Articles on Medicine...and One on Amtrak (Mar 2012)

It has been awhile since I link-blogged, but I think I have a few interesting ones lined up, so here goes:

A few months ago, Wired published a nice long article looking at science, correlation, and causality. It uses the failure of the drug torcetrapib as a lead-in example, and also discusses some interesting stuff on diagnosing back pain. Read here.

The NYU School of Medicine has begun to supplement its anatomy classes with computer simulations. The future is here. It won't replace traditional dissection labs completely, but has a lot of potential to enhance medical education. (New York Times)

Biomedical engineering? How about an artificial heart that doesn't beat? The amazing story here, courtesy of Popular Science.

Now that you're all read out, consider taking some real time off from the world. This Washington Post columnist writes about her experience on a cross-country Amtrak trip, where the destination was the journey.

IBM's Watson goes to Medical School

Remember IBM's computer, Watson, which made a showing on Jeopardy a couple months ago? It's moving past game shows and looking to assist doctors. Watson would fit perfectly with the move towards electronic patient records, but it will be interesting to see how Watson affects the role that a doctor will play in medicine.

Interview with Scott McNealy

Well, okay, I never interviewed him myself, though he did visit my high school and gave a talk there about a year after I graduated, though. That was shortly before news broke that Sun was looking to be acquired.

Regardless, The Register seems to have a pretty fair article from an interview with the co-founder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems. It's worth a read if you ever got know what Sun was for anything other than "they made Java."

Articles on Medicine (May 2011): Beyond Diagnostics

Just two this time.

• Are patients just interesting cases, or are they people capable of emotion?


• People talk about treating the root cause of a problem and not just its symptoms. Social causes should not be forgotten, either.

Articles on Medicine (Oct 2010)

Well it's been awhile since I posted anything here, but I'll try to get back into writing some stuff. For now, I'll catch up sharing some interesting articles I read over the summer.

• Advances in biomedical instrumentation enable a portable mini-lab.
  
• Live in a city? Take some time to get away to a more natural environment.
  
• Trade some study time for exercise.
  
• There is lots and lots of medical waste, thanks to the popularization of disposable supplies. Many hospitals are now seeking to reduce that quantity.
  
• Scientists are good at science, but medical doctors need to be better at more than just science.
  
• Hospice care and discussions about end-of-life plans are not "death panels." If you haven't discussed this issue with your family at all, don't wait until it is too late. (This is a long, in-depth article, but is a good read nonetheless.)

The Future of OpenSolaris

The clouds of uncertainty over OpenSolaris under Oracle have parted, but while what we see behind them was perhaps expected, it is certainly still disappointing. I've included the original sources below, but here are the key sentences (emphasis added) from the internal Oracle memo regarding OpenSolaris:

• We will distribute updates to approved CDDL or other open source-licensed code following full releases of our enterprise Solaris operating system. In this manner, new technology innovations will show up in our releases before anywhere else. We will no longer distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating system in real-time while it is developed, on a nightly basis.


• We will have a Solaris 11 binary distribution, called Solaris 11 Express, that will have a free developer RTU license, and an optional support plan. Solaris 11 Express will debut by the end of this calendar year, and we will issue updates to it, leading to the full release of Solaris 11 in 2011.


• All of Oracle's efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology will be focused on Solaris 11. We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution. We will determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express.

It remains unclear how OpenSolaris as a community will transform, but it certainly doesn't look that good.

References (from the osol-discuss mailing list):
Leaked internal memo
Confirmation from Oracle employee

Security and Blackboard

...the online course management system Blackboard, not the one that instructors literally write on. Apparently it's insecure enough that a 9-year-old student in my K-12 school district was able to grant himself administrative privileges, according to this article in the Washington Post. I'd be interested in knowing what was actually exploited, but since the software is developed under a closed source model, I doubt the general public will find out the details of the problem, even if it is fixed.

See my previous extended write-up on Blackboard here.

Articles on Medicine (Mar 2010)

Really now?

Simulation-based training, something I'm a little familiar with from my Emergency First Responder training. And yes, it's not just the technical skills that are important. The teamwork and communication skills are often the harder ones to practice abstractly.

End of life, hard decisions

Doctors on Haiti: NYTimes, American Medical News

Articles on Medicine (Feb 2010)

A commentary on the influence of Western medicine in understanding mental health in the international community.

The human side of being a doctor: here and here.

There may be some cases of physician malpractice, but sometimes you need to let go. RIP stands for Rest in PEACE. And that doesn't mean cause trouble for those left behind.

Be careful with analysis of cost-effectiveness. You can't easily reduce everything to numbers, in this case relating to end-of-life care.

NORAD and Santa

CNN published an interesting article on some of the history of NORAD's Santa tracker. Read it here.

Shaping the Future

Wired recently published an interesting profile on Oracle and its CEO's possible role in influencing the computing world as we know it today. And something else the article implies to me is that perhaps Oracle's recent acquisition of Sun was actually pretty appropriate given that Sun's slogan is "The Network is the Computer."

Here's the link (don't worry, it's short for a profile): Time Your Attack: Oracle's Lost Revolution

Some More Articles on Medicine

Related to health care reform:
An existing example of something that works
Reform and the Health Care Workforce — Current Capacity, Future Demand
What Hopkins medicine has to say
A case for evidence-based medical practices

General:
Medical schools are revising their curriculums
On the mindfulness of doctors

Articles on Medicine

Interesting articles on caring for seniors:
The Patients Doctors Don't Know
Experiencing Life, Briefly, Inside a Nursing Home

The Dog-Eat-Dog World of Applying to Med School - sort of a med school version of an earlier blog post I wrote about applying to college.

Are you reading this blog post at 2am in the morning? Have a look at this.

We can detect cancer, but what should we actually do about it?

And on the topic of healthcare reform, what Hopkins medicine already does.

Prosthetics 2.0

Or rather, optogenetics. It's been awhile since I've posted here since I've been busy with schoolwork. I'm still busy, so I haven't really written anything substantial despite my to-do list of things I want to write about. But I did want to share the following biotechnology article, which I found interesting:
Algae and Light Help Injured Mice Walk Again

2009 Ig Nobel Prizes

No, not the real thing, but a fun read nonetheless:
BBC's coverage of the 2009 Ig Nobel Prizes

The End of Reading Rainbow?

A Facebook friend pointed out the following news article:
In Memoriam: "Reading Rainbow"

One of the many good shows I remember from my early childhood....

Not My Spleen!

The spleen is apparently more useful than once thought.

High Tech Schools

TVNZ: Wired for the future

I had trouble getting the Flash version to load, possibly because the server is half way around the world from where I am. The Windows Media link did work. For those on non-Windows systems, here's a direct link to the Windows Media version of the video. Of particular note are the Sun Rays running what appears to be GNOME with Firefox 2. In addition, it seems that they use Zimbra for their e-mail.

John Doe and Musicians

It's a real John Doe, even if it was an accident.

This is something I'd like to see sometime, for now the video will do: Glass harp player brings Old Town alive

Healthcore Costs, Doctors, and Salaries

There have been some interesting articles recently about health care. The point about the value of prevention is an old one for me, but the salary vs. fee pay system for doctors was something I had not heard about before. I'm not sure which is better since my experience in comparing the two is limited, but I think what any healthcare reform needs to boil down to is patients first, not profits. I'm not going to deny that the limited sources from which I read these articles may provide a biased view, but it seems that in the cases presented, improving patient care led to a reduction in healthcare costs, without cost savings being a primary goal.

References:
NYT: Getting Good Value in Health Care
NYT: Hospital Savings: Salaries for Doctors, Not Fees
NYT: Forget Who Pays Medical Bills, It’s Who Sets the Cost
The New Yorker: The Cost Conundrum