I hope your holidays were restful. This is just a quick reminder that if you need assistance finding articles or using any of the library’s resources, please don’t hesitate to contact either me or any of the librarians. I will be resuming CHP hours in the student lounge beginning on January 25th. I look forward to working with you! – Jill Turner...
Due to finals week being right around the bend, I decided to keep this posting light. Turns out someone put forth a theory on belly button lint… and actually ran an experiment. In a faintly comical article, Georg Steinhauser offered an hypothesis for what comprises belly button lint and how it accumulates. According to Steinhauser, belly button lint accumulates as a result of abdominal hair pushing fibers towards the naval. The fibers collect in this indented central location and are mashed...
Happy Thanksgiving!!! Photo by: Angela Mabray...
Tyler Vigen manages a humorous website entitled Spurious Correlations. He mines research data from datasets, finds data with similar trends, and creates a chart graphing that data. The result is a “spurious correlation”. The charts do not imply causation, but rather they are an entertaining visualization of statistics and data manipulation. Examples of his spurious correlations include: number of people who drowned by falling into a pool correlates with films Nicholas Cage appeared in per capita cheese consumption correlates...
Figure 1 is a photosharing social media app that has been described as “Instagram for physicians”. In a broad sense it is, but it is also more. Figure 1 is an online community not only for physicians but also for other health professionals who might find medical image sharing a useful tool in their practices: nurses, PA’s, medical and nursing students. The app is free and is available for both Apple products as well as Android devices. Figure 1 is a...
PubMed Health ”specializes in reviews of clinical effectiveness research, with easy-to-read summaries for consumers as well as full technical reports. Clinical effectiveness research finds answers to the question “What works?” in medical and health care. “A search on PubMed Health runs simultaneously in PubMed. A filter is used to identify all the indexed scientific articles at the NLM that might be systematic reviews.” PubMed Health contents include DARE reviews, executive summaries, clinical guides, full text systematic reviews, and consumer information. DARE or...
It has been a short summer, but I am happy to be back into my routine. I have put together a few new hand-outs and videos on finding full articles online. I have streamlined the process, and hopefully, it won’t be as confusing. We can now search for full articles using the PMID (PubMed Identification) number. YEA! See the Find Articles section of the Nursing and Physician Assistant Library Guides as well as the Library Assistance tabs for links to the...
H1N1, Ebola, SARS … all are examples of epidemics / pandemics within the last fifteen years. SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) was the first pandemic of the 21st century. It killed 774 people in 26 countries. Ebola is the most recent epidemic of the 21st century. There have been 11,283 reported deaths, according the World Health Organization. The ultimate pandemic however was the “Spanish” flu of 1918. Total deaths were estimated at about 50 million with some counts as high...
The staff at MedPage Today chose the following Tweet posted by Dr. Jaime Friedman as their “Tweet of the Week” last Friday: C Diff Barbi. Now that’s funny!...
Last posting I highlighted two books written by bad science guru Dr. Ben Goldacre. This time I am passing on another (shorter) source that came across my desk last week. Jordan Ellenberg wrote a short posting for the Wall Street Journal, How Not to Be Mislead by Data, that provides several examples of how accurate data can be presented in a way that can lead a reader into unsound conclusions. Dr. Ellenberg talks about the following data presentation errors. 1. Failure to...
