Best Explanation of US Healthcare Plan Controversy on Slideshare

I tried to resist, I really did. A friend of mine often quotes the old guideline that politics and religion should never be discussed in polite company. The US healthcare reform debate has become emotionally volatile and provokes strong reactions. This means, of course, that it is everywhere I look. So, I was avoiding bringing the topic into this blog.

Then I found the Healthcare Napkins All presentation on Slideshare. Very impressive. I opened in a browser window and debated whether I wanted to put it here or not. I’ve been having computer problems with lots and lots of crashes, and each time I restarted my browser, there it was. I noticed that the stats for it were, well, impressive.

That made sense, since it had won an award for best presentation. The topic is obviously timely. The presentation is attractive, colorful, and creative. The presentation is about as unbiased and bipartisan as anything I’ve seen, while clearly explaining many of the concepts in the process in simple easy-to-understand words and images. But what has really got my attention the conversation.

A rich conversation full of most of the populations represented in public online communities, from right wing, left wing, trolls, persons with stories to tell, persons with axes to grind, folk who want more, folk who think the images are silly, … So what is all the talk about? Why don’t you check it out yourself.

Augmented Reality and More ETech Trends

I depend on the NMC’s Horizon Report for a great synopsis of what’s important as far as emerging technologies, with emerging divided into now, leading, and bleeding. I love the way they present the info, with managerial summaries within time frames to anticipated crest of adoption followed by example resources. Beautiful. However, each year, new things come up that are, well, NEW.

A couple years ago I was reading about augmented reality as something restricted to science fiction and research labs. A few months ago I started to hear it often, and it has only ramped up since then. I now see things on augmented reality several times a day. Why? Because AR is combining with some of the other leading etech trends – mobile, structured/linked data, personalization, etc. Basically, augmented reality shifted from SciFi to on the verge of ready for prime time.

So what are some other things to keep your eye on? Read the Horizon Report. Then take a look at Read Write Web’s just released new slideshow giving a quick introduction to some of the important trends right NOW. Here are the high points.

* Structured / Linked Data – Wolfram Alpha, OpenCalais

* Real-Time Web – Twitter, FriendFeed

* Personalization – Facebook, Amazon.com

* Mobile Web / Augmented Reality – FourSquare, Layer/Layar

* Internet of Things – IBM (ie. A Smarter Planet), Pachube

Looking for a Job or New Hire? What about Social Media, Cloud Computing, and Virtual Worlds?

Part One

A friend of mine just got a really nifty and exciting position here on campus, well suited for her talents, interests and abilities. I am thrilled for her! I am also thrilled for the campus, since she will be bringing some new skills and experience to the mix and will hopefully apply these in new ways to the existing position. Before this came along, she’d been doing a lot of work in her industry in Second Life, blogging, and had worked professionally supporting distance education, which meant using social media and a wide variety of online tools and resources. Her new job is in one of the most traditional of all old-fashioned library positions – a curator of a special collection area. I am terribly excited to see the recognition and potential of new media connections with classic librarianship!

Part Two

This morning an article appeared in my Plurk stream on using social media and virtual worlds for hiring. LinkedIn was being used to discover folks with unusual or rare skillsets, and Second Life (the 3d virtual world) is being used for actually interviews. There is a lot more than this going on in both places mentioned as well as others, but here is the article. Read it and then think more broadly.

Karl Flinders. Will LinkedIn and Second Life kill the recruitment industry? 8 Jul 2009. http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/07/08/236804/will-linkedin-and-second-life-kill-the-recruitment-industry.htm

Part Three

Last night, I got a message via Slideshare from a startup with an interesting vision. Insightory is a social media space specifically for people interested in business trends and corporate marketing and management. Folk there are sharing a lot of high quality articles, presentations, reports, white papers, and other publications as well as establishing their own credentials and expertise.

I popped over to check it out, and immediately was sucked in by a number of the resources available that caught my eye. I liked the features and functionality, too! It allows you to download, provides PDFs of articles as well as presentations, and is embeddable (although not at WordPress.com, darn it!). I wish it let you skip to a particular page, especially as the document I want to highlight below is 144 pages and the best part is at the end.

This presentation by Michael Marlatt not only lists a lot of really interesting websites, tools, and resources but also provides strategies on how to make use of them and apply them specifically for recruitment and hiring. He captures relevant trends, and seems to focus on the same ones identified by the 2009 Horizon Report, which lends credibility and support for his vision. He pulls it all together in an overarching vision. Even if you are not a recruiter yourself, this presentation is worth looking at just for the resources highlighted! Any of you who follow my Cool Toys Conversations will find this of interest.

Michael Marlatt. The Future of Recruiting is in the Cloud (Insightory): http://www.insightory.com/view/1917/the_future_of_recruiting_is_in_the_cloud

Here are the basics Marratt mentions about the tech infrastructure we need to be SMART in the immediate future.

“Synchronized
Mobile
Appropriately equipped
RSS enabled
Tuned In”

If your corporate and personal work environments are not here now, think about catching up. Or, as he says it, tune in.

Tech Trends (Important Pieces I’m Trying to Read)

Since I’ve been too busy to blog lately, I am way behind on sharing the really delicious and important discoveries that have been percolating to the surface. So much I want to share! Each of the follow deserves at the very least a full blog post (or several) to talk about various concepts and issues in them. These are all important documents that deserve our attention.

Horizon Report / New Media Consortium: http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2009/

The Horizon Report is an annual publication (usually released in late January or early February), one of those I eagerly await with baited breath, grab while it is hot off the presses and read several times to absorb. I absolutely love the brilliant structure that makes the most critical concepts absolutely clear even if you only have a few seconds, and then enriching and embroidering upon those themes. Just look at the Table of Contents!

• One Year or Less: Mobiles
• One Year or Less: Cloud Computing
• Two to Three Years: Geo-Everything
• Two to Three Years: The Personal Web
• Four to Five Years: Semantic-Aware Applications
• Four to Five Years: Smart Objects

Report of the Provost’s Special Committee on Institutional Innovation in Collaborative Technologies for Learning, January 2009 / University of Michigan. http://www.lib.umich.edu/news/IICTLrept.pdf

While this was completed in January, it wasn’t released until March 2009. Just a few selected highlights.

• “University Library to be charged with fostering and enabling a more efficient and rapid deployment of transformative learning-technology and related pedgogies.”
• “Digital Media Commons be adminsitratively part of the library.”
• “CRLT work in close collaboration with the University Library to help foster innovation in learning technologies across our campus.”

Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning / George Siemens, Peter Tittenberger. March 2009. www.umanitoba.ca/learning_technologies/cetl/HETL.pdf

This is just a stunning piece. Incredible graphics and visualizations to communicate the concepts, terse pungent statements that put a finger right on the important issues … just brilliant. Here are a few favorites snippets.

• “Changes to the information cycle (from creation to validation) are at the core of change in higher education.” p. 3
• “Rapid growth of information requires higher education to change its focus from knowing (epistemology) to being (ontology). p. 7
• “Knowledge is distributed across a network that includes people and objects. To navigate, make sense, and come to understand … knowledge, the process of cognition is also distributed across networks …” p. 10
• “Research mindsets required by academics to succeed in their discipline are also important in teaching with technology. Through an ongoing cycle of personal research, theory and practice, educators are able to create an approach to technology that fits within the scope of their discipline, and the expectations of learners.” p. 15
• “A defining trait today is the ability to speak into the context others have created.” p. 41

The Tower and the Cloud, Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing / ed. Richard N. Katz. www.educause.edu/thetowerandthecloud

I’m writing a review of this for a journal, due next week, so you’ll be hearing more, soon. Briefly, it looks at the evolution of what it means to be an academic individual or an organization of higher learning in the context of the incredibly potent and rich information environment that has exploded with social, semantic and cloud computing technologies. My blog post yesterday on Science 2.0 actually touched on this peripherally, but they do a much more elegant job of this.

Open Cloud Manifesto: http://opencloudmanifesto.org/

I owe you all a blogpost on “what is the cloud”. After all, you’ve seen it mentioned in at least three of the five publications listed in this post. Obviously it is important. As the term gets adopted and used, it is also misused, so I want to take the time to clarify some of those for those of us who are working outside the heart of geekdom. I find the many ways I see the term used a bit confusing, so it will also help me to get a better handle on it. However, this manifesto? Touches on the foundation issues already addressed as part of the University of Michigan vision — a commitment to open educational resources, to open access, to transparency in our intellectual lives and academic endeavors.

Autism & Healthcare Reform – The Twitter Event for the Obama-Biden Transition Team

Crowdsourcing at its most relevant, this is about the outcomes of the innovative community discussion held for the autism community via Twitter on December 23rd 2008 in support of the initiatives of the Obama-Biden Transition Team under the oversight of Tom Daschle. Links listed at the bottom are from the slides.
Part One includes introductions, challenges, wishes, and the importance of location in receiving care in the USA.
http://www.slideshare.net/umhealthscienceslibraries/autism-healthcare-twitter-day-part-1-for-the-obamabiden-transition-team-presentation/
Part Two includes discussions on service, insurance, and education.
http://www.slideshare.net/umhealthscienceslibraries/autism-healthcare-reform-twitter-day-part-2-for-the-obamabiden-transition-team-presentation/
Part Three includes research, resources discussed in the event, and suggestions for governmental involvement or oversight.
http://www.slideshare.net/umhealthscienceslibraries/autism-healthcare-reform-twitter-day-part-3-for-the-obamabiden-transition-team-presentation/

Autism & Healthcare Reform Twitter Day, Part 3 – For the Obama-Biden Transition Team

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: twitter microblogging)

LINKS
Where It Started

http://autism.about.com/b/2008/12/30/best-of-2008-for-the-autism-community-your-ideas-requested.htm
In-Home Services
This was a provocative topic to many of the people involved in the event, as that awareness of the possibility of assistance for provision of in-home services was minimal, and awareness that parents could be paid for providing in-home care to their disabled child in place of out of home employment was entirely new to most. The parent who was doing this, Bonnie Sayers, provided extensive information and resources about it. Further digging revealed that this is possible in only a few states in the country: California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (State-Based Initiatives to Improve the Recruitment and Retention of the Paraprofessional Long-Term Care Workforce).
California: Department of Developmental Services: Information About Regional Centers: http://www.dds.cahwnet.gov/RC/Home.cfm
California: Department of Social Services: In-Home Supportive Services: http://www.dss.cahwnet.gov/cdssweb/PG139.htm
State-Based Initiatives to Improve the Recruitment and Retention of the Paraprofessional Long-Term Care Workforce (Institute for the Future of Aging Services, Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute): http://aspe.hhs.gov/daltcp/reports/pltcwf.htm
US. DHHS. In-Home Supportive Services for the Elderly and Disabled: A Comparison of Client-Directed and Professional Management Models of Service Delivery (Doty et al): http://aspe.hhs.gov/daltcp/reports/ihss.htm
United Domestic Workers of America: Statewide Information on IHSS Wages, Contracts and Unions: http://www.udwa.org/statewid.htm
California Disability Community Action Network: IN-HOME SUPPORTIVE SERVICES (IHSS) ISSUES: http://www.cdcan.us/IHSS/index.htm
Protection & Advocacy, Inc: IHSS FAIR HEARING AND SELF-ASSESSMENT PACKET: http://www.pai-ca.org/pubs/501301.htm
Protection & Advocacy, Inc: IHSS ISSUES – PROTECTIVE SUPERVISION (Revised January 2000): http://www.pai-ca.org/pubs/527601.htm
Disability Rights, California: In-Home Supportive Services, Nuts & Bolts: http://disabilityrightsca.org/pubs/547001Index.htm
Research
Discussion about research made it clear that there is substantial lack of agreement about the causes and best practices for treatment for autism spectrum disorders. In addition, what information or medical consensus is available is largely unclear to the ASD community, especially parents making decisions for their children. The links below include information about proven, contested, unreliable, and emerging approaches that were discussed or mentioned during the event. There is no implied endorsement of any of the resources listed. There was a call from the ASD community at this event for coordination of research findings and dissemination of results in a coherent fashion to stakeholders.
Australian Government: Department of Health and Ageing: A review of the research to identify the most effective models of practice in early intervention for children with autism spectrum disorders: http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/mental-child-autrev-toc~mental-child-autrev-comp~mental-child-autrev-comp-che
Healing Threshholds: Autism: Novel Treatments for Autistic Spectrum Disorders: http://autism.healingthresholds.com/research/novel-treatments-for-autistic-sp
Chew, Kristina. Another Autism “Treatment”: Stem Cell Therapy. Autism Vox. July 12, 2007. http://www.autismvox.com/another-autism-treatment-stem-cell-therapy/
STEM CELLS: THE FINAL PIECE OF THE AUTISM PUZZLE? Age of Autism. July 11, 2008. http://www.ageofautism.com/2008/07/stem-cells-the.html
Stem Cells for Brain Injury Recovery? Age of Autism. January 2, 2009. http://www.ageofautism.com/2009/01/stem-cells-for-brain-injury-recovery.html
Ichim et al. Stem Cell Therapy for Autism. Journal of Translational Medicine 2007, 5:30. http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/5/1/30
2007 Fall Rimas Autism Dolphin Therpay (sic): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMpunLzaccE
Hyson, Michael T. Dolphins, Therapy and Autism. Planet Puna, Sirius Institute: http://www.planetpuna.com/dolphin-paper-html/dolphin-paper.htm
Research Autism: Dolphin Therapy: Basic Level: http://www.researchautism.net/interventionitem.ikml?ra=64
Research Autism: Dolphin Therapy, Advanced Level: http://www.researchautism.net/interventionitem.ikml?ra=64&infolevel=4&info=researchstudiesincluded
Research Autism: http://www.researchautism.net/
Research Autism: Alphabetic List of Interventions: http://www.researchautism.net/alphabeticalInterventionList.ikml
Other Resources Shared
One of the blessings of the two Autism Twitter Day events has been the intense sharing of information and resources among the community members. While the resources were shared by autism spectrum disorder (ASD) community members for each other, the ones listed below were mentioned during the event for the Obama-Biden Transition Team, and may potentially be useful for decisionmakers seeking to better understand the needs of the ASD community.
Autism Hangout: Podcasts: Adonya Wong – “Key Learnings of Autism Thought Leaders”: http://www.autismhangout.com/news-reports/feature-programs.asp?id2=80
Age of Autism: http://www.ageofautism.com/
Toast on the Ceiling: Where Was This Book When I Needed It?: http://toastontheceiling.blogspot.com/2008/12/where-was-this-book-when-i-needed-it.html
Sensory Processing Disorder Answer Book: http://www.amazon.com/Sensory-Processing-Disorder-Answer-Book/dp/1402211236/
Health Products for You: Posey Bed Canopy System: http://www.healthproductsforyou.com/catalog/products/4286/Posey-Bed-Canopy-System/
Causecast: Autism Health Twitter day Tuesday December 23rd ALL DAY Obama wants to know: http://www.causecast.org/member/tanners-dad/videos/4994-autism-health-twitter-day-tuesday-december-23rd-all-day-obama-wants-to-know
Easter Seals: Guide to Living with Autism [PDF]: http://www.easterseals.com/site/DocServer/Study_FINAL_Harris_12.4.08_Compressed.pdf?docID=83143
Act for Autism: http://actforautism.org/
Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital: http://www.devoschildrens.org/?start
BellaOnline: Autism Spectrum Disorders Site: Purposeful Communication Techniques: http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art59220.asp
Voice of America: Temple Grandin Turned Disability Into Asset for Animals: http://www.voanews.com/english/AmericanLife/2008-12-22-voa35.cfm
Temple Grandin: http://www.templegrandin.com/
Autism Speaks: Support Groups: Michigan: http://www.autismspeaks.org/community/fsdb/category.php?sid=27&cid=76
Wrong Planet: Could autistics become the majority in the distant future?: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt86414.html
Wrong Planet: http://www.wrongplanet.net/
BellaOnline: Autism Spectrum Disorders Site: Book Review on puberty and hygiene for young people with autism: http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art34042.asp
US Department of Education: Office of Civil Rights: http://ed.gov/ocr/ OR http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/index.html
Autism Risk & Safety Management: http://www.autismriskmanagement.com/
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association: Typical Speech and Language Development: http://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/
Autism Speaks: Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) nears completion of Strategic Plan for Autism Research: http://www.autismspeaks.org/inthenews/dec_12_2008_iacc_meeting_recap.php
CauseCast: Tanner’s Dad: http://www.causecast.org/member/tanners-dad
Final Thoughts

http://www.causecast.org/member/tanners-dad/blog_posts/505-for-one-day-in-december-there-was-peace-on-earth-and-goodwill-towards-families-dealing-with-autism-and-health-care?

Josie Parker of AADL Saves Christmas Spirit

Janice Greenberg, a librarian from New Jersey, noticed on the national news from CNN a story of a librarian who is being touted as a Librarian Turned Super Hero for rescuing a charity donation box at Christmas time. Janice posted it to her Facebook page. That is how I heard about the librarian heroine who turned out to be our very own Josie Parker of the Ann Arbor District Library. Josie and friends were wrapping books for charity at a local bookstore, as our own Health Science Libraries folk did recently. Librarians are kind of, well, fond of people who buy books for the holidays. The story is that there was a donation jar for charity and someone tried to grab the jar on the way out of the store. Josie injured her leg pretty badly during the rescue attempt. Lesson to be learned — place the donation jar away from the door, on the opposite side of the table.
Embedded video from CNN Video
Spread the word – Christmas is safe in Ann Arbor.

Google Flu Trends

Announced today, Google is using individual’s search term patterns to track and predict the spread of the flu.
Google: Flu Trends: http://www.google.org/flutrends/

Notice that even though the country at large has only barely started to climb, Michigan is showing more activity.

I am, on the one hand, excited to see Google applying appropriate data mining techniques to develop and test skills that could be used for disaster management and general health. On the other hand, I think this tool needs some work.
First, Google Flu Trends needs to be tested and validated by public health researchers. It is great that Google is putting it out, and I am very excited about this resources as an indicator or trend showing Google’s commitment to the community at large. I would be more excited if I saw articles comparing and contrasting it with other similar tracking tools, and linking it to other informational tools beyond saying the CDC says you should get a flu shot.
Second, IMHO, the methodology. Of course, being that this is Google, we don’t really have a clue how they arrived at this. They give us access to their data, but we don’t know what they are tracking or how this is related to the outcomes. The methodology is missing, and I’m not sure how relevant the data is when you don’t know the methodology that resulted in the data. We are lacking the opportunity to validate the data. This is a problem for me. If it is something more just of general interest, then fine, trust Google without knowing how they got there. With health information, I would feel safer if I knew more. Frankly, you have the same problem with Google Trends looking at the corporate and business information they make available. Fascinating, but would you put you money behind it in planning investments?
Which leads to my third thought. What little I’ve been able to tease out about this is that they are tracking the geographic use and incidence of phrases such as “flu diagnosis”. I hope that they are using a rich collection of words related to the flu. Perhaps something like this:
(diagnosis OR symptoms OR “what’s wrong” OR “do I have”) (flu OR influenza OR vomit OR vomiting OR cough OR coughing OR chills OR aches OR aching OR headache): http://tinyurl.com/5ujuo7
Of if you want to get more technical, maybe something like this:
(diagnosis OR symptoms) (flu OR influenza OR ~vomit OR ~cough OR influenza virus OR influenza viridae OR H3N2 OR H1N1 OR H5N1 OR H9N2 OR “upper respiratory tract infection” OR URTI OR “severe acute respiratory syndrome” OR SARS OR pandemic OR Orthomyxoviridae OR “respiratory syncytial virus” OR RSV OR “West Nile virus”): http://tinyurl.com/5tjler
Now, what would make this all much more powerful, would be to bring together a collection of data sources that contain things people say about their health. Google searches is one. I would not be surprised if Google included phrases in people’s email if they have GMail accounts. If you also included microblogging tools such as Twitter, Identi.ca, Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce, etc., social networks such as Facebook and Myspace, and other social media, then we’d have such a rich source of sources that I would hope the predictive validity would be very high. Here is a screenshot from someone else who is thinking about this – Morbus on Twitter.
Twitter: Morbus: http://twitter.com/morbus

Now, I just wish Morbus would share their findings.

Via Slideshare: Widgets for Webmasters

An interesting selection of online tools from Darlene Fichter & Frank Cervone. Check them out!

Widgets Tools and Doodads for Webmasters – CIL 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: gadgets widgets)

Maps, Mashups, and Mirrors, Oh, My! – Innovative Disaster Response & Tracking Tools

Since Hurricane Katrina I’ve been talking to many people about ideas for crisis and disaster planning, information needs and how to anticipate them, innovative technologies to support communication, collaboration, response, management, and much more. But I haven’t been blogging about it.
This will be a bare beginning, just a peek at a few tools using social media and mashups in innovative and urgently helpful ways. To explain the concept in simple terms, a technological mashup is a new tool that is created as the end result of combining data or information with data or functions from two or more existing tools or sources. For more information, here is the Wikipedia article on mashups. Social media or social technologies are terms I prefer to use instead of the popular but imprecise “Web 2.0″.
Returning to Hurricane Katrina, here is an example of Hurricane Information Maps — a mashup combined with crowdsourcing, using Google Maps with markers placed by the general public with information and resources.

Hurricane Information Maps: http://www.scipionus.com/
Seattle city government has another mashup that combines mapping with real-time data on reported events and crises (fires, ambulance calls, car accidents, etc.), including a community reporting system.

SeaStat (Seattle Statistics) Impacts: My Neighborhood Map: http://web1.seattle.gov/seastats/doimpacts.aspx
Sahana is an open source, free, downloadable software package for disaster management, including a focus on facilitating collaboration among volunteers and people in the field. In their own words, “Sahana is a Free and Open Source Disaster Management system. It is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.”

Sahana: http://www.sahana.lk/
RISEPAK (Research and Information System for Earthquakes – Pakistan) was developed by a team lead by Dr. Sarah Zaidi of Harvard in response to earthquakes in Pakistan, and is an open source, online tool incorporating many social technologies to facilitate community collaboration and response.

RISEPAK: http://risepak.com/
More information:
AIDG Blog [Appropriate Technology, Development, Environment]: Video: RISEPAK, a Web 2.0 tool for disaster response [Harvard Social Enterprise Conference] by Catherine Laine, March 24, 2008: http://www.aidg.org/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,34/p,1030/
Another good example of crowdsourcing is the “Did You Feel It?” maps from the USGS Earthquake Center, allowing significant data contributions to earthquake tracking and prediction from the general population in affected areas of the United States. The images below show the data input screen and a map of earthquakes for today and this week.

USGS: Earthquake Hazards Program: Did You Feel It?: Community Internet Intensity Maps: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/dyfi/
Probably my favorite mashup of disaster information is the interactive map housed at the Havair Information Service in Budapest, from the National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications, Emergency and Disaster Information Services (EDIS).

This amazing tool combines Google Earth with the WorldKit mapping tool with several real-time data sources collecting and merging information on weather, health, avian flu, politics, wars, tech disasters, and much more, all combined into a single display rich in information. The map tracks and displays hundreds of different types of emergencies or crises. The following image shows just a very small sampling of the icons used on the map (click on the image to enlarge it).

You can scroll down the page for more data, and click for a report on the event.

Or you can simply hover over icons on the map for a pop-up with a brief description of the event.

Havaria Information Service (Budapest, Hungary): RSOE EDIS: Emergency and Disaster Information Service: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/?area=&lang=eng
What about mirrors? What are the most important and useful of these tools? Think for a minute. Most of these, if not all, appear on a single server somewhere. What if there was a disaster or crisis that made one of these tools unavailable right at the moment we need them? Any of these that is truly necessary in disaster or crisis planning and response should be mirrored — copied and made available in many different locations. Think about it? Is there an organization that has oversight of this type of issue? I don’t know of one – if there is, please comment on this post and share the information.
More reading about social media and mashups in crises and disasters.
CrisisBlogger: http://crisisblogger.wordpress.com/
Slideshare: Dave Fleet: Social Media in a Disaster: http://www.slideshare.net/davefleet/talk-is-cheap-crisis-presentation

A Blogpost in Unexpected Places

I have the honor of being a guest author on the blog for our library director, Jane Blumenthal. Here is my first blogpost in that location.
Health, Science, & Libraries: Insight in Unexpected Places: http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/hsldir/archives/2008/07/insights_in_une.html
It begins with this quote:
“Health is personal. Health Care is not. The term is a euphemism for Condition Treatment, and it’s not about patients. It’s about systems, and most of those are both proprietary and closed.”
Doc Searls. “The Patient as the Platform” LINUX Journal. http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/patient-platform
and explores how social media brought me to it, with various ramblings along the way. Twitter is mentioned, as are other social media.