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The Health Tweeder appears to be an attempt at visualizing tweets about health conditions on Twitter. Interesting.

The UK government has in recent years made significant amounts of government data openly available for reuse.  They Work for You is an example of a website which creatively reuses data on UK parliamentary activity,  and its parent organization, MySociety, has played an important role in encouraging the UK government towards opening up more data.

The latest development in UK government open data sharing is the launch of data.gov.uk, launched in beta test form last month , which “provides a single access point to over 2,500 central government datasets that have been made available for free re-use”.

Buried in the small print of this announcement is an important change, with significant implications for open access publishing in the UK. This change is the adoption of Creative Commons-compatible licensing for UK government open content.

Up until now, open data  from the UK government was licensed via the Office of Public Sector Information’s ‘Click Use’ license scheme. The Click Use model required any potential users or distrubutors of the data to first request their own ‘Click Use’ license from the UK government website, in order to gain permission to reuse the data.

In contrast musicians, artists and other creators around the world who wish to share content openly while reserving some rights have increasingly standardized on the use of  Creative Commons licenses, which do not require any such license request to be made.

BioMed Central, like many other open access publishers, uses the Creative Commons Attribution License, which requires only that the original version of the work should be correctly attributed when the work or any part of it is reused.

Until now, because work carried out by researchers at UK government agencies is often covered by ‘Crown Copyright’, and because Crown Copyright is legally distinct from the normal Copyright law, the applicability of Creative Commons licenses to such work has been in question. As a result, special license wording has in some cases been necessary for such articles published in BioMed Central journals, in order to indicate that they can be reused only under the ‘Click use’ scheme. This had the potential to cause delays for authors and confusion for readers.

The good news is that the announced intention of OPSI to move away from ‘Click Use’ licensing towards Creative Commons-compatible licensing over the coming months should entirely solve this problem, making life easier for all concerned.

It also provides an important precedent for dealing with similar challenges in other (rather arcane) areas of copyright law. For example, the World Health Organization and other supra-national bodies do not recognize national jurisdictions, which causes similar challenges for Creative Commons licensing to those caused by Crown Copyright,  and requires similar workarounds via special-case license wording. BioMed Central is hopeful that a Creative Commons-compatible licensing scheme specifically designed for such supra-national bodies will soon resolve this and we are working with WHO and Creative Commons towards such a solution.

I finally broke down and bought a Motorola DROID from Verizon several weeks ago- that’s the new phone that runs Google’s Android 2.0.1 Operating System.

Thus far, I don’t regret the decision.

AT&T’s coverage where I live stinks, so as much as I like the iPhone, it just wasn’t an option for me. Fortunately, the DROID does most things as well as the iPhone, and does some things much better than the iPhone.

I agree with most of the accolades and criticisms you’ve probably already read about the DROID.

Things I Like:

The touchscreen is large, responsive, and looks terrific.

Syncing of my Gmail contacts, my work contacts, and my Facebook contacts is pretty darn great. I always have ALL my contact information on me- and it is updated whenever Facebook, my Gmail contacts, or the Address Books at my place of work are updated.

The “open” model is appealing. Even without having a rooted phone, I have *much* more control over the device than with an iPhone. If there’s any file I want on my Droid, I can put it there without jumping through any hoops. I have complete control over the file structure. iPhone/iTouch users has undoubtedly been annoyed by how strictly Apple controls what can (and cannot) be moved over the device’s USB cable and have to use third party applications to move data from an iPod/iTouch to a new computer- even if that data has no DCM.

Customization-I can tweak so much about the DROID’s interface that it took me several days to explore a lot of options and make some decisions about how I wanted it laid out. As my continued use of it reveals new/different/unexpected needs, I can quickly and easily make changes.

Navigation design is good- getting around the DROID takesa bit of getting used to, but it makes sense and I can customize shortcuts to almost any application, document, directory, etc- so common tasks are accomplished quickly.

The Notification Panel is GREAT. I’m never interrupted, just notified.

MPOW supported my access to my (Exchange) work email and work calendar immediately- cleverly, it interfaces through Outlook Web Access, which makes supporting the device’s access to Exchange a very easy decision for the Information Systems department. I win, they win. Everyone is happy with no additional work. (Our IS department has some security concerns about iPhone access to our Exchange server and Blackberries require an enterprise server to make Blackberries play nice with Exchange.)

It is a good TELEPHONE. The sound quality is about as good as can be expected from a mobile phone.

There’s a nifty little app called Call Filter that blocks calls from unknown numbers (i.e. telemarketers) or any number you tell it to block. This is especially useful if you keep getting “wrong number” calls from one particular source.

Other useful telephony apps include Phonalyzr, which analyzes your phone usage:

Dial Zero is useful little utility that lists companies alphabetically. Choose the company and it’ll give you a number to click (which the Droid will dial), then tell you how to game the voicemail system to get to a human being as fast as possible.

Awesome Apps for Android
All of these are available from the Android Market.

SugarSync may remind some of Dropbox (mentioned during the #mlamobile Webcast for the iPhone/iTouch), but actually does a good deal MORE than just synch files between my DROID and folders on other computers. I can stream media files from my home computer to my DROID, if I want. More here: https://www.sugarsync.com/downloads/android.html

Locale is incredibly cool.

I have it set up to send status messages to Twitter when I get to work or when I go to my Mother-in-law’s house. I’d eventually like to set up a simple status board for Liz and I so each would always be able to quickly check where the other is. Imagine that I could tap my phone and see quickly if Liz is on campus, at her mom’s, or somewhere else. I also have Locale (with a WOL plugin) set up to wake up my home computer as I approach our house after work.

I also have it set up to prevent my phone from ringing when my calendar says I’m in a meeting. (Can your iPhone do that?) It also stops notifying me of new work email between 5:00 PM and 8:00 AM.

I also have it set up so if my battery falls below 30% of capacity it alerts me to plug in and shuts down all non-essential functions (don’t want to miss a call from my wife because I was using it for something power-intensive, right?)

abcOrganizer is a great way to be able to manage and access a great number of applications, shortcuts, contacts, or any other objects in Android in a compressed, organized fashion. Click on the category icon and a window of the apps in that category pops up. Yes, you could do this just by using Android’s native folders, too- but I like AbcOrganizer better. I get to choose my own icons.

For those who like reading comics in .cbr or .cbz format, check out ACV:

For books, I’ve use mostly FBreader and have read a few novels in it now. No eye strain for me, and the night display (black background, white text of adjustable brightness) keeps it from annoying my wife.

AndFTP is an awesome file explorer and FTP client for your Android device. Soooooo convenient to access my FTP server this way. Also supports SFTP and FTPS. The Estrongs File Explorer is another good client for managing media files via LAN or FTP.

ES File Explorer is also great.

Barcode Scanner is really neat. It’ll scan the barcode on an item and try to find prices for you elsewhere. Even cooler for those of us who like books: If the book is scanned by Google Books, you can scan the barcode and search within that book. We live in the future.

Medical/Health Info:

PubMed Mobile is okay:

It is at least better than AgileMedsearch:

So, thus far there aren’t a ton of health info apps for Android that I find exciting.

In the meanwhile, my favorite health info destinations on my DROID are the new MedlinePlus Mobile and Unbound MEDLINE, both of which run in the browser.

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Perhaps I can write a bit more about my trip to Arizona soon, but for now I wanted to get the slides posted for those who attended.

It was lots of fun and a treat for me to get to leave Syracuse in January and gape at palm trees for a couple of days.

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An increasing number of peer-reviewed journals and research funding agencies require authors to make available the raw, unprocessed data supporting the findings reported in their research articles (click here for information on why this is important). Just this month, for example, The American Naturalist announced that its authors must make their data publicly available as a condition of publication and the UK Government has also recently launched an open data website.

But there is little practical guidance available on how data should be shared, particularly in clinical research where sharing information about individuals without their consent presents risks to privacy - both from a legal and ethical perspective.

Recognizing this problem, in March 2009 the editors of the journal Trials made a committment to produce guidance on preparing raw clinical data for publication.

"Preparing raw clinical data for publication: guidance for journal editors, authors, and peer reviewers" - co-published today in Trials and in the BMJ - represents that guidance. It proposes a minimum standard for anonymizing (or "de-identifying") datasets to protect patient privacy whilst allowing clinical data to be shared.

Research article
Preparing raw clinical data for publication: guidance for journal editors, authors, and peer reviewers
Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Melissa L Norton, Andrew J Vickers, Douglas G Altman
Trials 2010, 11:9 (29 January 2010)
[Abstract] [PDF]

The guidance lists 28 items of personal and clinical information that can make patients identifiable and recommends that any direct identifiers, such as patients' names and addresses, should be removed from datasets before publication. Unless patients have consented to the sharing of their data, datasets containing three or more indirect identifiers, such as age or sex, should be reviewed by an independent researcher or ethics committee to determine any risks to privacy, before data are submitted for publication. If the independent review finds privacy could be at risk, alternatives to fully open access sharing of data must be considered.

Making raw clinical data available will benefit future research - and to that end, human health - and all researchers should obtain consent for sharing of supporting data when recruiting human subjects. Until this becomes a routine practice, however, concerns about patient privacy remain a common barrier to the sharing of information. This practical guidance aims to help remove this obstacle and enable other scientists and patients to benefit from full and transparent reporting of research data.

• How to get your iPhone/iPod to connect to the RuG-FN2 wireless WiFi network / by Hedderik van Rijn
  How to get your iPhone/iPod to connect to the RuG-FN2 wireless WiFi network To get your iPhone/iPod Touch to connect to the RuG-FN2 network, you have to enable TTLS authentication. To do so, open the iPhone Configuration Utility (download), and create a new "Configuration Profile" with the following information:

• Learning in a Virtual World: Experience With Using Second Life for Medical Education | Wiecha | Journal of Medical Internet Research
  Conclusions: The results of this pilot suggest that virtual worlds offer the potential of a new medical education pedagogy to enhance learning outcomes beyond that provided by more traditional online or face-to-face postgraduate professional development activities. Obvious potential exists for application of these methods at the medical school and residency levels as well.