Almost a year ago I started a new series Kaleidoscope, with a “kaleidoscope” of facts, findings, views and news gathered over the last 1-2 weeks.
It never got beyond the first edition. Perhaps the introduction of this Kaleidoscope was to overwhelming & dazzling: lets say it was very rich in content. Or as Andrew Spong tweeted: “Part cornucopia, part cabinet of wonders, it’s @laikas Kaleidoscope 2009 wk 47”
This is a reprise in a (somewhat) “shorter” format. Lets see how it turns out.
This edition will concentrate on Social Media (Blogging, Twitter Google Wave). I fear that I won’t keep my promise, if I deal with more topics.
Medical Grand Rounds and News from the Blogosphere
Life in the Fast Lane is the host of this weeks Grand Rounds. This edition is truly terrific, if not terrifying. Not only does it contain “killer posts”, each medblogger has also been coupled to its preferred deadly Aussie critter.
Want to know how a full time ER-doctor/educator/textbook author/blogger/editor /health search engine director manages to complete work-related tasks …when the kids are either at school or asleep(!), then read this recent interview with Mike Cadogan, the founder of Life in the Fast Lane.
Don’t forget to submit your medical blog post to next weeks Grand Rounds over at Dispatch From Second Base. Instructions and theme details can be found on the post “You are invited to Grand Rounds!“ (update here).
And certainly don’t forget to submit your post related to medical information to the MedLibs Round (about medical information) here. More details can be found at Laika’s MedLibLog and at Highlight Health, the host of the upcoming Edition.
(sorry, writing this post took longer than I thought: you have one day left for submission)
Dr Shock of the blog with the same name advises us to submit good quality, easy-to-understand posts dealing with science, environment or medicine to Scientia Pro Publica via the blog carnival submission form.
There is a new on-line science blogging community – Scientopia, till now mostly consisting of bloggers who left Scienceblogs after (but not because of) Pepsigate. New members can only be added to the collective by invitation (?). Obviously, pepsi-researchers will not be invited, but it remains to be seen who will… Hopefully it doesn’t become an elitist club.
Virginia Heffernan (NY-Times) has an outspoken opinion about the (ex-) sciencebloggers, illustrated by this one-liner
“ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd.”
Although I don’t appreciate the ranting-style of some of the blogs myself (the sub-“South Park” blasphemy style of PZ Myers, as Virginia puts it). I don’t think most Scienceblogs deserve to be labelled as “preoccupied with trivia, name-calling and saber rattling”.
See balanced responses at: Neurodojo, Neuron Culture & Neuroanthropology (anything with neuro– makes sense, I guess).
Want to understand more about ScienceBlogs and why it was such a terrific community, then read Bora Z’s (rather long) ScienceBlog farewell post.
Oh.. and there is yet another new science blogging platform: http://www.labspaces.net/, that has evolved from a science news aggregator . It looks slick.
Social Media
Speaking about Twitter, did you know that Twitter reached its 20 billionth tweet over the weekend, a milestone that came just a few months after hitting the 10 billion tweet mark!? (read more in the Guardian)
Well and if you have no idea WHAT THE FUCK IS MY SOCIAL MEDIA “STRATEGY”? you might click the link to get some (new) ideas. You probably need to refresh the site a couple of times to find the right answer.
First-year medical school and master’s of medicine students of Stanford University will receive an i-pad at the start of the year. The extremely tech-savvy Students do appreciate the gift:
“Especially in medicine, we’re using so many different resources, including all the syllabuses and slides. I’m able to pull them up and search them whenever I need to. It’s a fantastic idea.”
Good news for Facebook friends: VoIP giant Vonage has just introduced a new iPhone, iPod touch and Android app that allows users to call their Facebook friends for free (Mashable).
It was a shock – or wasn’t it – that Google pulled the plug on Google Wave (RRW), after being available to the general public for only 78 days? The unparalleled tool that “could change the web”, but was too complex to be understood. Here are some thoughts why Google wave failed. Since much of the Code is open source, ambitious developers may pick up where Google left.
Votes down for the social media site Digg.com: an undercover investigation has exposed that a group of influential conservative members were involved in censorship, deliberately trying to ban progressives, by “burying them” (voting down), which effectively means these progressives don’t get enough “digs” to reach the front page where most users spend their time.
Votes up for Healthcare Social Media Europe (#HCSMEU), which just celebrated its first birthday.
Miscellanous
A very strange move: a journal has changed a previously stated conclusion of a previously published paper after a Reuters Health story about serious shortcomings in the report. Read more about it at Gary Schwitzer’s HealthNewsReview Blog.
Finally for the EBM-addicts among us: The Center of Evidence Based Medicine released a new (downloadable) Levels of Evidence Table. At the CEBM-blog they stress that hierarchies of evidence have been somewhat inflexibly used, but are essentially a heuristic, or short-cut to finding the likely best evidence. At first sight the new Table looks simpler, and more easy to use.
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