Internet encyclopaedias go head to head
An expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule. The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around 4 inaccuracies; Britannica, about 3. (Note: Perhaps the ClinfoWiki has a future after all!)

HealthNex: IBMers and Friends On The Building Blocks of Connected Care: Electronic Health Records, Information-Based Medicine, e-Prescriptions, & The Integrated Healthcare Ecosystem
The mission of this blog is to drive discussion and collaboration on some of the key elements in a global, interconnected healthcare ecosystem: integrated electronic patient records, a new information infrastructure for improving the quality and efficiency of care, transforming treatment by marrying personal genomics with care. To spur the global conversation that will improve the quality of life for billions, a group of IBMers are leveraging the uniquely collaborative power of blogging. HealthNex contributors include many of IBM's thought leaders and experts who work with clients in all areas of healthcare and life science, including government and public policy, technology infrastructure, and with the full spectrum of healthcare providers.

AMIA 10x10 at OHSU -- Registration Deadline: February 16, 2005
The Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) at Oregon Health & Science University offers a Biomedical Informatics Distance Learning Course from the AMIA 10x10 Program.

Study Strengthens Link between Virus and Weight Gain
New study results bolster the controversial hypothesis that certain cases of obesity are contagious. Over the last 20 years, some research has suggested that certain strains of human and avian adenoviruses--responsible for ailments ranging from the chest colds to pink eye--actually make individuals build up more fat cells. Having antibodies to one strain in particular, so-called Ad-36, proved to correlate with the heaviest obese people, and in one study, pairs of twins differed in heft depending on exposure to that virus. (Note: How long will it be before we can use large clinical data warehouses to help confirm ideas like these?)

Assisting consumer health information retrieval with query recommendations
The Health Information Query Assistant (HIQuA) system suggests alternative/additional query terms related to the user's initial query that can be used as building blocks to construct a better, more specific query. The recommended terms are selected according to their semantic distance from the original query, which is calculated on the basis of concept co-occurrences in medical literature and log data as well as semantic relations in medical vocabularies.

Prospective evaluation of an internet-linked handheld computer critical care knowledge access system
An updateable handheld computer system is feasible as a means of point-of-care access to medical reference material and may improve clinical decision making. However, during the study, acceptance of the system was variable.

A comparison of graphical and textual presentations of time series data to support medical decision making in the neonatal intensive care unit.
In this experimental task, participants performed better when presented with a textual summary of the medical scenario than when it was presented as a set of trend graphs. If the necessary algorithms could be developed that would allow computers automatically to generate descriptive summaries of physiological data, this could potentially be a useful feature of decision support tools in the intensive care unit.