How-To: Maintain a correct posture while working on your laptop

Adult or Child Laptop Use at Home, Work or Classroom.



Mobile or Smart Phone Use while Driving, Traveling or on the Move.

Link via Digital Inspiration.

The 10-year rule: you must persevere with learning and practising for 10 years before making breakthrough

From The Lancet:

Hard work is required: “Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration” - Thomas Edison

Late in life, Charles Darwin made the same point in a letter to his son: “I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things, and a most perplexing problem it is.—Many men who are very clever,—much cleverer than the discoverers—never originate anything. As far as I can conjecture, the art consists in habitually searching for causes or meaning of everything which occurs.” Darwin was a relentless student of nature from 1828 until the few weeks in late 1838 when he suddenly perceived the mechanism of evolution by natural selection.

There can be no doubt that geniuses have worked habitually and continually. Darwin produced 160 published papers, in addition to celebrated books and a vast correspondence. Albert Einstein had 240 publications, Sigmund Freud 330, Henri Poincaré 500 papers and 30 books; Edison was the owner of 1093 patents, lodging an average of one patent every 2 weeks of his adult life. In the arts, J S Bach on average composed 20 pages of finished music per day, while Pablo Picasso created more than 20,000 works.

Experience is essential: “Where observation is concerned, chance favours only the prepared mind” - Louis Pasteur

The 10-year rule states that a person must persevere with learning and practising a craft or discipline for about 10 years before he or she can make a breakthrough. The initial scientific evidence for the rule came from studies in the 1960s and 1970s of chess-players, who take 10 years and more to become masters of the game. Then it was found to apply to Olympic swimmers and concert pianists.

Hardly any genius in history—not even Leonardo da Vinci—seems to have short-cut the long and gradual path to creative breakthroughs.

References

Perspiration, inspiration, and the 10-year rule. The Lancet, Volume 376, Issue 9751, Pages 1458 - 1459, 30 October 2010.

Twitter comments:

@equijada: the ability to infer disparate ideas into one is the 1%. The rest is just salty water. 10-yrs, 10,000 hrs -> playing w/ observations

Beware of online "filters" that hide the information you need

Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles", TEDtalksDirector, May 2, 2011: As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

Similarly, you don't want Twitter to replace your RSS reader - always get to the original source. When you see a medical news item on Reuters or WebMD, don't stop there - always go to the original journal article. More often that not you will find that the results reported in the original article are a quite a bit more nuanced and less certain than the layman language, SEO-optimized headline that you first encountered. Always go to the source. If you write a blog, always link to the source.


The circle of online information (full version) (click to enlarge).

Related:

For doctors: How to be a Twitter star in two easy steps

Polish Your Online Image, AAMC Advises Medical Students and Residents

How can you make sure future program directors find only the best “you” online? Follow these suggestions when using social media services such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs:

- Consider carefully what you’re posting
- Avoid posting patient stories
- Periodically search yourself
- Check the photos in which you’re “tagged”
- Define funny - Humor can be hard to interpret
- Choose your friends carefully
- Restrict your privacy settings

References:

Careers in Medicine. AAMC, 2010 (PDF).

Image source: OpenClipArt.org, public domain.

'Nodding disease' - Sudan and Uganda's incurable child disease with unknown cause

AlJazeeraEnglish: Hundreds of children in southern Sudan have died from a mysterious illness that they have called the "nodding disease". The mentally and physically disabling disease, which has no cure yet and affects only children, first emerged in Sudan in 1980s.

"We have no clue as what is causing this. It's like a detective novel and a murder mystery, because it's fatal," says a tropical disease specialist from UNICEF.

Bizarrely, the seizures occur when the sufferers start to eat, or when it is particularly cold. When a bowl of sorghum is placed in front of Susannah, the "nodding" begins almost immediately, and stop when she has finished eating.

Some villagers say the disease is a curse, others blame the country's long civil war and suspect that government forces have been dropping chemical weapons.

93% of those surveyed are infected with a parasitic worm which causes Onchocerciasis (also known as river blindness). However, the level of infection among children without "nodding" is 63%. The worm is carried by black flies which breed near fast-flowing rivers.



A team of CDC experts conducts a multifaceted investigation in northern Uganda. An Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer tells the story about Nodding Disease, a neurologic syndrome which is devastating to afflicted children.

References:

'Nodding disease' hits Sudan. BBC, 2003.

African outbreak stumps experts: childhood nodding syndrome. Nature, 2011.
Mysterious nodding disease debilitates children - CNN, 2012.

Top 10 Most Prescribed Medications

According to a report from the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, the top 10 most-prescribed drugs in the U.S. are:

- hydrocodone (combined with acetaminophen)
- simvastatin
- lisinopril
- levothyroxine sodium
- amlodipine besylate
- omeprazole
- azithromycin
- amoxicillin
- metformin
- hydrochlorothiazide

The top 10 best-selling drugs are:

- Lipitor, $7.2 billion
- Nexium, 6.3 billion
- Plavix
- Advair Diskus, $4.7 billion
- Abilify
- Seroquel
- Singulair, $4.1 billion (it will be generic in 2012)
- Crestor
- Actos
- Epogen

References:
The 10 Most Prescribed Drugs. WebMD.

Image source: Wikipedia, public domain.

Cell phones and your brain - CNN video

From CNN:

Do cell phones cause brain cancer? It may be too early to say for sure. The latency period or time between exposure and recognition of a tumor is around 20 years, sometimes longer. And, cell phone use in the U.S. has been popular for only around 15 years. Back in 1996, there were 34 million cell phone users. Today there are 9-10 times as many.

Interphone is a multinational study designed to try to answer this question. The data showed people who used a cell phone 10 years or more doubled the risk of developing a glioma, a type of brain tumor.

References:
Cell phones, brain tumors and a wired earpiece. CNN.
Cell phones and your brain. CNN.

Mobile phones may increase cancer risk - list of DOs and DONT's of mobile phone use (scroll down the page). Daily Mail, 2011.

How much radiation does your phone emit? Comprehensive chart by CNN http://goo.gl/l0l5q