Posts Tagged ‘PubMed’

Friday Foolery #102: Bacony fun with PubMed

Friday, September 17th, 2010

Thursday’s post research inspired me and I’m not sure why I haven’t tried this before.

Alas, there is no bacon[MeSH].

Life is so unfair.

I did the next best thing, winnowing the list as I scanned the results and ended up with a relatively accurate Bacon[ti] NOT (Francis OR Roger OR Kevin OR Selden OR Chow OR Harry OR Cyrus OR Josiah OR George OR Governor)


That still includes some mentions of Bacon As Person but not many. Swine flu update: bringing home the bacon was the only one that had anything to do with H1N1, about a dozen articles had variations of ‘bringing home the bacon’ as the title.

Perplexing international translations I’d love to have someone check for accuracy include

  • [Instruments, books and other objects memorable to (almost) forgotten opinions, therapies, buildings, etc. Bacon fatness meter in live pigs] (Dutch)
  • [One catches not only mice with bacon. An atraumatic treatment for cutaneous myiasis] (German & nasty, don’t click if you’re eating)
  • ["Worry bacon" in children and adolescents. A contribution from child-guidance and forensic-psychological practice] (German)
  • [Bacon as therapeutic substance in pediatrics.] (Undetermined language (!!))

Speaking of eating, how about Characteristics of a cream of cheese with bacon frozen soup concentrate? Mmm tasty!

The Bacon pull-through procedure is… probably something I don’t want to think  about. What appeared to be related (an article in J Assoc Off Anal Chem about uncooked bacon) is actually not since that’s the Journal-Association of Official Analytic Chemists. Maybe that abbreviation is why they went out of print in 1991?

Bacon therapy sounds inviting but in reality is also nasty and related to the German article above. You’ve been warned if you click to find out.

My favorite title is just a little older than I am:

While this appears to be my personal manifest destiny, it was a letter to the editor about prohibiting carcinogens in food that took things a little bit too far.

I still plan on having coffee & bacon for breakfast today though!

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Posted in Friday Foolery, PubMed | 1 Comment »

Friday Foolery #84: It’s All About the Cat

Friday, May 14th, 2010

You’ve seen or heard the backstory about  ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, right? It was a British World War II motivational poster that was printed in case they were about to be invaded but never actually used, then Barter Books realized they had one and so many people started asking for it that they made copies beginning in 2000.

The parody site http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/ allows you to create your own pithy saying with the King George crown or another image (or none at all), and this one from the recently created gallery caught my eye.

Keep Calm and Feed The Cat

You’ve got that right, there is no calm if the cat is not fed.

On a related cat food note, my colleague Dave brought the video Satisfy the Cat, aka User-Centered Design to my attention and it has been cracking up our 7 year old son repeatedly for days.  On a more serious note, how do you design a website to satisfy several different herds of cats at once…. say researchers, clinicians and medical librarians? I know which one had the Coke reaction to the PubMed redesign last year!

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Posted in Friday Foolery, NIH | 2 Comments »

NWS & Twitter: Tweet your #wxreport; Time again for #pubmed?

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

Edit: They may want to reconsider shortening to just #wx and including state initials, check out how Twitter was used to cover a tornado in Arkansas on April 30th using #arwx & especially the critique of Facebook-to-Twitter auto posts.

I think announcements from the National Weather Service (NWS) are about the only time we can read information in ALL CAPS and not feel like we’re being yelled at.

The all caps version is at http://www.weather.gov/stormreports/PNSWSH.txt, but the fun usage of red ALL CAPS is at http://www.weather.gov/stormreports/ complete with regular writing encouraging you to report significant weather events in your area on Twitter.

The reason they are exploring this as of April 15th until the end of 2010 is Twitter now has geotagging capabilities available to identify where you are located.

If you’re a little concerned about privacy and don’t want to turn on Twitter geotagging (as I haven’t), the site gives you information on both how to enable geotagging and tweet weather events in your area, or how to tweet to report a significant weather event (what that means is covered too) by using this format

#wxreport  WW  your location WW  your significant weather report

Following this format for Snowpocalypse 2008 that wrecked our Christmas, I would tweet a conservative

#wxreport  WW  N Seattle, WA WW  Local roads flooding w/1′snow+now rain!

or something along those lines. If things were really crazy I might consider turning on geotagging to allow for more detail though since that allows for #wxreport your significant weather report

I’m excited to see a government agency experimenting with the use of Twitter and a publicized, searchable hashtag (the #wxreport part of the tweet ) to enable data to better serve the public and their local weather forecasting offices. I hope it goes well for them and that the spammers stay far away from it & not wreck the data as they did with #pubmed feedback although that seems to have died down dramatically since January.

Is it time to try #pubmed again now that @ncbi_pubmed is an official National Library of Medicine social media channel? Are they listening? What other government or local agencies can do something similar? What can be done to filter out the noise?

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Losing #pubmed signal to noise

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Almost exactly a year ago,  I suggested using the #pubmed hashtag on Twitter as a form of group feedback and tracking about PubMed. Since then I’ve subscribed to the #pubmed RSS feed, keeping an eye on everyone’s triumphs, frustrations & randomness that was a relevant low noise signal, and still believing this might be a way for the National Library of Medicine to keep an eye on things in lieu of an official PubMed Twitter presence.

I now have to laugh at my own naïveté:

Medical information professionals have multiple channels of communication ranging from international to regional, state & association listservs, reading each others’ blogs, and social networking tools such as Twitter. We can and do share among ourselves! However, each of these communication methods can carry high levels of noise, or information that is neither concise nor relevant to what we are looking for in terms of helpful input…

A thought I had for a quick, easy-to-contribute, low-noise feedback mechanism for everyone to see, participate in, and track via a webpage or RSS regarding PubMed is the use of hashtags on Twitter by including #pubmed in your tweet.

Forget about that.

It began on December 30, 2009

Um, yeah.

Counting that one and the others through early this morning, there have been 67 of these #pubmed spam posts in 12 days. Maybe there was some spam usage of #pubmed before, but none of them caught my attention in an entire year compared to recently.  The real usage of the #pubmed hashtag numbers maybe 10 or so and completely drowned out by the spam noise (spoise?). It’s frustrating but I’m unsubscribing from the #pubmed RSS feed & highly encourage the @pubmedtoolbar to quit retweeting the spoise too.

Combined with the Digital Jester’s observation about Twitter spam (that Eric Schnell summarized nicely) a day before the #pubmed spam appeared, this is a disturbing new trend on Twitter for those of us seeking to use this channel, and particularly hashtags, to actually communicate and keep an eye on trends. What’s on the development horizon to filter out the Spamalope spoise?

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More great new PubMed tutorials

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

Since my October 2009 entry about the updated PubMed information resources created by the medical library community, Beth at the Indiana University School of Medicine has created & shared some of the clearest and most concise video tutorials I have seen to date about PubMed. I asked her if I could cover them in my blog and she happily agreed. Thanks so much, Beth!

Beth created a series of 3 minute tutorials on Screenjelly, which can be embedded but (unlike some other video options) are great quality when enlarged to full screen by hovering the mouse over the bottom right of the video and clicking Fullscreen view. The screen capture above sort of got what to look for. Also note the clear buttons to share videos via Twitter (Tweet), Email and Facebook, and clicking Share provides URLs and embed codes.

Below is my favorite way to explain the concept and organization of controlled vocabulary using Diddy and pants at the Gap as examples she then carries forward to explain Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).

The video links in sequential order, content does build somewhat but all are good individual reference points, are

  1. Main PubMed layout & differences from the old one
  2. Single Citation Matcher and the search box
  3. Parts of a PubMed record
  4. Controlled Vocabulary Part 1 (go Diddy!)
  5. Controlled Vocabulary Part 2 (Diddy meets MeSH)
  6. Searching for MeSH to then search PubMed
  7. MeSH terms to search in PubMed, Display & Send To features
  8. Advanced Search – History, Details, Limits, Additional Fields
  9. Topic Specific Queries – especially for Public Health
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Posted in PubMed | 3 Comments »