Bioethics' New Media: Online Streaming Video

Just in - a perfect little distraction for a bit of non-work-like-bioethics-surfing during the holiday break. It is called 'Yahoo! Video', and according to MIT's Daily Recycler, which tracks the most cited links among all three million english language blogs, it is literally everywhere.

Why is it such a big deal? Because Yahoo! Video allows you to search from millions, yes MILLIONS, of video clips all over the internet in order to turn up clips in your area of interest. Beyond "ego searching" for clips in which you appear, the teaching and research uses for Yahoo! Video - and those engines that follow it - are expansive and interesting. Just think about all of the ways in which you might use a tool like this and you'll begin to see why, like Google Scholar, which in my opinion will revolutionize scholarly information, this is a major technological breakthrough for our field. For example, here is a search for video with stem cells in it. - GM

Move Over, ISI Citation Index

Off topic a bit, but very important news for anyone who uses the web in research for scholarly papers and books: for years now, the ISI indices, a costly system of interrelated citation databases that track thousands of publications in dozens of disciplines, have been pretty much the only way to track how papers are cited and used. Many universities actually grade faculty on the basis of a "citation count" from ISI, and journals (like ours) make claims about their influence on the basis of similar ISI searches. Enter Google Scholar. This service will literally revolutionize the tracking of the lifetimes and reach of articles, because it at a minimum provides a much, much wider scan of articles than does ISI, and the implication of Google providing this service is that it can be integrated into the Internet at large. It is pretty easy to speculate that if John Dewey were alive, he would mark this event among the more important possible links between the scholarly world and public discourse. According to MIT's Blogdex, the best ranking of "who is visiting what on the Internet," scholar.google.com was the single most visited site on the entire Internet today. Needless to say, bioethics journals and their publications show up all over this thing, which is still in beta by the way, and it will be fun to pick around. If you find anything (after you do your vanity search) let us know.

Where I Want to Be Ill

The Medical Center of North Texas has wireless internet in its facilities. All the better to bug your doctor about that favorite alternative medicine website. Just take your laptop right into the doc's office and you can show her your sites live. Anyone want to bet on how long this lasts? On the other hand waiting times won't be such an issue anymore for wireless mavens...