As the costs of sequencing our DNA shrink and the roles of digital media in our lives expand, we will need to understand who (or what) controls the ownership, access and use of our genomic information.
From state regulation to Google to Facebook, who controls the acquisition, transmission and replication of our genomic information and material will become an important battle in the 21st century. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Phil Baumann*
Now that Google has become a near-universal information provider for many people, it’s finding itself answering questions that need a little more of a nuanced approach.
Apparently prodded by a mother who was looking for poison control contacts in an emergency, Google is now providing relevant phone numbers at the top of search results for a few specific queries. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
More and more patients are on the Internet researching health information, and for the most part this is a good thing. But are doctors in danger of being “phased out” by Google and other search engines?
Read more about it here: Health information online won’t make doctors obsolete.
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
Do you advertise on your social networks? You might not think that you do, but every time you tweet or update your status on Facebook or post a picture to Flickr, you’re advertising – perhaps not with commercial or self-promotional intent, but you are advertising something: an item of news, a humorous post or a moment from your vacation. I don’t believe that Advertising is bad; but there is bad advertising, the kind that pointlessly interrupts and annoys and leads to no action.
As the Web expands and evolves from a tangle of static web pages towards social and real time streams, Advertising will need to evolve into a suppler and friendlier animal. Google may have perfected Advertising on the traditional web platform, but the door is open to new players who can socialize advertising. It’s not an easy task: the bull’s eye of targeting customers is getting tinier everyday. Enter MyLikes, a start up which has taken on the task of helping advertisers reach their base. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Phil Baumann*
A post on Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational draws our attention to Google as a source of data for all sorts of research into human emotions. Dan Ariely, the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University, believes that by using drop down suggestions in Google, we can gain insights into “what people might care the most about concerning a given topic. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…
I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…
Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?
I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…
The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You
When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…
Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book
I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…
