Health 2.0 as a new data source
A talk I gave to the National Comitee of Vital & Health Statistics, a public advisory committee that advises HHS on data collection (and related topics). They were interested in finding out more about "non-traditional" data collection options, hence I have some details at the end about Health 2.0 sites that are moving in the research direction.
Mendeley Blog » Blog Archive » If you’re a researcher, this is for you
While we always loved doing research, we were constantly wondering why managing and sharing literature would have to be such a hassle. Discovering new papers, topics and people in your research field and keeping track of them could also be easier (Source: DigiCMB)

Learning 2.1: Explore … Discover … Play: Learning 2.1: A Master List of Things
Learning 2.1: A Master List of Things
Here is a master list* of discovery explorations for Learning 2.1:
E-health records need Web 2.0 cure — Washington Technology
For years, the idea of making health records electronic — for increased accessibility, reduced errors and portability — has exerted a near-gravitational pull on the government market.
Google Scholar Search Performance: Comparative Recall and Precision
DOI: 10.1353/pla.0.0034
This paper presents a comparative evaluation of Google Scholar and 11 other bibliographic databases (Academic Search Elite, AgeLine, ArticleFirst, EconLit, GEOBASE, MEDLINE, PAIS International, POPLINE, Social Sciences Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, and SocINDEX), focusing on search performance within the multidisciplinary field of later-life migration. The results of simple keyword searches are evaluated with reference to a set of 155 relevant articles identified in advance. In terms of both recall and precision, Google Scholar performs better than most of the subscription databases. This finding, based on a rigorous evaluation procedure, is contrary to the impressions of many early reviewers. The paper concludes with a discussion of a new approach to document relevance in educational settings—an approach that accounts for the instructors' goals as well as the students' assessments of relevance. (Source: DigiCMB)

Dragonfly » Blog Archive » Medical Applications on Mobile Devices
Medical Applications on Mobile Devices is a newly recorded presentation by Shikun “KK” Jiang, Technology Coordinator for NN/LM’s South Central Region. In this presentation, KK reviews several free and fee-based applications for health professionals, and a few applications for consumers as well. Here is an outline (times are approximate):
Yo Tweeps! Check Headup on Twitter… | headup – The Semantic Web browser add-on
So here’s the news in a nutshell:

The new Headup identifies Twitter users, making it point’n'click simple to discover a wealth of info about your twitter friends. (Source: DigiCMB)

Alain Badiou launches a scathing attack of the ‘bling bling’ French president, but British politicians should take note, warns Rafael BehrNicolas Sarkozy once spoke admiringly of Tony Blair and of Britain’s economy. Lethargic France, Sarkozy suggested during his campaign to become the country’s president, could learn a thing or two from zesty, entrepreneurial Albion. That was spring 2007, which feels now like a different political era. Sarkozy won. Blair retired. And then the British economy, and the global financial system that sustained it, broke down. So what does Sarkozy stand for now? What, for that matter, does Gordon Brown stand for? Or David Cameron? Their strategies, their movements, their rhetoric, were all variations on a theme of liberal, free-market capitalism. Suddenly the music stopped and, like children in a party game, they were caught striking meaningless poses.That is what western politics has always looked like to Alain Badiou. The eminent French philosopher is not tuned into the music of liberal democracy. He refuses to accept any of the premises of what he calls “parliamentary cretinism”, preferring to judge politicians by their proximity to the absolute moral truth contained in “the communist hypothesis”. On those terms, it isn’t surprising that he finds the current French president deficient. In The Meaning of Sarkozy, the first English translation of Badiou’s angry meditations after the election, the author can hardly bear to write his subject’s name, referring to him mostly as “the Rat Man”. In Britain, this brand of ultra-leftism rarely leaves the university campus. But in some quartiers of Paris, Badiou is practically a celebrity. Salons erupted with feverish chatter when The Meaning of Sarkozy was first published. …

Geraldine Bedell enjoys an ambitious anatomy of lossIn a small town in the middle of Ireland in the 1960s, an adolescent boy is playing with chemicals in his garden shed when he blows himself up. Josephine Hart’s sixth novel opens violently and then develops into a meditation on grief and the competing needs – on both an individual and national level – to forget and remember. Her story of the O’Hara family, who had already lost a daughter when their son is accidentally killed, is set alongside that of their German neighbour, Thomas Middlehoff, who shares a first name with Mr O’Hara, and has also lost two children. The death of the O’Hara boy, who is unnamed, leaves his family stricken by guilt as well as grief. Was he building a bomb? If so, was that in some sense their fault? And did they do right to keep his mother from him in his final hours, knowing that to see his body would have driven her mad?All the characters in the novel struggle to deal with the past. The O’Haras stay in the house where their son has died; Thomas Middlehoff emigrates to Ireland. There may not be a “right” way of making the present bearable, but the effort the characters put into the attempt is a measure of their love for one another. This is an ambitious book, which sets out to say something both about the individual capacity for love and the love of country and tribe. The two strands never quite mesh; the domestic seems to be neither symbolic of, nor an alternative to, the tribal. But perhaps Josephine Hart knows this, which is why her title is laced with irony.Hart, who is Irish, is probably most famous for her 1991 novel Damage, and her two popular guides to reading poetry, Words That Burn and Catching Life by the Throat. “Will it come like a change in the weather?” Auden asks of love in the poem from which she takes this novel’s title. “Will its greeting be courteous or rough?/ Will it alter my life altogether?/ O tell me the truth about love. …

Couture as an antidote to war, poverty and economic turmoil? Viv Groskop salutes Linda Grant’s spirited defence of fashionIs an economic downturn really the time to be analysing the essence of style and wallowing in descriptions of red high heels? Oh yes, argues Linda Grant, more than ever. “If we were heading into the Great Depression,” she writes of a moment last summer when she was hesitating over a pair of £300 shoes, “I wanted to arrive there well-dressed.”This is the philosophy of this elegant and inspiring collection of essays: take pleasure while you can because life is short. It feels like a curiously timely message. And although Grant has based a lot of her musings on her blog of the same name, the book amounts to a sustained argument, as serious as it is enjoyable. In fact, The Thoughtful Dresser is exactly what you would expect from this author: compelling, analytical, surprising.It’s also funny. Grant sends herself up a lot, whether she is complaining about her thick ankles, middle-age spread or her inability, as she puts it, to “be” fashion. This self-deprecation is what makes for a charming read: Grant salivates over clothes, dreams of shoes and is desperate to make style the backdrop to her life. But, like most of us, she fails a lot of the time. She is not a naturally elegant woman, she admits, but she is damned if she is not going to give it a good go.Grant knows what she is talking about and has touched on this subject many times in her fiction. In many ways, this is a companion piece to her Booker-shortlisted novel The Clothes on Their Backs. She re-uses this expression several times here, reminding us that immigrants always arrive with nothing but what they’re wearing. We might like to pretend that clothes are not that important, but they are all we have when we are reduced to nothing.Her nearest relatives, she writes, were properly poor and for many years could not afford the clothes they wanted. …

Known for his discretion, Graham Swift is at last confronting his own past, writes Edward Marriott In 1983, Graham Swift, with Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, was named by Granta as one of Britain’s best young novelists. While the others have gone on to enjoy stellar careers, Swift’s trajectory, like the man himself, has been more enigmatic, even fragile. After the Booker-winning heights of Last Orders in 1996, he’s going through one of his quieter periods, which may account for the fact that, at the age of 59, he’s about to publish his first work of non-fiction, Making an Elephant. For a writer with a reputation for distinctly un-Amisian levels of discretion, this is the closest he’s ever got to an autobiography.For Swift, Making an Elephant is quite a departure. It’s revealing, self-deprecating, full of fascinating details. There are pieces about friends – Salman Rushdie, who used to bring along his Special Branch bodyguards for fatwa-era Christmases with Swift and his wife, writer Candice Rodd; Kazuo Ishiguro; Ted Hughes – and memoirs of parents and childhood. Throughout the book, an unspoken question rings out: “What made me a writer?”By his own admission, Swift was one of literature’s slow starters. A seemingly perennial student, with an English degree from Cambridge and three further years “posing as a PhD candidate” in York, he’d gone to Greece at the age of 25 in the hope of transforming himself into a writer. A year later, he returned home and got out his manuscript: “It was awful. Irredeemably awful.” It’s at this point that many would-be writers, having dipped their toes in the all-too-exposing waters of fiction, might have mothballed their dream in favour of a sensible job. But Swift, “contrary to the immediate evidence”, was convinced that he had what it took. He taught adult evening classes in English and began rising at 5.30am to write. …

The Norse gods have really plummeted down the theocratic leader board over the past thousand years, but Betsy Tobin, setting her latest novel in 11th-century Iceland, returns to the time when they were only just starting to lose ground. Freya, the goddess of love, must try to stem their decline by obtaining the mythical gold necklace, Brisingamen, by any means necessary; such are the necklace’s powers that it may even have dominion over the volcano Hekla that threatens the whole country. Meanwhile, young mortal Fulla rails against her impending arranged marriage, but her love for another man has tragic consequences. Ice Land could have been clunky, but Tobin brings myth and history impressively to life.Fictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Source: Guardian Unlimited Books)

http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=118986,00.html

“The Free File program provides free federal income tax preparation and electronic filing for eligible taxpayers through a partnership between the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Free File Alliance LLC, a group of private sector tax software companies.”–From the Web Site. (Source: MPLIC Reference Highway)

And the award goes to…The Children’s Book Council has unveiled the finalists for its second-annual Children’s Choice Book Awards based on votes from kids from around the country who nominated their favorite book, author, and illustrator. (Source: School Library Journal Breaking News)