Dental Information & Library Innovation: Technology Archives

July 16, 2007

PostGenomic Science Blog Aggregator

For those who enjoyed our podcast on science blogs, here is a newly discovered resource to help make it easier to follow the science blogosphere -- PostGenomic.

PostGenomic is an aggregator -- a source that compiles or aggregates information from a variety of sources. In this case, PostGenomic collects information from a variety of science blogs, and repackages in a way to make them more useful. It has several very nice features, including (my favorite) the option to track your favorite blog postings and see who is talking about them. It collects science blogs across domains, so is broad in scope, but I have yet to visit their main page without finding something of interest. A marvelous resource!

PostGenomic: http://www.postgenomic.com/

Staying Current with Science Blogs & Wikis: Slides ; Podcast (zipped)

Posted by pfa at 01:16 PM | Comments (2)

June 08, 2007

Share Your Favorite RSS Feeds in Teaching

Are you a fan of RSS Feeds? Have you found a number of favorites you are tracking? Ah, but now you want your students to review a select set as part of their regular class readings.

There is an easy way to share selected RSS feeds with others. Pageflakes is a service that allows you to collect functional tools (flakes) and RSS feeds into a single web page. Here is an example that collects example RSS feeds in medicine and dentistry.

Pageflakes: Med/Dent RSS Demo: http://www.pageflakes.com/pfa/11118181

Notice you'll see organizations, journal table of contents, blogs, image streams, videos, and more.

Here is a screeshot that shows this entire collection, to give a better sense of the range of information included.

Just imagine what you could do!

Posted by pfa at 07:05 AM | Comments (0)

December 06, 2006

Neanderthal's Molars, Future Genius, Scientific Fraud, & Diagnosis in Diversity: Article Highlights from Science Journals

Interesting articles selected from new issues of Nature and Science. NOTE: You must be a UM patron to have access to these. If you are a UM patron and have trouble accessing the articles linked below, try using on on-campus computer, or accessing the articles from the Electronic Journals page.

(1)
Scientific American: Oral and Whole Body Health:
http://www.dentalcare.com/soap/products/promotion_sa.htm

"It's a first step on the journey as we work together to uncover the most important and factual information there is regarding the important role good oral health can play in achieving whole body wellness."

(2)
How Neanderthal molar teeth grew
Roberto Macchiarelli et al.
Abstract: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7120/abs/nature05314.html

"Here we show that the timing of molar crown and root completion in Neanderthals matches those known for modern humans but that a more complex enamel–dentine junction morphology and a late peak in root extension rate sets them apart."

(3)
Futures: Awakening the genius within, Revolution in the head.
Daniel Gregory
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7120/full/444788a.html

"Teetering on the knife-edge, the humans struggled against the Inspiron and the talent that it could give them."

(4)
The right tools can save lives
Effective diagnosis, paired with treatment, for developing-world
diseases can have far-reaching impacts, says the Global Health
Diagnostics Forum.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7120/full/444681a.html

"The Forum has defined the need and impact of diagnostics for six devastating disease groups. Now we challenge scientists, technology developers, funding agencies, policy-makers, international governmental and aid organizations, investors and diagnostic companies to work together to take this forward. A coordinated approach is needed so that appropriate diagnostics can achieve the promised impact."

(5)
Donald Kennedy
Responding to Fraud
Science 1 December 2006
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/314/5804/1353

"The committee was asked to make a thorough and unsparing analysis of Science's handling of both papers and to make recommendations for changes in procedure that might protect both the journal and the scientific community from further unfortunate outcomes of this kind.

The report, and a short response from Science, are available at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/5804/1353/DC1."

Posted by pfa at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2006

Dentists Seeking Information via Google

Here is a very interesting study about dentists and how they use Google (and other information resources), right on the heels of the recent BMJ study of doctors using Google for diagnosing difficult cases.

Landry, Carol Fay. Work roles, tasks, and the information behavior of dentists. JASIST December 2006 57(14):1896-1908.
Link for UM patrons

"Developing an information framework is one technique dentists have applied to their seeking strategies. ... Google was favored by study participants as the means to develop this type of framework."

"Textbooks were the preferred source for the patient management/service provider task, professional associations were favored for CDE/student and patient education/educator tasks, vendors and sales representatives were first for the practice management/administrator task, and colleagues and journals were chosen for the research task."

"Although dentists continue to rely on traditional sources for their authority and accessibility, the Internet has emerged as an important adjunct in the information process because of its convenience and accessibility and the belief in the currency of found information. ... However, despite its ability to provide information quickly and conveniently, the Internet is not considered by dentists to be without flaws. Irrelevant, promotional, and questionable information flourish online. Recognizing these limitations allows one to consider the Internet a tool to augment rather than replace traditional information sources. Cross-referencing and framework building illustrate these findings. Still, the Internet is not embraced by all. An underlying current suggests that maintaining a personal connection with people remains important to a segment of this population and should not be ignored."

Posted by pfa at 08:02 PM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2006

SlideShare.net: Ready, Set, Present!

Dr. X. Pertise agreed to speak to a university group at a meeting that is coming up in two days, on a broad topic peripherally related to his own research, but for which he doesn't have appropriate slides. Dr. P. thought there would be plenty of time to just put together something quick, but something unexpected has gone haywire in the lab at the last minute. He doesn't have time to make presentation slides, so he logs onto SlideShare and looks to see if there is a presentation by anyone he knows on this topic, that he could repurpose for this talk, with appropriate attribution to the original author. A few quick keyword searches, and he has found one presentation that has some good images, another presentation with a good conceptual outline, and some recommended resources that he can easily enrich. He knows the authors, so he contacts them to request a copy of their slides. In the meantime, he sends the links to his assistant, and asks them to start assembling new presentation slides that incorporate these bits. Later, he will quickly reorganize the information the way he wants it for the presentation.

------------------------------------

Does this sound too good to be true? Pie-in-the-sky futuring? Well, tah-dah! The future has arrived. SlideShare.net allows people to share their slide presentations. It does not allow people to download the slides, only view them online, but that still can be very useful when assembling ideas in a time-dependent situation. SlideShare is a new service, so the content is still very much growing. Some of the best content is from organizations and government institutions that provide free information as advocates for a specific topic.

Still, you might be surprised what you can find. Examples include presentations on HIPAA and e-mail, four-handed dentistry, medical ethics, professionalism and education, bioinformatics, genomics, the semantic web, craniofacial anomalies, tissue engineering, drug development, and more.

The search interface is particularly sloppy, so you have to do a fair amount of digging once you get to the results. The more specific language is more useful in this circumstance. Like any of the Web 2.0 tools, the quality of what is findable will depend on people who are willing to share their content. If this would be a useful resource to have in the future, consider if it is worth sharing something of yours to make it more useful now.

Posted by pfa at 03:06 PM | Comments (0)

September 24, 2006

"Priceline"-style Dentistry in Germany

A new trend in Germany is web sites for patients seeking dental care. These sites allow patients to anonymously post what sort of dental services they seek (along with treatment plans provided by their current dentist), and then dentists bid what they would charge to provide that service. This is a dramatically different approach to providing healthcare. Here in the US, this approach has been seen extensively in other topics, such as travel (Priceline.com) and insurance (Progressive.com).

Online Dentistry: Health Care Takes to the Net / Deutsche Welle (September 1, 2006): http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2152304,00.html

"In the search for more affordable dental care, some Germans are letting dentists bid at online auction sites for the chance to work in their mouths. Dentists' groups are worried about the commodification of health care."

"Schikora's Web site ... require people looking for dental work, or in some cases physical therapy and cosmetic surgery, to register anonymously and post their current doctor's treatment plans, how much the treatment is estimated to cost and how far they would be willing to travel."

Posted by pfa at 01:04 PM | Comments (0)

May 30, 2006

Online Community Tools: Streamline and Turbocharge Your Information Retrieval

A great deal of the power of science has come from collaborations. These days collaborations increasingly begin online or convert to online when one or the other participants move to another part of the country. Technology is making these connections easier in many ways. here are just a few.

The UM Research site facilitates connections among on campus researchers.

UM Research: http://www.research.umich.edu/

UM Research recommends the Community of Science, saying, "Community of Science publishes databases useful to the research community funding opportunities, in expertise, funded research, patents, and others. UM faculty and staff may search many of these databases free-of-charge." In the Community of Science, you can enter a personal profile describing your research interests, and then subscribe to a notification service for funding announcements in those areas or browse to locate other researchers working in those topics. Very useful.

UM Research: Funding: Community of Science: http://www.research.umich.edu/funding/cos.html

Community of Science: http://www.cos.com/

There are free online comunity resources also. One specifically in dentistry is the Dental Informatics Online Community, which provides "a networking platform for people interested in DI promoting the development of dental information resources, disseminate research results and encourage the formation of research and education partnerships."

Dental Informatics Online Community: http://www.dentalinformatics.com/

Not specifically dental, there are what are becoming known as folksonomy tools -- tools for 'folk' to share information, discover what other 'folk' think is worthwhile, and who the other 'folk' are interested in the same areas as you. Folksonomy tools initially were created for the general public, and over the past few years some have become available specifically for the scientific community. Here is an article about how these are being used in the scientific and research communities.

Social Bookmarking For Scientists - The Best Of Both Worlds, by Ben Lund, Nature Publishing Group, b.lund@nature.com (XTech 2006: "Building Web 2.0" — 16-19 May 2006, Amsterdam, The Netherlands):
http://xtech06.usefulinc.com/schedule/paper/75

So let's take a closer look at how this works in practice, and what you can expect to find. Here is an example of a general purpose folksonomy tool, del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a "social bookmarking" tool. You can put your bookmarks online, keep them private or share them, and access them from any computer with a network connection. Since del.icio.us is for the general public, its greatest strengths are in finding things of interest to lots of people. Let's see what they have for dentistry or dental.

Del.icio.us: Dental: http://del.icio.us/search/?all=dental

Now, knowing that this is not the likely place to look, let's see what they have for matrix metalloproteinases or MMPs.

Del.icio.us: Metalloproteinases: http://del.icio.us/search/?all=metalloproteinases

Now, let's compare this to what we can find in Connotea for the same topic, knowing that Connotea is for scientists and clinicians, and that it collects citations for articles, not web sites.

Connotea: Metalloproteinases: http://www.connotea.org/search?q=metalloproteinases

Connotea: MMP: http://www.connotea.org/tag/mmp

There are other scientifically focused folksonomy tools, most notably CiteULike. Let's look for MMP articles in CiteULike.

CiteULike: Metalloproteinases: http://www.citeulike.org/search/all?f=title&q=metalloproteinases

Do you like anything you saw? Just checking this topic, it looks like the MMP folk are hanging out at CiteULike, so if I was doing research in that topic, that might be a resource I'd want to start considering.

If you are thinking about using any of these tools, they are especially good to keep your favorite citations handy and accessible whenever and wherever you are. Here is a helpful tool that will allow you to send your favorite references from PubMed to either Connotea or CiteULike from within the Firefox browser. Recommended only for the truly advanced technophile (a.k.a. "geek"). If there is enough interest, I'll try to do a lunch class on this for faculty.

Pubmed2Connotea / Pumed2CiteULike:
http://www.urbigene.com/pubmed2connotea/

Want to know more about Folksonomy and folksonomy tools?

Wikipedia: Folksonomy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

Posted by pfa at 07:38 PM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2006

Rollyo: Search Like an Expert

I have been playing with a new-to-me folksonomy tool. Rollyo stands for "roll your own search engine." The idea, as I understand it, is that an expert in any area quickly finds that they are going to the same sites over and over again. Rollyo allows you to collect a group of sites that are your favorites for a specific type of task, and then search them all at once. It limits you to 25 sites in a list.

Here are a few examples I've put together. The first one selected reputable consumer health information sources to search for information for dental patients. The second one searches vendors selling historic and out-of-print medical and dental books. The third one searches free fulltext books online for the word, phrase, or concept of your choosing. I use this to find curious quotes to enliven my professional presentations and publications.

Rollyo: pfa: Dental Consumer Health Search Engine: http://rollyo.com/pfa/dental_consumer_health/

Rollyo: pfa: Antiquarian Medical Books: http://rollyo.com/pfa/antiquarian_medical_books/

Rollyo: pfa: Do-It-Yourself Quotations from Original Sources: http://rollyo.com/pfa/diy_quotes_from_sources/

Just imagine what you could do! I promise you, I'll be doing more of these, and will share those relevant to the dental community.

Posted by pfa at 06:21 PM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2006

Availability of Software Program to Assess Total Fluoride Exposure

----------- QUOTED MATERIAL ---------------

The NIDCR and NHLBI wish to announce the availability of the Nutrition Data System for Research with Fluoride (NDS-R Fluoride), the first software designed to assess total fluoride exposure of humans from both dietary and non-dietary sources. The software was developed as a new functional model for the Nutrition Data System for Research (NDS-R), a well established computerized database and interview system used by nutrition researchers for collection of dietary information and calculation of nutrient intakes.

The NDS-R Fluoride software is available on a CD-ROM accompanied by a comprehensive Online User Manual fully documenting its features and functionality and providing instructions for its use in a research setting. Training seminars also can be arranged. For information on how to license the NDS-R Fluoride software and the fee schedule contact, please see:
http://grants2.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-DE-06-002.html

For additional questions or information, contact:
María Teresa Canto, DDS, MPH
Director, Health Promotion and Comunity-based Research Program
Center for Health Promotion and Behavioral Research
NIDCR/NIH/DHHS
Phone: 301-594-5497, E-mail: maria.canto@nih.gov

----------- QUOTED MATERIAL ---------------

Posted by pfa at 03:51 PM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2006

More Podcasts: NIH, Science, and Health

We've added a handful of new podcast resources to our podcasting page:

http://www.lib.umich.edu/dentlib/resources/guides/podcast.html

Highlights of special interest to our community include:

National Institutes of Health Podcast (NIH) (and blog)
NPR's Science Friday, and
Mayo's Medical Edge Radio.

Worth checking out!

Posted by pfa at 09:10 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2006

Podcast Resources

The Dentistry Library has a new guide to resources on podcasts, how to find them, and other online multimedia tools. Check it out at: