Digital Literacy: Find Whatever You Need for Medicine

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esterday I received an email from a friend. He asked about information to do a protocol. He told me he did his research for information in Google, but this was not useful. I think it was not useful because he did not know how how look for the information he needs that is in Google, and also because not all the information is there. Theassumption "if it is not in Google, it does not exist" is false. That is one reason I think digital literacy is really important. Today I am going to leave some links really useful to those people who are trying to get into a residency program. One presentation on PowerPoint, a list of questions you will be asked and some you can ask, and finally three videos of residency interviews. Enjoy them.

      What do the program directors look in a resident?
      General Competencies for a Resident:
      patient care,
      medical knowledge,
      practice-based learning and improvement, and
      interpersonal and communication skills,
      professionalism,
      systems-based practice.
      source: Outcome Project

      Material to READ:
      Smart Strategies for Successful Residency Interviews UCLA
      Interview Planning. Interview Questions: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

      List of Questions:
      List 1
      List 2
      List 3

      Interview VIDEOS:
      University of Texas: Bad Interview and Good Interview Examples
      University of Washington: Preparing for Interviews
      University of Minnesota: Residency Interview Workshop

Lawrence Lessig at Google

I think that to have a better idea of the changes the Web 2.0 is causing, we have to learn some principles like creative commons, collaboration, sharing, etc. By the moment, the only way you can learn those things is using the internet, because I do not see that a politic of education exists with respect to these topics, while a complete machinery to teach about copyright does. I am almost two years in the United States and I am taking classes at a Community College, and something they teach to you in each class is, "no plagiarism" . If you take an English class you will listen about copyright almost in any class, and all the books you use repeat the same thing. But nobody talks about principles like Creative Commons, collaboration, sharing, etc. That is the reason today I post this video "Authors@Google: Lawrence Lessig". He talks about copyrights, what we can do,what is allowed, who has the control, culture and Google. But mainly he explains what is RO (read only internet) and what is RW (read and write internet). He presents good examples of how, buy and consume control us, how merchants just allow us to buy their products, how do they create more market, more control about how to use, control and consume culture. For example, we buy any song we want on iTunes store, but only to play it on an Ipod. Therefore, now increasingly power to control us exists with copyright. Hence, what freedom do we have?
Fortunately, a read and write culture is born. Create, Share and Creativity have become important for business. Re-edit as you want, be free to do what you want. Nowadays, we can talk and realize about the Power of REMIX culture.

Recommended Links:
Are we a Free Culture?
Are We part of the Human Lobotomy?
What is Creative Commons?

Searching the Internet: Life Beyond Google

Is it everything in Google?

I use Google a lot, because with my e-mail account can access many different services like notebook, blogger, video, images, page creator, reader, etc. that with a little bit of imagination complement each others and make my life easy, a little dependent, but more efficient in compensation. But is it every thing in Google? the answer is NOT, not all is in google. Google is just the tip of the iceberg, there is a lot of information ( in many different formats) that we can access through other search engines. But Google is so good that some times we forget that, and sometimes we assume that when we don't find something in google that just do not exist on the web, what is not true. That's why is so important to learn how to search for the information we want. It is important for us to become familiar with medical databases. Here I just leave a list of some of them, you have to spend some time looking at them, to become familiar with the information you will find in them.
Medical Databases list:
STAT!Ref Online
Promedicum
PubMedCentral
McGraw-Hill's Access Medicine
Medscape
Wiley InterScience
TRIP Database
Thieme-connect
Taylor and Francis Group
Springerlink
ScienceDirect
ProQuest
Welcome to Ovid
Merck Medicus
Pub Med
MDCONSULT
McGraw-Hill's AccessScience
Biblioteca Cochrane Plus
HINARI Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative
HighWire Press
Emedicine
Doyma
Ebsco Journal Portal
BMJ Journals Online
Blackwell Synergy
BioMed Central

What happened with Google Print Project

I belong to the group of people who can not buy an original book, because they are too expensive, so I always try to find for good information in different ways, I always try to get full access to a book, and internet allow me that, in such a way that I think that information belong to those who find and use it. But to download book from internet is time consuming then it is an inconvenient to look in each of them to find what you want. And even when It is easier to download the book from many different servers than buy the book. It is more helpful to have a search engine to look in many different books at a time, is it possible to do that? the answer is yes, and that is what Google print project look for until is was stopped. The information for all is still a dream, even when most of the books are not under copyright law, why don't we use this information, we don't have access to these information, why when the technology to do that exist we do not use it, maybe because we don't know we can do that, so they take advantage of our lack of knowledge and do not release the information to anyone who wants to use it. Many people download books, scan books and post them online, there are many examples with more than four thousands medical books online. do you have to ask for permission each time you use a work, NO, the fair use of a copyright work is not and infringement. people have the right to profit with other work without permission, can I share my work, do I need to ask permission from the author to share something I bought, learn about what are our rights, what I can do in internet, what I can do with my computer, what I can see.