Inexpensive Hand-held Braille Writer Devised By Undergraduates

And for only $50...great job.

Medication Errors Harm 1.5M U.S. Residents Annually, New Institute Of Medicine Report Says

About as scary as the last IOM report which pegged the number who die from medical Serious Adverse Events (SAEs) in the US at 1M per year.

Journals Should Require Disclosure, Editorial Says

About time too...

New Scientist News - To heal a wound, turn up the voltage

Some "electrifying news" from my alma mater. Ok, so this is a ways off from being practical. Indeed, I wonder if it will turn into a practical use. I remember from the late 70's (yes, I'm old) when we were experimenting with low voltages to accelerate bone healing.

Plus ca change...

A poke with a sharp stick » Blog Archive » Blackboard’s LMS Patent

Strongly agree with this one. US Patent laws are getting completely out of hand! Rather that fostering innovation, which was their original purpose, they are now merely enriching lawyers. The worst are these patent holding companies, like that one that RIM had trouble with earlier this summer. All they do is sit on potentially profitable but undeveloped ideas, wait for somebody else to figure out how to actually make their idea come to fruition, and then pounce for profits. And now the ridiculous US legal system is affecting the rest of us. We in Canada are not immune to this one!

Visual Being » Blog Archive » The Double Latte Persuasion Technique: "It just might be that the best place to deliver a presentation is Starbucks.

Apparently, not only does caffeine increase alertness and mental acuity, it also makes you more open minded."

I knew there had to be something good about the stuff.

Boing Boing: Bandwidth of the eye: "Scientists have estimated that the human retina can transmit data at approximately 10 million bits per second, equivalent to a standard ethernet connection. The researchers at the University of Pennsylvania came to that number by measuring spikes of electrical impulses from a (disembodied) guinea pig retina 'looking' at movies of biological motion, like a salamander swimming. The ganglion cells in the retina were then classified as either 'brisk' or 'sluggish,' depending on how fast they fired."

EIU.com: "A lot can happen in 15 years. At the start of the 1990s, China was largely a planned economy, and the Soviet Union still existed. Few people had heard of the Internet and e-mail seemed closer to science fiction than reality.

'Foresight 2020', a new research report written by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Cisco Systems, assesses likely changes to the global economy, to eight major industries and to corporate structures over the next 15 years.

More than 1,650 senior executives, analysts and policymakers from across the globe took part in a survey and a series of in-depth interviews conducted especially for the report. The report also showcases the Economist Intelligence Unit's new long-term growth forecasts.

PDF Download the report for free. Download the electronic version of Foresight 2020: Economic, industry and corporate trends free of charge."

Read/WriteWeb: Search 2.0 vs Traditional Search

A short piece describing some of the new advances in search tools. Aimed more at those of us who take searching seriously. This is not about to knock Google off its pedestal...yet. I have used Clusty to search PubMed/Medline and have been very impressed. I think it will be worth checking out these other approaches.

Bokardo » Social Networks are Killing Email

I'm not sure that I agree that email is about to die, but this post is certainly indicative that there is a signficant shift in how people communicate now. Just a short piece but eye-catching.

ottergroup.com :: RSS Dashboards

ottergroup.com :: RSS Dashboards.

Following on from my previous post, here is a bit more info from ottergroup about various ways of aggregating and reading RSS feeds. BTW, as I’ve mentioned before with links to ottergroup material – you will be asked to sign in but you can bypass this if you want. Again, this article mentions Flock and BlogBridge and other alternatives, along with some comments on the pros/cons for each approach.

ottergroup.com :: Flock

ottergroup.com :: Flock.

This is a short review of a new web browser called Flock. There are now a number of excellent alternatives to Internet Explorer. Others include Firefox, Opera etc. This article touches on the advantages that Flock provides for blogging, tagging etc. Worth a quick look for those of us who are exploring blogging a bit more intensely. The article also touches on BlogBridge, a feed aggregator that I heartily recommend.

This all raises the question: what is the best way to handle all these different ways of working with RSS material? Not to say that there should be a one-size-fits-all but it is good in this early phase to look at different ways of working with blogs and RSS feeds.

mamamusings: online professor rating systems

mamamusings: online professor rating systems.

Rating systems that are designed to allow students to provide assessments of their teachers are highly prone to problems. Laurentian has such a system and so far, I am not convinced that it is useful. But the idea has some merit, if we could figure out to make it effective and useful. This short article has some interesting comments – and there are also some useful comments in the ensuing discussion that are worth perusing if you are interested in this topic.

The social networking concept might be worth exploring – not that it would solve the bias issues by itself – but it does provide some interesting mechanisms that might help. The big question of course is how seriously we take this issue.

Bloggers of NOSM Unite

Well, are we having fun yet? We did discuss using the blog itself to discuss how we could use these tools, what challenges there might be, what opportunities that they open up etc etc…but there has not been much discussion yet. Remember that this is just a small group who are aware of NOSMeLD so far. Lurking might be fine most of the time on most topics but if we are to get this going, we do need to be active participants on this particular topic/post.

Apologies to those of you who have no idea what I am talking about. For the past several weeks, NOSMeLD has been ticking along with just the occasional posted message or piece. We were waiting to get our act together on the internal (closed) NOSM blog before we really started to push this concept as a tool. Well now the cat is out of the bag and we need to generate some momentum – a critical mass of contributors and posts so that it is worthwhile for potential readers to actually watch this site.

The nice things about the blogging approach is that it is much easier than the old web site paradigm (gasp, cliche alert!). It is easier for consumers of the content (readers, lurkers, customers…ya know what I mean) because there are so many ways in which they can grab the material from NOSMeLD. They don’t have to remember to keep coming back to check out our web site on a periodic basis – they can grab an RSS feed and plug that into a tool of their own that will automatically pull the material off the NOSMeLD blog without them having to do anything. Kinda like the “push content” web sites from a few years ago but less pushy (sorry). More on this later.

It is also easier for creators of content. You don’t need to fire up FrontPage, Dreamweaver or some other web site design program. You don’t have to know anything about web publishing, worry about ftp uploads, html coding etc. There are lots of simple, free (or really cheap) mini-programs that make it really easy to post material to a blog. So you can type something from scratch, like I’m doing just now…or you can do it the lazy way – see an article on another web site, or another blog, that you think is interesting or might be interesting to the readers of NOSMeLD? Simply use one of these mini-programs like BlogJet or BlogThis to grab the link to the article, add a couple of cogent comments (if you want) and then post it to the NOSMeLD blog. You can do all this with just 3 clicks of the mouse if you want to keep it really simple.

This last part sounds like pure plagiarism…and in a way, it is. But it seems to be an accepted fact of life that blog material will be copied from one site to another. The upside to this is that the original material gets much wider exposure than it would have done just sitting on its own little site. Not much downside really. It is not nice to try and pretend that the original material is really yours, but the little BlogJet-type applets make it so that the original link is retained and you can see where the material came from – a kind of simple attribution. It is this simple sharing of material across many blogs that makes this so powerful. A blog like ours can act as a condenser for a whole bunch of sites and other blogs, bringing a pre-selected “best of” material that should appeal to the faculty and students at NOSM.

There are many articles and blogs out there that explain the process of blogging, its advantages etc much better than I just did. The previous post gives you some overview info on RSS feeds (the lingua franca of the blogging world, kinda like HTML for web sites). But what we need to do now as a group of contributors is get our heads around some of the people logistics – a good blog is dependent on the cooperative input from a small group. It is too much work for just one person – but easy for half a dozen. Only 1–2 posts per week from each of us (not exactly a huge time demand) will be plenty to keep the blog full of interesting material.

And then once we start to get too active or there is too much stuff, it is really simple to set up other blogs that cater to other interests here at NOSM.So let’s get our teeth into this one, get some enthusiasm going and see how things go from there.

What Can RSS Do For ME?

What Can RSS Do For ME?.

Following on from today’s retreat, here is a simple article on what RSS is capable of. It just touches on some of the very basic stuff but is a good place to start. For some people, just getting started is enough – once you find a couple of blogs or RSS newsfeeds that you like and find useful, you might be hooked. Anyway, check this out.