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Medical Devices: Spell “Stromuhr,” Win The Spelling Championship

gtj5ly7i.jpgThey seem to like medical devices in the high stakes world of spelling championships. Anamika Veeramani, from Cleveland, Ohio, won the Scripps National Spelling Bee this weekend by spelling “stromuhr,” a rheometer designed to measure the amount and speed of blood flow through an artery.

Don’t feel bad — we’d never heard of it before either, and we’re supposed to be experts in this stuff. Education never ends…

Merriam-Webster: Stromuhr

London Science Museum: Ludwig-type stromuhr, London, England, 1920-1940

Press release: National Spelling Bee: A Spawning Ground for Future Physicians and Obscure Diseases

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

Automatic Translation Services: Miscommunications Still Likely

Health IT is valuable in many ways and I do believe it will revolutionize how we practice medicine. However, we’ve got a long way to go yet, especially in auto-translating English into other languages. This short exercise in English-Spanish translation (through a computer software program) reminds me of how far off “seamless” health technology really is…

(My mother is fully bilingual in Spanish and English and decided to test the auto-translator service with a sentence from a book. Here is the result:)

ENGLISH: He popped a deep-fried sardine into his mouth and washed it down with a few swallows of beer.

LITERAL TRANSLATION OF SPANISH RESULT: He punctured a sardine fried deep in his mouth, and he laundered it near the bottom along with some swallows (referring to the birds) made of beer.

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