Remember the news of how Google was tracking flu outbreaks through search queries? Apparently it wasn’t such a new idea.

Search over 4,300 pages of evidence files used to prosecute cases by the FDA. This new digital library includes legal correspondence, lab reports and data, photographs, and product labeling and containers.  Facinating to poke through and a treasure trove for public health historians.

If you want to create a free and easy screencast*, Jing is the tool for you. Jing works on both Macs and Windows computers and it’s simple to install and get working.  My six year old was able to start producing screencasts with only 3 minutes of instruction. The biggest problem- you can’t edit your recording after you are finished. This can be a deal breaker.

Looking for something other than Jing? Check out Mashable.com’s list of screencasting tools, both free and commercial.

*Why would you want to create a screencast?  For a video tutorial of how to do something on the computer or a recording of a powerpoint presentation are two examples.

Here’s my top five list why I can’t easily find interventions in PubMed:

1. The subheadings are extraordinarily inconsistent.
   “Methods” is a subheading defined as “Used with techniques, procedures, and programs for methods”. Huh? I’m still not sure what that covers. Even if I did, the subheadings are notoriously inconsitently applied and while including the term “methods” in your search will increase the number of relevant results, it will also greatly increase the irrelevant ones.
2. “Program evaluation” also seems inconsistently applied
   Now I’m repeating myself, but I really wish I could count on using the MeSH term “Program evaluation” in order to find program evaluations. Yes, it helps, but it is wildly underused.
3. “Intervention studies” is not quite right
   This is another MeSH terms that doesn’t really get you what you want.  In fact, it gets you far more of what you don’t want than what you do. Plus…
4. Searching for “intervention” doesn’t map to “intervention studies”
   As mentioned above, I love MeSH. One of the main reasons I love it is that PubMed maps your search terms to appropriate MeSH terms behind the scenes and generally makes your results vastly superior to what they would have been otherwise. Come on, PubMed, is it too much to ask that you map the search term “intervention” to the MeSH “intervention studies”?
5. Maybe PubMed isn’t the best place to search
   I sometimes get much better results simply Googling for interventions or looking at model practices web sites and then searching PubMed for articles on particular interventions. However, I’d rather be able to search a public health-friendly PubMed.

Google has created a gadget using this same software to create Motion Charts so you can easily create your own animations. If you have data that you want to share with others, you can jump through a few hurdles and join the Gapminder community.

• Health Status Disparities
• Healthcare Disparities
• Minority Health 

Since these terms were only introduced in 2008, you will still have to be creative with your keywords for articles published in 2007 and earlier.

This is what I did today:

1) First thing in the morning, I responded to email that accululated during the night. I sent someone the link to this blog, I replied with a “thank you!” to someone who really likes our Second Life video, I declined a meeting, I read an update on the new MLibrary web site, etc.

2) Next, I lead a discussion about the future of the Public Health Library web site. We’ve been through a lot of transitions over the past year and our web site is now hopelessly out of date. Plus, we really want people to just use the Health Sciences Libraries web site.

3) Following the meeting, I created a quick mock up of the new site that we decided on and sent it off to the SPH web administrator and my bosses.

4) Before running out to grab lunch, I dealt with more email, blogged, and read my Twitter feed.

5) While eating some Spicy Tofu from Rich JC, I attended a meeting in Second Life discussing SLoodle, an open source content management system for SL.

6) Next, I prepped some more for my upcoming School of Public Health course and panicked a little because I still have so much to do.

7) Finally, I met with my supervisor and talked about things like my involvement with the Informatics unit at the school and the Open Michigan project.

Oh… and I wrote this blog post.

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently launched a 5-year cooperative agreement with AMIA funded by the National Center for Public Health Informatics (NCPHI) and the Office of the Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (ODCDC). The purpose of the program is to strengthen the breadth and depth of the public health workforce by providing training in public health informatics. As a first step AMIA is accepting applications from public health workers at state or local public health agencies interested in participating in informatics training. “

*AMIA = American Medical Informatics Association