Anousheh Ansari, the first female space tourist is blogging from the International Space Station. Her posts are full of enthusiasm and hope for better international collaboration. She even has the US and Iranian flags side by side on her space suit!

There’s also some great videos including a Ham Radio conversation she makes with school kids from Coloma Junior High School and her farewell message from the ISS.

If you are interested in the world of tech, you should definitely check out the new Scoble Show on Podtech. He has been videoing tech luminaries for a long time at Microsoft and he’s back at it in his new job at Podtech.

(Also check out his blog here)

Bill Crounse has a new Audio-cast up about the benefits for healthcare professionals of using Windows Mobile devices.

The program has 3 experts from the Windows Mobile healthcare world inlcuding Dr Edward Zabrek from PPC mag, Hemang Patel fro Microsoft and Robert Quinn from Epocrates.

It’s a really interesting presentation about how mobile devices are gaining more capability and increasing in popularity amoungst doctors.

Check it out here.

Starting this week, applications are open for the Ali
Abdulla Al-Ubaydli™ Scholarships for Mobile Medical Computing™. This is
an international scholarship program sponsored by Epocrates and the five
selected winners will each receive:

* $1,000 Scholarship.
* Mentoring and one-on-one tutorials with Dr Mo Al-Ubaydli.
* Publication of their work in the Mobile Medical Computing Reviews journal
* Press campaigns by Epocrates and Dr Mo Al-Ubaydli.
* One year free subscription to Epocrates Essentials all-in-one mobile
reference to drugs, diseases and diagnostics.

http://www.handheldsfordoctors.com/scholarship

Ambulatorycomputing.com has a great article on choosing an EMR system with a list of recommendations for anyone choosing a new EMR system:

http://ambulatorycomputing.com/blog/?p=67

Amazon have just released what I would consider to be a pretty revolutionary new service: Amazon Unbox.

The idea is that you can buy or rent films in the same way you can buy songs from iTunes. You simple pay for the film and you can download it for viewing on your PC or Pocket PC.

I’ve just tried to buy my first film and have got the following error message:

We’re sorry!
An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we’re working to resolve the problem as soon as possible. If you were trying to make a purchase, please check Your Account to confirm that the order was placed. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Grrr.. never mind - I’ll try again later. Bit dissappointed though!

Try for yourself at www.unbox.com

UPDATE: Just read the small print: US customers only!

The eJHI (electronic Journal of Health Informatics Inaugural Issue is online here.

Table of Contents:

Editorial
Editor’s Introduction to this Journal: Advancing Health Informatics and the Use of Information, Knowledge and Communication Technologies in Health Care
Evelyn J.S. Hovenga
Guest Editor’s Introduction to Special Issue on Health Data Mining
Jim Warren, John Roddick, Geoff Webb, Graham Williams

Papers
Finding Anomalies in Medicare
Robert A. Pearson, Wayne Murray, Thomas Mettenmeyer
Epidemiological data mining of cardiovascular Bayesian networks
Charles R. Twardy, Ann E. Nicholson, Kevin B. Korb, John McNeil
Frequency-based Rare Events Mining in Administrative Health Data
Jie Chen, Huidong Jin, Hongxing He, Christine M. O’Keefe, Ross Sparks, Graham Williams, Damien McAullay, Chris Kelman
Inferring ‘Therapeutic States’ of Patients from Community Electronic Prescribing Data
Jim Warren, Jan Stanek, Svetla Gadzhanova, Ivan Iankov, Gary Misan
Towards Role Based Hypothesis Evaluation for Health Data Mining
Anna Shillabeer, John F. Roddick
Research within the Privacy Regulations: Problems and Solutions for Database Custodians
Ea Mulligan, Wendy A. Rogers, Annette Braunack-Mayer

Interesting article on TechNewsWorld covering the latest advances in Robotic Surgery including:

• Robotic surgery 62 feet underwater 3.2 miles off the coast as a practice run for surgery in space
• Telesurgery for rural patients
• Less invasive robotic prostatectomies

Read the full article here.

Via Future Health IT.

After a suggestion by Ves Dimov I’ve just created a new page at Wikipedia for collecting medical podcasts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_podcasts

If you know of any medical podcasts not included in the list, please add them.

UPDATE: This page has been deleted by the Wikipedians so I’ll just try and maintain the list in my blog post - Medical Podcast List.

Anyone with a new Palm or Pocket PC (Windows Mobile) PDA always wants to get stuck in and load it up with all the free software they can get their hands on. Of course, most of that software gets deleted but some are gems that will stay the course.

Here’s a list of some free medical PDA software apps that are particularly good:

1. Epocrates (Free Version)

This is a very popular drug database. It used to be just US drug names but they have recently released several international versions including UK and France.

2. Diagnosaurus

Differential diagnosis software. Search by disease, symptom or organ system.

3. Johns Hopkins Antibiotics Guide

Palm Only

This is a handheld version of the Johns Hopkins POC-IT Antibiotic (ABX) Guide

5. NLM Mobile

Several software applications from the National Library of Medicine.

Includes:

• MD on Tap - search Medline on your PDA
• PubMed for Handhelds Website
• AIDSinfo’s PDA Tools
• Wireless System for Emergency Responders (WISER)
• NCBI Bookshelf

6. ACC Pocket Guidelines

The complete set of Pocket Guideline materials adapted and enhanced for mobile devices from the full text version of ACC/AHA Practice Guidelines.

7. MedMath

Palm Only

Medical Calculator for Palm OS PDAs. Designed for rapid calculation of equations used in adult internal medicine.

8. Archimedes

Free medical calculator from Skyscape. Useful if you use a Windows Mobile device and can’t use MedMath.

9. EBM 2 Go

EBM tools, databases and guidelines.