Here’s a great video of Karate expert Joe Eigo doing some acrobatics:

Matrix - For Real…joe Eigo - video powered by Metacafe

It’s interview time again for medical schools in the UK. In one of the threads on our medical school interviews forum, one of our forum members posted a link to this video…:-)

I’m doing some research into the various synchronous e-learning tools around.

Here’s a couple I’ve looked at so far:

Netmeeting: Free tool that comes with windows - click start, run, type in ‘conf’ to run. You can chat, have video, share the desktop and have a virtual whiteboard. It’s pretty good but I have had problems setting up the audio and connecting to a netmeeting server.

Breeze (Acrobat Connect Professional): Flash based web-conferencing tool. You can join a meeting by simply opening up the webpage where the meeting is being held. Has video-conferencing, chat, VOIP, and everything you’d need to synchronous learning. Subscriptions are fairly expensive though.

Web-Ex: Similar to Breeze but uses a proprietary plug-in which you have to download before joining the meeting. Again subscriptions are fairly expensive.

I’ll be trying out several more applications over the next few weeks. If anyone has any experience with synchronous e-learning tools, please post any suggestions in the comments.

In particular, I’m looking for opinions about Elluminate, Interwise, Live Meeting and Centra.

Goolge has posted it’s top search terms of 2006 in it’s annual Zeitgeist:

1. bebo
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia
7. video
8. rebelde
9. mininova
10. wiki

NB: Note that Google tinkers with these results to remove offensive and even common search terms. The results are also determined by growth and traffic and not just how many times they are typed into the search engine. For a more detailed explanation see the Google Blog.

Reports are circulating that some users are finding that their emails have been deleted from their Gmail accounts. A Google spokeswoman has sent this message to GigaOm:

Regretfully, a small number of our users — around 60 — lost some or all of their email received prior to December 18th. Once we found out about this issue, we worked day and night to confirm that only a few accounts were affected and to do whatever we could to restore as much of the users’ accounts as we could. We’ve also reached out to the people who were affected to apologize and to work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have. We know how important Gmail is to our users – we use it ourselves for our corporate email. We have extensive safeguards in place to protect email stored with Gmail and we are confident that this is a small and isolated incident.

Techcrunch also seem to have been contacted by the same person.

This story highlights the danger of relying on third parties for storing important information. If you have important emails stored on Gmail, I’d recommend forwarding them to your desktop email client or have some way of backing them up locally.

Robin Good posts a list of trends that he believes will become prominent in 2007.

Includes, video, online advertising and video-conferencing.

Via Jane Knight’s Blog.

Hansen Medical, a US based medical robotics company has raised $75M in it’s IPO. The company had previously raised over $50M from VCs.

Hansen make the ‘Sensei’ robotic catheter system. If you want to try out the system visit the 12th Annual Boston Atrial Fibrillation Symposium where you can get a ‘hands-on’ demonstration.

New bionic hand being shown off. It has five individually powered fingers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3681938.stm

The BBC is reporting that the government has agreed to give patients a veto on whether their records will be shared.

Previously the government were only offering the options to patients who would have experienced ’significant mental distress’ by their records being online. Now anyone will have the option to opt-out.

Read the story on the BBC website.

At the moment I’m looking into synchronous tools for e-learning applications. This means video-conferences, VOIP, etc.

Here’s a pretty neat application. Paste in a VOIP phone to your blog!

Try it out on the sidebar —>

Update - I’m removing the Wengo Vision plug in as it is causing significant delays to the page loading.