Dr Shock MD PhD

Yes Dr Shock is preparing for his yearly holiday, should he keep on blogging or just go "cold turkey"? Can he cope with his blog addiction? What do you think let me know in the comments.

As some of you will know I took part in Adbusters’ Mental Detox Week last week. This meant I stopped doing screen and computer based stuff as much as possible. I was at work so there were obviously times when I had to check email and things. But I did manage to cut it right down to a bare minimum. Outside of work it was a total no computer, no TV, no iPod existence for me. Which is quite a big thing in my ordinary daily life.

• E-mail can wait


• Phones are good


• Screens and Sleep

and so on, and so on......
Read all 10 at Crackunit.com

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The Gender Genie is about pasting a text in a box on The Gender Genie. Choose a genre and click submit for the results. It will predict whether the text is written by a man or a woman. I tried it, you can see the result in the picture above this post.

There is even a video on FoxNews about this software

The Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.

Although I think you really can't figure out whether a writer is male or female based on writing, I still believe that the linguists' algorithm has useful applications. I have received emails from several authors saying that they have used it to help make their female characters come across as being more female and vice versa. Now, Customer Experience Crossroads sees it as another tool for tailoring marketing to target market: "We don't all communicate in the same way. Worth considering when you think about customer experience."

For other gender testing tools read this article on Customer Experience

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Zittrain argues that today's Internet appliances such as the iPhone and Xbox hamper innovation. That's because these locked-down devices prohibit the kind of tinkering by end users that made PCs and the Internet such a force of economic, political and artistic change.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain is Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University.
Zittrain's research includes digital property, privacy, and speech, and the role played by private "middlepeople" in Internet architecture. He has a strong interest in creative, useful, and unobtrusive ways to deploy technology in the classroom.

He has written a new book: The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It. This book is due for release on April 14. He discusses the future of Internet and it's threats. Since I am a fan of open source software I will order it an probably tell you more about this topic in the recent future. There is some comfort in knowing that iphone's and xboxes get hacked easily and readily, besides most consumers just want a properly working device.

Zittrain doesn't predict that PCs will become extinct any time soon. But he worries that PCs are being locked down and prohibited from running open source code that has driven much of the Internet's new functionality.

Thanks PC World

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I particularly liked this one, go seee the other 9 on Wacky Archives: 10 Ways They Failed

Probably all photoshopped but who cares.

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In short:

• Find the right search engines such as medlineplus.gov and healthfinder.gov. Sites that end with .edu or .gov are usually more trustworthy. Watch out for commercial websites on health.


• Find smart bloggers with the same disease


• Invest in the tutorial of pubmed.gov


• Read the About me when visiting medical websites and be sure they are doctors.


• Visit sites from annual meetings, for instance from the American Psychiatric Association

For some more information visit CNN.com/health.

Thanks Lifehacker.com

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On lifehack.org a newbie guide for blogging. It has reasons for blogging, these appealed to me:

• Share your knowledge


• Learn to write better


• Express yourself


• Connect with others in your business or interest
  

It also deals with how to write posts and how to keep going. These appealed to me:

• Create a posting schedule


• Write posts in advance


• Link to other blogs

Needless to say that this is an excellent post on this topic, a short comprehensive introduction to blogging. It also has some practical advise, go read it and tell me what you think.

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Medblog English has updated his Medblog list. I am on number 32 due to the fact that he has divided the list in categories.

I have upgraded the MedBlogEN-list. Firstly I categorized the medblogs. I tried to find what the writers’ profession was. I made a distinction between physicians, pharma-people, nurses, patients, paramedics, journalists, managers, others and unknows. It is ofcourse possible that I made mistakes. So please let me know if I wrongly categorized a medblog. Secondly I removed non-relevant or closed sites from the list. The list is now pretty up-to-date. If you want to add your medblog to the list, please send an e-mail to jan @ medblog.nl. Don’t forget to mention your profession in the mail. And please include the url to your feed.

Go an have a look at MedblogEn

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People using flickr are not amused by the possible take over of yahoo by microsoft. They fear their favorite photo site will suffer from this merger.

They have formed a group on flickr: MICROSOFT: KEEP YOUR EVlL GRUBBY HANDS OFF OF OUR FLICKR. And they have uploaded photos to make their point, mostly not very friendly about Microsoft.

This is one of my favorites.

What is yours?

Related topic
Photos from Dr Shock on Flickr

Thanks techcrunch.com

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With a Medblog you search other blogs and the web for posts, news and other interesting stuff for your readers. There are different ways to store this information and use it later on. You need to process all this info. On Vandelay Website design there is a list of 10 tips to retain more of what you read online.

Here are some that appealed to me:
Read at times when you can focus

Be aware of visual cues

There are also some tips on the software you can use to help with the information overload. Read the comments for suggestions. I mostly use Google Notes for keeping notes and Del.icio.us for storing bookmarks, what do you use?

Thanks Lifehacker.com

Here are some more tips to cope with information overload: How to split an Atom

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• Evaluating Internet Resources from National Network of Libraries of Medicine


• How to Evaluate Health Information on the Internet from the FDA


• How To Evaluate Health Information on the Internet: Questions and Answers from the National Cancer Institute

I warned you

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I didn't make it to the group of finalists of the 2007 Medical Weblog Awards. Others did so cast your votes on Medgadget 2007 Medical Weblog Awards

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An excellent post by Dr.Mani Sivasubramanian from Money.Power.Wisdom. On Problogger.net
Here is just one of the 7 lessons

Death Shows How Insignificant Many Things Really Are

We obsess and worry about many things. We blow up many minor misunderstandings and shortcomings into earth-shaking disasters. We live our lives in a frenzy of self-created crises and emergencies.

Most, if not all, don’t matter as much when viewed in the cold light of hindsight. How many of these ‘terribly urgent’ things will matter some years from now?

Or how we can learn from death, not only the death of 2007 and not only applicable to bloggers.

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1. A man comes into the ER and yells, "My wife's going to have her baby in the cab!" I grabbed my stuff, rushed out to the cab, lifted the lady's dress, and began to take off her underwear. Suddenly I noticed that there were several cabs -and I was in the wrong one.
Submitted by Dr. Mark MacDonald

There are much more where this came from.
From Funny Moments for Doctors

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I mainly write about depression, electroconvulsive therapy, psychiatry, neuroscience, education and other medical topics. And in this order. Mostly I try to write articles, sometimes links to interesting news related to health and health care. Today I have some interesting links for you, a summary of recent news related to health care and health. Hope you like them. Happy reading.

1. Do you know what a hospitalist is? Well I didn't until I read these posts on Clinical Cases and Images: definition of hospitalists and blogs from hospitalists

2.Bush is sending government officials to The Netherlands to learn from their health insurance.

The Netherlands, which has shifted insurance from employers to individuals and subsidized insurance for the poor, is a particularly appealing model for many in the U.S.

On Wall Street Journal Health Blog.

3. Participants Left Uninformed in Some Halted Medical Trials from The New York Times

When Congress passed a bill last month requiring makers of drugs and medical devices to disclose the results of clinical trials for all approved products, advocates of greater study disclosure applauded the move.But a provision that would have mandated disclosures for another group of products never made it into the final version of the bill. It would have covered products tested on patients, but dropped before marketing.

This way patients and professionals can be kept unaware of outcome of trials with devices that will not reach the market.
Thanks Pharmalot.com

4. The Quit Smoking Counter.
This site counts the time since you quit smoking and the amount of money you saved by not smoking since then. It also clarifies the physical benefits of quiting.

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For about $25, students and employees can buy excuse notes that appear to come from doctors or hospitals. Other options include a fake jury summons or an authentic-looking funeral service program complete with comforting poems and a list of pallbearers.

If you are feeling like you need a day of work you can contact this company: The Excused Absence Network. Customers receive templates so they can print the notes after typing the name and address of a local doctor or emergency room. Those who choose jury duty as an excuse to miss work enter their county courthouse information on the form.
There are downsides as well:

If bosses find out the notes are not authentic, they might think the medical provider helped in the scam, said Dr. John Z. Sadler, a psychiatry and clinical sciences professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. Reputations could be unfairly damaged, and accreditation or license problems could arise, he said.

From CNN

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Read here to understand the difference between an article and a blog post.

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Blogging addiction is a serious condition. Dr Shock is 64% addicted to blogging which is very high according to his wife. Before looking for marital counseling fortunately Dr Shock found a blog with 23 health tips for bloggers. If you're not a blogger you may try them as well.

Two tips:

If you're in a healthy relationship, have sex at least once every 3 days. I'm dead serious about this. It can be critical to both mental and physical stability.

If you're addicted to IMing, porn, RSS reading, movie watching, shoe shopping, music searching or whatever else dominates your time.... TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOURSELF and YOUR TIME ... addictions of any kind are not healthy - a healthy person has full control over him or herself.

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64%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

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A list of medical blogs based on a algorithm with the number of comments, posts, feed readers, incoming links. You can see the widget about it in my sidebar.
Here is a discussion about rating medical blogs.

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