Arin's Blog

Here are my thoughts about using Prezi for Teaching a Class

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 04:00:00 +0000

Using Prezi for Classroom Teaching

I usually teach using powerpoint or the whiteboard. Today for a change I started using Prezi an online presentation creation and demonstration tool. I downloaded the presentation after creation to my notebook computer for presentation but this was not necessary. Prezi is a different implementation of a show and tell environment and I will be using this more frequently in my presentations.

In a sense, Prezi is more like a dynamic poster presentation than a presentation software that runs linearly through the slides. It is a flash based and browser dependent application, so that it can be shown nearly everywhere, and no additional hardware needs to be installed. In that sense, a prezi presentation is quite a nice and hassle free application; besides it is possible to embed images, videos, audio clips (I think through the sound bytes), and of course texts and images that then become dynamic entities that gain focus.

It takes a while to get used to create presentations in Prezi. Basically you need to start with an outline, and I found that you cannot think while you work on Prezi. Think about your presentation beforehand, lay it out on a mind map (which is what I usually do for any writing), then either transfer that mind map as it is on a word processor or text document (use textedit/textwrangler on mac or any other word processor/text processor on other platforms) and then work from there, i.e., copy and paste or write on the prezi template.

Basically the way it works is this:

You develop the idea of the presentation first
Populate Prezi using word boxes, add pictures, add voice or other files, video, etc
Link the “units” using a path selector

The combination of your own boxes/text/image/multimedia and paths creates a unique pathway based or learning pathway based implementation of what you want to show and when. On screen the elements will keep on being exhibited according to the magnification you want them (in turn depending on what you want to highlight). You can highlight individual words or phrases, and you can play on them. Or you can dynamically link individual elements within picture units. They are not “slides”, as nothing really slides anywhere but display units glide around and it creates quite a unique effect. I am not sure how learners may interact (coming to it).

The first couple of times I tried to use the Prezi templates that were prebuilt, it did not work. First of all, the templates were somewhat complicated for me to use for a first timer, and second, it was a pain to identify and select the path. Second, understanding this path structure is quite complex. It seems that it is suited to edit and modify paths after creation, but it was quite difficult to do this in the first shot. So I ended up adding to the path component after every two to three element creation. There is a panel that will let you reorder your panels to show.

Did I like it? I think I did. It has almost all the interactivity and elements of powerpoint, but the paradigm is different. It is more of a dynamic story telling. You got to have a story first and then build the elements around the story. Some people may not like the way the screen rotates and refreshes (may make people dizzy). One of my students got confused in setting up the iPad in the middle of the presentation as it asked her to log in. She just downloaded the app on her iPad without registration. These need to be fixed.

Overall, good tool to work with. I quite like it. Need to figure out some more productive ways to use it.

Test post

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 21:39:00 +0000

This is a post to test

Criticism of Ashok Mitra's "An honorary century"

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 23:50:00 +0000

The veteran Indian economist and columnist, Ashok Mitra, wrote an opinion piece in today's The Telegraph, titled, "An honorary century". In his column (linked here) he, I think mercilessly criticized Sachin Tendulkar - the Indian cricketer, for not voluntarily retiring from test cricket (perhaps all forms of cricket).
I think this essay was uncalled for and rather rude. Sachin lately may not have scored his "elusive" hundredth hundred in Australia (or for that matter in some matches hosted in India and elsewhere as well), but let this not take away from our attention that he has been examples of outstanding batting under really difficult conditions, particularly in Australia as well as having faced some fierce attacks against other bowlers from other test playing countries while playing in India. He is not getting any younger; besides, a bowler can be quite motivated to bowl his best when knows he is going to bowl at Tendulkar.
Why should he made to retire now or why should he be dropped? It'd be inconsistent on part of the selectors to rest him based on his performance alone. After all, his scores in his latest outings were not all that low or awkward either. Not that everyone of his team-mates outplayed him. Besides, test cricket is as much a game of strategy as it is a game of individual performances, and presence of Tendulkar in the team serves as an inspiration for young cricketers in the team. Besides, Tendulkar is hardly blocking the way of a younger cricketer; in contrary, his presence in the team itself can be an inspiration for a youngster to do his best to play along side the master for the country.

As it shows, Tendulkar is surely fit enough to continue as long as he can, and as long as he has to show for it (hopefully his scores in the seventies and eighties are not trivial), one wonders why one would be judgemental, compare Tendulkar with dotard academics at Santiniketan ready to kick the bucket? The insinuations at how much money he made or how much he means fiscally for the BCCI are non sequitur. Sad to see a senior, widely respected intellectual such as Mitra should take such cheap pot shots at one of our cricketing geniuses.

Guy Kawasaki writes a great manual on Google Plus titled, "What the Plus!"

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 00:03:00 +0000

Just finished reading +Guy Kawasaki ’s latest book on Google plus, “What the Plus!”

I tend to keep a manual at hand. To that extent, it’s a much needed manual for Google+, and I guess there’s something to learn from this book for everyone. Besides, the book is very readable. Easy, fast, sharp.Some lessons I got out of the book from my first read:

Participate, and take it for a spin (aim for like five posts a day). Get a good profile (he suggests what features to consider for mugshots like forehead and chin)
Write often, write clearly, must embed figures and links in your post.
Comment on other people’s posts and provide helpful advice, and remain positive.
He cites several ways to find meaningful posts and people including using google’s social search (I leave you to read the book to find out what they are, nitfy tricks like “circles shared with me” in the search boxes)
When writing long posts, break up and use bullet points.

I think he could have expanded on the hangout section. Perhaps more will come in the next iterations. There are also other tricks and shortcuts that he could have listed (he has listed several shortcuts). A nifty feature in this book is how he has described features in Google plus that stack up with Twitter and Facebook.

I know google+ keeps on changing all the time. Social web is powerful, and I feel that at least I need a strategy to negotiate with the plethora of information. Lately (and quite significantly), we had quite a few books coming out, one of the best to my mind is +Clay Johnson ’s book “Information Diet” (I think it’s really well written, another must read for anyone interested in information management).

Some people complain about sparseness of Google+ interactions, perhaps it is, but it’s a different ecosystem that needs some handholding (which this book does eminently). But it’s also true that it’s largely built around what we are interested in and how to find and interact with contents, much more than intereacting with people in our immediate social networks.

It’d be good to have some insights in these processes, but I guess this was not the book’s purpose. As Guy writes in this book, that fine grained differentiation between perspective (twitter), people (facebook), and passions (google+) is important. I quite liked this typology. There are overlaps on all three, but this is perhaps as good a way to think about what people do on social media as it gets.

Overall, good job, +Guy Kawasaki .

(This was also posted on my google+ here: https://plus.google.com/117270655453846612117/posts/b5RzAamnKoL)

Watch this moving video on the ethical dilemma of robotics

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 19:36:00 +0000

Quantic dream's KARA is a very moving video on the ethical dilemma of
the robotics. Surreal and but it moves you in the end where they are
going to disassemble the robot because "it/she" wants to "live":

https://plus.google.com/109602109099036550366/posts/ZmTM6FQSPSU

Disturbing.

Converting a PDF to a readable format on small devices

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 04:19:00 +0000

It's a pain to convert a pdf to an epub for reading and optimizing on
a tablet device, and unfortunately there are no reliable programs that
can get the work done. Note the steps:

1. First of all, the pdf has to be truncated to remove white spaces.
Fortunately, there are programs such as briss that helps to get the
job done. Nothing else quite works.
2. Next, use Calibre to convert the pdf to ePub format
3. Edit the epub in sigil because in 99 out of 100 cases calibre does
a sloppy job in the conversion process.
4. Finally, reconvert it back to mobi fomat
5. Upload to the device for reading decently.

Who cares? Way too much work.

Much better to plug in iPad and use iannotate to read the damn pdf.

I am quite disappointed with amazon kindle touch.

Why Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work according to this "New Yorker" article

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 19:08:00 +0000

It's a longish reading, but well worth it. It essentially pulls up examples from other research studies and claims that the two basic tenets of brain storming "freewheeling" and uncritical acceptance of all ideas to solve problems or come up with creative ideas may not be the best after all, and that, solo thinkers produce more ideas which can then be pooled, OR, groups of people who debate and criticize ideas often come up with a range of ideas and diverse creative solutions more often.

Possible. But ideas and nature of the demand on creative outcrop of ideas change with time.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer

Excellent info graphic, I think, on the dangers of Fracking

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:19:00 +0000

http://www.dangersoffracking.com/

NIcholas Carr writes on Facebook and Saint Zuck

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:50:00 +0000

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/02/saint_zuck.php

How scheduling a writing time and gathering a group who write together can work wonder for your writing habits

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:45:00 +0000

Heather Whitney wrote about her experience in following Silvia's book on productive academic writing and describes what she did on streamlining her time and writing management. I think there are some interesting lessons for many of us who find writing and reading stuff as part of our daily routine. For me, most mornings are spent in reading my blog feeds and planning writing.

<--- Here's the post in full. There are some lessons here for us to follow ---

How to (Try to) Get a Lot Done in the Sciences

ProfHacker 3/02/12 2:00 AM Heather M. Whitney Productivity Profession gtd productivity science

In a previous post, I described how reading How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing proved to be beneficial to me, a fairly skeptical scientist, in increasing my writing productivity. (A brief summary of my post: the book recommends scheduling writing time and participating in a writing group. Do it. It works.)

I also alluded to the fact that reading the book has boosted my productivity in other ways, which I’ll now describe in this post. But first, a disclaimer. I’m a science faculty member at a small liberal arts college, and I work solely with undergraduate students. My semesters are primarily focused on teaching (which can include classroom and instructional lab time) and mentoring, with some institutional service thrown in. Research theoretically is partitioned to the summer, but in my world (doing experimental nuclear magnetic resonance research without postdocs or grad students, a fact which makes others in the field blanch upon hearing) I have to fit research in the school year to ensure productive summer work. I mention all this to note that what I’m about to write about may not work for everyone, because the description “professor” can have an amazing number of variations. But it is my hope that the methods that have worked for me, a scientist for whom the typical advice about “getting things done in academia” has always seemed to not relate, might in some way help ProfHacker readers who are in a similar scenario.

Back to the topic of my post: how scheduling writing led me to change up how I schedule my work in its entirety. You see, before I began scheduling writing I filled in my calendar according to other people’s claims on my time: classes, meetings, office hours. That left me with misleadingly wide open “slots” in which I could theoretically get everything else done: prep for each class period, prep for meetings, do the tasks that resulted from meetings, follow up on questions that came up in office hours, read, do the aforementioned writing (which I now realized for me was not just journal article writing but essays, grant proposals, grant activity reports, abstracts, and more), planning the writing, answering email, acquiring data, evaluating the data, etc. You get the picture.

Overall, I had previously felt that I was a fairly productive person. I was getting a lot done, but I had periods, especially on the weekends, in which I felt panicky and could not rest because I sensed that there were work-related items that I should have been doing. After reading How to Write a Lot, I realized that my change in thinking about writing — purposefully scheduling it so that it has a dedicated place in your schedule, and protecting that time — could (and really, should) apply to everything else I need to get done.

So several weeks ago I began sitting down on Friday afternoons and carefully evaluating my schedule for the week to come. At the beginning of the semester, when I put in recurring events for standing class, meeting, and office hour times, I also put in recurring slots for reading, writing, research efforts, and class prep/grading. I review those on Fridays to remind myself that in the coming week, those activities deserve the time allotted. I also review my tasks list, which I maintain in Remember the Milk (RTM), to see what tasks I’ve specifically tagged according to the standing time slots. For example, each week I have to look at the lab we will do with students the following week, make sure we have all the items, make edits to the lab as necessary, and then upload it to Blackboard for students to access; all of these items are recurring tasks in RTM, tagged for the time slot “intro lab administration.” Sometimes I’ll need to enter newly ordered items into our lab database, or fix a piece of equipment. That to-do will be tagged for lab and I’ll know to attend to it in my scheduled intro lab administration slot the next time it comes up. Next, I look at other more general to-do’s that have made their way into RTM and fill in time slots in which I will attend to other miscellaneous responsibilities that don’t happen regularly, such as arranging for clicker use in a faculty inservice day. After this weekly review period, I know I’ve set myself up for spending enough time on all the things I need to do in the coming week, and don’t have to worry that I’m somehow misappropriating my time.

There’s still room for flexibility, an absolute must, with this system. For example, when meetings get scheduled out far in advance they go into the calendar, and then when I do my weekly review I know to work around them as they come up. But the value is that I definitely know I’ve got to work around them and make up for the lost time somewhere. There’s a lot less ambiguity and overestimation of available time in the future. And at the same time, I am less likely to schedule meetings that interfere with my reading, writing, and research time and displace them in the first place.

I’ve been amazed at how this change in thinking has improved my semester thus far. I believe that previously I had a false sense of how much time was available to do everything that is a part of work. I do now have some Friday afternoon moments in which I’m gasping in awe at the sheer volume of things to get done the next week and how little time there is to do them. But now I feel more sure that I’m doing the best that I can with the 24 hours in a day I have. I also feel more motivated to continue to seek out ways to make my work and home life more efficient, to really and truly rest when I am able, to be honest when someone asks me to take on something that is outside of my work and life priorities, and to encourage students to protect their time as well.

Maybe you’re thinking, “she just needlessly reinvented the wheel.” If you already have found a similar process to work for you, then congratulations! But I felt compelled to write about this at ProfHacker because so much of the hacker-type advice seems to be written by those not in the sciences, and I have felt that advice hasn’t related to me. I’ve always thought to myself that those who write about hacking the academy don’t have to set up demos before class and then take them down afterwards, grade quantitative problem sets for both accuracy and appropriateness of solution strategy, make time-sensitive samples that will degrade if you don’t image them soon enough, get a stubborn machine to work, create data before you can even begin to think to write about it, and thus what they’ve suggested (which often is read by me as “just write” or some other oversimplification) doesn’t translate to my work. The few resources that are available for improving productivity in science are often produced by those with administrative help or course releases that allow them to protect their time, which doesn’t relate to me either. So if you’re in this boat with me, this post is for you. Even though “just schedule writing time” may not be directly applicable, there’s a principle there of protecting your time and giving it the attention it deserves that is helpful. I offer this perspective as a possible way to rethink getting things done in the sciences, especially in the small liberal arts college setting.

...>

How Can Asians Eat So Much Rice and Not Gain Weight? Because they exercise a lot and rice is not the only thing ...

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:15:00 +0000

So writes Mark Sisson in his blog: "daily apple".

I think Mark got a point here. Where he writes that it's just not rice per se, but a combination of rice, regular aerobic exercise like slow walking at a constant pace for long time, and other adjunct highly nutritious food items consumed as well relates to their rice "binge" but not getting fat. I think though that the food patterns are changing and it's getting closer to the Western dietary patterns, at least that's what I get to see in what flies out of the supermarket shelves off Calcutta (Bengalees are the other group in India who are great rice eaters).

Thoughts?

Here's the full story for you:

The “Asian Paradox”: How Can Asians Eat So Much Rice and Not Gain Weight?

Mark's Daily Apple 2/02/12 5:00 AM Mark Sisson Carbs Diet Health Low Level Aerobic Activity Nutrition

How the Primal community loves the concept of a dietary paradox. How we eagerly point to its various manifestations as supportive evidence for our way of eating, living, and moving. You know the French Paradox and how it confounds the experts. To mention all those smug surrender monkeys with their brie and their butter and their duck confit and their Gauloises and their seeming imperviousness to heart attacks is to make Dean Ornish binge on bran and pull out tuft after tuft of frizzy hair. And then there’s the lesser-known Israeli Paradox, which attempts to answer why Israelis have skyrocketing rates of heart disease despite a skyrocketing intake of “healthy” omega-6 fatty acids. In its wake, Walter Willet might be found weeping into a mug of safflower oil. There’s even an American Paradox – those who ate the most saturated fat had the least coronary heart disease – that had the minds of researchers thoroughly boggled.

All those paradoxes work out in “our favor.” Saturated fat gets off pretty much scot-free and omega-6 vegetable oils get raked over the coals (and, presumably, oxidized). And if people were honest about things, they would see these paradoxes not as paradoxes, but as reasons to reevaluate previously-held beliefs about health and diet.

But what about the Asian Paradox? How can Asian countries consume so much white rice and so many noodles and remain so thin? If carbs make you fat, how do they eat so many of them? This is a question I get from Mark’s Daily Apple readers all of the time, so it’s about time I gave a thorough response.

First of all, I want to confirm that Asia eats a lot of rice. It may be a “side dish” or not the main course, but there’s no dancing around the fact that a lot of rice gets eaten – the stats (PDF) are pretty clear on Asian rice consumption. I briefly covered the Asian Paradox in the rice post, but I think the subject deserves more than a brief paragraph. So, today, I’m going to explain why the Asian Paradox (like all “paradoxes,” really) isn’t actually a paradox, and why I consider it to happily coexist with all of the other Primal-friendly paradoxes. I’ll also explain why I think the Asian Paradox offers us Primals a chance to evaluate our own beliefs (because that’s the only honest thing to do).

They Move(d) Frequenty at a Slow Pace

Whenever I’m in a large city with a sizable Asian immigrant population, I notice a different approach to walking. For instance, Carrie and I were recently visiting San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. We spent the day just walking around and getting sort of lost, and we both noticed the difference. Of all the multitudes of people walking, jogging, and otherwise being active, everyone but the older Asian folks seemed to be actively exercising. Exercising on purpose. Trying to “burn calories” or “improve VO2 max.” We noticed as a young mother with strollered child powerwalked down the path, wearing compression tights, a baseball cap, and the latest running shoes, while the elderly Chinese grandma she passed wore some keds and a knit sweater. Two seemingly identical joggers (one in Vibrams!) with Bluetooth earpieces jabbed at each other with business-speak opposite a pair of old friends strolling along and loudly speaking (in another language) of politics and times long past (again, it was another language) in well-worn suits and loafers. A group of cyclists could have passed for pros with all their gear and advertisements and special cycling shoes, while an older Asian gentleman wearing a collared shirt and slacks cruised by on a simple ten-speed. I got the distinct impression that walking or cycling or just getting around using your own limbs as the vehicles was simply a way to get from here to there for the older Asian folks. It wasn’t a special occasion. It was an everyday occurrence. It was normal. For everyone else, it was exercise. It was a big event that you had to get geared up and spend money for. Exercise is great, and walking with intent of getting healthier is great – I do it all the time. But my observations speak to a huge cultural difference between the way older Asian folks who immigrated over (and, presumably, the cultures back at home) and Americans treat moving frequently at a slow pace.

People living in Asian countries have historically been more active than people living in the States. It’s not that they’re all lifting weights and running sprints and joining gyms; it’s that their average daily activity levels are higher. And as everyone here probably already knows, the simple act of walking on a regular basis does wonders for one’s health. Daily walking is consistently associated with (among other health benefits) improved insulin sensitivity (better tolerance of carbohydrates like white rice), better mood, lowered blood pressure and triglycerides, and greater longevity. America is a car country, and has been for about a hundred years. We don’t – and haven’t for over 50 years – have to walk to get around. Heck, oftentimes we can’t walk to get where we want to go even if we wanted to walk, since many of us live in a kind of suburban sprawl that requires the use of cars just to buy groceries or take the kids to school. The result is a country that takes fewer steps per day than the rest of the world. As Asians start buying more cars, relying more on vehicular transportation, and moving further away from labor-intensive work, I suspect you’ll see more carbohydrate intolerance, fat gain, and general ill health begin to emerge. It’s already happening, as you’ll see.

I think daily activity levels are probably the biggest determinant in tolerance to carbs. In American cities where walking is required or more convenient than driving, like New York, people are generally healthier, slimmer, and longer-lived. Things are changing, though. In 1989, 65% of Chinese performed heavy labor on a daily basis. By 2000, that proportion had dropped to 50% – still far more than in Western nations, but the downward trend is clear. You’ll notice on that same page that the proportion of overweight children also increased by the year 2000.

An Otherwise Unprocessed, Nutritious Diet

Traditional Asian food is highly nutritious. Go to a Vietnamese noodle house and the signature dish is pho, a big bowl of homemade beef marrow bone broth, tripe, tendons, brisket, and rice noodles. Go to a real Thai restaurant and get bone broth soup with cubes of pork blood, greens, rice noodles, and a duck egg. Go to a Chinese restaurant and get sauteed (alas, in soybean or corn oil these days) pork kidneys with Chinese broccoli and rice on the side. Go to a Japanese restaurant and get wild caught salmon eggs rolled with seaweed and rice, mackerel sashimi, and some fermented miso soup with kelp strips. Go to Korean barbecue and eat a dozen different kinds of kimchi, grilled short ribs, beef tongue, and liver all wrapped in lettuce, with rice on the side. In all these foods, rice is present, but so are real bone broth, fresh meat, fermented cabbage, offal, and vegetables. The presence of rice does not invalidate or negate the presence of every other nutrient.

Of course, that’s restaurant food. If you want to get an idea of how Asian folks cook at home, go to their supermarkets and note what people are buying. It’s not as fancy or flavorful, but it’s just as nutritious. Stand by the register and you’ll see twenty kinds of whole fish; live oysters, mussels, clams, crabs, snails, and sea urchins; a http://www.marksdailyapple.com/tails-tendons-and-tripe-a-guide-to-discovering...">pig’s entire digestive tract; buckets of chicken feet; bags full of strange leafy green things and exotic vegetables like bitter melon; all sorts of herbs, roots, and teas; fermented, pickled foods; a dozen different kinds of http://www.marksdailyapple.com/difference-yams-sweet-potatoes/#ixzz1l5OaJqzD">root vegetable; and yes, rice. If you want to isolate the rice from that list of nutrient-dense offerings and say “What about that?” be my guest, but not me. I’ll be admiring the handsome beef foot oozing collagen and marrow and imagining all the wonderful dishes it could make (while I mentally compare the contents of shopping carts in Asian markets to the contents of shopping carts in standard American grocery stores… guess who wins).

Before recently, Asians ate less refined sugar and used animal fats for cooking. Sugar intake is rising now, of course, and cooking oils made from corn and soybean have largely replaced lard and tallow, but rice in the context of a low-sugar, no-HFCS (remember, the oft-cited 55/45 fructose/glucose breakdown for HFCS is highly misleading and actually quite often incorrect), low-vegetable oil, nose-to-tail nutrient-dense diet is (or was) acceptable. You can’t reduce a food down to its constituent parts and focus on, say, the bit of fructose in a blueberry and then condemn the entire berry because of it. Similarly, you can’t reduce a diet down to a single constituent food and condemn – or praise – it based on that single food. You have to look at the entire picture, and the Asian diet is largely a nutritious one.

More Rice, Less Wheat

Thanks to regular monsoons, 90% of the world’s rice production is located in Asia. It’s been cultivated in the region for close to 10,000 years, so the region’s occupants tend to eat a fair amount of the stuff.

Luckily for them, rice, especially white rice (the favored type across most of Asia; as a Thai friend of mine who grew up there and came to Hollywood in the 60s told me, “rice bran was for the chickens”), is a mostly non-toxic source of glucose. On the grain spectrum, where wheat and other gluten grains reside at one end, rice relaxes at the opposite end. It’s not “good,” but it’s also not “bad.” It just is. It’s pretty much neutral. Whether you can handle (or need) the glucose load is another thing, but you can rest assured that white rice will be generally free of gut irritants, phytic acid, and deleterious lectins. If you’re eating wheat, on the other hand, you have gluten, wheat germ agglutinin, and a host of other antinutrients with which to contend. And, as Ned Kock’s masterful (and under-appreciated) series of stats posts on the China study data suggests, rice intake is associated with a reduction in cardiovascular disease while wheat flour intake is associated with an increase in cardiovascular disease. The upper level of rice intake did correlate with a slight increase in CHD, however, but not a major one.

All else being equal, people will be healthier on a rice-heavy junk food diet than on a wheat-heavy junk food diet.

Is Asia Even All That Healthier Anymore?

Healthy, long-lived Asia isn’t so healthy and long-lived. Both China and India are facing diabetes epidemics. In Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, and Thailand, diabetes is also increasing. The perfect storm – of sedentary living, processed junk food full of carbs and bad fats, and poor sleep – that has ravaged America and other industrialized nations for almost a century and led to a host of debilitating illnesses is beginning to descend upon Asia. Cooking oils have displaced traditional animal fats and sugar intake is rising. People walk less and eat more wheat.

Even the low BMIs of Asian countries are misleading. At equal BMIs, Asians generally have more body fat than other groups (PDF). So, on average, the American or the Pacific Islander with a BMI of 25 has less body fat than the Chinese guy with a BMI of 25. It’s not clear whether these higher body fat levels (at lower BMIs) correspond to increased risks for certain diseases, but it does suggest that BMI is an unreliable barometer for a country’s leanness on a particular diet. You can be skinny-fat with a low BMI – and it appears that significant numbers of Asians with low BMIs fit that profile.

So, like every other one before it, the Asian Paradox topples: there is actually no paradox. Asian countries remain lean (if they’re actually lean, that is) on a rice-heavy diet by virtue of lots of low-level aerobic activity to promote insulin sensitivity, lots of nutrient-dense food to go with that rice, and because rice is the least offensive grain.

Any questions? Fire away!

Eddington's parable and how tools determine what we perceive as truth

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:48:00 +0000

Here is Eddington's parable,

<--

Marie Curie, Geiger counters and mass hysteria: more in common than meets the eye

Healthcare, etc. 2/02/12 7:05 AM noreply@blogger.com (Marya Zilberberg) methods methodology Eddington's parable philosophy science hysteria scientific tools

What do Marie Curie, a Geiger counter and mass hysteria have in common? Well, to answer this question we need to go Sir Arthur Eddington, who was a British astrophysicist and philosopher of science at the turn of the 20th century. He came up with what is frequently referred to as the Eddington parable, which has nothing to do with the stars specifically and everything to do with how we make scientific progress. Here it is for your reading enjoyment, as told in this editorial (available by subscriptionby Diamond and Kaul, two highly respected clinician-researchers:

Let us supposethat an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into thewater and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he[concludes that no] sea-creature is less than two inches long. An onlooker may object thatthe generalization is wrong. "There are plenty of sea-creatures under twoinches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them." The ichthyologistdismisses this objectioncontemptuously: "Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of ichthyological knowledge, and is not part of thekingdom of fishes which has been defined as the theme of ichthyological knowledge. In short, what my net can't catch isn'tfish”.

Suppose that a more tactfulonlooker makes a rather different suggestion: "I realize that you are right inrefusing our friend's hypothesis of uncatchable fish, which cannot beverified by any tests you and I would consider valid. By keeping to your own method of study, you have reached ageneralization of the highest importance—to fishmongers, who would not beinterested in generalizations about uncatchable fish. Since thesegeneralizations are so important, I would like to help you. You arrived atyour generalization in the traditional way by examining the fish. May I point out that you could havearrived more easily at the same generalization by examining the net and the method ofusing it?"

So,you see my point? Tools determine knowledge. Period.

--->

In part yes, but I thought we know now better. There is this eternal conflict of sampling and generalizability and l'd leave at that.

"Squid is a shirt that keeps an exercise journal so you don't have to -- Engadget"

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:26:00 +0000

We are increasingly seeing emergence of personal measurements or quantifying of selves, and this is a great thing. I did not know of this before.

Read on:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/02/squid-is-a-shirt-that-keeps-an-exercise-journal/

Scott Adams on finding "energy" and "The Right Priority", superb stuff for productivity

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:19:00 +0000

Got to say that in a nutshell, this is the most important message or motivation or hack or however you may want to look at it for leading a life. I think his philosophy of focusing on what gives him most energy is a very sensible and a very interesting approach to life. Read the whole thing. Excellent stuff, thanks Scott.

The Right Priority

Dilbert.com Blog 1/02/12 8:00 PM

If you had to pick one priority in your life, could you do it? That's an important question because focusing on the wrong priority would get you a bad result, and having multiple priorities isn't practical. For example, if health is your top priority, you might make choices that are good for your health and bad for your career, such as saying no to having a few drinks after work with your boss.

We humans want lots of things: good health, financial freedom, success in whatever matters to us, a great social life, love, sex, recreation, travel, family, career and more. The problem is that the time you spend maximizing one of those dimensions usually comes at the expense of time you could have spent on another. So how do you organize your time to get the best result?

The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main goal: energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.

Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep, and all of the obvious steps. But it also means having something in my life that makes me excited to wake up. When I get my personal energy right, the quality of my work is better, and I can complete it faster. That keeps my career on track. And when all of that is working, and I feel relaxed and energetic, my personal life is better too.

At this point in my post, I must invoke the Dog Whisperer analogy. The Dog Whisperer is a TV show in which dog expert Cesar Millan helps people get their seemingly insane dogs under control. Cesar's main trick involves training the humans to control their own emotional states because dogs can pick up crazy vibes from the owners. When the owners learn to control themselves, the dogs calm down too. I think this same method applies to humans interacting with other humans. You've seen for yourself that when a sad person enters a room, the mood in the room drops. And when you talk to a cheerful person who is full of energy, you automatically feel a boost. I'm suggesting that by becoming a person with good energy, you lift the people around you. That positive change will improve your social life, you love life, your family life, and your career.

When I talk about high energy, I don't mean the frenetic, caffeine-fueled, bounce-off-the-walls type. I'm talking about a calm, focused energy. To others, it will simply appear that you are in a good mood. And you will be.

Before I was a cartoonist, I worked in a number of energy-sucking corporate jobs, in energy-sucking cubicles. But I enjoyed going to work, partly because I exercised most evenings, and usually woke up feeling good, and partly because I always had one or two side projects going on that had the potential to set me free. Cartooning was just one of a dozen entrepreneurial ideas I tried out during my corporate days. For several years, the prospect of becoming a professional cartoonist, and leaving my cubicle behind, gave me an enormous amount of energy.

The main reason I blog is because it energizes me. I could rationalize my blogging by telling you it increases traffic on Dilbert.com by 10%, or that it keeps my mind sharp, or that I think the world is a better place when there are more ideas in it. But the main truth is that blogging charges me up. It gets me going. I don't need another reason.

As soon as I publish this post, I'll feel a boost of energy from the minor accomplishment of having written something that other people will read. Then I'll get a second cup of coffee and think happy thoughts about my tennis match that is scheduled for after lunch. With my energy cranked up to maximum, I'll wade into my main job of cartooning for the next four hours. And it will seem easy.

Manage your energy first.

Jonathan Franzen Is Wrong: Ebooks Are Good for Everyone

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:00:00 +0000

I love books, especially old ones. Recently I learned a simple dinner table trick from a 110-year-old magic book. It involves picking up a napkin with both hands and, without releasing either corner, tying the napkin into a knot. Good fun and likely unavailable anywhere but in this very old tome. That fact, though, does not make me love ebooks any less or think that they somehow are a better long-term solution for the reading public. Celebrated author Jonathan Franzen thinks otherwise.

Author of The Corrections and Freedom, Franzen is revered for his prose, attention to detail and ear for the inner lives of sometimes desperate (and or depressed) people. I think his writing is excellent, but he is way off base on ebooks.

In a speech given during Britain’s Hay Festival in Cartagena, Columbia, Franzen said he prefers paper technology. “I can spill water on it and it would still work!” said Franzen, according to a report in The Telegraph. Franzen was also fixated on the idea that ebooks can or will change over time. Print is permanent and Franzen apparently prizes that permanence. For the record, Franzen’s books are available as ebooks.

I have no idea why Franzen assumes that publishers and authors are changing their books for the e-editions. With the exception of no longer knowing exact page numbers, I don’t see anyone changing their books for the Amazon Kindle, Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble Nook, or the Apple iPad and iBooks. An ebook reader is just a new delivery mechanism for literature.

To make matters worse, Franzen throws “capitalists” into the mix. They hate print books, he said, because these physical books will continue to work 10 years from now. “It’s a bad business model,” noted Franzen. I think capitalists like any kind of book they can sell you in mass quantities. I don’t think they love ebooks more because they won’t last as long (or at least the platforms they’re on won’t). My guess is that capitalists appreciate the speed with which you can get an ebook to market and the enhanced opportunities for broad distribution. Think about it: Millions of Steve Jobs bio books (one of ebook’s top three sellers in 2011) were delivered to readers, and I bet a vast portion of them did not ride on trucks. They sped through the air from, say, Amazon’s servers to millions of Kindles around the world.

If Franzen is interested in permanence, shouldn’t he cheer the fact that people are now reading books, but not hacking down the world’s trees to make them or sending carbon-monoxide-producing global warming-promoting 18-wheelers around the county to deliver thousands and thousands of physical books (though, to be fair, this is still happening, too)?

No, Franzen is fixated on the idea of physical books. I partially agree with him: Printed books are a powerful, romantic idea. As noted, I love them and have a rather large collection of both large format books and many from the late 1800s and early 1900s. It’s not unusual for me to pull one of the shelf and start thumbing through it, just to look at the old engravings or marvel at the notes scribbled near the binding by, perhaps, the first owner. That romantic ideal, however, doesn’t make me want to read stop reading ebooks on my Kindle, iPad or iPhone.

Oddly, my own 13-year-old daughter is a little like Franzen. She has never read an ebook. I blame J.K. Rowling. Until recently, the author refused to offer the Harry Potter series as ebooks. So my daughter’s only choice has been to lug around each increasingly larger volume in the series. She’s on the final tome now and it is a monster. Yet, she insists she never wants to own a Kindle. She says she simply loves books too much and cannot imagine a time when they’re gone.

I hate to tell her this, but ebooks are the future. They’re cheaper to produce, easier to distribute and, dare I say it, probably promote reading better than your local library. And while Franzen is concerned about ebook versions differing from their real-world counterparts, I’m cheering the emergence of new kinds of ebooks that take the IRL reading experiences to places we scarcely imagined on the printed page. One need only look to interactive children’s books and etextbooks for evidence.

What Franzen fails to realize is that while books are beautiful, permanent things they’re also inconvenient. Years ago you traveled with, maybe, one book and some magazines. You wouldn’t consider taking two big books (maybe two thinner paperbacks). But even if you weren’t traveling, when you finished one book, you needed to head to the library or bookstore to buy another. When I finish an ebook, I simply connect to Kindle’s Whispernet and buy and download a new one. Like most people I know, I read more now with my Kindle than I ever did before.

My reaction to Franzen’s comment was immediate and negative. Not surprisingly, when I posted news of Franzen’s comments on Google+, the tech-savvy audience echoed much of my own sentiments. They derided Franzen for appointing himself “guardian of society” and noted how Franzen’s concerns are not unlike those who feared what the rise of the Guttenberg press would do to publishing.

I will not lie and say that I won’t miss print when it’s gone, but, as Franzen himself predicts, it will be a memory in 50 years. Franzen’s glad he won’t be here to see it. I, on the other hand, hope to live well past my 97th year and to thoroughly enjoy ebooks from now to then and beyond. Maybe Franzen will change his mind and join me.

Do you decry the rise of ebooks and inevitable fall of print? Share your worries (or lack thereof) in the comments.

Bonus: Up Close with the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet

Barnes & Noble's Nook Demo

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Here's one more argument in favour of ebooks and ranting against paper books. I am divided, there are both sides to the argument. As much as I enjoy ebooks, I think paper based books are not going away any sooner and actually book making and sharing is still important. Having said that, I think he is right on the spot where he writes ebook reader is just a new delivery mechanism for literature.

How to Watch Obama's Google+ Hangout

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:59:00 +0000

Google hangouts are great. Here's one more reason to check into your google plus account today and do a hangout session. I think. Here are the instructions for those of you who might use it.

http://mashable.com/2012/01/30/obama-google-hangout/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

Will ValoBox (Web-powered Books) be the next iTunes for books and text contents?

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:45:00 +0000

From their website, "

The content community is you, me and everyone else who produces, reads and shares great content.

ValoBox rewards those who share content with a massive 25% of any sales made to spend on more books.

For every page bought, a 60% royalty is sent directly to the content owner.

We believe that reading should be simple, fun and support good causes. That is why ValoBox sends 15% of its profits to our selected charities from the word go.

So if you like what you read, click share and watch your tweets and blog embeds do some good. You’ll be helping everyone who makes great content as well as being able to buy some great new books!"

http://www.ValoBox.com/

I think the idea is great, and reminds me of how itunes impacted the way people used to listen to music. The premise was that, most people would prefer only one item in a CD or a cassette and then would have the ability to mix and match to their preference. Itunes was geared towards that and this indeed was quite a revolutionary idea how mp3s and other formats were packaged to suit personal choices.

Is it the same story with books and journals? I think to some extent that might indeed be the story. For instance, I know that for journals, many of us are interested in one article or a specific section and then would like to grow our own collection (for instance, citeulike (http://www.citeulike.com) or Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com) are great tools and webapps that let you do exactly that. It'd be great to see how valobox emerges and lets us play with this concept. Money adds a new twist here, I think.

Research is the fourth "R", after reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic and we need to learn well, here's an argument

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:28:00 +0000

Dan Russell writes,

The fourth R--Research, and the skills we all need

SearchReSearch 28/01/12 4:08 AM noreply@blogger.com (Daniel M. Russell)

We all know about the three R’s of education—reading, writingand ‘rithmetic. The three basic skillsthat school have to teach… and which obviously doesn’t include spelling.

I want to propose that there’s a 4^th R we shouldbe considering: RESEARCH.

If you think about it, learning has changed from aschool-only activity to a life-long activity. And just as advantage accrues to the person who can learn the best andknow the most, so also does the ability to research to the best of yourability.

As SamuelJohnson said: "Knowledge is of two kinds, we know a subjectourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."

While that’strue, but this common version of his quote usually leaves off the rest of thatparagraph: “...When we enquire into anysubject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated ofit. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries.” (Boswell's Life of Johnson, 1791)

Inother words, even if you know how to research something, you still need to knowa little bit about the skill of how to search. In Johnson’s day that meant knowing that cataloguesexisted, that libraries were collections of books on topic of interest, andthat the back of a book contains an index. It also meant that you knew how toget into a library, many of which were still private and by subscription (read,“invitation”) only.

People fluent in search and retrieval not only savetime, but are far more likely to findhigher quality, more credible, more useful content. More importantly, they can ask questions thatwere impossible just a few years ago. People with these skills are effectively smarter.

Using Google to do search is easy. It's been designed that way. You type something like [New York Times] intoa search box and a moment later you're reading the paper. If you search for [pizza Mountain View], you get a list of local pizza places withphone numbers and user reviews.

Most of the searches that Google sees in a typical day fallinto this simple category where user goal is clear and the results are pretty obviousand unambiguous.

But a significant number of searches are not. Searchers might have a goal in mind but theycan’t figure out how to express it in a way that will give them what they want. Sometimes their search is precise, but theydon’t know how to read and interpret the results. Sometimes I’ll see searchers spending 30minutes searching for something that should take less than 2 minutes. It drivesme crazy as a researcher because I know that the searcher is missing just one small,but critical piece of information. Wetry to build as much as we can into the search algorithm, but people still needto know a bit about how the web is organized (there’s no index in the back ofthe book) and how search engines crawl, index and respond to their queries.

In a sense, that’s my mission—to help people become betterresearchers, beyond just the basic skill of knowing how to make Googledance. My goal is to help people understandthe larger issues at play here—how to be a literate person now, and now to becontinually learning how to be literate as changes happen in the future. This is the idea of meta-literacy—knowing how to be literate about your ownliteracy. More about this in future posts.

BOTTOMLINE: Research is a skill that we all take for granted, yet it’s acritical skill for our future. As thenature of work and education changes (and that, really, is the only constant wehave), we… as a teaching culture… need to bring our students up to speed onwhat it takes to be good searchers.

We need to give them the skills of the 4^th R—research—and all of the skills andknowledge they need to function effectively as learned searchers.

What’s more, we’re trying to equip them with skills they canuse not just now, but for every information search problem they confront nowand in the future.

Search on!

----

I agree. I think more so, because we are increasingly living in an age where it's important to identify where to locate a piece of information and then instruct a machine to go fetch it for us. This is true for locating a restaurant as much as it is important for identifying that essential journal article which will advance our knowledge. A good search-ability enables us with time to think of greater and more important things. That then become search worthy. The iterative process continues.

How technology hurts us — and how it can make us happier

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:59:00 +0000

Very interesting take on our lives as we live in technology and all the distraction of a life lived on the Internet, the likes and LOLs, and paying attention to stuff. He talks about Information Diet in the post which I agree as a wonderful resource for learning how to be digital distraction freedom. A truly reflective post worth reading over again.Sort of a digital Walden Pond manifesto, if one could be.

http://www.theverge.com/web/2012/1/26/2736373/brian-lam-technology-distractio...

What is Nodding Syndrome and how do you investigate if you come across a case series?

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:32:00 +0000

In this installment of the CDC MMWR, epidemiologists from CDC describe a great investigation of a cluster of disease known as Nodding Syndrome they received reports of, from South Sudan. The story of their tracking it (using case series and case control studies to get to the heart of it) is very instructive. Nodding syndrome is repetitive nodding of head along with signs of seizure prevalent in parts of Africa. It appears that infection with Oncerca volvulus may play a role in it, but the story of their investigation into the cause of the disease makes for interesting reading.

Nodding Syndrome — South Sudan, 2011

CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 28/01/12 10:16 AM

(No description.)

Why AI will eventually drive healthcare, but not anytime soon, or the clinician as a "Go" player

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:26:00 +0000

I was reading today Fred Trotter's argument about algorithms and his critcism about a recent piece of article by Vinod Khosla where Khosla argued that in future doctors would be like AI algorithms that run through diagnostic possibilities and use of cell phones to arrive at diagnoses driven by algorithms. Here is a very well argued piece by Trotter where he compares clinicians with Go players and discusses how difficult and premature it is to consider that algorithm driven solutions alone can lead the way to future.

I'm interested in your views.

AI will eventually drive healthcare, but not anytime soon

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. 26/01/12 3:00 AM Fred Trotter Data Programming algorithm doctors healthit healthcare medicine patients

TechCrunch recently published a guest post from Vinod Khosla with the headline "Do We Need Doctors or Algorithms?". Khosla is an investor and engineer, but he is a little outside his depth on some of his conclusions about health IT.

Let me concede and endorse his main point that doctors will become bionic clinicians by teaming with smart algorithms. He is also right that eventually the best doctors will be artificial intelligence (AI) systems — software minds rather than human minds.

That said, I disagree with Khosla on almost all of the details. Khosla has accidentally embraced a perspective that too many engineers and software guys bring to health IT.

Bear with me — I am the guy trying to write the "House M.D." AI algorithms that Khosla wants. It's harder than he thinks because of two main problems that he's not considering: The search space problem and the good data problem.

The search space problem

Any person even reasonably informed about AI knows about Go, an ancient game with simple rules. Those simple rules hide the fact that Go is a very complex game indeed. For a computer, it is much harder to play than chess.

Almost since the dawn of computing, chess was regarded as something that required intelligence and was therefore a good test of AI. In 1997, the world chess champion was beaten by a computer. In the year after, a professional Go player beat the best Go software in the world with a 25 stone handicap. Artificial intelligence experts study Go carefully precisely because it is so hard for computers. The approach that computers take toward being smart — thinking of lots of options really fast — stops working when the number of options skyrockets, and the number of potentially right answers also becomes enormous. Most significantly, Go can always be made more computationally difficult by simply expanding the board.

Make no mistake, the diagnosis and treatment of human illness is like Go. It's not like chess. Khosla is making a classic AI mistake, presuming that because he can discern the rules easily, it means the game is simple. Chess has far more complex rules than Go, but it ends up being a simpler game for computers to play.

To be great at Go, software must learn to ignore possibilities, rather than searching through them. In short, it must develop "Go instincts." The same is true for any software that could claim to be a diagnostician.

How can you tell when software diagnosticians are having search problems? When they cannot tell the difference between all of the "right" answers to a particular problem. The average doctor does not need to be told "could it be Zebra Fever?" by a computer that cannot tell that it should have ignored any zebra-related possibilities because it is not physically located in Africa. (No zebras were harmed in the writing of this article, and I do not believe there is a real disease called Zebra Fever.)

The good data problem

The second problem is the good data problem, which is what I spend most of my time working on.

Almost every time I get over-excited about the Direct Project or other health data exchange progress, my co-author David Uhlman brings me back to earth:

What good is it to have your lab results transferred from hospital A to hospital B using secure SMTP and XML? They are going to re-do the labs anyway because they don't trust the other lab.

While I still have hope for health information exchange in the long term, David is right in the short term. Healthcare data is not remotely solid or trustworthy. A good majority of the time, it is total crap. The reason that doctors insist on having labs done locally is not because they don't trust the competitor's lab; it's more of a "devil that you know" effect. They do not trust their own labs either, but they have a better understanding of how and when their own labs screw up. That is not a good environment for medical AI to blossom.

The simple reality is that doctors have good reason to be dubious about the contents of an EHR record. For lots of reasons, not the least of which is that the codes they are potentially entering there are not diagnostically helpful or valid.

Non-healthcare geeks presume that the dictionaries and ontologies used to encode healthcare data are automatically valid. But in fact, the best assumption is that ontologies consistently lead to dangerous diagnostic practices, as they shepherd clinicians into choosing a label for a condition rather than a true diagnosis. Once a patient's chart has a given label, either for diagnosis or for treatment, it can be very difficult to reassess that patient effectively. There is even a name for this problem: clinical inertia. Clinical inertia is an issue with or without computer software involved, but it is very easy for an ontology of diseases and treatments to make clinical inertia worse. The fact is, medical ontologies must be constantly policed to ensure that they do not make things worse, rather then better.

It simply does not matter how good the AI algorithm is if your healthcare data is both incorrect and described with a faulty healthcare ontology. My personal experiences with health data on a wide scale? It's like having a conversation with a habitual liar who has a speech impediment.

So Khosla is not "wrong" per-se; he's just focused on solving the wrong parts of the problem. As a result, his estimations of when certain things will happen are pretty far off.

I believe that we will not have really good diagnostic software until after the singularity and until after we can ensure that healthcare data is reliable. I actually spend most of my time on the second problem, which is really a sociological problem rather then a technology problem.

Imagine if we had a "House AI" before we were able to feed it reliable data? Ironically it would be very much like the character on TV: constantly annoyed that everyone around him keeps screwing up and getting in his way.

Anyone who has seen the show knows that the House character is constantly trying to convince the other characters that the patients are lying. The reality is that the best diagnosticians typically assume that the chart is lying before they assume that the patient is lying. With notable exceptions, the typical patient is highly motivated to get a good diagnosis and is, therefore, honest. The chart, on the other hand, be it paper or digital, has no motivation whatsoever, and it will happily mix in false lab reports and record inane diagnoses from previous visits.

The average doctor doubts the patient chart but trusts the patient story. For the foreseeable future, that is going to work much better than an algorithmically focused approach.

Eventually, Khosla's version of the future (which is typical of forward-thinking geeks in health IT) will certainly happen, but I think it is still 30 years away. The technology will be ready far earlier. Our screwed up incentive systems and backward corporate politics will be holding us back. I hardly have to make this argument, however, since Hugo Campos recently made it so well.

Eventually, people will get better care from AI. For now, we should keep the algorithms focused on the data that we know is good and keep the doctors focused on the patients. We should be worried about making patient data accurate and reliable.

I promise you we will have the AI problem finished long before we have healthcare data that is reliable enough to train it.

Until that happens, imagine how Watson would have performed on "Jeopardy" if it had been trained on "Lord of the Rings" and "The Cat in the Hat" instead of encyclopedias. Until we have healthcare data that is more reliable than "The Cat in the Hat," I will keep my doctor, and you can keep your algorithms, thank you very much.

Meaningful Use and Beyond: A Guide for IT Staff in Health Care — Meaningful Use underlies a major federal incentives program for medical offices and hospitals that pays doctors and clinicians to move to electronic health records (EHR). This book is a rosetta stone for the IT implementer who wants to help organizations harness EHR systems.

Related:

Obama to Take Live Questions on Google+ Hangout Next Week

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 04:55:00 +0000

Now, that's something!

Obama to Take Live Questions on Google+ Hangout Next Week

AllThingsD 24/01/12 5:07 AM Liz Gannes News Social Barack Obama Google Google Hangout YouTube

U.S. President Barack Obama will participate in an interview with YouTube users on Jan. 30, as he has done before. What’s different is that some of those questions will be asked live, via a Google+ Hangout. Would-be interviewers (who might be live, but will surely be tightly scripted) can submit questions via YouTube.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The Summers' Tale

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:42:00 +0000

In his blog (http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/the_summers_tal.php), Nicholar Carr writes,

" But this idea that knowledge can be separated from facts - that we can know without knowing - really needs to be challenged before it gains any further currency. It's wonderful beyond words that we humans can look things up, whether in books or from the web, but that doesn't mean that the contents of our memory doesn't matter. Understanding comes from context, and context comes from knowing stuff. Facts become most meaningful when, thanks to the miracle of memory, we weave them together in our minds into something much greater: personal knowledge and, if we're lucky, wisdom."

Greatly liked this observation and wanted to share. Availability of ready access to facts and figures brings us to the verge of generating new knowledge and wisdom, .... only if we have the vision to grow.

I think genomics-based EHR is a realistic expectation for future EMR designs but also needs to include enviromics at some point

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:14:00 +0000

Bruce Friemdan writes in Lab Soft News,"

Genomics-Based EHR: Is This a Realistic Expectation?

Although I generally agree with what John Lynn posts on his blog over at EMR and EHR, one of his recent posts caused me to wince a little bit (see: Genomics Based EHR). He raises the issue of the "smart EMR" with genomic data as one its "core elements". Here's his note:

Genomics is one of the core elements that I think a “Smart EMR” will be required to have in the future. I really feel that the future of patient care will require some sort of interaction with genomic data and that will only be able to be done with a computer and likely an EHR....As I think about genomics interacting with EHR data and the benefits that could provide healthcare going forward, I realize that at some point doctors won’t have any choice but to adopt an EHR software. It will eventually be like a doctor saying they don’t want to use a blood pressure cuff since they don’t like technology.

First, some history. I was part of a panel discussion with one of the pioneers of the HIS (hospital information system), a precursor to the EMR/EHR, more than two decades ago. He predicted that the LIS would soon disappear, along with other "ancillary systems," and be replaced by a single, monolithic hospital-based information system. LISs have certainly not gone away during these years away and have now been joined by RISs, PACSs, CVISs, and other specialized clinical information systems. In fact, they have persisted and evolved because their functionality was required by physicians. There is no question that the EMR/EHR will get smarter as rules-based logic becomes a more important part of its repertoire. However, I believe that its role vis-a-vis genomic data will be mainly as a reporting engine.

Along these same lines, I also have significant doubts that the LIS will be the primary storage and analytic engine for genomic data. If not the LIS, then what will replace it within the hospital IT environment. In a previous post, I suggested that the -omics cloud will be required to provide the analysis, storage, and reporting of genomic data (see: The -Omics Cloud: A Healthcare IT Solution Already Developed for Genomics Research). I copy from that note the conclusions I reached in this earlier communication which I continue to think are valid:

We are at an evolutionary dead-end with our current EMR technology. Hospitals will happily pay tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars to use old technology designed to mimic the traditional paper medical record.
All of these EMRs are transaction-based with little "intelligence" and even less ability to integrate and analyze the deluge of patient data generated by the EMRs and their "feeder" systems such as the LIS.
LISs are highly functional -- pathology and the clinical labs would be unable to function for a day without them. Nevertheless, LISs vendors are not keeping up with the development of modules that can support the exploding -omics science.
It is highly unlikely that many of the incumbent EMR and LIS vendors will be able to jump to a new generation of analytic healthcare information systems. They are too tied to their current technology, current business models, and their need to recover their sunk development costs.
In my opinion, most of the progress in cutting-edge healthcare computing will be generated in academic research labs, [and] non-profit biomedical research institutes....

So where does all of this leave us? My view for the future of healthcare IT is that it will evolve into a network of highly specialized servers, some in the cloud, with hospital physicians interacting primarily with the EMR for reporting purposes. The field of genomics is moving so rapidly that an EMR vendor would be unable to keep abreast of the underlying science necessary to support workers in the field. So what will be the role and function of the "smart EMR." It will serve mainly to manage the deluge of data fed to it by the network of hospital computers, including the diagnostic systems, and present them in an orderly fashion to the physicians responsible for optimal patient care."

I agree. I also think in designing a robust, life-course based electronic medical record that takes into account the various aspects of a person's life, focusing on genomics alone leaving out the other "omics", the enviromics (where one studies the combined impact of the ecology and environmental, epigenetic or not impact on gene expressions) should also be incorporated in the future designs.

Why health care news readers need an “information diet”

noreply@blogger.com (Arin Basu) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Health News Review writes,

Do health care news readers need an “information diet”?

Health News Review 21/01/12 5:06 AM Gary Schwitzer General journalism issues Health care journalism

As we close out the week and prepare to head to a beach for a desperately-needed mid-winter break, here are some catch-up items we meant to write about earlier.

NPR interview with author of The Information Diet making the case for “conscious consumption of news and information.” We certainly make that case for health news and information – which often floods a thirsty public with a firehose of information when all they want and need is a sip of balanced, unbiased, complete information. Excerpt:

“The question is, can we make enough people go: ‘Hey, you know what? I’m done. I’m done with the sensationalism of media. I’m done being taken advantage of by media companies so that I can have ads sold to me.’ … If we want to make media better, then we’ve got to start consuming better media.”

... and this,

This is really getting old since we’re a month deep into 2012, but among the Nieman Journalism Lab’s predictions for journalism for 2012 was this one:
- “News will increasingly be a conversation rather than a series of stories. In 2012, the divide will grow between journalists who are intently aware of and responsive to the needs of their communities and those who continue to make decisions based on long-ago-learned fortress mentalities. I wish I could say I were optimistic about crumbling fortresses. Instead, I’ll say that I’ll be on the lookout for examples of news presented as an ongoing, topical conversation rather than a series of journalist-driven stories. In an election year, being responsive to users’ actual information needs and being a part of a community’s conversation is more crucial than ever.”

I recently read "information diet". It's an excellent book on information management at an age when we are literally being "bamboozled" with more information than we can possibly do with, and presents a series of very sensible strategies to work with. One of the most important points that the book raises is to go through to the origin of the source for any news or analysis you get to see and objectively analyze the claims or the thesis of any work you come across, online or not. I think it's a great message for a book such as this, and pertinent when it comes to health news consumption. It's important to be skeptic and question the claims of any health related article and have an open mind.