Do you remember Personas that visualizes the map of your online presence? Here is a better solution. From one point of view, it’s great to have such a useful tool as Google Social Search. A short video about what it is and how it works.
Social Search taps into a user’s social network profiles and displays relevant links and status updates that members of a user’s own social network have shared at the bottom of the default search results page. According to Google, Social Search will enhance the search experience on Google by providing users with more personally relevant search results.
The BBC is reporting on a wirelessly controlled “spider pill” being developed somewhere in Italy. The device supposedly has eight legs and reportedly can crawl through intestines. With an attached video camera, the device might actually become a diagnostic modality for imaging the intestinal tract. The big question is whether it is more unpleasant to have a colonoscope defile you or a robotic gerbil crawl through the insides.
I’ve recently come across AcaWiki, an interesting project focusing on academic research and web 2.0.
Today, representatives from the new nonprofit project AcaWiki announced the opening of their website to the public. AcaWiki’s semantic-wiki based website allows scholars, students, and bloggers to easily post summaries, and discuss academic papers online. All content posted to the site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
AcaWiki’s mission is to make academic research more accessible and interactive by creating a “Wikipedia for academic research.” “Cutting-edge research is often locked behind firewalls and therefore lacks impact,” founder Neeru Paharia explains, “AcaWiki turns research hidden in academic journals into something that is more dynamic and accessible to have a greater influence in scholarship, and society.” AcaWiki enables users to easily post and discuss human-readable summaries of academic papers and literature reviews online. AcaWiki also helps users to share and organize summaries through the use of tags and RSS feeds.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
I’ve been following the career trajectory of Dr. Gordon Moore since I first became aware of his low-overhead, high-tech model of medical practice. He’s come a long way since the AAFP first interviewed him in 2002. I had the chance to catch up with him at the recent Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco, and we discussed the future of primary care and a practice model that I believe in (I just joined DocTalker Family Medicine myself!) Here’s our peek into our healthcare crystal ball…
Dr. Val: Tell me about what got you interested in creating a new practice model for primary care?
Moore: I came into healthcare with a somewhat Pollyannaish vision of reducing suffering and improving health. Without any docs in my family, I had no understanding of what it meant to actually practice. About 5 years after residency, I realized that there was an increasing disparity between my vision of practicing medicine and its reality. At that time I joined a quality improvement initiative at the University of Rochester, and we looked at increasing efficiency in primary care, including creating the idealized design of clinical office practices. Read more »
We have known for many years that melittin, an ingredient in bee venom, is a poison to tumor cells. Development of therapeutic uses of the substance has been stymied by the fact that melittin does damage to healthy cells as well. Now researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have developed nanoparticles called “nanobees” that can ferry the melittin directly to tumor cells with great specificity.
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…
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…
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…
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…
We have known for many years that melittin, an ingredient in bee venom, is a poison to tumor cells. Development of therapeutic uses of the substance has been stymied by the fact that melittin does damage to healthy cells as well. Now researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have developed nanoparticles called “nanobees” that can ferry the melittin directly to tumor cells with great specificity.
