Mthatha students in UK

The students from the MSc in Health Informatics that CHIRAD are running at Walter Sisulu University in South Africa (www.chirad.org.uk/mthatha.htm) are currently on a visit to the UK. They are attending the EFMI STC 2008 in London over the next few days, and have had a variety of visits and activities over the past few days.

EFMI STC 2008 starts this evening

The EFMI Special Topic Conference on Open Source and Healthcare in Europe starts this evening (www.chirad.info/efmi_stc), with an opening ceremony and welcome reception.

CHIRAD is one of the sponsoring organisations for the event, and CHIRAD members have been active in organising it.

I hope to do some blogging from the event, here and on other blogs that I contribute to.

April 2008 must be South Africa

Graham and Peter will be in South Africa for about 3 weeks in April 2008. WE will be teaching on the MSc in Health Informatics (www.chirad.org.uk/mthatha.htm) , meeting with colleagues from SAHIA and the MRC, and adding in some holiday.
We will try to do some 'on the road' blogging, including uploading photos. As a starter, here are some photos from the January 2007 visit:
http://picasaweb.google.com/chirad.blog/SouthAfricaJanuary2007

Some viral videos

You have probably seen the 'Machine is us/ing us' video that shows the movement from text to hypertext to today's social networks - if not, you can find the latest version on YouTube at >>> There are plenty of other versions around too, and it was produced by Michael Wesch and his 'Digital Ethnography' group at Kansas State University, USA.

It has spun off many similar videos, the most recent one I have come across is called 'A vision of students today' - it is by Wesch and his students and is also on YouTube >>>. Interestingly, it has provoked widely differing reactions from colleagues, from "sad and left me not knowing what to do to reach these individuals" to "Pretty powerful stuff". Decide for yourself - you might also be interested in the transcription and discussion at http://www.mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/

This week must be Vienna

Peter Murray, and a number of other members of CHIRAD and BCS Health Informatics Forum, wil be in Vienna, Austria this week for the 'World of health IT' event (www.worldofhealthit.org).

I will be blogging the event, although probably mainly on a couple of other blogs, so keep an ee on them - or you can check the 'uCru6' widget that aggregates posts from our various blogs. As BCS are funding the trip, many of the posts will be on the 'Release Zero' blog.

More later in the week; this post from Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam.

IMIA Web 2.0 taskforce

Peter Murray is co-leading the new IMIA (International Medical Informatics Association - www.imia.org) Web 2.0 Exploratory Taskforce.

See the post of Informaticopia for more information ( >>> ) or go directly to the Taskforce portal - http://www.differance-engine.net/imia20/

South Africa and London

CHIRAD members Graham Wright and John Bryant are teaching this week in Mthatha, South Africa, on the MSc in Health Informatics (>>>) (>>>).

Today (17 September), Peter Murray is attending the KIDMM 'Metaknowledge mashup' day at BCS HQ in London. He will be blogging 'live' throughout the day - posts can be found on the BCS blogs site at his 'Release Zero' blog - http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConBlog.6

Portable apps

The PortableApps.com Suite™ looks good >>>. It is "a collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client, antivirus, ... all preconfigured to work portably".

It has several versions, and can be installed to portables devices (such as USB/flash drives):
* Base: 0.7MB (download), 1MB (installed)
* Lite: 30.4MB (download), ~105MB (installed)
* Standard: 89.5MB (download), ~260MB (installed)

And it is all under Free / Open Source (Mozilla apps: MPL, Others: GPL) Licenses.

We'll post a review here when we've played with it a bit.

After medinfo2007

All too quickly, medinfo2007 has been and gone. Blogging from the event proved to be more challenging than we had expected - Internet access in Australia is nowhere near as cheap and readily available as we have come to expect in other places we have travelled to, or here in the UK.

CHIRAD members did contribute various blog posts, which can be found on Informaticopia and the hi-blogs.info blog. If anyone has additional comments, please feel free to add them to the existing posts. If you have photos you would like to share, then contact us about how to do this (ie, don't just email them to us).

The great trek to medinfo2007

The great trek to medinfo2007 has started. Some CHIRAD members set off on their journeys today, and others will be setting off over the next week or so.

We hope to blog here, and elsewhere, about the event and share experiences with those not fortunate enough to be able to get to medinfo2007. More later.

See www.medinfo2007.org

IMIA OSWG meeting at medinfo2007

The 2007 business meeting of the IMIA Open Source Working Group ( >>>) will take place as follows:

Sunday, 19 August 2007, from 5:30 - 7:30pm

Venue: Room P3, Brisbane Convention Centre, Australia
(in conjunction with medinfo2007)

Agenda to be advised later.

Apologies to colleagues who won't be at medinfo2007.

All queries to imia.oswg[at]gmail.com

Sixth LinuxMedNews Award nominations open

As reported by Ignacio Valdes on Linux Medical News (www.linuxmednews.com/1185396012/index_html), nominations are officially open for the 6th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award. Deadline for nominations is August 24th, 2007 and the Award will be presented at the November 10th-14th AMIA Fall conference at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Deadline for entries is August 24th, 2007. [This is NOT an officially sponsored award or event of AMIA.]

This award is co-sponsored by the IMIA Open Source Working Group. This award is intended to honor the individual or project who has accomplished the most towards the goal of improving medical education and practice through free/open source medical software. The award winner is chosen by a panel of judges.

Full details are on Linux Medical News.

Open access developments

Two new developments today from the world of open access publishing:

- BioMed Central has introduced a new information portal calling attention to the developing world's need for open access to the scientific and medical literature. It can be accessed at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/developingcountries/
As part of the launch, BioMed Central is inviting researchers and others working in developing countries to share their stories about how open access to the online research literature is changing their work.

- BioMed Central has also created a custom button for the Google Toolbar, to make finding open access research from BioMed Central’s research even easier. See http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/toolbar/google

CHIRAD supports moves to develop open access and signed up early to the Budapest Open Access Initiative - http://www.soros.org/openaccess/

CHIRAD at Buck House

CHIRAD Directors Dr Helen Betts and Prof. Graham Wright yesterday (19 July) attended the Queen's Garden Party at Buckingham Palace, in London.

SINI2007 week

The main SINI (Summer Institute in Nursing Informatics, University of Maryland School of Nursing) starts on Wednesday 18 July - tomorrow (Monday 16 July) sees the start of pre-conference workshops.

CHIRAD members Peter Murray and Scott Erdley will be blogging from SINI2007 - we hope to try out some podcasts, vodcasts, etc as well.

See the SINI2007 blog at: http://differance-engine.net/SINI2007blog/
Main SINI website (School of Nursing) is at: http://nursing.umaryland.edu/informatics/

Two interesting items

Two interesting items selected from today's RSS feeds:

- "Web 2.0 is built on Open Source" from FSDaily - a run-down of the free and open source software that runs many Web 2.0 applications >>>


- "Inspired by Vannevar Bush, Is Fleck Just What the New Web Was Missing?" from Social Computing magazine - about Fleck, a new tool for annotating web pages and sharing them. Also has a Firefox extension - >>>

Podcasting Has No 'Inherent' Pedagogic Value

Thanks to our colleague Bill Perry for pointing up two recent reports.

One ( >>> ) is a 'comprehensive survey of the latest academic studies on the impact of podcasting on learning and teaching'. The findings should really come as no surprise, and probably ought to fall under the heading of 'the blindingly obvious', but are a useful reminder not to be taken in by hype.

The report states that "As with any educational technology, whether and how podcasting impacts the quality of the learning experience and/or educational outcomes depends largely upon how the technology is put to use,"

Bill also points out the full 15 page White Paper is at:
http://connect.educause.edu/files/CMU_Podcasting_Jun07.pdf

IBM epidemiology software now open source

Linux Medical News reports ( >>> ) a news item from the eHealth News Portal ( >>> ) that IBM has announced that it has made available an advanced software technology that can help predict the transmission of diseases across countries and around the globe to the open source community.

STEM (the Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler tool) is designed to help scientists and public health officials create and use spatial and temporal models of emerging infectious diseases. STEM, which runs on any operating system, allows the rapid creation of epidemiological models for how an infectious disease, such as avian influenza or dengue fever, is likely to geographically spread over time. It creates a graphical representation of the spread of a disease based on a variety of parameters such as population, geographic and macro-economic data, roadmaps, airport locations, travel patterns and bird migratory routes around the world.

The STEM software is available at: http://www.eclipse.org/ohf/components/stem/

Google health group - no nurses, no internationals

As pointed out by Rod Ward on his Informaticopia blog (www.rodspace.co.uk/blog/blogger.html), Google have set up a 'Google Health Advisory Council' - further details are at:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/new-advisory-group-on-health.html.

And guess what? - surprise, surprise, there are are no nurses on it. In fact, it has 5 women out of the 22 (23%), seemingly no-one from outside the USA, and 13 (59%) have MD after their name.

This does not show the kind of forward-thinking, or even current thinking and awareness, on health issues that one would expect from a global company that claims to want to 'better understand the problems consumers and providers face every day and offer feedback on product ideas and development'. I think, given the tone of many blog posts that are linking to the article, they will soon begin to understand!

Perhaps this is an opportunity for the international nursing community, and the nursing component of the blogosphere, to flex some muscle.

Note also that many other health professionals are similarly excluded.

Launch date for blog carnival

The first issue of 'A global carnival of health informatics' will be hosted on the Health informatics 2.0 blog (healthinformatics20.blogspot.com) in July 2007. It will be available on 22 July - submission deadline to be considered for inclusion is noon UK time on Saturday 21 July.

Please send all submissions via the blogcarnival.com website at: http://blogcarnival.com/bc/submit_1960.html - or if having problems, to hi.blogs[at]gmail.com