Jerry's posterous

Biomedical Informatics Techniques for Processing and Analyzing Web Blogs of Military Service Members


http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JMedInternetRes/~3/hyQ76QKCojc/e45

Biomedical Informatics Techniques for Processing and Analyzing Web Blogs of Military Service Members

Background: Web logs (“blogs”) have become a popular mechanism for people to express their daily thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Many of these expressions contain health care-related themes, both physical and mental, similar to information discussed during a clinical interview or medical consultation. Thus, some of the information contained in blogs might be important for health care research, especially in mental health where stress-related conditions may be difficult and expensive to diagnose and where early recognition is often key to successful treatment. In the field of biomedical informatics, techniques such as information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP) are often used to unlock information contained in free-text notes. These methods might assist the clinical research community to better understand feelings and emotions post deployment and the burden of symptoms of stress among US military service members. Objective: To evaluate the potential for using NLP and automated IR to unlock information in blogs related to US military service members’ thoughts and emotions of combat exposure. Methods: In total, 90 military blog posts describing deployment situations and 60 control posts of Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF) were collected. After “stop” word exclusion and stemming, a “bag-of-words” representation and term weighting was performed, and the most relevant words were manually selected out of the high-weight words. A pilot ontology was created using Collaborative Protégé, a knowledge management application. The word lists and the ontology were then used within General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE), an NLP framework, to create an automated pipeline for recognition and analysis of blogs related to combat exposure. An independent expert opinion was used to create a reference standard and evaluate the results of the GATE pipeline. Results: The 2 dimensions of combat exposure descriptors identified were: words dealing with physical exposure and the soldiers’ emotional reactions to it. GATE pipeline was able to retrieve blog texts describing combat exposure with precision 0.9, recall 0.75, and F-score 0.82. Conclusions: Natural language processing and automated information retrieval might potentially provide valuable tools for retrieving and analyzing military blog posts and uncovering military service members’ emotions and experiences of combat exposure.

This is the abstract only. Read the full article on the JMIR site. JMIR is the leading open access journal for eHealth and healthcare in the Internet age.

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Most compact and meaningful are the series of choices we have made


[Link] http://ehealthgr.posterous.com/most-compact-and-meaningful-are-the-series-of

Most compact and meaningful are the series of choices we have made

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos gave the Baccalaureate address to Princeton University's Class of 2010. Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. He was introduced by Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman.

Bezos spoke to the Class of 2010 about the difference between choices and gifts. Cleverness, Bezos pointed out, is a gift, while being kind to others is a choice. One's character, he suggested, is reflected not in the gifts one is endowed with at birth but rather by the choices one makes over the course of a lifetime. Full transcript here:

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S27/52/51O99/index.xml
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBmavNoChZc

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“You’re 100% alive or 100% dead at any given moment”

[Link] http://e-patients.net/archives/2010/06/you%e2%80%99re-100-alive-or-100-dead-at-any-given-moment.html

“You’re 100% alive or 100% dead at any given moment”

A recurring training topic on this blog, originally for e-patients but also for clinicians and policy people, is understanding statistics. (See posts in that category.)  Not only are statistics often misinterpreted; even when they’re correctly understood, patients too often interpret a slim chance as no chance.

During my illness I heard from a long-ago co-worker. A cancer patient herself now, she recently wrote that while sitting in the chair getting chemo, she found this splendid and empowering tidbit :

What I think I learned is, you’re either 100 percent alive or 100 percent dead at any given moment,” says Meg Gaines, whom doctors gave a 5 percent chance of surviving [ovarian cancer]. “What statistics tell you is whether you’re in a great big fight, a medium-sized fight, or a little fight. People win and lose all three, so it just tells you what your fighting mind-set is.

“It tells you what level of risk you’ll take in treatment. It informs things. But I don’t think it’s very helpful on the ultimate question: Will I stay or will I go?”

Excerpted in Utne magazine, March-April 2010, pp. 71-73, from On Wisconsin (Winter 2009), www.uwalumni.com/onwisconsin.

8 Traits of Ineffective Leaders

I’m often asked if there is a simple test that can be used to quickly determine an executive’s leadership ability? The short answer is yes. There are in fact a great number of tests that can quickly assess leadership ability. Something as simple as a 360 Review, or as complex as a deep psychological profile (both with weighted emphasis on leadership aptitude) can point out an individual’s leadership capabilities.

Video: Preparing an Emergency Plan

Video: Preparing an Emergency Plan

Today we're publishing a new video called "Preparing an Emergency Plan - Explained by Common Craft"



If you've seen the news lately, you know there is no shortage of emergencies.  Tornadoes, hurricanes, winter storms, earthquakes, fires, it's all out there.  We don't like to think about them affecting us, but they can.  This video is focused on making a plan so that you and your family or loved-ones know what to do when an emergency happens.  It only takes 20 minutes to create an emergency plan and the once it's in place, you can have peace of mind that you and yours know what to do when it something happens.


This video is obviously a departure from our technical and financial focus. It came from a relationship that we've established with Public Safety Canada. This video is a follow-up to the video we made with them in 2008 called "Preparing an Emergency Kit."  They recently came to us about making this video and we were happy to work with them again.  This relationship is what we call the "hybrid model", where we work together on the video, and we can offer a Common Craft version for licensing.


Along with use in classrooms, we hope that this video will be useful for government organizations that need better ways to get their constituents. This video is only available through this website or via licensing. It is not shared on You Tube or other hosts.  If you're a blogger that would like to use it, please contact us.