The prestigious Information Advancement Award was presented by the Medical Library Association at its Annual Meeting in San Antonio in May to Arizona Health Information Network (AZHIN) for their strong impact on the delivery of health information in the state of Arizona. This award recognizes outstanding contributions in the use of technology to deliver health sciences information, in the science of information, or in facilitation of the delivery of information.

As a current member of AZHIN and past Board Member, I’m proud to be associated with this group. The AZHIN website is a great model for organizations looking to pool resources to provide a greater breadth of medical information resources to their constituents.

“Imaging Goes 3-D: ‘Exquisite’ PET/CT Image Captures Society of Nuclear Medicine’s 2005 Image of the Year

“In announcing his annual Image of the Year at SNM’s press conference on June 20, Henry N. Wagner Jr., M.D., SNM past president and historian and professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., explained that the Stanford researchers “stretched volume imaging” and produced “an exquisite structural and biochemical image.” Wagner, who for 28 years has summarized current trends in molecular/nuclear imaging and the meeting’s significant findings, annually picks an Image of the Year. This one image, chosen from the thousands presented at SNM’s Annual Meeting, illustrates what Wagner predicts will be the future direction of this dynamic and ever-expanding field. ”

Full Press Release
Via medGadget

“The purpose of Oak Ridge Associated Universities’ Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Museum Collection is to chronicle the scientific and commercial history of radioactivity and radiation. It has been deemed the official repository for historical radiological instruments by the Health Physics Society, and the Society has been generous in its financial support for the purchase of items.”

A dermatology image atlas from Johns Hopkins University that has more than 7700 images. Although it’s a great resource, it’s not for those who are easily rendered queasy. The image to the left of a typical child’s water-based tattoo is one of the tamest on the site. At a previous job, I skipped more than one lunch after stumbling across the wrong image in a dermatology textbook while working on projects related to an anti-baldness medication. Sometimes visual communications shouldn’t be quite so visual.

This site is particularly notable because it has an interesting graphical user interface that’s actually a graphic. Rather it’s a homunculus that assists in finding images related to a particular part of the body. Worth a visit just to give this a spin.

eye of science is a site showcasing the wonderful scientific microphotography of Oliver Meckes and Nicole Ottawa.

As a two-person team of photographer and biologist, our aim is to combine scientific exactness with aesthetic appearances, and thereby help to bridge the gap between the world of science and the world of art. We are committed to the rigorous standards of scientific investigation, but also to the use of color as a creative and harmonious tool to achieve beauty. By combining science and aesthetics we hope to enthuse our audience. Day after day we explore fascinating forms and structures in a world beyond human vision.

The “text reveal” function in PowerPoint is a common technique for displaying information point by point during a presentation. However, Edward Tufte’s essay, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” (Graphics Press, November 2004) proclaims this to be an unnecessary “spoon-feeding” of the information, and learners are better served by presenting the information in its entirety. I have seen a difference of opinion on this issue among Media Specialists and would like to conduct some research into this and other variables in presentation design.

Some of the experiments include the violations of expectations model where one actually does project irrelevant information ahead of time. If what my colleague John Hall (Media Specialist, University of Arizona) thinks is true, and if you aurally provide a very important fact simultaneous to the revelation of irrelevant visual information, he predicts a drop in the recall by the audience of that aural information and a significant increase in recall of the visual information because it IS incongruent; out of place.

One counterargument with the approach Tufte and myself suggest would be that at least all the incongruent information is out of the way early and then the audience member is free to focus on the arguments being presented and not spend time trying to resolve the irrelevant visual information — or even more promising — maybe they DO spend time trying to resolve the irrelevance but in the process they have to attend in greater detail to the aural presentation to make the counterarguments. And what is the impact of handouts (which are usually a duplicate of the presentation) when they are provided to the audience prior to the lecture?

Then there’s the whole line of research that shows (this is mostly Clark and Mayer stuff with e-learning which of course is a single user context) that satisfaction goes up when the audience has a perception of control (in this case being able to read ahead) but that user learning drops significantly.

Learners simply don’t make consistently good decisions when they’re left to their own devices to extract what’s important. So the audience actually might have to be spoon fed IF and only if you really want them to take home a specific point.

Anyway, Dr. Hall and myself are interested in conducting a research program that doesn’t rely upon the one-shot case studies like Nielson’s stuff tends to be, and we’re looking for interested parties to participate and discuss this and other issues (such as the whole bullets vs. no bullets thing that Tufte also promotes).

Thoughts?

The first Annual Art of Science Competition at Princeton University is now on display. 55 images out of 200 entries were chosen for an online gallery.