Silly Sunday #30 FIFA, World-Cup, Orange, Octopuses & More

The Netherlands turns orange again, the colour of the Dutch Team. After 32 years, Oranje plays the World Cup final tonight.

A good moment to write a Silly Sunday post, with some silly and some less silly topics.

Lets begin with the serious ones.

It seems that not all African countries love football.

The al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabab has banned playing soccer in Somalia. It prohibits broadcasts of the World Cup, describing the sport as “a satanic act” that corrupts Muslims. They threaten Somali soccer players and anyone who has challenged their extreme views. Worse, in the past month, they have killed at least five people for watching the World Cup. Read more at the Washington Post and at NU.nl (NL)

Despite concerns about South Africa‘s ability to host the World Cup, so far the tournament has gone off without any major incidents.  The major hiccups concerned transport.

I enjoy the football matches, I like the chit-chat at tv about the Dutch team, but I’m not charmed by the way the FIFA keeps the organization in a stranglehold like a giant octopus. And I’m not talking about FIFA’s non-response to wrong decisions of referees nor its unwillingness to introduce new technology to assist the referees. But about the non-transparancy and their too big fingers (or rather arms! aka monopoly) in the pie of football revenues. The latter permits it to extract immense rents from countries (US$1 billion per year, with an additional US$ 3 billion generated in the year when the World Cup is held). Most of its revenue is generated through their control over television and marketing rights for games.
As I’ve experienced in the UK last week, the Dutch NOS-television blocks NOS.nl/WK2010 abroad, because the NOS is under contractual obligation to broadcast only in the Netherlands.  The FIFA also has a strict regulations with respect to advertisements. The entire world could witness that women were arrested because they wore Dutch orange dresses with microscopic Bavaria logos, because official sponsor Budweiser is the only beer company allowed to advertise within FIFA venues (see Telegraph.co.uk).
More seriously are the consequences of this monopoly for South Africa. Read why the Daily Maverick concludes that “the price of staging this spectacle is that we had to make a deal with the devil. We signed over sovereign rights to foreigners who, secretly, despise us.”

Social Media and Football don’t seem to go hand-in-hand. Mashable reports that besides alcohol and sex, coaches increasingly institute ad hoc bans on social media sites. “So far, players on the teams from Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Holland, Germany, Argentina and England are forbidden to use social services such as Twitter.”

As a link to the humorous part, Dutch can read this  column of Youp van het Hek in the NRC about Budler (and more).

Animals
Many Brazilians disliking Brazil’s leading sports announcer, Galvão Bueno, twittered “Cala Boca Galvão.”, which means “shut up Galvão”. It became a trending topic on Twitter and tweople start asking what it meant. Someone made up it meant “Help us save the Galvão birds”. In fact “gavião,” (hawk) resembles Galvão.  Websites and videos were made to substantiate this. The Brazilian author Paulo Coelho wrote on Twitter: “CALA BOCA GALVÃO is the Brazilian version of a homeopathic remedy SILENTIUM GALVANUS.” (sources: NY Times and Joop.nl [nl]). So indirectly animal lovers and animal rights activists helped to spread the word like parrots… A brilliant practical joke.

Speaking about homeopathy, the Octopus Paul who has accurately predicted all knock-out matches till now seems to be an example of a placebo-effect: believing in a certain outcome helps to establish this. People take it very seriously, and threatened to use the octopus as an ingredient in a meal. Not paella, because the octopus has favored Spain as the Winner. However, I seriously doubt the experimental settings, as one of the boxes the octopus can choose from is always closer to the octopus than the other, and he always seems to choose the closest (possibly he is not psychic, but intelligent). Furthermore, the experimenters were not blinded to the outcome and neither was the octopus.
By the way the Octopus has competition of an exotic bird, an Aardvark, a chimpanzee and others who all have predicted another outcome of the Final, namely the victory of the Dutch!! However, some have accused the animals of orange bias.
Anyway in support of the Dutch I have changed my avatar on Twitter (right).

By the way I was completely fooled earlier this week by a hoax of the journal the Telegraaf who showed this picture:

Miscellaneous

Real fanatics can install this Personas Firefox add-on to support your team and compete for the Firefox Cup.

Onion Sports presents an interactive visual guide for the new soccer fans, especially Americans

Here is an updated results scheme for the world cup brand war. Since the brands do supply the goods to enhance natural talent and performance, this may be another way of predicting the outcome. Alas (again), the Dutch are sponsored by Nike, and the Spanish by Adidas. Adidas has won almost all matches till now (except against Holland once) (source: Freshnessmag.com).

And here: World Cup 2010 soccer stats as art (more of an infograph) with all kinds of details about the matches.

For some the main question may be: Will it (vuvuzuela) blend? See the answer on this video.

To keep it more in line with the content of this blog a wonderful comparison of Soccer & PhD * from PhD-Comics.

“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham
http://www.phdcomics.com

Finally some humorous twitter-quotes:

1. 
   lecanardnoir So, as i said. Keep your vuvuzela for the Pope’s visit. 27 Jun 2010 from TweetDeck
2. 
   mfenner @elmarveerman Is there a role for vuvuzelas to make a statement about particularly bad presentations? #lnlm10 28 Jun 2010 from Twitter for iPhone in reply to elmarveerman
3. 
   laikas RT @noahWG: Paul the octopus has been selecting which manuscripts go out for review at Nature for months now. 11 Jul 2010 from TweetDeck
4. 
   laikas RT @michlr: RT @LVenselaar: LOL! RT @Yoranv: Tip van de dag: OntSPANJE! haha 11 Jul 2010 from TweetDeck
5. 
   eurogene Maybe Science shld do same. Nice picture! @laikas: RT @noahWG: Paul the octopus selecting manuscripts 4 review at Nature for months now. 11 Jul 2010 from TweetDeck

– this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Good luck boys. You will need it!

Photo Credits:

• Orange flags http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlesfred/4698496547/
• Hoax: http://www.mobypicture.com/user/kicken/view/6957745
• My new avatar was based on Deviantart.com
• PhD Comics: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1329 *
  (I have asked permission a few weeks ago, perhaps the publication will evoke  a response…..

MedLibs Round 2.6

Welcome to this months edition of MedLib’s Round, a blog carnival of “excellent blog posts in the field of medical information”.

This round is a little belated, because of late submissions and my absence earlier this week.
But lets wait no longer …..!

Peer Review, Impact Factors & Conflict of Interest

Walter Jessen at Highlight HEALTH writes about the NIH Peer Review process. Included is an interesting video, that provides an inside look at how scientists from across the US review NIH grant applications for scientific and technical merit. These scientists do seem take their job seriously.

But what about peer review of scientific papers? Richard Smith, doctor, former editor of the BMJ and a proponent of open access publishing, wrote a controversial post at the BMJ Groups Blog called “scrap peer review and beware of “top journals“. Indeed  the “top journals” publish the sexy stuff, whereas evidence comprises both the glamorous and the unglamorous. But is prepublication peer review really that bad and should we only filter afterwards?

In a thoughtful post at his Nature blog Confessions of a (former) Lab Rat another Richard (Grant) argues that although peer review suffers terribly from several shortcomings it is still required. Richard Grant also clears up one misconception:

Peer review, done properly, might guarantee that work is done correctly and to the best of our ability and best intentions, but it will not tell you if a particular finding is right–that’s the job of other experimenters everywhere; to repeat the experiments and to build on them.

At Scholarly Kitchen (about what is hot and cooking in scholarly publishing) they don’t think “peer review“ is a clear concept, since the list of ingredients differ per journal and article. Read their critical analysis and suggestions for improvement of the standard recipe here.

The science blogosphere was buzzing in outrage about the adding a corporate nutrition blog sponsored by PepsiCo to ScienceBlog (i.e see this post at the Guardian Science Blog). ScienceBlogs is the platform of eminent science bloggers, like Orac, Pharyngula and Molecule of the Day. After some bloggers left ScienceBlog and others threatened to do so, the Pepsico Blog was retracted.

An interesting view is presented by David Crotty at Scholarly Kitchen. He states that it is “hypocritical for ScienceBlog’s bloggers to have objected so strenuously: “ScienceBlogs has never been a temple of purity, free of bias or agenda.” Furthermore the bloggers enjoy more traffic and a fee for being a scienceblogger, and promote their “own business” too. David finds it particularly ironic that these complaints come from the science blogosphere, which has regularly been a bastion of support for the post-publication review philosophy. Read more here.

Indeed according to a note of Scienceblog at the disappeared blog their intention was “to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change”, although it was clearly not the right way.

The partiality of business, including pharma, makes it’s presence in and use of Social Media somewhat tricky. Still it is important for pharma to get involved in web2.0. Interested in a discussion on this topic? Than follow the tags #HCSM (HealthCare Social Media) and #HCSMEU (Europe) on Twitter.
Andrew Spong, has launched an open wiki, where you can read all about #HCSMEU.

The value of journal impact factors is also debatable. In the third part of the series “Show me the evidence” Kathleen Crea at EBM and Clinical Support Librarians @ UCHC starts with an excerpt of an article with the intriguing title “The Top-Ten in Journal Impact Factor Manipulation”:

“The assumption that Impact Factor (IF) is a number absolutely proportional to science quality has led to misuses beyond the index’s original scope, even in the opinion of its devisor.”

The post itself (Teaching & Learning in Medicine, Research Methodology, Biostatistics: Show Me the Evidence (Part 3)b) is not so much about evidence, but offers a wealth of information about  journal impact factors, comparisons of sites for citation analysis, and some educational materials for teaching others about citation analysis. Not only are Journal Citation Reports and SCOPUS discussed, but also the Eigenfactor, h-index and JANE.

Perhaps we need another system of publishing and peer review? Will the future be to publish triplets and peer review these via Twitter by as many reviewers as possible? Read about this proposal of Barend Mons (of the same group that created JANE) at this blog. Here you can also find a critical review of an article comparing Google Scholar and PubMed for retrieving evidence.

Social Media, Blogs & Web 2.0 tools

There are several tools to manage the scientific articles, like CiteULike and Mendeley. At his blog Gobbledygook Martin Fenner discusses the pros and cons of a new web-based tool specifically for discussing papers in Journal Clubs: JournalFire

At the The Health Informaticists they found an interesting new feature of Skype:  screen sharing. Here you can read all about it.

Andrew Sprong explains at his blog STweM how to create a PDF archive of hashtagged tweets using whatthehashtag?! and Google Docs, Scribd or Slideshare. A tweet archive is very useful in case of  live tweet or stream sessions at conferences. (each tweet is then labeled with a # or hashtag, but tweets are lost after a few days if not archived)

At “Cool Toy of the Day” Patricia Anderson posts a lot about healthcare tools. She submitted Cool Toys Pic of the day – Eyewriter“, a tool for allowing persons with ALS and paralysis to draw artwork with their eyes. But you find a lot more readworthy posts at this blog and her main blog Emerging Technologies Librarian.

Heidi Allen at Heidi Allen Digital Strategy started a discussion on the meaning of social-medicine for Physicians. The link to the original submission doesn’t work right now, but if you follow this link you see several posts on social-medicine, including “Physicians in Social Media”, where 3 well-known physicians give their view on the meaning of social-medicine.

Dr Shock at Dr Shock MD PhD, wonders whether “the information on postpartum depression in popular lay magazines correspond to scientific knowledge?” Would it surprise you that this is not the case for many articles on this topic?

The post of Guus van den Brekel at DigiCMB with the inspiring title Discovering new seas of knowledge partly goes about the seas of knowledge gained at the EAHIL2010 (European Association for Health Information and Libraries) meeting, with an overview of many sessions, and materials when possible. And I should stress when possible, because the other  part of the post is about the difficulty of obtaining access to this sea of knowledge. Guus wonders:

In this age of Open Access, web 2.0 and the expectancy of the “users” -being us librarians (…) one would assume that much (if not all) is freely available via Conferences websites and/or social media. Why then do I find it hard to find the extra info about those events, including papers and slides and possibly even webcasts? Are we still not into the share-mode and overprotective to one’s own achievements(….)

Guus makes a good point,especially in this era, when not all of us are able to go and visit far away places. Luckily we have Guus who did a good job of compiling as much material as possible.

Wondering about the evidence for the usefulness of web 2.0, then have a look at this excellent wiki by Dean Giustini: http://hlwiki.slais.ubc.ca/index.php/Evidence-based_web_2.0.
The Health Librarianship Wiki Canada (the mother wiki) has a great new design and is a very rich source of information for medical librarians.

Another good source for recent peer reviewed papers about using social media in medicine and healthcare is a new series by Bertalan Mesko at Science Roll. First it was called Evidence Based Social Media News and now Social media journal club.

EHR and the clinical librarian.

Nikki Dettmar presents two posts on Electronic Health Records at Eagledawg.net, inspired by a recent Medical Library Association meeting that included a lot about electronic health records (EHRs). In the first part “Electronic Health Records: Not All About the Machine” she mentions the launch of an OpenNotes study that ”evaluates the impact on both patients and physicians of sharing, through online medical record portals, the comments and observations made by physicians after each patient encounter.” The second post is entitled “a snapshot of ephemeral chaos“. And yes the title says it all.

Bertalan Mesko at Science Roll describes a try out of a Cardiology Resident and Research Fellow in Google Wave to see whether that platform is suitable for creating a database of the electronic records of a virtual patient. The database looks fine at first glance, but is it safe?

Alisha764′s Blog celebrated its 1 year anniversary in February. Alisha Miles aim for the next year is to not only post more but to focus on hospital libraries including her experience as a hospital librarian. Excellent idea, Alisha! I liked the post Rounding: A solo medical librarian’s perspective with several practical tips if you join the round as a librarian. I hope you can find time to write more like this, Alisha!

Our next host is Walter Jessen at Highlight HEALTH. You can already start submitting the link to a (relevant) post you have written here.

See the MedLibs Archive for more information.

Photo Credits:

• Librarian’s Costume by Librarian Avenger
• http://eyewriter.org/images/

Thoughts on the PubMed Clinical Queries Redesign

Added 2010-07-09:  It is possible to enter the set numbers again, but the results are not yet reliable. They are probably working on it.

Last Wednesday (June 30th 2010) the PubMed Clinical Queries were redesigned.

Clinical Queries are prefab search filters that enable you to find aggregate evidence (Systematic Reviews-filter) or articles in a certain domain (Clinical study category-filters: like diagnosis and therapy), as well as papers in the field of  Medical Genetics (not shown below).

This was how it looked:

Since there were several different boxes you had to re-enter your search each time you tried another filter.

Now the Clinical Queries page has been reconfigured with columns to preview the first five citations of the results for all three research areas.

So this is how it looks now (search= PCOS spironolactone cyproterone hirsutism (PubMed automatically connects with “AND”))

Click to enlarge

Most quick responses to the change are “Neat”, “improved”, “tightened up”…….

This change might be a stylistic improvement for those who are used to enter words in the clinical queries without optimizing the search. At least you see “what you get”, you can preview the results of 3 filters, and you can still see “all” results by clicking on “see all”.  However, if you want to see the all results of another filter, you still have to go back to the clinical queries again.

But… I was not pleased to notice that it is no longer possible to enter a set number (i.e. #9) in the clinical queries search bar.

….Especially since the actual change was just before the start of an EBM-search session. I totally relied on this feature….

1. 
   laikas Holy shit. #Pubmed altered the clinical queries, so that I can’t optimize my search first and enter the setnumber in the clin queries later. 30 Jun 2010 from TweetDeck
2. 
   laikas Holy shit 2 And I have a search class in 15 minutes. Can’t prepare changes. I hate this #pubmed #fail 30 Jun 2010 from TweetDeck
3. 
   markmac perfect timing (for an intrface chnge) RT @laikas Holy shit 2 And I have a search class in 15 min. Can’t prepare changes. #pubmed #fail 30 Jun 2010 from web

– this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Furthermore the clinical study category is now default on “therapy broad” instead of narrow. This means a lot more noise: the broad filter searches for (all) clinical trials, while the narrow filter is meant to find randomized controlled trials only.

Normally I optimize the search first before entering the final search set number into the clinical queries.(see  Tip 9 of  ”10+1 Pubmed tips for residents and their instructors“).  For instance, the above search would not include PCOS (which doesn’t map to the proper MeSH and isn’t required) and cyproterone, but would consist of hirsutism AND spironolactone (both mapping to the appropriate MeSH).

The set number of the “optimized” search is then entered in the search box of the Systematic Review filter. This yields 9 more hits, including Cochrane systematic reviews. The narrow therapy filter gives more hits, that are more relevant as well (24).

The example that is shown in the NLM technical bulletin (dementia stroke) yields 142 systematic reviews and 1318 individual trials of which only the 5 most recent trials are shown. Not very helpful to doctors and scientists, IMHO.

Anyway, we “lost” a (roundabout) way- to optimize the search before entering it into the search box.

The preview of 3 boxes is o.k., the looks are o.k. but why is this functionality lost?

For the moment I decided to teach my class another option that I use myself: adding clinical queries to your personal NCBI account so that the filters show up each time you perform a search in PubMed ( this post describes how to do it).

It only takes some time to make NCBI accounts and to explain the procedure to the class, time you would like to save for the searches themselves  (in a 1-2 hr workshop). But it is the most practical solution.

We notified PubMed, but it is not clear whether they plan to restore this function.

Note: 2010-07-09:  It is possible to enter the set numbers again, but the results are not yet reliable. They are probably working on it.

Still, for advanced users, adding filters to your NCBI may be most practical.

——-

*re-entering spironolactone and hirsutism in the clinical queries is doable here, but often the search is more complex and different per filter. For instance I might add a third concept when looking for an individual trial.