nursing2go

Site which posts safety alerts issued by the FDA as well as additional alerts that come from other sources.

http://www.consumermedsafety.org/

Original story:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/12/AR2009011202340.html

Actually it’s probably more than that. Livestrong.com is my new best friend. It’s very easy to enter the foods you eat and the activities you do. The charts and graphs for seeing your progress and monitoring where you measure up according to recommended nutritional requirements are great. It’s very easy to see how what you’re eating provides or doesn’t provide the nutrients you should be getting. I’ve made some needed adjustments based on the site feedback and I seem to be shedding a few. Hopefully I will be able to keep it up long-term. As of now the site is free. For something like $50/year you can become a Gold member and get access to more tools and keep unlimited information. It does seem to be supported by advertising. There are some very doubious ads regarding “effortless” weightloss schemes which I think detract considerably from the site’s credibility. Other than that I think it’s one well put together tool that I’ve found easy to use. There are quite a few things you can see on the site, so it might take a few days of use to take it all in.

http://www.livestrong.com/newhp/

This tool will help you create a family health history.

https://familyhistory.hhs.gov/ 

As a doctoral student in nursing informatics I’m very interested when a new search tool comes out. I saw an article about deepdyve on Google news.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10093575-2.html

I gave it a try.

http://mysearch.deepdyve.com/start.php

I don’t have anything positive to report so far. I tried searches on “personal health records research”, “personal health records”, and “PHR”. All searches took a long time to complete. All searches returned NO results. deepdyve’s email giving me my username and password says I would be able to,  ”…access the wealth of untapped information that resides in the ‘Deep Web’.”  If the results deepdyve returned on my subject of interest are what is available in the “Deep Web”, I guess I better stay on the surface for now.

November 18, 2008

Update: I received an email a couple days after I saw the original story. It explained that high demand caused several users to get no results. I did go back and try another search. It may be a good tool after you learn how to use it, but it does look like there is a bit of a learning curve.

http://www.oculture.com/2008/09/the_top_five_open_course_collections.html

Google just released a new browser. Looks interesting. Easy to set up.http://www.google.com/chrome/index.html?hl=en&brand=CHMB&utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-ha-na-us-sk&utm_medium=ha&utm_term=chrome 

The topic of Beyesian statistics has come up in one of my informatics courses. I was doing a little Googling on the topic and found some interesting essays about using Beyesian statistics to sort emails for spam. This caught my interest (see previous rant about spam). Even better, a free application is available to sort your emails in Outlook based on the technique. It downloaded, installed, and configured quickly.

http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/

Essays describing the technique:

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/better.html

Handy Windows utility for finding a printer on your network.

Bonjour

http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/bonjourforwindows.html 

Handy tool for making flashcards and tracking learning.

Great price….free!

http://jmemorize.org/

Vignette

http://www.vignette.com/

U of U project

https://www.unite.utah.edu//