DundeeChest 3.0

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The study guide for your microbiology and pathology tutorials is now available here.

Please be patient during this period of transition....

Like the North Korean Government we are undergoing a regime change.

We will have to take the site offline for a short period.

We need to password protect some of the content due to copyright issues (mostly the downloadable lectures) and to do this involves moving to another server and a lot of other technical jiggery pokery that is beyond me.

We hope to do this tomorrow morning while you are all in lectures.

The site may look different and some of the links may not work in the first few days after the move, but the core material of interest to you – posts, comments, questions, timetables and downloads, should still be available.

The original website will hold a link to the new one.

To access protected material you will only have to use your University of Dundee username and password.

Welcome to the brave new world (which will look like the old one, but with increased security).

We’ve made the corrections to the diagram in the ‘Alveolar Air’ section of this week’s online ITA resource on basic sciences.  The updated version is now live in Blackboard and the latest pdf version is also here on Dundee Chest.

It’s been brought to my attention that there is yet more formative assessment for you all to get stuck into. The iCAST (interactive clinical anatomy and skills teaching) online modules are on blackboard now and there are 5 packages starting with the normal findings and examination. They are all designed to integrate the anatomy with the clinical examination in a normal or pathological chest. I’ve had a look at the first one on examination and normal function and it’s a really good package which goes into a bit more detail than we have time to cover in the clinical skill sessions. The other packages cover various disease processes and will come in handy in the coming weeks as we cover the system more fully. I can’t link them into DundeeChest directly because of password and coding malarky but I will give you a roadmap to find your way to them

Click on “Teaching Materials” on the left hand side

Then on “Formative Assessment” in the bottom left hand corner

Then on “Phase 2”

Then on “Year 2 Respiratory”

Then on “iCAST Normal 2010-11” (or whichever you fancy)

You will be greeted with a long page of confusing text but not far from the bottom is where you will find the first one on normal function and structure.

Simples eh?

Some of you have been asking what an RSS is feed after yesterday’s introductory lecture when we suggested you might want to subscribe to Dundee Chest’s RSS feed. Hopefully this post will go some way to letting you now what this bit of techno babble is all about.

With so much information on the web and everyone seeming to be busier and busier RSS feeds are a way to help you manage and access the information you’re interested in.  So what is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary.  It’s essentially a feed of information which may be a headline, a summary or full text of information published on the web.  Websites like BBC News, the Guardian, the BMJ, SIGN, blogs, video sharing sites and most academic journals now distribute their content via RSS feeds.   This is all good news because it means that we can subscribe to these RSS news feeds using an RSS newsreader. Whenever you see the RSS icon (shown here to the left) on a website or on the address bar in your web browser, this indicates that the site has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to.  If you subscribe to these feeds it means that you can retrieve all the latest information from the sites you’re interested in dynamically in one place rather than having to trudge from site to site to see if there’s any new content. This video video put together by Sarah Horrigan of Nottingham Trent University gives you a helpful overview of RSS.

There are different ways to subscribe to RSS feeds.  You can subscribe to them in your web browser, i.e. in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Flock, Safari etc.  This is fine but if you use different computers you might want to consider using a web-based news reader which you can access anytime you are on the web.  One option as outlined in Sarah’s video is Google Reader, another is Netvibes.  You can take a look at a Netvibes page that I’ve put together with some RSS feeds relating to some respiratory journals and organisations.  With Netvibes you can create your own personal pages of RSS feeds and also share pages publicly and embed images, and widgets for sites like Facebook, for searching sites like Google, PubMed etc.  The page I’ve linked to from this post includes a widget which allows you to search the BMJ (thanks to Anne Marie Cunningham at Cardiff for creating and sharing this).

I subscribe to well over 100 RSS feeds across a whole range of work and personal related interests.  Using an RSS reader saves me a lot of time, there’s no way I would have time to visit all these sites.  I check my reader and look at the headlines and can quite quickly see what looks interesting and what I want to take a closer look at.  Why not give RSS a try yourself and start start subscribing to some feeds from your favourite websites, including Dundee Chest!  If you need any help to get started post a comment and I’ll follow up with you.  If it would be helpful I could also record a short screencast tutorial showing some of the options re RSS readers and how to get started,

Now I have an iPad, I have invested in the WordPress iPad App. So now I can update the site from anywhere.

It’s the future. Web 4.0

Alternatively, it will tell you what the weather is like out at the smoking shelter...

The Department of Health is trying to prove that although it can spend more money than the GNP of a small African nation on a dysfunctional patient database, it is up to speed with the world of mobile technology.  They have produced an iPhone app to help patients quit smoking and surprisingly it, well, actually works (as an App I mean, I couldn’t attest to its impact). There are prominent hints and tips about kicking the habit and a few nice scary facts (in red, no less) to try and keep the underlying fear factor above the “can’t be arsed” threshold.  By far the best feature however is the timer that starts from the second you quit and then tracks how much money you have saved. If nothing else I recommend non-smokers to download it and start the counter for that nice warm smug feeling you get when you see how much of your cash hasn’t gone up in smoke.  I will have to restrain myself from shoving it in the faces of smokers and laughing though….

Doh!, indeed.

As ever, the best piece of writing (in my humble opinion) from over the weekend comes from the “Bad Science” blog.  Ben Goldacre’s mind is hardwired for statistics, and this week he has turned it to the oft touted health benefits of smoking, and in particular, protection against Alzheimers.  He discusses a recently published systematic review which – surprise surprise (and I’m sure I’m not spoiling it for anyone here – hey? what? smokings bad! You don’t say) – shows that the risk of alzheimers is increased in smokers.  The really interesting part however, if you are into this sort of thing, is the analysis of papers where the researchers were associated with the Tobacco industry. Now that is a surprise I won’t spoil.