Interesting web links and quotes for the month of April (April 20, 2005)

This page is being phased out.

Note: any quotations on this page have been moved to Category: Interesting quotes.

Iconico - Tools and services for graphic designers and web developers. Iconico. Accessed on 2005-04-21. This company produces several useful web authoring utilities including tools for measuring length, angles, and areas on a computer screen. www.iconico.com/index.aspx [Filed under writing resources]

NIH Data Sharing Policy. Office of Extramural Research, U.S. National Institutes of Health. Accessed on 2005-04-20. Data sharing is essential for expedited translation of research results into knowledge, products and procedures to improve human health. The Final NIH Statement on Sharing Research Data was published in the NIH Guide on February 26, 2003. This is an extension of NIH policy on sharing research resources, and reaffirms NIH support for the concept of data sharing. The new policy becomes effective with the October 1, 2003 receipt date for applications or proposals to NIH. grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/data_sharing/index.htm

NIH Data Sharing Policy and Implementation Guidance. Office of Extramural Research, U.S. National Institutes of Health. Accessed on 2005-04-20. Data sharing promotes many goals of the NIH research endeavor. It is particularly important for unique data that cannot be readily replicated. Data sharing allows scientists to expedite the translation of research results into knowledge, products, and procedures to improve human health. There are many reasons to share data from NIH-supported studies. Sharing data reinforces open scientific inquiry, encourages diversity of analysis and opinion, promotes new research, makes possible the testing of new or alternative hypotheses and methods of analysis, supports studies on data collection methods and measurement, facilitates the education of new researchers, enables the exploration of topics not envisioned by the initial investigators, and permits the creation of new datasets when data from multiple sources are combined. In NIH's view, all data should be considered for data sharing. Data should be made as widely and freely available as possible while safeguarding the privacy of participants, and protecting confidential and proprietary data. To facilitate data sharing, investigators submitting a research application requesting $500,000 or more of direct costs in any single year to NIH on or after October 1, 2003 are expected to include a plan for sharing final research data for research purposes, or state why data sharing is not possible. grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/data_sharing/data_sharing_guidance.htm

The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. F Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), American novelist, in The Crackup, 1936. Quote found at BMJ 2005;330:783 (2 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7494.783

No Free Lunch. Accessed on 2005-04006. We are health care providers -- physicians, pharmacists, nurses, dentists, among others -- who believe that pharmaceutical promotion should not guide clinical practice, and that over-zealous promotional practices can lead to bad patient care. It is our goal to encourage health care practitioners to provide high quality care based on unbiased evidence rather than on biased pharmaceutical promotion. www.nofreelunch.org

NetEpi - Free, open source, network-enabled tools for epidemiology and public health practice. Centre for Epidemiology and Research. Accessed on 2005-04-06. NetEpi, which is short for "Network-enabled Epidemiology", is a collaborative project to create a suite of free, open source software tools for epidemiology and public health practice. Anyone with an interest in population health epidemiology or public health informatics is encouraged to examine the prototype tools and to consider contributing to their further development. Contributions which involve formal and/or informal testing of the tools in a wide range of circumstances and environments are particularly welcome, as is assistance with design, programming and documentation tasks. www.netepi.org

Going to the source: nonproprietary medical software. Chin T, published in AMNews on April 11, 2005. Accessed on 2005-04-04. Open-source EMR software promises to be everything many electronic medical record systems aren't -- inexpensive, downloadable and easy to modify. But is this software the best fit for your practice? www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2005/04/11/bisa0411.htm