Misspellings in keywords

Just now I was hoping to find a resource to help me find out what medical words are frequently misspelled and what those misspellings look like.  I found a couple of websites of general words and their misspellings but both lacked medical words.  So I was left guessing.  Words I find genuinely bamboozling such as ‘arrhythmias’ and ‘hypercholesterolaemia’ I typed into Google and if misspelled, it directs me to the proper spelling.  I do like the way Google doesn’t give any US bias in spellings–i.e. ‘hypercholesterolaemia’ isn’t corrected to ‘hypercholesterolemia’.

However, I think there is an informationist-sized gap (or is that ‘informaticist-sized’?) for an intelligent tool that does the following:

1. Gives synonyms for medical words

2. Gives common misspellings of commonly misspelled medical words

3. Gives alternate endings (i.e. hypercholesterolaemic) associated with the word

4. Has an abbreviation lookup (yes I have seen these, but nothing masterful, authoritative and international, at least for the English-speaking world) AND gives colloquial abbreviations (e.g. ‘afib’, ‘a-fib’, and ‘af’ for atrial fibrillation)

I should mention that I am sorting out the keywords for the work website.  About three-quarters of the way through, I noticed that my predecessor had tagged each publication’s record with ‘GENERAL PRACTIONER’.  When they invent a simply ‘find and replace’ function for this sort of thing, would you let me know?

I just did a medical dictionary search and found something new and somewhat promising: mondofacto.  I say somewhat because it didn’t return anything for ‘hypercholesterolemia’ but gave me some useful stuff for ‘hypercholesterolaemia’.

Top 10 Health Search Engines of 2008 & federated search

I’m shamelessly stealing this from Danni’s Twitter update (see Danielle, I do read them!). I thought that it deserved a little pointer on the blog itself.

“The Top 10 Health Search Engines of 2008, by Hope Leman. It is the time of year for annual “the best…” lists, so here we go with The Top 10 Health Search Engines of 2008. This list is in order of preference of the author of this article.”

Danielle’s not very impressed with them, but then she’s a difficult girl to please. One thing that I find interesting is that a couple of them (Mednar [Biznar is their business federated search tool] and WorldWideScience) are federated search engines; if you’re into that sort of thing (the deep web – it’s all about form filling, don’t you know?). Health Sciences Online might be useful for looking for guidelines and similar material.

Bad passwords vs. everything under one password

People can’t even be bothered to come up with unique, difficult to crack passwords for their important online accounts, according to a US survey of 4000 people blogged at Read Write Web. I don’t lose sleep over someone hacking my Jango account, but my email and bank account need to be secure.  Convenience and memorability are king.  Facebook Connect promises to help us, but I’ve heard all that before (what about OpenID?). Will they be able to control spammers, as those who are most visible tend to be the best behaved?  Will we all have online avatars, visible wherever we go? Will I have to learn Esperanto or Chinglish?  Are you completely screwed if you forget it?  All these questions need to be answered before I’m satisfied.

Google’s eightieth blog

According to Dean Giustini, Google’s new social media blog is its eightieth.  The Social Web blog will be devoted to writing about Google Friends Connect as well as “community” efforts like OpenSocial.  It only has 2 posts so far, but I am looking forward to all the forthcoming stuff.

GFC aims to grow your internet traffic by allowing webizens to log into their email accounts and gain identities, on your blog.  Hey, and it even talks to wordpress (for a demo video go here).  This is obviously worth a try, but I personally tend to shy away from signing up for too many things.  Okay, it helps that it piggybacks on your email password.  The question is, how many people will be bothered?

Conferences galore

I’m looking forward to a second professional trip across the pond the SLA (or Special Libraries Association) conference in Washington DC. The Americans are a lot more optimistic about things and despite the economic gloom they have the change and hope of Obama to cling onto. I tend to consider them ahead of us Brits in terms of new technology but it’s also an excuse to travel and I share the new found love of the place that Stephen Fry recently brought to the small screen albeit briefly, its scent of opportunity and strangely surprising alien environment, as in we share the same language no? I went to this conference last year courtesy of a student award: this year they have made it for early careers LIS people as well and the application is the end of February so get applying if this applies to you (shameless plug over).

Other conferences of interest:

- EAHIL (European Association for Health and Information Libraries) workshop in Dublin

- CILIP (or cillit bang to us abstaining from the UK professional body for library bods, if only Barry Scott and his magic pennies were made President) Umbrella in sunny Hertfordshire

- MLA (Medical Libraries Association, not to be confused with the Museums and Libraries Association, US based) iFusions conference in Honolulu, Hawaii

- For more Americana the ALA (American Library Association, sister to CILIP) conference in Chicago

I went to the Book Collectors and Collecting conference at Chawton House Library in Hampshire a couple of years ago out of pure aspiration (I have a tiny and possibly non-extending collection of artists’ books) and it was such a fun small conference with a range of people. I remember speaking to a former head of Manchester’s grand John Rylands library who gave me some good careers advice (first four years of his career were tedious and then he worked his way up, which is my general plan), as well as meeting a private collector of agricultural books and some lovely women who worked for Canterbury Cathedral chained library. All very fun and a bit different from a big conference. Apart from the masses of socialising in large hotel suites and packing into lecture theatres filled with gentle debate there are however the queues for the loo and the bumping into people over coffee so I’m hoping for some small scale contact with other information professionals, librarians and possibly even Colin Powell who is the keynote speaker.

Facebook and Privacy

Has Facebook become a prison for your personal details (and photos)?  It appears that way as bloggers Consumerist and Mashable report that Facebook has changed its terms and conditions to state that information about how you use Facebook and details about you will be retained even after you quit.

Facebook has removed this paragraph from the terms of service:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Now, I am not sure why Facebook would *want* to use my content, but I find the wording of the agreement (which is minus the above) very worrisome.  I also do not like the fact that they own my photos that are on there–since mid last year I have not put much up.

Hmm, is it time for me to find a shiny, happy, my-rights-are-protected social networking site?

According to Eric Lee, Ning and Elgg are a couple of social networks that could work as alternatives to Facebook.  I might have a look at these in coming weeks and report back.

Information overdose

Is technology responsible for information overdoses among doctors?  Or perhaps ‘information adverse reactions’ would be more apt here.  

A ‘retrospective analysis of 233 537 medication safety alerts generated by 2872 clinicians’ published in the Archives of Internal Medicine caused a stir recently because it concluded that ‘clinicians override most medication alerts’ on their electronic prescribing systems.  These systems alert doctors when a patient may be allergic to a medicine or if they are already on a medicine that may cause an interaction.  The results of the study were that ‘clinicians accepted 9.2% of drug interaction alerts and 23.0% of allergy alerts’ – so they rejected the vast majority of the alerts then.  Why?

Gruntdoc (why does that moniker always make me smile) and others have blogged about this from the doctor’s point of view.   It seems that the electronic prescribing systems have a glitch–they are far too cautious to be useful in clinical practice.  They might flag a possible interaction where there is no evidence for one (but, let’s face it, that kind of research tends either not to be done or is a secondary offshoot of other research).

Also doctors tended to ignore the alerts if the patient had previously had the medication without any problem (well duh).

I am not sure, as this study was American, if these electronic systems are in use in the UK.  It seems like they need some tweaking so as not to conflict with common sense.

Reading into things too much

I’m watching a brilliant programme on the modern phenomenon of reading, popular since the lapsing of the licensing legislation for printing presses (thanks William). This was the start of mass publication of newspapers and although apparently the editor of the first daily paper, the Daily Courant, said he would resist pushing his own views on his readers, assuming they could make the 17th Century equivalent of a critical appraisal of the pieces on offer. What a shame the case isn’t so now.

Ben Goldacre is having trouble with the law (it makes its results known like the visible and clunky version of the economic invisible hand) as journalists weigh in with their views of the matters of the day, this time annoyingly still MMR. The BMJ reports from a meeting held by, ironically, the Lancet, where journalists were arguing with our Ben that they weren’t all sloppy heathens with no grasp of science. The MMR-autism fallacy was picked up by a journalist and so all in all critics of whatever shade are always welcome. I’m more worried that most ordinary people don’t have enough basic science knowledge to make assessments of what they read. Measles rates rise and parents argue as if being an ignoramus is going out of fashion. I really am thinking of joining something sciency to compliment my art portfolio. The Science Museum has late nights although is like a cuddly aunt with a flashy window display, go upstairs to the veterinary science exhibits to be transported (perhaps this is the purpose?) to a time when proper glue to fix the objects to the wall hasn’t been invented yet. It is a shame as I think there is something more wholesome about the wow of really getting something scientific versus the ahh of a straining reading of the tiny plaques next to a glorious oil painting. But that’s probably just me and my stubborn belief in a knowable real material world.

During my training erm training today I was getting a little on-the-way-to fuming at the claim that we have different learning styles during a ‘test’ much like a horoscope. I should apparently adapt my teaching methods to accommodate those who cannot deal with structure, cannot stomach linear structures, cannot cope with something in a logical sequence. I’m quite the opposite although I proffered what if I’m warned first that the speaker is going to come out with waffle, then I can adapt. I fear that wanting to have a nice debate about things is okay with say philosophy but when it comes to medicine we need facts and transmission of, this is important in areas such as AIDS or cholera where misinformation causes increased morbidity and mortality.

Windows 7 rushed out because of downturn? Will it run on netbooks?

I read in the FT yesterday (paper version – no link, though similar stories from cnet and internetnews suggest likewise) that Microsoft are rushing out Windows 7 because the downturn is hitting sales. Already many businesses are delaying upgrading from XP to Vista because a) Vista has had some bad press from the word go, and b) why upgrade to Vista when a few months later you have to go through the whole process again to upgrade to Windows 7? It all adds up to a lack of sales for Microsoft, and at a time when they can least afford it. Therefore, the logic goes, get things going with an early release of 7. The delayers won’t delay any more, and those sitting on the fence might be convinced to splash the cash if the PC has a spanky new operating system. Windows 7’s official release date is January 2010, though the “company has been aiming to get it done in time to be on PCs that ship for this year’s holiday-shopping season.”

It all sounds great, but by rushing, does that mean less time for beta testing and hence more initial bugs might sneak in? Vista, all over again? I guess that most companies, including ours, would wait for a while anyway until the major bugs have been ironed out before upgrading. And, let’s face it, we all expect there to be bugs, don’t we? Perhaps by rushing it out though it might get the personal computer market moving, rather than the professional/business market. Though of course many consumers are buying netbooks these day. Will Microsoft 7 be available for netbooks? Apparently (apcmag, cnet), though will it be too expensive, given the budget priorities of most netbook purchasers?

Anyway, what we do know is that there will be six different versions of 7 when it comes out. A basic, free download for personal users would be nice. Can’t see it happening somehow though…

Cochrane now on Twitter

The Cochrane Colloboration have had a sudden rush of blood to the head – they are now on Twitter. Follow them here. So far, they’ve posted that Cochrane podcasts, in the form of audio summaries of selected reviews from Issue 1, 2009, are now online, and that the Cochrane Library is now freely available in Denmark. Result for the Danes. And this all happened just one hour ago. How up to date am I?