Your Own Wealth - With a 3D Printer?

I ended up using Skype with Call Burner as an add-on to record my first innovation podcast. The idea of this exercise being the discovery that, any old phone can be used to dial in and record your thoughts. Very Cool Indeed! Thanks Lyr Lobo!

My first few tests using Gabcast turned out to be quite disastrous. One minute went by much too fast. All to render a mediocre recording at best. Clearly, the 5 minutes available as part of the introductory membership to Gabcast would never be sufficient to play around and test a few things, let alone be happy with the delivery. You'd quickly run out of free minutes!

In the true spirit of discovery, I decided to venture onto a different tool to do my recording. Gabcast would ultimately be the 3rd party delivery tool. Expanding on my favorite long distance calling program, I investigated the possibilities with Skype. There are so many extras you can add to the Skype installation, I got lost for a while, meandering among the possibilities. With the help of a 30-day trial period afforded by Call Burner, I was able to record both sides of a phone call made via Skype if I wanted. The recording quite conveniently began once the call was initiated. It allowed for much more creative juices to flow, not to mention the numerous retakes made possible to get a remotely enjoyable final product.

I ended up with a homemade studio in a matter of minutes! It was quite entertaining! Aside from taking 2 days to figure out the sampling rate was crucial for flash to work properly via the Gabcast application, generating your MP3 ahead of time gives you much more flexibility and freedom of expression. It also gives you much more latitude with Gabcast!

As if I needed reminded, the lesson learned with Animoto stood true here as well. It quickly became evident that, outside of the cool Replicating Rapid-Prototyper I would soon build for myself, copious hard work is necessary to produce a memorable sound bite.
I remember witnessing a professional recording long ago. A stout lady was invited to sit in a sound-proof room where she would be directed to, either stop and do over, or asked to read again with a particular intonation. Another striking impression I vividly remember was the softness and richness in her voice. My first impression of her had not been so flattering, in my own mind of course. Never judge a book by its cover, I told myself. Some lessons are harder to admit. This would be one of them. *grin* So much work goes into multimedia production! Thanks Karl, I learned a lot from watching you!

Here's my first rendition of a podcast, as I introduce the next project on my to-do list, via Gabcast. This one will have to wait until I finish building Karl’s FTP server and a new custom PC for myself! *smile*

Introducing RepRap:

Is it Ok to Click Here?

Introducing Animoto as a Web 2.0 tool from a personal perspective. It is very easy and quick to create a video. The web interface is really intuitive. Congrats to the Animoto team! I really enjoyed it. It is a simple, 10-minute process but !

Did you ever wonder about the effort put into those amazing documentaries? Lucky for me, I know a very talented individual who works multimedia for a living. He will spend countless hours removing the sound made when someone inhales each time a new bite of narration is read. It’s one of those things where the absence of evidence is not noticed until someone inhales very loudly.

There are times I wished I was the one collecting the images. A good final product requires hours of research for rich image contents, sometimes exposing you to very interesting or, even dangerous environments. That very difficult part hinges on the creativity of the individual. Music selection also has a great part to play in the effectiveness of media delivery.

For me, this exercise reminded me of the TED video introduced by a classmate regarding "Optical illusions show how we see" In his presentation, Beau Lotto demonstrates that even at this very fundamental level, the brain's capacity to detect differences in light heavily depends on context. This Animoto project certainly has emphasized the reality of his assertion. Thanks for the experience Lyr Lobo. I think I found a new passion.

Here's my rendition of the "Good and Evil" of technology and the Wild WWW. Images are courtesy of Communications of the ACM via screen scraping. Got your membership yet? *grin*

Consensus Methods - Who To Believe? And Why?

While studying various consensus methods as part of our curriculum, a classmate departed from main stream discourses looking at the recently controversial news about breast cancer screening. In my opinion, her analysis merits a post on this blog.

While the full version of the US Preventive Services Task Force is quite comprehensive, it gives no indication as to the type of deliberation and consensus method used. The contents of the article I am referring to can be found here: "Screening for Breast Cancer: U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Recommendation Statement. "

As a scientist, I think of myself as one of them too *smile*, I find that tit-bit somewhat disturbing. Why? Because while there is no way for all to know everything about every thing, there are definitely many reasons to validate or, invalidate such reports. Should we trust such a panel of experts? My personal verdict is still out.

Interestingly, I found out about the "Screening Policies won’t change - US Officials say" article shortly after the initial debate on this question. When I saw the title of the article, my mind put a "case closed" stamp on this rather quickly but, it probably shouldn’t be so in hind sight.

Whether the data is scientifically valid or not, a physician worth his/her salt will find time to review such reports to make informed decisions about recommending what and, to whom. So many factors will influence a decision for or, against mammograms in this case. It heavily depends on the patient. As an example, the DELPHI method, modified or not, will likely never bring any one group to consensus on this item, not yet anyway. This is in fact, one of the biggest challenges that face the migration to EMR - Electronic Medical Records. You can read more about those problems here: "Implementing Electronic Medical Records ". I have first hand testimony on this effort. I attempted to help an Internal medicine friend with her small-practice EMR project. It was already a disaster by the time I was asked to contribute. Reading the article above from my hard copy, I ripped it out and gave it to her. I recommended she held off for a bit longer. The frustrations she experiences just aren’t worth the trouble at this time.

There is great merit to moving to such a platform nationwide, even world wide! It could become a very meaningful source of data, like in the case of the breast cancer debate. There would be some source of data to analyze. However, there are also significant draw backs.

It’s evident that the importance of breast cancer screening remains high since it is the number TWO leading cause of CANCER deaths among women. I read that lung cancer is the number one but, I'm told ovarian has the highest mortality rate. This is because its discovery is nearly always in stage three, the point of no return, usually. Ovarian gets no press because it affects a very small community of women in spite of its close-to-no-mercy status. Another fact to remember is that there are also instances of cancer in patients whose family history shows no trace of cancer at all. I know this first hand as well, unfortunately. Would there not have been reason to find this out sooner? Maybe some day, enough well-analyzed data will lead to such conclusions. For now, those relatively few cases will remain victims of unknown circumstances.

To me, this is a case scenario where a process like "Christakis's SDP" could truly make a difference. It would remove emotions and, hopefully politics, allowing for factual contributions from various sources of experts, and non-experts alike, to prevail.