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Posts from the ‘Computer’ Category

Jun 8

7 Comments

The Future of Data

FlowingData, one of my favourite blogs, just featured an entry focusing on how data will be organized in the future.

If there’s anything uniform across all the ideas, it’s ubiquity. In the future, computers won’t feel like computers, and data will not just flow alongside the physical world. Instead, data will intertwine with your day-to-day like threads in a fabric.

They come up with many examples, but I liked this one below the most. Imagine a totally transparent healthcare system in which you see all the relevant data about doctors, procedures, hospitals (success rates, costs), etc. You can really make a wise decision because you will know all the details and data you need.

Microsoft envisioned what 2019 would look like:

And here is a great talk from Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler who presents g-speak – the real-life version of the film’s eye-popping, tai chi-meets-cyberspace computer interface.

Sep 10

H1N1: Rap, Second Life and Datasets

Just a few articles focusing on the recent H1N1 outbreak.

h1n1 stats

May 19

2 Comments

New Feature of Labmeeting: Autocite

I’ve come across a great new feature, Autocite, on the blog of Labmeeting.

If you’re reading a document with a big long bibliography, you can copy and paste the bibliography into Autocite and immediately have a list of links to abstracts and full text for all the articles.  Or, if you have a webpage of your own with a list of your own past published works, you can automatically convert the plain text list into the HTML that you would use to link to the abstracts so that people who read your page can more easily find things out about your work.

Let’s give it a try. It works quite easily:

1. Copy and paste the references on your website

2. Click Autocite

3. Preview the linked version of your citations

4. Copy and paste the HTML of the linked citations

labmeeting autocite

Apr 17

2 Comments

Second Life in 3D

We’ve been organizing medical and scientific events in the virtual world of Second Life for years now. Just imagine how great it would be to do the same simulations and case presentations in 3D and with touch screen. Case presentations would become more realistic than ever.

An excerpt from the press release:

3Di, Inc. , a Tokyo-based company providing 3D Internet solutions and services (representative director and CEO Satoshi Koike), has released the world’s first commercially available OpenSim-based(*) viewer software “3Di OpenViewer”, which allows end users to view and interact with multi-user 3D virtual worlds using a web browser. The launch of the 3Di OpenViewer original software accompanies the simultaneous product release of “3Di OpenSim Enterprise Version 1.0″, the company’s server software for large-scale construction of 3D virtual worlds. 3Di OpenViewer and 3Di OpenSim Enterprise Version 1.0 are aimed at business use and are commercially available starting April 15, 2009.

Apr 1

17 Comments

Being Productive Online: Time-Management Lifehacks

Recently, Ves Dimov at Clinical Cases and Images has come up with a great post on How to deal with the information overload from blogs, RSS and Twitter so I thought I would share my thoughts with you about time-management lifehacks.

The main concept is to centralize the flow of information into one or two sites. For me, these are GMail and Google Reader. It means I can control anything I’m interested in by visiting these places online.

How to keep up with Twitter?

I follow more than 1000 users and have more than 1500 followers, so I receive thousands of tweets every day. Here are a few things that save me time and effort.

  • I use Tweetdeck and created several groups on Tweetdeck that let me filter useful information (e.g. Health 2.0, genetics, bloggers groups, etc.).

tweetdeck

  • I check Friendfeed Best of the day because it will filter the best discussions for me (though not all of my Twitter contacts are on Friendfeed).

ff-best

  • Microplaza automatically filters the most interesting discussions and links mentioned in my Twitter community. I get the updates through RSS so it’s quite easy to see what I miss when I’m not online.

microplaza

How to follow the content you want to track?

  • Google Alerts helps me track the content that is published about me, my blog or my service online.

alerts

  • Twilerts and Tweetbeep do the same but via Twitter. Whenever a Twitterer mentions my name, blogs, favourite search terms, I will be notified via e-mail.

tweetbeep

How to write posts fast on your blog?

I often use the Quickpress function on WordPress that lets me write a post from the admin dashboard in just seconds. I always have  a huge backlog on Scienceroll so I created clearly defined directories in Firefox bookmarks and tag all the links I save there. It helps me organize the thousands of bookmarks I have and I always get a clear picture of what I should write about.

quickpress

As I’m working on different computers, Foxmarks synchronizes my bookmarks automatically.

foxmarks

How to work on Wikipedia?

As an administrator, I have some duties, so I built a long watchlist to keep track of the changes in the entries I’m interested in. I also use Huggle to fight vandalism. With Huggle, reverting hundreds of vandalisms and notify vandals on their talk pages take only minutes and a few clicks.

How to use RSS?

I created categories based on priorities in Google Reader. I always know which category of feeds to check depending on how much time I have and whether I’m looking for blog topics or just interesting pieces of information.

google-reader-categories

I also receive the updates of my favourite Youtube channels, Pubmed search terms and Del.icio.us tags.

And you may also find the slideshow from Joshua Schwimmer interesting

If you have more tips on how to be productive online, please let me know.

Mar 14

3 Comments

USB Finger

A Finnish programmer lost one of his fingers in a motor accident and the doctor offered him to build a prosthetic finger containing a USB drive. Check the Flickr photoset out.

usb-finger

Photo courtesy of Jerry Jalava (Flickr)

May 10

5 Comments

The 21st Century in Medicine: What will it look like?

Jeffrey Dach used one of my recent posts (Personalized Medicine: Real Clinical Examples!) as a reference in his article describing the future of medicine. It’s a quite detailed and comprehensive essay about several fields of medicine and he doesn’t forget to mention personalized medicine and its impact on the future of healthcare:

Personalized Medicine is the combination of these two new powerful forces, Orthomolecular Medicine and Genetic Testing. In the future, Personalized Medicine will expand and ultimately play a dominant role in medicine. Example: Warfarin Genetic Testing allows improved calibration of coumadin dosage to avoid bleeding complications. Drug metabolism testing allows for personal modification of drug dosage.

Orthomolecular and personalized medicine together?

We will be able to sequence the entire genome of an individual human in milliseconds. The cost will be minimal and within the means of the average person.

Individuals will have ability to reprogram our own sperm and eggs. One will be able to buy new genes on the internet based on desired traits and features, and use these genes to make one’s own children as easily as buying a copy of Microsoft office.

My comment: If the government gets involved, then this sounds a lot like Aldous Huxley’s, Brave New World.

Example of this new biotechnology: Human genes are inserted into microbes to make insulin. We will see a dramatic increase in gene therapies and treatments.

Well, I think and hope many of these will never come true, but it’s interesting to see how others predict the future. This fantastic video tries to show us some plans and projects that can really shape this century:

If you would like to know more about the future,

Jan 15

3 Comments

Video Game Surgeons

In a small study, they compared surgeons who played video games at least 3 hours a week to those who have never played. In their experiment, video gamers made 37% fewer errors and worked 27% faster.

The video was made by Sciencentral. I’ve already subscribed to their Youtube feed. I encourage you to do the same.

Anyway, I hope I’ll have time to see some results from similar experiments during the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality conference in the last days of January.

Further reading:

Dec 19

2 Comments

My Dream Came True

I’ve already talked about my dream to have a software or service that could help physicians how to find out a diagnosis more easily based on symptoms or how to avoid misdiagnosis more efficiently. Now, I came across Isabel on Constructive Medicine where Rahul Shetty, MD said:

Now they can use a web tool named ISABEL,

What is Isabel, it is a Web-based medical technology that generates a list of possible diagnoses based on the patients’ symptoms. The cost for using this system for a 300 bed hospital is $50,000

isabel.jpg

According to their About Us page:

The clinicians who ‘Isabel’ their patients at an early stage are able to offer a higher quality of care and reduce clinical risk by ensuring that important possible diagnoses have not been missed.

Isabel uniquely adds intelligence to the electronic medical record (EMR) by processing extracted relevant clinical information automatically thereby providing the clinician with diagnosis support instantly with no additional data entry.

What’s next? Maybe DrFirst (via Medgadget):

As physicians are becoming more tech savvy, and a younger flock is graduating from medical school more comfortable with gizmos, many companies are releasing mobile productivity tools specifically designed for physicians. DrFirst™, for example, just released its attractive e-prescribing system for the iPhone, allowing doctors to very easily, and securely, send a prescription to a patient’s pharmacy.

dr-first.jpg

Before you’d say, no, these will never substitute the work of physicians. These are just meant to assist medical professionals in order to be able to use the incredible amount of information of the web. That’s all…

Nov 14

1 Comment

Web 2.0 Geek T-Shirt of the Year

Just a quick note about a funny T-Shirt designed especially for web 2.0 geeks.

The T-shirt “Are you social?“ takes up this phenomenon and shows a list of the best-known social web services (as of 08/2007) with their icons and colours. The owner of the T-shirt is expected to mark the services he uses with a pen and to wear it in public. What happens when users start wearing their network identities openly in public?

geek-tshirt.jpg

geek-tshirt2.jpg

You can order it here.

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