Notes
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Vadlo is a new search engine that's different in two ways:
- Vadlo is geared towards the vertical market -- and it only searches content related to biology research related information.
- Vadlo doesn't really look at just pages -- it indexes five categories of documentation -- these are Protocols, Online Tools, PowerPoints, Databases, and Software
I found their PowerPoint search quite amazing -- and asked the folks at Vadlo about their new search engine. While the Vadlo user-base is growing rapidly, the team at Vadlo is focused on developing the content. Here's a statement that the Vadlo Scientists sent to me to put up on the MedicinePPT site:
"We believe PowerPoint presentations are very useful tools -- more than they are recognized as such. A teacher preparing a lecture, an executive preparing for a business meeting, a clinician reporting a case study, or a scientist preparing for the departmental seminar can get a lot of angles on the subject matter by quickly looking at similar presentations and refine her/his own accordingly.
"The Vadlo index is built on the PowerPoints which have relevance to the following, everything else is filtered out.
- Biology Research - Organisms, Genes, Pathways, Mechanisms etc.
- Academia - Grants & Funding, Publication, Interviewing etc.
- Bioinformatics - Statistics, Software, Methods etc.
- Biology Education - College level Biology lectures, Biodiversity, Environment etc.
- Medical/Clinical - Diseases, Conditions, Case Studies, Intervention, Drugs etc.
- Library - Journals, Open-access, Peer-review, Literature databases etc.
- Biotech/Pharma Business - Technology transfer, Patents, Products, Clusters etc.
"We do hope search-users realize that PowerPoints are not peer-reviewed material, nor supposed to be authentic reference. The use of these PowerPoints should be limited to quick approximate subject reference while getting presentation ideas. It would be quite important to find out the time-frame, focus, and source of the presentation before using it as a substantive source of information, if you must".
The Vadlo site also has a cool collection of medical cartoons that you can use in your PowerPoints freely.
Labels: medicine, powerpoint, vadlo
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Greg Friese, MS, NREMT-P is president of
Emergency Preparedness Systems LLC and a paramedic, educator, author, and outdoor enthusiast. To learn more and to receive rapid e-learning design and production tips subscribe to the
EPS blog at their site.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, Emergency Preparedness Systems LLC, and the training programs you create.Greg: I am the founder and president of Emergency Preparedness Systems LLC. EPS does four things:
- We create narrated multimedia Flash movies for emergency responders.
- We convert existing classroom training for online delivery.
- We design and deliver new lessons and curriculum for online delivery that honor student's knowledge, experience, and time.
- We teach our proven rapid e-learning for emergency responders production process to educators and training officers.
Our training programs for EMTs and paramedics, generally 25-30 minutes long, are used for continuing or refresher education. Since emergency responders work rotating shifts, it is very difficult for all employees to be in the training room together. Online lessons allow asynchronous delivery of the exact same content across multiple shifts and multiple stations. If users are called out for an emergency they can resume the training program when they return. Each lesson is approved by the Continuing Education Coordinating Board for EMS (
CECBEMS) so students know that it will be accepted for local, state, or national recertification requirements. Most EPS content is distributed through
CentreLearn.com and
RapidCE.com.
Geetesh: Why do you use PowerPoint as the starting point for the creation of these programs? And what else do you use to enhance and distribute these programs.Greg: We use PowerPoint for several reasons. First of all it is an excellent tool for us to storyboard a lesson. During initial production, each slide is given a working title and the script for the audio narration is written in the notes view. As production and editing progresses, notes for images, objects, and animations are added to the notes view. Once the script is finalized, slide production begins which includes a descriptive slide title and sub-title, insertion of images and objects, and animation formatting.
The final step is to convert the PowerPoint slides to Flash using
Articulate Presenter. The audio is inserted and synchronized with the PowerPoint slide animations. The end user watches a narrated Flash movie inside the Articulate Presenter player. They may not even be aware that they are watching a movie that was created with PowerPoint.
We also use another Articulate product called Engage to create and insert custom Flash learning objects into the PowerPoint. The Articulate Engage Interactions publish inside the Articulate Presenter movie.
Labels: articulate, medicine, online_presentations, powerpoint, training
Monday, April 28, 2008
Motifolio is a new site that provides a range of biomedical clip art -- these are available in topics like human and animal forms, cell, cell organelle, cell protein, nucleic acid, antibody, microorganism, labware, etc.
Most of the stuff is very affordable -- and they also have some free samples that you can download. Go to the
Motfolio site for more details and to explore their clip art collection.
Labels: art, biomedical, clip art, medicine
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Echo Swinford (pictured to the right) is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional). When she's not working on new media, she is answering almost all the questions on the PowerPoint newsgroup. Echo is also the co-author of
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit, published by Que. She also creates tons of presentations for the medical industry -- you can contact her for your presentation requirements through
her site: Echo's Voice.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, and the PowerPoint work you do in the medical industry.Well, I started working for a medical education communications company in 1997. The owner was considering outsourcing her slide work, but she was worried about quality control. I knew
my quality control was good in general, so I proposed that she let me create her slides. I didn’t tell her that I didn’t really know PowerPoint, so when she agreed, I had to learn it – and learn it fast!
I think my background in journalism and desktop publishing has really helped me with slide development, especially if you think of it as page layout on a large scale. I know that my proofreading skills are a definite plus, and the fact that I’m a bit of a math and puzzle geek sure hasn’t hurt!
Here I am, 11 years later, still developing presentations for a variety of industries. In the healthcare and medical education industry specifically, I do a lot of slide cleanup work, making presentations consistent and visible for conferences and meetings as well as developing collateral materials like scientific posters and syllabi. I also do a lot of promotional decks, speaker-led presentations, CME materials, and stand-alone enduring education modules that are distributed in a variety of ways. In addition, I can often be found with the production crew backstage at meetings, running speaker review or minding the presentation equipment. I love being self-employed, so I have the opportunity to do all of those things and more (like write PowerPoint books!).
Geetesh: What sets the presentations created for medicine to be different than conventional PowerPoints?Echo: Honestly, I don’t know that there
is such a thing as a “conventional” PowerPoint! PowerPoint is used in so many ways….
One thing common to many medical presentations, though, is the sheer amount of data-driven slides. That means lots of charts, lots of tables, and lots of really text-heavy slides. I find that the extreme mix of chart slides is always a challenge in medical presentations – more so than with what I see in other industries. For example, it’s not unusual for a medical presenter to want four or six very small charts on a slide, with the goal of comparing various studies or compounds at different stages. Therefore, understanding what point the speaker wants to make becomes imperative to the design of the slide. If you can eliminate or at least downplay the extraneous information, you can emphasize what’s important – what the audience should remember.
So, maybe after this four-chart slide, there’s a column chart. Then a line chart, then a pie chart, then a column chart with a trend line. Some have error bars, some don’t. Some slides have two or three or four charts, others have just one. The challenge is making all of these different charts look like a cohesive set, especially when the data varies so greatly. It’s also important to understand what types of charts show what types of data the best so you can advise your clients appropriately.
When you toss in text-heavy slides, it’s important for the presentation developer to understand what’s important and what can be moved into speaker notes or downplayed on the slide. Some text slides work better as tables, especially if the text has lots of numbers and specific data.
And then, of course, there’s always the struggle with where to place references, P-values, and acronym definitions, and it’s not unusual to have a
lot of
all of those on an individual slide! That extreme amount of “fine print” just isn’t as much of an issue in the presentations I work on for other industries. And finding some of the symbols used in medical presentations can be an adventure, too.
Labels: interview, medicine, powerpoint
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
If you like looking at medicine art, you'll love this new exposition site that looks at all nuances of the human heart. Hosted on the
Wellcome Collection site, which is a London based organization that brings to life the vision of Sir Henry Wellcome, this new heart exposition is a Flash montage of various small stories all related to the human heart.
But remember, spare enough time to get lost in the montage!
Labels: art, heart, medicine
Saturday, April 5, 2008
This is part of a continuous series of posts in which I will explore the fascinating relation between medicine and art. Most of these posts will contain plenty of links to resources with more info, and as far as possible, I'll try to include visual content as well.
We'll start by exploring a little known facet of Aristotle's personality -- it's not a very well known fact that Aristotle was a anatomist -- his philosophical attributes often overshadow his other capabilities.
Aristotle has been credited as being the first anatomist although none of his
anatomical drawings and biological work has survived. He drew the
distinction between nerves and tendons -- and explored the
relations between organs quite accurately.
Labels: anatomy, aristotle, art
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Olivier Gryson is the Internet Project Director at
Servier International, an independent pharmaceutical company based in France. Their medical art is an offshoot of their existing business which they offer as free downloads for non-commercial use. In this exclusive conversation, Olivier discusses Servier's medical art and its evolution and usage.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the purpose and evolution of Servier Medical Art.Olivier: The aim of Servier Medical Art is to provide healthcare professionals with a valuable tool to help them create their PowerPoint presentations. Indeed, when you want to illustrate a specific medical mode of action or an experiment in a lab, it is very difficult to find the image that exactly suits your needs.
Our idea was to propose a construction set made of basic elements that can be combined each other to create more complex scenes. For example, to illustrate a pharmacological mode of action, you can combine an empty cell, with a nucleus, receptors, channels, and any other intracellular component by a simple “copy” and “paste”.
We launched Servier Medical Art at the occasion of the congress of the European Society of Cardiology in September 2005 in Stockholm. More than 30,000 cardiologists were attending the congress.
At this time, we were looking for an innovative service to animate our booth. It met a great success.
We then used Servier Medical Art during other international and national congresses or events in many countries worldwide. (Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Turkey, …)
Geetesh: What's unique and different about the Servier Medical Art collection. Can you share some trivia about their usage.Olivier: First of all, our images are available as PowerPoint files. Using them only requires “copy” and “paste”. It was very important for us to propose a service that is easy to use. Indeed, most of our visitors do not have specific skill in computers.
They are true vector images. We work with specialized scientific illustrators who produce Adobe Illustator files. Images are rescalable without loss of quality.
More than 2500 images are available for download. Furthermore, doctors can submit their suggestions online. We enrich our image bank almost every week.
Servier Medical Art is free of charge. Our objective is to be a source of reference for any healthcare professional who would like to illustrate a PowerPoint presentation. Basically, we precise on the site that images are available for educational purpose only, but we are often contacted by companies, universities or public organization who want to use our images in books or training programs. We often grant them the permission providing that they add Servier in the credits.
Recently we were amused to discover that our files were also spreading via peer-to-peer networks. We don’t think that it is the best way to get our image bank. Indeed, Servier Medical Art is in permanent evolution.
Our site is the only up-to-date source to get the files. Furthermore, we do not ask for a specific registration to get the images. "You enjoy the images, you download them free of charge and that’s all!".
Note: This interview originally appeared on Indezine.com -- here's a
link to the post...Labels: interview, medicine, powerpoint, visuals
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