AMIA Summit on Translational Research

The AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) summit on Translational Research is March 15-17, 2009 in San Francisco. http://summit2009.amia.org/ Conducted in close partnership with the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), this meeting will be an indispensible gathering for translational bioinformatics research and development worldwide. The abstracts to papers and posters are available for viewing.

Use 2.0 to keep up!

Having trouble keeping up with those journals that are piling up? Don’t remember where those email reports are about your committee work? Well…..

You can set up your personal Google Reader which accepts RSS feeds to monitor your favorite journals, keep track of your own publications and get notified when someone cites you, and stay up to date with society/association announcements, and your favorite blogs.

Don’t know what I just said? You should contact a reference librarian reference@lsuhsc.edu immediately. She will assist you in using these 2.0 technologies. This technology will simplify your life. You can wow your kids at the same time! The drawback? Once you get the hang of 2.0 technologies it will be 3.0 technologies!

Shots 2008

Did you know? The CDC postponed publishing updates to the adult immunization schedule until January 2009, but the folks at Group on Immunization Education (GIE) of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine has updated their PDA-friendly immunization schedules. You can also find other resources such as clinical scenarios for teaching, online educational videos, and curricular materials.

http://www.immunizationed.org/

Nintendo makes you skinny. April Fools.. no, wait, really.

No, I’m not talking about the Wii. This summer Nintendo will introduce a new program for the DS system. My Weight Loss Coach comes with a pedometer, mini quizzes and challenges designed to motivate and reward users for maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Another reason you need a Wii

Turns out video games aren’t SO bad, at least if you’re planning to be a surgeon. A report from New Scientist magazine posits that surgeons perform better after warming up with Wii, — and that study’s authors are now planning to develop surgery training software for the video game platform.

Read more about it here

Scholarship Opportunity for PDA users

The second-annual Ali Abdulla Al-Ubaydli scholarships for mobile medical computing offer five $1000 Scholarships for Mobile Medical Computing. In addition to academic record, the application requires reading and critically evaluating a piece of the medical literature. Scholars are also be published in the Mobile Medical Computing Reviews journal.

More information

Beat the cheats with this handy chart

Of course we don’t have a problem with plagiarism here at LSUHSC, but it never hurts to be aware of the different software available to detect would-be cheaters. Josh Fischman of The Wired Campus, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s technology blog, reports on a handy chart PDF comparing several anti-plagiarism tools.