America’s Women Physicians

“Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrating America’s Women Physicians“

is a traveling exhibition from NLM now on view at the Houston Academy of Medicine – Texas Medical Center (HAM-TMC) Library, through 2008 June 06 Friday.

Exhibition Web Site links here…

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Mashup? or Mashie-Niblick

Week VIII – continued…

Tending to be a laid-back technozoid (I rub Valium® on my face to wake up in the morning), and having seen many bursts of unhealthy enthusiasm for now-deprecated applications & hardware, I’ll still say that there’s room for cautious optimism that the technics/techniques we’ve examined over the past several weeks will be of practical use.

The mashup (MU) of GIS with TerraKitty would provide improvement to OPACs for our instant-gratification clientèle in physically finding (& mapping) the location of what they want. Of course they want it yesterday with a side of fries, but now they can send the pickup info to their courier company. The ILL models are also ripe for these kinds of incorporations.

BTW: I don’t think that those duets-with-the-dead (A/V or audio-only) should be called a MU, no more than the à la Matrix BulletTime video technique.

It would be very nice to see a more flexible MU of Google tools; say a med student is looking for a nearby, gross anatomy class happening soon. That front end would be med class-related, have search parameters for class+gross anatomy, know starting or target location, then GIS for azimuth & elevation.

Tagging plus MeSH was touted in N.Y. Times the other day, an article about the “Diseasome”. (They picked up on this only a year late, c.f. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 May 22;104(21):8685-90. Epub 2007 May 14). Hmmm, various sized/colored circles, linkages, font size differences… sort of a Clusty look… holey DNA, Batman, it’s social diseases tagging!

Never forget TANSTAAFL: somebody, somewhere, somehow pays for it. But the identifying & allocating of responsibility & funding can also be aided by the same tools being used for providing service; all in all a sustainable business model after all. But there’s going to have to be some resetting of expectations…

Week Eight: Mashups & API

“Mashups” in the generally accepted sense today is the updated terminology for “GIS-enabled web app”.

G eographic I nformation S ystem/or Science having come to maturity as computer processing power came up to speed (cheap puns Я us), it’s been a bit of a ramp-up for its mainstream integration. At present, most mashups are based on GIS integration with databases. The difference in FPU is really appreciated in comparing using ArcView, PhotoSlop, or just gaming back in the aulde days of the roarin’90s to today.¹

Of course, it’s not all geopolitical. The most useful tool I saw was the SocialScan, which goes across a dozen-odd social networking sites to report popularity of a site in each.

Even with the flexibility granted by assorted APIs (pending OpenAccess) it’s a challenge to automate the parsing of data to yield usable results. When we can integrate demographic data as easily as GIS data are there will be another jump forward in usability, albeit incremental. This ain’t no paradigm shift, we’re still establishing the paradigm.

Second instalment this afternoon, many things on the burners: for those of you who know me personally, please update your contact information. I gave notice Monday, Beltane, May 05 for the non-pagan. Will be starting as the medical informatics maven next month. Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah! ²

¹ Even today, on a current machine with dedicated GPU running high GHz/GBs, running the NCBI Entrez Cn3D 4.1 will bring it to its knees looking at, say, 1918 Hæmagglutin H1… [ed.]

² Go Navy, Beat Army

Week Seven: Podcasting & Online Hosted Video, redeux

My podcast movie review (https://robtbart.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/movie-review-from-new-scientist/, just in case the link doesn’t work) functions quite well aside from the inarticulate reader.  But it’s been a couple weeks now troubleshooting what went wrong with the website, still not seeing all the image slices.

So far as fav video short, got to say “The Landlord” with Will Ferrell was very funny.  Of course my mind is lower than a snake’s belly in a waggon rut: the language is coarse and the set-up is weird… Caveat Videre.  One other thing to keep in mind is that the same video content is often repackaged & uploaded in different forums, even within the same forum but under different names.  “The Landlord”, being a professional production was consistent, but there were many related shorts that came up in a search.

Considering the source of the doom saying complaints, the major telecom vendors, the prediction of imminent Internet meltdown from video traffic may be exaggerated.  But the performance issues experienced during this class seem to indicate that the days of the free model may be coming to an end.