The link to each item’s podcast is at the highlighted topic and reached by double-clicking or ctrl-clicking it. Actual podcasts at 1.5x speed can be downloaded here for four months.
Banking with Dad 64 mins – Two economist parents talk about how to educate our children about money and finance. Stock market games teach bad lessons. A Quicken account for kids set up in the home that provides monthly interest is a better teaching tool than a savings account in a bank because kids can more easily study what they have and draw on it. Reading to your kids is an important form of investing for a parent. Go to the link, find the title, Owen on Parenting, Money, and the First National Bank of Dad, right click Owenparenting.mp3 and select “Save Link As…” to download the audio file.
Immunology and the Gut 68 mins – Commensal bacteria tune our immune system to control autoimmune diseases like crohnes, rheumatism, asthma, autism and MS. A major researcher on the topic and Dr Racaniello provide background and current efforts to understand the complexities. They mention that Pasteur said “Chance favors the prepared mind.” And that “Two months on the bench equals two hours in the library.” Also noted is that the two fields of microbiology and immunology are now merging.
Book Jacket Design 17 mins – Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is. Chip Kidd doesn’t judge books by their cover, he creates covers that embody the book — and he does it with a wicked sense of humor. In one of the funniest talks from TED2012, he shows the art and deep thought of his cover designs. Find and click on the “Download” button and select audio or video to download. The video shows his designs and is a better download.
Guided Mastery 12 mins – David Kelley’s company, IDEO, helped create many icons of the digital generation — but what matters even more to him is unlocking the creative potential of people and organizations to innovate routinely. He mentions and makes use of concepts developed by a Dr Bandura. Find and click on the “Download” button and select audio or video to download.
Medical Checklists 19 mins – Dr Atul Gawande asks “How do we heal medicine?” and proposes one measure, the use of checklists. (At the link click the “download” button and select audio or video.) Below the Download button are numerous comments that expand on Dr Gawande’s talk, such as: “Apr 23 2012: Skill #2 is already taken holds in orthopedics, physical therapy, and sports medicine. Checklists and algorithms (like the Ottawa Ankle Rules, LBP algorithms for stabilization, flexibility, or surgery, etc.) are designed from retrospective research to improve outcomes while reducing costs. If you take a look at the numbers from the original outcomes, especially for the Ottawa Ankle Rules, the reduction in costs become staggering. I’m really impressed by Mr. Gawande mentioning how effective these tools can be in medicine, and hope this can spark the development of more algorithms for improved patient care in conjunction of cost reduction.” and
<“Apr 23 2012: The speaker has a great guide here.” and,
“Apr 19 2012: As a practicing anesthetist I found this lecture interesting because over a year ago we implemented the check list into our hospital. I find the checklist most useful for myself in having a structured reminder for the dosing of the antibiotics because at beginning of the case is when the anesthetist is most busy inducing the anesthetic state and it is easy to miss whether or not an antibiotic is required. However, parts of the checklist are counterproductive simply by being multiple times redundant – the same question being asked 4 or 5 times to the patient throughout the process of admitting the patient into the operating room. It may seem like a small point but in a tightly run operating room if an extra 2 minutes is wasted for 15 cataract cases through the day, there is a potential 30 minutes a day lost, or one extra cataract case every day being wasted. That could amount to a hundred less cataract procedures over a year. I realize that the concept of a checklist has to be rigid enough so that it picks up omissions but if it is so broadly designed as to work in a modern western operating room as well as a third world one there will be wasted effort and inefficiencies. For example, the introduction of everyone in the operating room can be highly redundant when the people have been working together for many years, such as happens in a non-teaching hospital in a small city such as where I work, but much more reasonable in a teaching hospital in a large center where there is a constant flow of new faces.” and finally, “Apr 17 2012: The pilot study referred to by Gawande was preformed by Haynes, et al., 2009. A more careful consideration regarding the data provided by the earlier study finds that this decline in complications and mortality was not as great in hospitals in developed countries compared to hospitals in undeveloped countries (Ko, et al., 2012).Data collected by van Klei, et al., 2012, in a Dutch setting found that crude mortality ‘only’ decreased from 3.13% to 2.85% (P=0.19), while a study preformed by Sewell, et al., 2011, in the UK did not observe the same decline in complications and mortality as observed in Haynes, et al., 2009 (8.5% to 7.6% and 1.9% to 1.6% respectively).Barriers to effective checklist implementation stem not just from the above, as Fourcade, et al., 2012 identifies duplication with existing safety checks as the most commonly occuring barrier in implementing the checklist in 18 cancer centres in France.In a nutshell, based on current evidence, while the WHO surgical safety checklist is effective at decreasing complications and mortality, it is highly unlikely we will observe the same decrease in countries where protocol that perform a function similar to the checklist are already in place.
Works cited:
Ko, H. C., Turner, T. J., & Finnigan, M. A. (2011). Systematic review of safety checklists for use by medical care teams in acute hospital settings–limited evidence of effectiveness. BMC Health Serv Res, 11, 211.
Fourcade, A., Blache, J. L., Grenier, C., Bourgain, J. L., & Minvielle, E. (2012). Barriers to staff adoption of a surgical safety checklist. BMJ Qual Saf, 21(3), 191-197.
Haynes, A. B., Weiser, T. G.,.. Gawande, A. A. (2009). A Surgical Safety Checklist to Reduce Morbidity and Mortality in a Global Population. The New England Journal of Medicine, 360(5), 491-499.
Sewell, M., Adebibe, M.,… Levack, B. (2011). Use of the WHO surgical safety checklist in trauma and orthopaedic patients. Int Orthop, 35(6), 897-901.
Secrets Blog 11 mins – Frank Warren, the founder of PostSecret, shares some of the half-million secrets that strangers have mailed him on postcards. Frank Warren is the creator of the PostSecret Project, a blog full of secrets anonymously shared via postcard. He also describes another project in which photos from found cameras are posted on the web to help locate the camera owners. Find and click on the “Download” button and select audio or video to download. Images from the video version make the presentation more interesting.
Eye Disease Research 23 mins – Dr. Swaroop, Senior Investigator and Chief at the Neurobiology Neurodegeneration & Repair Laboratory, National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, discusses his research in retinal and macular diseases and the progress his lab has made in the field. Some sixty researchers do this through the application of gene based therapy, small molecule therapy and stem cell based therapy.
Cyberwar 36 mins – The first three segments of this six segment digest concern cyber countermeasure comparisons. One concept is to hunt adversaries instead of building defensive firewalls as is done by a company called Crowd Strike. The last three segments concern Steve Jobs, high speed rail in the U.S. and the Draw Something App. Go to the link, find “NPR: 05-16-2012 TechnologyWednesday,” right click “npr_152877865.mp3” and select “Save Link As…” to download.
College Prices 14 mins – “On today’s show, we visit beautiful Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.Price of one year at Lafayette: $55,688. Up 63 percent from the price a decade ago. At least, that’s the sticker price — the price you get if you add up tuition, room and board, and all the fees listed on the school’s website.But there’s a huge gap between the sticker price and what the average student actually pays after figuring in grants and scholarships.That’s true at private colleges around the country. Nationwide, the average sticker price is more than twice as high as the price students actually pay, and the gap is getting wider. It turns out, it makes economic sense to have a high sticker price and offer lots of discounts. On the show today, we explain why. Go to the link, find “#370: The Real Price Of College,” right click below it on “npr_152532589.mp3” and select “Save Link As…”
Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy 26 mins – The second part of this two-part program is an interview with Dr Gold who organizes an annual Boulder Gold Lab Symposium A major part of the interview concerns one or more talks at the past and forthcoming symposiums about MD. Don’t expect to find out more by going to the symposium site. A few presentations are available as videos, none deal with MD, none can be downloaded, no audio versions are available and an email about the problem to the website brought no response. Go to the topic link, right click on the “Download” button and select “Save Link As…” to download.
Sophistry and Rhetoric 4 mins – Plato started it, Aristotle refined it, and it needs to be rehabilitated. Learn more by going to the link, locate the title, “Engines of Our Ingenuity 1926: Rhetoric,” right click “KUHF_152649733.mp3” and select “Save Link As…”
HDL Cholesterol 9 mins – Seamus Harrison discusses new research which suggests no causal link between raised HDL cholesterol and reduced risk of coronary heart disease. LDL, however, is still an effective indicator of potential problems. Go to the link, find “Listen to The Lancet: 17 May,” right click “17may.mp3” and select “Save Link As…” to download.
E-publishing 54 mins – Author and tech consultant Shel Israel discusses the issues of publishing in an electronic format. He reviews how he went through the process of preparing his most recent book, Stellar Presentations, for the Amazon Kindle and other devices. He also discusses the various steps necessary to help make an electronic book successful — writing, editing, corrections, updates, blog-to-book-conversion and indexes.
Audubon vs Wilson 4 mins – Audubon left England after being charged with blackmail and Wilson produced better drawings. At the link locate “Engines of Our Ingenuity 1935: Wilson, Before Audubon,” right click “KUHF_152973065.mp3” and select “Save Link As…” to download.
Bug Photography 69 mins – Catherine Chalmers photographs insects and spiders and rodents doing mostly natural activities. The video at the topic link shows all of this, how and why she does the work, but some images may be unsettling. The video file can be downloaded here. The audio file is at the topic link; right click the “Audio” link and select “Save Link As…”
Randomness 51 mins – Five scientists discuss aspects of randomness that affect our daily lives and behavior. A major source of information is the book, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives. At the link find the title, “That’s So Random!,” right click “BiPiSci12-05-14.mp3” and select “Save Link As…” to download.
Font Design 20 mins – Steve Matteson, Creative Type Director at Monotype Imaging talks about the challenges in designing fonts for mobile devices. He mentions a site, Web Fonts for unique fonts to use on a web site and notes that Verdana is the best font for small screens due to its clarity.
Russian Energy 18 mins – The Yamal region sits in the north-west of Russia – a land of Siberian tundra and few people. But populations are rising, because here above the Arctic Circle there is potentially enough fuel to heat a quarter of the homes in Europe for the next 35 years. This week on One Planet, Lucy Ash heads into Siberia to explore Russia’s new energy frontier. We hear from the recently arrived workers who have been brought into the region to pump up the gas, and from the nomadic reindeer herders who have roamed these lands for centuries.” Go to the link, find the title,”OnePlanet: Russia’s New Energy Frontier,” right click on “oneplanet_20120518-1932a.mp3” and select “Save Link As…”
Fungi Uses 18 mins – Fungi are one of the most important and underrated groups of organisms on the planet. Without them the world would be uninhabitable and we use them every day for food, drugs and drink. In Rwanda they are a new weapon in the battle against hunger and malnutrition. In New York they are a new alternative to plastic packaging. Go to the link, find the title, “OnePlanet: The World’s Ultimate Super Food,” right click “oneplanet_20120511-1932a.mp3” and select “Save Link As…” to download.
Diabetic Neuropathy 8 mins – This is a numbness of the hands and feet, at first. The complications, causes and why it occurs are discussed. Go to the link, find the title “Listen to The Lancet Neurology: June 2012,” right click “laneur_june.mp3” and select “Save Link As…”.
iPad Use 70 mins – This weekly program hosted by Sarah Lane and Gina Trapani covers a number of software products of use on the iPad. All the products are identified in the show notes. Many are only for Apple products, but two interesting exceptions in this episode are Autodesk 123D free modeling software and the LastPassWallet. The Autodesk 123D can be used to convert photos to 3D images which can be produced on a 3D printer. Right click “Audio” at the left side of the linked page and select “Save Link As…” to download.
The 88 feeds used to prepare this weekly blog are gathered using Feedreader3 and are available as a opm file at Google Docs. A PDF of feeds is also available there. Free Commander is used to compare old and new downloads to remove duplicates. MP3SpeedChanger is used to change playback speed of multiple files as a batch. Speed listening background article here.
Thanks for stopping by.
Media Mining Digest 