Education Meanderings

If you have an interest to work in the health industry, then you can achieve this through degree programs in many health areas, such as anenvironmental health, public health, health promotion, or health education.  

This web page provides help if you want to look for online and distance learning health degree programs that will prepare you for a career in health and medical professions.

Read more at: http://onlineanddistancelearning.com/health-degree-programs

 A project being implemented under a Global Fund grant will improve Zimbabwe’s health information systems by providing Internet connection infrastructure for 82 urban and rural sites. The Zimbabwe project is just one of many similar projects around the world where modern communications technology is being used to enhance data collection.

The project is part of a Round 8 health systems strengthening grant to Zimbabwe for which the principal recipient (PR) is the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The project is designed to improve the availability of timely quality health data, which is critical for planning, implementation and monitoring of health programmes in Zimbabwe.

Read more at: http://africahealthitnews.com/blogs/zimbabwe-uses-technology-to-improve-data-collection/

WordPress’s CEO claims the company got a bump in imported blog posts from Tumblr Sunday on the news of the Yahoo buy.

Mullenweg (pictured) wrote on his blog that WordPress received 72,000 imports during one hour on Sunday, versus the usual 400 to 600 posts. He added that WordPress is friendly with Tumblr, and the two use each other’s services.

Princeton scientists developed a “bionic” ear that can hear radio frequencies human can’t, by using 3D-printed materials combined with special electronics.

McAlpine said he and his research team basically wanted to ask the question of whether they could grow an organ in a petri dish, with the electronics intertwined into the organ as it grew. Their successful project used a $1,000 3D printer to print the cells with the electronics (see video). The “ear” was then put in a dish so the cells could culture for 10 weeks into cartilage tissue.

You can watch these bionic ears listen to Beethoven: http://mashable.com/2013/05/24/3d-printed-ear-princeton/

In the afternoon of May 20th, a monster tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, near Oklahoma City.  The twister, with winds of at least 200 mph, traveled for 20 miles, leaving a two-mile-wide path of destruction, flattening homes, smashing vehicles, and killing at least 24 people, including nine children. 

See 38 photos that show the terrible power of this tornado: http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/05/photos-of-tornado-damage-in-moore-oklahoma/100518/ ;

The costs to a person who does not know when to quit can be enormous. In economics it’s known as sunk cost fallacy, though the costs are more than financial. While we recognize the fallacy almost immediately in others, it’s harder to see in ourselves. Why?

There are several powerful, largely unconscious psychological forces at work. We may throw good money after bad or waste time in a dead-end relationship because we haven’t come up with an alternative; or because we don’t want to admit to our friends and family, or to ourselves, that we were wrong. But the most likely culprit is this innate, overwhelming aversion to sunk costs.

Read more at: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/how-to-walk-away/275833/

[…] mental health apps, whether they’re games, symptom checkers or coping tools, are quick and accessible at the moment you need them, perfect as a complement to (not a replacement for) professional help.

For example, Game designer Jane McGonigal created SuperBetter as a means to cope during a slow and arduous recovery from a concussion. She designed it to make players mentally, physically, emotionally and socially stronger by building personal resilience through game challenges.

Read more about these six mental health apps at: http://www.chron.com/news/health/article/Stay-head-strong-with-mental-health-apps-4543585.php

She may be only 18, but Brittany Wenger built a custom, cloud-based artificial neural network that can help with leukemia diagnosis.

The 18-year-old student from Sarasota, Fla. built a custom, cloud-based “artificial neural network” to find patterns in genetic expression profiles to diagnose patients with an aggressive form of cancer called mixed-lineage leukemia (MLL). Simply put, this means Wenger taught the computer how to diagnose leukemia by creating a diagnostic tool for doctors to use.

Since artificial neural networks are programs that model the brain’s neurons and their interconnections, Wenger told Mashable that they “can actually learn to detect things that transcend human knowledge.”

Read more at: http://mashable.com/2013/05/21/computer-leukemia-diagnosis/

Kmart is on a roll with its ads.

The discount chain is promoting a deal on gas with a funny new video called Big Gas Savings. If you don’t realize the joke already, just say “big gas” out loud a couple times — and you’ll get it. In the video, several customers ogle over the “really big gas discounts.” One man tells his wife it solves her “big gas problem.” She agrees, but gives him some cause for concern when she stares longingly at the “big gas man” standing in front of the “big gas truck.”

Watch the video at: http://mashable.com/2013/05/23/kmart-big-gas-ad/

See on Scoop.it - Transformations in Business

A visual infographic from the Financial Times highlighting the effect of big data on the business of the future.