?
Prostate Specific Antigen, for example, is likely the first thing a clinician or medical librarian thinks of when seeing PSA.
However, a recent search on Google for “PSA” shows how a myriad of different interpretations. Following – among many available processes, agencies, ideas, associations or manufacturing methods – is a short and eclectic list about PSAs, including players of squash, the science of chickens, professional skaters, political science honor students, trainers of dogs, scuba diving enthusiasts, sociologists, philosophers, protein sequencing tools, a society for Polish actuarians, the science behind sticky tape and a lot of other stuff:
Last week, in anticipation of the beginning of ‘regular’ flu season in the Northern hemisphere and the public health concerns over the pandemic spread of H1N1 influenza worldwide, it seemed logical to add a news-feed to the EBM and Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC blog from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention for current news, advisories and practical information about Pandemic Flu (H1N1).
Flu.gov is open and available for anyone in the world to access at no cost, in English or Spanish language versions. The focus of the CDC website is on incidence of influenza among Americans, but there are also links to current information about H1N1 posted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and other sources.
A section of Flu.gov is dedicated to the information needs of clinical care providers (or medical students), and is titled “For Professionals“. Below is a screenshot of that page:
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Image/Photo Credit: http://pandemicflu.gov/index.html – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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Here are several links which might be of particular interest for professional (and amateur) epidemiologists. First: an excerpt of text found on the FluView page: ” Each week CDC analyzes information about influenza disease activity in the United States and publishes findings of key flu indicators in a report called FluView. “
Next: true news junkies will appreciate the many updates found on the CDC H1N1: What’s New? page.
Eurosurveillance is “an open-access peer-reviewed journal about infectious diseases surveillance prevention and control in Europe. Over 14,000 readers around the world subscribe to our weekly online edition, which is published every Thursday…. “.
The goal of HealthMap is to ” bring together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization) “
An entry from Wikipedia – “2009 Flu Pandemic by Country” – features many maps for reported incidences shown both by country and continent (but note: their data lags behind that reported by other international public health sites).
Can’t seem to learn much about who produces or updates Swine Flu Count but their News Clippings page is interesting.
Public Health Agency of Canada provides current links to the spread of the disease throughout the country; their FluWatch interactive maps are useful (screenshot shown below):
Finally, UCHC library users can search GIDEON, a subscription database (note: Proxy access required from off-campus). Why is GIDEON a unique resource for epidemiologists, researchers, students and public health administrators? Here is an excerpt from their “About” page:
It is my blogo-versary (two years, 3 weeks of blogging, folks – send a comment, please), it’s the depths of summer, the students are on vacation, so let’s take poetic license to post whatever is at hand. Here they are:
A friend of mine is terrified of clowns in all forms. If you read the novel It by Stephen King, you might not ever walk past a clown (or street gutters) without wincing. The actor Tim Curry (who played Pennywise, the evil clown, in the film version of It) gives me the creeps, too.
Adam Bergin 2009 created a short film funded by Philips to promote their Cinema 21:9 LCD TV.Like a Dada film, one can start and stop watching Carousel – and then start it again – and it all makes about as much sense.
The fictional mayhem in this short film occurs in a hospital. It won an award at the 2009 Cannes Lions Festival. Dada-esque?
Photo credit: http://stinkdigital.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
Don’t laugh – I used to live in San Francisco and have eaten once or twice at Doggie Diner, where the food is cheap, fast and good — amusing for the fact that the cooks yell at you if you don’t give your order quick and then move along. No holding up the customer line!
Photo credit: http://laughingsquid.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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“Hibi no Neiro” (Tone of everyday)is a music-video by Japanese band SOUR, used to promote the group’s first mini-album, Water Flavor EP. The 3.5 minute video was created by Masashi Kawamura, Hal Kirkland, Magico Nakamura and Masayoshi Nakamura in June 2009.
It is interesting to watch for both the music and the people (all fans of the band) who collectively filmed it worldwide. It is one of those videos where, every time you watch it you can see something new in it:
Image source: YouTube.com - All rights reserved – copyright 2009
Thanks to Michael Wesch for twittering about it.
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And that’s the Friday Post #36 for Aug 14 2009. Hurray – a new academic year begins next week!
STM publishers Cell Press and Elsevier ratcheted up the technological ante this month with their announcement on Monday, Jul 20 2009, of a shared project called Article of the Future, which they are funding to provide:
“… an on-going collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how the scientific article is presented online. The project’s goal is to take full advantage of online capabilities, allowing readers individualized entry points and routes through the content, while using the latest advances in visualization techniques“.
Currently available are two “prototypical” articles which the companies have put up in order to solicit feedback about the page and suggestions from the worldwide scientific community about useability and function.
Here’s one nice feature of the demo: “Integrated audio and video [will] let authors present the context of their article via an interview or video presentation and allow animations to be displayed more effectively”.
Visitors to the Article of the Future page are encouraged to provide direct (anonymous) input about the site using a 10-item online survey.
Thanks to AD for telling me about this.
P.S.This news release was first read on Twitter – Cell Press News around 1oopm today – http://twitter.com/CellPressNews – but the funny thing is, neither of the companies have posted a press release on their official websites yet (as of 3:15pm EST – Jul 20 2009).
So excited about going to see the fifth movie based on J.K. Rowling’s work, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which was released in the U.S. on July 15th at midnight. I’ve read every book in the series at least twice.
If you’re a big Harry Potter fan, you might want to check out which house in Hogwarts that the Sorting Hat would place you in, which you can do by clicking this link and filling out a 122-item questionnaire:
After taking the quiz, their assessment ranked my social networking skills as:Image credit: Anderson Analytics – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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Oh man. Their assessment of my SNS skills is encouraging, but it doesn’t seem to be too accurate. Because, although the blogging part is going well, in fact… I’m pretty sure I flunked Twitter.
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That’s the Friday Post for Jul 17 2009, folks. Have a nice weekend!
.Photo credit: http://www.clinicalreader.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
Clinical Reader, introduced Jun 29 2009 in beta, is getting a lot of buzz* on Twitter, blogs and librarian discussion lists. Thanks to librarians posting about it on Medlib-L listserv and to Berci for blogging about it.
” Clinical Reader was brought to life in 2009 by a junior doctor and a small group of forward thinking young tech programmers spread across London and Toronto. The conceptualized idea was to manage clinical information overload and deliver relevant news from an authoritative source on a daily basis.… it is truly quality collection of accessible clinical, scientific and health literature aiming to filter the river of information presented to the online medical community.”
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I noticed that the creators of the site have constructed it using sets of criteria which include journal performance indicators; two of the criteria for inclusion in the site are shown in this screenshot of their FAQ page:
Photo credit: http://www.clinicalreader.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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There are currently about 3,000 readers who subscribe to the Clinical Reader newsletter. Anyone can use the site, at no cost.
This is a rich and multi-layered site targeted at medical and dental clinicians. It can be used to read daily health news, journal scans, searching links for training or educational videos, clinically-oriented podcasts and medical specialties. Site content is divided in three sections:News (links to UK-oriented news), Sections and Multimedia.
Photo credit: http://www.clinicalreader.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
Best wishes to the creators of Clinical Reader.com, who have rolled out a working website designed to meet the information needs of physicians, by physicians. I look forward to watching this site develop over time.
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* Edit: On July 15, after reading posts from other medical librarians (see EagleDawg blog and Steve Lawson (both dated Jul 13 2009), and other discussions who collectively remind administrators at Clinical Reader to proceed with caution in regard to commercial and copyright laws, to intellectual and graphical property, I think I’m going to retract what I wrote on Jul 9 2009 (above).
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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See another video of Snowball dancing to the Backstreet Boys here
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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.
A blog for medical students, faculty, researchers and librarians about their use of clinical literature, Web 2.0, evidence-based medicine sources, search strategies.
