"medicine" entries

Four short links: 23 Apr 2009

Four short links: 23 Apr 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 23, 2009

Multitouch, visualizations, body hacks, and ubicomp:

  1. Dell Demos Multitouch on the Studio One 19 (Engadget) — the multitouch software on this baby is Fingertapps from the New Zealand company Unlimited Realities, whose founder was at Kiwi Foo Camp this year. Multitouch hits consumer PCs in a very mainstream way.
  2. Circos — open source Perl library to produce beautiful circular data displays. (via flowing data)
  3. Brain Gain: The Underground World of “Neuroenhancing” Drugs (New Yorker) — more on the body hacks theme of radical and literal self-improvement, as originally documented by Quinn Norton. What I found interesting was that when BoingBoing linked to it, they quoted the “Provigil might make us smarter” bit, and when MInd Hacks linked to it, they quoted the negative effects of amphetamine-based drugs.
  4. Towards the Web of Things: Web Mashups for Embedded Devices — slides and notes for a presentation given at MEM 2009. Basically saying that the Internet of Things should be built on JSON and REST, with demo. (via Freaklabs)

Four short links: 3 Mar 2009

Four short links: 3 Mar 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | March 3, 2009

The problems of Creative Commons around the world, ebook futures, open source biomed research, and a new open source conference:

  1. The Case For and Against Creative Commons — skip straight to page two, where the article talks about the places around the world where CC isn’t working. “More exactly, they fear that if you try to convert artists to CC who had never thought of copyrighting their works before, they may simply fall in love with the concept of making money through full copyright and stick to it.” (via Paul Reynolds on a mailing list)
  2. Are We Having The Wrong Conversation About eBook Pricing? — “The first TV shows were basically radio programs on the television — until someone realized that TV was a whole new medium. Ebooks should not just be print books delivered electronically. We need to take advantage of the medium and create something dynamic to enhance the experience. I want links and behind the scenes extras and narration and videos and conversation…”. Yes, but radio shows still persist even though they’re delivered through the Internet. Old formats don’t have to die in the face of new media, the question is what’s best for a particular purpose. I read books on my iPhone as I go to sleep at night … I don’t want hypermedia linked videos and a backchannel. I don’t want the future of ebooks to be 1990s Shockwave CD-ROM “interactives”. (via Andrew Savikas’ delicious feed)
  3. Sage — “a new, not-for-profit medical research organization established in 2009 to revolutionize how researchers approach the complexity of human biological information and the treatment of disease. Sage’s objectives are: to build and support an open access platform and databases for building innovative new dynamic disease models; to interconnect scientists as contributors to evolving, integrated networks of biological data.” Apparently they’ll be seeded with a pile of high-resolution very expensive data from Merck.
    (via BoingBoing)
  4. Open Source Bridge — open source conference in Portland, OR, started to fill the void when OSCON moved to San Jose. Very open source: they show you all the proposals, and you can even subscribe to a feed of the proposals as they come in. Many look good, though I’m pretty sure that 1993 called and wants its Tcl back. This conference might be just the excuse I need to visit Portland.
Four short links: 11.5 Feb 2009

Four short links: 11.5 Feb 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 11, 2009

This second Feb 11 post was brought to you by the intersection of timezones and technology. If there’s a third Feb 11 post, I’m changing my name to Bill Murray.

  1. Hacking the Earth — an environmental futurist looks at “geoengineering”, deliberately interfering with the Earth’s systems to terraform the planet. Radical solution to global warming, unwise hubris and immoral act of the highest folly, or all of the above? (via Matt Jones)
  2. Reinvention Draws Near for Newsweek — fascinating look at how Newsweek are refocusing their magazine. “If we don’t have something original to say, we won’t. The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.” gives me hope. Newsweek are hoping to target fewer but richer advertisers, essentially a business strategy of tapping existing customers for more. This feels like they’re ceding the contested parts of their business (commodity news stories) and doubling down on the bits that nobody else is fighting for yet (their columnists, pictures, whitespace). What else could they do? Possibly nothing (see Innovator’s Dilemma), but the alternative is figuring out something new that people want and giving them that. Easy to say, hard for anyone to do.
  3. Tinkerkit – a physical computing kit for designers. Arduino-compatible components for rapid prototyping. Sweet!
  4. Stanford University YouTube Channel — short interesting talks by Stanford researchers. Brains on chips, stem cells to fight deafness, and brain imagery are some of the first up there. The talks aren’t condescending or vague, they’re aimed at “a bright and curious audience”, as the Mind Hacks blog post about them put it.
Four short links: 7 Jan 2009

Four short links: 7 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 6, 2009

Draw closer around the flickering firescreen, and hear four tales of brains, words, medical improvement, and the sharp ache of the wisdom teeth of the future poking through the soft gum of the 21st century as diagnosed by Dr Sterling.

  1. Mind Bites – Flickr set of findings from neuroscience on top of beautiful photos. Mind candy meets eye candy.
  2. Dr Johnson’s Dictionary – the original dictionary of the English language, reborn as a word a day blog. Love the old citations, e.g.

    A’DAGE. n.s. [adagium, Lat.] A maxim handed down from antiquity; a proverb.
    Shallow, unimproved intellects, that are confident pretenders
    to certainty; as if, contrary to the adage, science had no friend
    but ignorance. Glanville’s Scepsis Scientifica, c.2.
    Fine fruits of learning! old ambitious fool,
    Dar’st apply that adage of the school;
    As if ’tis nothing worth that lies conceal’d;
    And science is not science ’til reveal’d? Dryd. Pers. Sat. i.

  3. Peter Provonost – prevented untold infections in hospital procedures by instituting a simple checklist. This is a long article, but worth reading as it shows how to institute change. He was diligent, scientific, and worked with the teams instead of against them. For more like this, read The Best Practice: How the New Quality Movement is Transforming MedicineThe Best Practice by Charles Kenney, a fascinating look at the quality movement in healthcare.
  4. Bruce Sterling’s State of the World 2009 – I’m just skipping through reading Bruce’s responses. Some fabulous zingers that make me look forward to his presence at Webstock in February: “The Americans
    don’t have a place to offshore their money. They can offshore their
    LABOR, that’s dead easy, but their money? If the American dollar goes,
    finance as an industry gets the blue screen of death.    . On urban reinvention: “Suppose you found some dead James Howard Kunstler strip-mall burg,
    bought it for a dollar, and turned it into “OpenSource-opolis” where
    every possible object and service was creatively commonized. Would
    that be heaven, hell — or what we’ve got now only different?”     On netbooks + cloud slowing the upgrade cycle: “I’ve been a computer “consumer” for decades now, in the sense that I
    follow the trade press and buy computers regularly, but I dunno: if a
    $300 netbook running freeware lets me get the job done, 2009 may be the
    year when I just plain vanish off the radar.”    . Oh forget it, as is always the way with Sterling every damn sentence is quotable—go read the whole thing yourself and enjoy.

Understanding Web Operations Culture (Part 1)

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | June 14, 2008

“You don’t choose the moment, the moment chooses you. You only choose how prepared you are when it does.” – Fire Chief Mike Burtch (Note: I became a Firefighter-1 and EMT in 2000. My experiences in the fire service profoundly influence my efforts in technology. Much of my work over the past few years has been translating and distilling my…