Googling Health Info

Did you know you can use Google to find quality health information? Librarians have teamed up with staff at Google to create tools that lead searchers to reliable health information. Do any search for a health-related topic, such as asthma, and you will see options for refining your search:


It's a great way to begin a search for basic health information. If you need more advanced health information, check out PubMed. It's a free database from the National Library of Medicine. You can get to full-text articles the campus libraries have paid for by using the library icon.


Or, look for the PubMed Central icon for free full-text.

Open Science

Robin Lloyd, Senior Editor of LiveScience, recently wrote "secrecy and competition to achieve breakthroughs have been part of scientific culture for centuries, but the latest Internet advances are forcing a tortured openness throughout the halls of science and raising questions about how research will be done in the future."

Gerry McKiernan goes on to say that the phrase, open science, is "shorthand for technological tools, many of which are Web-based, that help scientists communicate about their findings. At its most radical, the ethos could be described as "no insider information." Information available to researchers, as far as possible, is made available to absolutely everyone."

For example, check out laboratree.org and labmeeting.com. Both offer scientists ways of managing their data, sharing it and collaborating with others. arXiv.org, a pre-print repository, is another example of open distribution that has been around since the 90s.

It's hard to imagine a world without paper journals, but new Internet tools will only result in new end products. The purpose remains the same--to communicate research and scholarship--but the means for doing so will have different boundaries...like text + streaming video instead of collated pages.

Younger scientists are breaking the mold, according to a story in The Boston Globe. "We're a generation who expects all information is a Google search away," [one 28-year old scientist] said. "Not only is it a Google search away, but it's also released immediately. As soon as it happens, the video is up on YouTube and on all the blogs. The old model feels kind of crazy when you're used to this instant information."

Want to participate more in open science? Attend the Open Access Awareness Day events on campus:

Broadcast of Nobel Laureate Sir Richard Roberts, PhD
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Health Sciences Education Building, Room 4100 C
5 pm

Hooked on Pandora

In high school, I was a music geek.

If it was playing on MTV (you know, back when the M stood for "music")--and even if it wasn't--I was listening to it: Rock, Pop, New Wave, R&B, Synthpop, Metal, Glam, Punk, Hiphop, Ambient, Raggae, Techno. I was in the stage band, marching band, concert choir, show choir, and high school musicals. I thought I'd be on top of what's new on the music scene for the rest of my life, unlike my parents who only listened to Neil Diamond, Kenny Rogers, and Elvis.

Then I went off to college and, without my noticing it, I settled into a music rut. Listening to the same ten albums that fit in my CD Walkman carrying case. Tuning in instrumental and classical radio stations (read: white noise I wouldn't be tempted to sing along with) when I studied.

Worse still, when I graduated from college and headed out into the real world, I got hooked on talk radio and eventually found myself listening exclusively to NPR and BBC news radio.

And that's the way it's been, until now!

This week, I discovered Pandora Radio. It's a perfect blend: I can be my own personal DJ, with the ease of a mindless radio broadcast, yet none of the commercials. Best of all, I don't have to risk a lawsuit by downloading all the songs I love but can't afford to pay for.

Here's how it works: you select an artist or a song that you like, and Pandora plays other music that has similar qualities. As you listen, you can give a thumbs up or down for each song, and Pandora will learn what your tastes are. Each song that you add to or ban from your "station" has a direct and immediate impact on what's played next. With the ability to create and share multiple stations, you can quickly tune in something that fits your mood.

The brains behind this tool is the Music Genome Project, where they've broken down songs to their sound essences and created a list of "hundreds of musical attributes, or 'genes'." Not unlike Library of Congress Subject Headings and the materials listed in our library catalog, Pandora labels each song with the musical attributes that comprise it. When you indicate that you like a particular song, it finds other songs with shared "genes" and puts them into the queue.

Pandora is free and my account is accessible anywhere I can find an open internet connection. I'm truly enjoying listening to a wide variety of music once again. As they say on the Pandora website:

It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.