The Samurai Journal of Radiology

Sipping from a firehose -- that's what it feels like to keep up with the medical literature these days.

Even an info nerd like myself can't keep up with all of it. However, I do have a few online tools that make my own personal information overload a lot easier to deal with.

NetNewsWire

I've used this awesome newsreader program for years. It currently grabs over 100 newsfeeds and converts them into what I like to call The Samurai Journal of Radiology™. This journal caters to my own peculiar tastes, and includes not just radiology articles, but also a fair amount of infogeek stuff and a comics section.

NetNewsWire is a Mac only program, but shares a lot of features and synchronizes with Google Reader, a non-denominational newsreader that I also use, especially on my iPhone.

These two programs do the following really, really well:

1. they insure that I will at least scan the titles of all the latest radiology articles in my field
   
2. they make it easy to read my literature at any level of granularity I desire: title only, title and abstract only, or full article
   
3. they keep track of what I've read and what I've not read
   

The main downside of NetNewsWire or Google Reader is that they make it way too easy for Type A people like me to become a newsfeed slut. Even though I've trimmed my feed list way back, I still have over 100 feeds that I somehow can't bear to delete. Sigh....

HubMed

Just about all of the radiology journals now provide RSS feeds on their websites. Radiology and the American Journal of Roentgenology also provide subspecialty feeds (such as just neuro or just musculoskeletal), keeping my reading list blissfully free of all barium articles.

However, there are some parts of my specialty that are more fascinating than others, and HubMed helps me keep up with them. Let's say that I have a special interest in one particular dysplasia: the bird-headed dwarf syndrome of Seckel. Not surprisingly, Radiology and AJR tend to have pretty spotty coverage of this rare syndrome.

However, if I type in the term "bird-headed dwarf" into HubMed's search window, it generates a special newsfeed for me on that very topic:

http://www.hubmed.org/feeds/atom.cgi?q=bird-headed%20dwarf

When I point my newsreader at this feed, it will always show me the latest 20 articles on this topic from PubMed, from all of the zillion medical journals in its database.

Very cool.

Fever

For the past week, I've been using a very cool new newsreader called Fever.

Fever, unlike conventional newsreaders, actually works better when you fill it up with a zillion newsfeeds. When you import your list of feeds into Fever, you first sort them into two piles:

1. stuff that you like to read every day
   
2. stuff that you read once in a while

Fever calls these 2 categories respectively "Kindling" and "Sparks". It then distills from them topics that are hot enough to be worth reading using the following principles:

1. if only one person writes about a topic, it's cold
   
2. if two people write about it, it's warm
   
3. if three or people more write about it, it's hot

The greater the number of posts on a topic, the hotter it is.

The downside: You'll need access to a server running Unix Apache, PHP and MySQL in order to install Fever. You don't have to be an alpha geek to get it up and running, but it doesn't hurt.

The upside: Fever has so far done a pretty good job of spotting gems that I would have otherwise missed. Well worth the $30 it cost and the few hours of time I spent configuring myserver and installing it. This alpha geek gives it two thumbs up.

The Fascist Octopus Has Sung Its Swan Song

Jeepers, two George Orwell posts in two days.

The lurid phrase above comes from
Politics and the English Language, a short but excellent essay by Orwell on the art of writing clearly in English. He has particular censure for buzzwords.

This essay is from 1946, but contains many wise words for anyone putting quill to parchment or post to blog.

A summary in Orwell's words:

But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I especially like rule vi, and plan to (ab)use it with great profligacy.

(via 43 Folders)

George Orwell, Blogger

Jeebus -- as if the competition for eyeballs in the blogosphere weren't already Darwinian enough. Now mere mortal bloggers will have to duke it out with the likes of George Orwell.

The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008, Orwell’s domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 until October 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.

Although his grasp of internet lingo and issues may lag behind the times a bit, Orwell's observations on life and politics during a difficult period of world history should be well worth following.

(via The Loom)