For those of you looking for words of wisdom about the golden fluid, I posted over at Stream of Thought about a couple of articles from the July 21 NEJM on urinary tract infections in children. These pieces illustrate the muddled mess that is our current approach to this problem. My take will give you a quick summary; follow the links to the original articles for an in-depth look at these issues.
No matter what the opportunity or how much support you have, moving just sucks. The end result is desirable, but putting all your possessions in boxes and trucking them 500 miles causes pain. I think that's part of why we stayed in The Big O for so long; it took 13 years to forget exactly how much of a POA this is.
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Son: Do we have The Brave Little Toaster on DVD?
Me: What a great movie! If we still have it, it's VHS.
Son: I just thought about it. Maybe it's on Netflix.
Checks Internet.
No, I can't stream it. Snort- they made two more: The Brave Little Toaster Returns and The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars.
Me: Sure you didn't miss The Brave Little Toaster Jumps the Shark?
Son: Sounds like it's time.
Thunderstorms overnight hailed the arrival of a "cold" front. I put that in quotes because the temperature has hit 86 today, which is not really cold, but it does represent an improvement.
This morning I retrieved all the stuff stored in a locker and transferred the tubs and boxes to the garage. Monday the movers come and start the relocation process for real.
Blogging must take a back seat to packing for a week or two.
Unless something really shiny catches my eye...
I have an article sitting here, making me feel guilty. I have this science-y post thought out, and I planned to get it written today.
But the sun is shining, it's nearly 100 degrees, and my parent's have a nice pool awaiting me.
What more can I say?
Over at AWEnow today I posted about an article I read yesterday. In it, a male chair of a department of medicine considers a number of issues he deems essential for good leadership. I was pleased to see a section on work-life balance, but then I read it...
Click on over and see what you think.
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Today's post title is the flippant answer I occasionally (OK, more than occasionally) give when someone asks me, "How are you?". Some days, upright and above ground is all I can promise.
Click for more on standing desks
In reality, the upright part is not accurate. I don't lie about at the office, but my ample posterior is often applied directly to a chair. Upright means head-above-feet, not on-my-feet. Since the start of 2011 I have read several posts about standing and treadmill desks (one very useful article can be accessed by clicking the image). Since my day job ended June 30 (and the new one starts in September), my life has been excessively sedentary. I decided to see if I could blog standing up.
Of course, I'm too cheap to plunge right in and buy an actual standing-height desk without knowing if I will tolerate it. I finally figured out that I could use my laptop at shopping-cart-handle height or 42 inches from the floor. My kitchen island is standard cabinet height at 36 inches, and a plastic storage tub of 5.5 inches raises it to a reasonable level.
Friday I ran a bunch of errands. In between, I spent about an hour writing my post after reading all the source material on the sofa, in a generally non-sitting position. After about 5 minutes of awkwardness, I got used to the position, and things worked well. My favorite Fit-Flops gave great padding, so no foot pain occurred, and I felt fine.
Yesterday I upped my time to just over 2 hours. Once again, no problems working in "the position." In addition to playing with Google+ and blogging it, I performed several moving-related tasks online. I felt fine, and stuff got done.
I even conversed via twitter with Karyn Traphagen (@ktraphagen) who made the switch earlier this year. She still works standing up, albeit with a real system made for the task: keyboard at arm level and monitor raised to eye level. Eventually, as I work longer stretches, my neck will appreciate that ergonomic treat.
So this morning I woke up, got out of bed, and realized that my core muscles felt like I had played the Wii Fit Hula Hoop game last night. Given that no other change in my daily activities occurred, I'm pretty certain my muscles hurt from the extra use just standing!
I'm not ready to order a desk yet. I have to stick with this a bit longer and feel like I am really committed. For something this easy and cheap to work would be great!
Anyone else out there doing it upright?
I finally got an invitation to Google+ that worked (thanks, Namnezia), so I have been wasting time learning about this new world. Mashable had a nice round-up of advice for the site, and they pointed me to a new app called Fluid that allows you to turn web apps into Mac apps that can be pinned to the launch bar. The article walked me through creating my Google+ app that I can click and have running separate from my browser. I moved on to creating other apps, including one for a Gmail account that I did not want to direct to my combined inbox.
Google also has no provision for convenient URLs. Everyone is a number - a really, really long number. Not exactly what you want to include on a business card or count on people remembering. Enter Gplus.to, a shortener for Google+. You will have to find your identifier number (which was far more difficult than I thought it should be - I only see it on my profile page) and come up with a unique name for yourself. The site then generates your short G+ URL. Mine is Gplus.to/PascaleLane (duh).
I will have to put my computer away soon; my son has another baseball game tonight. In the meantime, I would love to hear what you think of G+. Do you think it will be a Facebook killer? Or will it be another Google social media failure?
Click for source
Higher education has been my theme this week. It began with my son's orientation at the University of Minnesota. While there I downloaded the current issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education which includes several articles of interest:
And an interesting discussion has arisen at A College Education, Gratis and Online, a commentary regarding the tuition-free online UoPeople.
Then last night my dad tossed me his copy of the July 9 issue of The Economist which features a Business article, How to make college cheaper.
These articles have common threads woven throughout, including what college faculty do and how much it costs. One common theme is separating the research and teaching missions of institutions so public "teaching money" does not end up subsidizing the research mission. Many of our assumptions about providing education get challenged in a good way.
This statement in the article about the Texas education agenda sent major chills up my spine:
Taxpayers deserve to know why many professors teach less than a full load and "where their research is being published, how many people are reading it, how much is it being cited, or is it, for lack of a better term, a publication for the sake of a publication - or worse, a vanity project?"
So now think-tank dudes want to look at the impact factor and citation rate of everyone's work on campus? The academic community has enough trouble deciding how to measure impact. As a pediatric nephrologist, I am working in a field with ~500 practitioners in the US at any given time. In such a specialized field, the impact any paper can have is limited by this small audience. Does that mean my work provides less value to the world than a neurobiologist who studies basic cellular functions in the brain and discovers stuff that can make the cover of Science? Not if your child has kidney disease, I bet.
Higher education has outpaced inflation for several years, and we need to reign in its costs (as we do for healthcare, as well). However, US universities are the cream of the crop; that's why so many students come from other countries to take courses here. We must not lose all the good stuff we have as we make changes.
Click on over and enjoy the other pieces, particularly the UoPeople discussion.
Click for source
Today's Bastille Day issue of New England Journal of Medicine includes a piece aptly titled Money for Nothing? The Problem of the Board-Exam Coaching Industry. Science journalist and medical student Joshua Tompkins reviews the pressures that drive students to seek teaching to the test, both for medical college entry and to achieve maximal scores on Step 1. The latter has become quite important since competitive residency programs may have an arbitrary cut-point for inviting applicants for interview.
Virtually every medical student buys some sort of review book or access to a question bank. Of course, such self-study aids are the bottom rung of the coaching ladder. Online and classroom courses can run as much as $10,000. Medical graduates already leave for residency with ~$158,000 in loan debt; adding an additional few thousand may seem trivial. Of course, one could argue that medical school, for which students already shell out the bucks, should adequately prepare them to PASS THE DAMN TEST.
At least the classes improve your score, right? This has been studied, and the benefit to course-takers is negligible from the commercial vendors. Because of demand for review courses, The Ohio State University tried a free peer-coaching system recently. Participants scored 8 points higher on Step 1 than nonparticipants, so some sort of prep effort to review material and reduce student's anxiety may be of value.
The United States Medical Licensing Exam will be undergoing an overhaul in the near future, a process almost guaranteed to increase students' anxieties and drive more of them toward the test-prep firms. As long as the latter do not require accreditation of any sort, they will gladly collect funds from willing students hoping for a perfect future.
WhizBANG! presents my thoughts on whatever shiny thing catches my attention. Posts may include science, medicine, politics, academia, fashion or lack thereof, and urine. Lots of urine.
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