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mike schultz
Known to all as a geek wannabe, Apple fanatic, pretty good breadbaker, and sometime Toastmaster. Sometimes I write about recovering from a stroke, and sometimes I talk about marketing, social media, and other stuff for Toastmasters. You can write me if you want.
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Tweets
- @CityLightsBooks Well, definitely not convinced...
- Will it work? D.C. protesters tell Rep. Trent Franks if he has time to ban abortions, he can fix potholes, too http://t.co/k9I6ul1M
- .@SandwichRpblc tweets"feels like coming home";I'm glad to see great sandwiches in Springfield again. Photo: http://t.co/fCPeV2KI
- Quote: http://t.co/uCMgcn0Y
- @SandwichRpblc Waiting for this new restaurant to open; then I found it was Sherry, Alex, and Chris's. Oh Boy. I know where I'm having lunch
- @TheWarholMuseum Did you tell us about this? MT “@bigthink: It may seem like one small step for Warhol, but it's ... http://t.co/rvwkvV2q”
- Is shutting down the HOV during #policeweek a sensible way to call attention to the contributions police make? #steamedcommuter
- @ralphsierra Here's some narrative. Remembered that on I68 just shy of 220 there's a church building a new Noah's Ark. http://t.co/bQN1e3Wo
- @ralphsierra Here's a cheesy video about "The Ship of te Alleghenies." http://t.co/E0WRsjMb
- “d rtm #FT @PoetryFound: The Round 1 @PoetryOutLoud semifinals wrap up with two re of T.S. Eliot's "Preludes" http://t.co/QJOzuESw #POLnews”
- @ralphsierra I'll have to find a link to site about another building that's no longer on Rte 30. It looked like a ship. a riverboat I think
- @ralphsierra For your entertainment, https://t.co/baMXuDgE. For more info, see http://t.co/f2y0EDhI. Still haven't got the pin.
- @NPRWeekend When I'm going to Vienna, VA, @caffeamouri
- @hrbookie Cool! Congratulations.
- ;T #FT “@TEDQuote: “Those caught in the cycle of self-concern suffer helplessly; the compassionate are more free. http://t.co/rMaMRzU5 #TED”
- World's largest bagel? I need to research this kind of bread. http://t.co/oG7JfyOl
- Photo: vintageanchor: A companion piece, of sorts, to thoughts about the continuing process of death. http://t.co/CWlMtuDv
- @TMClub1997 BTW, you'll get a mention in my presentation at the District 29 conference this afternoon.
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Posts
- Apr 10, 12
The announcement that Posterous had been acquired by Twiiter got the tech press pretty convinced that this service would be disappearing so I started experimenting with a Tumblr site. For the time being I'm going to park this site and post only at Tumblr. You can head over there now to find out more about what inspired that post about random discovery.
- Apr 10, 12
Part of the fun for me at Twitter is discovering the coincidental juxtaposition and reinforcement of themes and ideas. This morning I saw @susancain's retweet of this message
Be kind to yourself and get rid of all negative self-talk. Remember to speak to yourself as you would speak to a friend.
— Tasting Mindfulness (@DrLynnRossy) March 22, 2012right after I saw this
We are never so fit for friendship as when we cease to seek for it, & take ourselves to friend.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (@dailyemerson) April 9, 2012You know what to do.
- Apr 08, 12
Remember reading about Gary Wolf's presentation at TED about tracking and using personal metrics? Stephen Wolfram has a pretty practical answer about how you can use the information in today's New York Times: he looked at 23 year's worth of email and phone usage to find "patterns in his personal activity that might be linked to bursts of creativity." Also noted: Larry Smarr who "wears one wireless sensor to monitor the calories he burns and another to see how well he sleeps. He is keeping track of the bacteria in his body, about 100 different variables in his blood and many other fine points in his biochemistry.
After examining the data, he makes changes to improve his health. (So far, he’s lost weight and gained hours of deep sleep, he says.)"
- Apr 07, 12
Got another trip to Pittsburgh set up at the end of the month. It's always fun, but I've got to stop finding quirky things to do there. (And I just might have to see this along the way.)
- Apr 06, 12
New Cyberpills Send Text Messages If You Forget To Take Them
Did you forget to take your medicine? If you’re using these new microchip-implanted pills, your phone will remind you--and your doctor. Helpful attention or Big Doctor breathing down your neck?
via fastcoexist.comI need this! I wanna argue with the article's "when you get old." For me—I think—I just get busy or bored. I heard about this before on Science Friday.
- Apr 06, 12
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in partnership with Million Hearts, an HHS initiative to prevent a million heart attacks and strokes in five years, and the American Heart Association announces the Beat Down Blood Pressure Video Challenge (#HealthIT4UBP). We invite the general public to create short (<2 min long), compelling videos sharing how they use health IT or consumer e-health tools to manage high blood pressure. Videos will demonstrate how health IT is used to support blood pressure control through activities such as routine monitoring of blood pressure, taking blood pressure medications as prescribed, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle that helps lower blood pressure. High blood pressure (aka “hypertension”) affects one in three adults in the U.S. and is sometimes referred to as the “silent killer” because it damages the brain, heart, eyes, and kidneys while causing no symptoms. If left untreated, high blood pressure can result in strokes, heart attacks, and kidney failure. Fortunately there are steps that each of us can take to prevent or manage high blood pressure and change our future health for the better.
Thrilled to see that there's a national coordinator for health information technology and that there's a contest to find out how people are using technology to manage blood pressure. I can't wait to see the entries and the prizewinners. I don't think (oh, call a spade a spade—I know) I'm not doing anything prizeworthy. Still, I wonder if I could use this as my justification to buy a video camera?
- Apr 06, 12via itunes.apple.com
I've done enough complaining (Government Apps and Potholes, Again!, for example) about the lack of eGovernment initiatives in Fairfax County to make it unsporting not to note this app which I just saw announced on Twitter. Looks a little more staid than I hoped for, but it's a start.
- Apr 05, 12
So I finished a round of rehab, spent a few minutes yesterday looking for a Just Do It t-shirt and a few minutes this morning looking for a pedometer app for my iPhone so I could monitor my activity (I was overwhelmed by the choices), and then I stumbled across this video. Talk about reinforcement!
- Apr 01, 12
About 100 people bumped and jostled their way to the snack table lined with bowls of popcorn and pretzels. Eager presenters button-holed passers-by. It looked like a middle-school science fair. But the buzz in the room wasn’t over homemade solar system models or photosynthesis; it was the sound of revolutionary civics in action.
Facing that article about poetry is a fascinating story of participatory budgeting in New York City. The scope is small for a place like New York City—$1 Million in each of four city council districts—and participation wasn't huge—"over the past six months, 250 regular New Yorkers jumped into the trenches and dirtied their hands with democracy"—but this seems like a great start. The model for this trial was developed in Brazil.
- Apr 01, 12
Billed as an East Village poetry walk, the project, “Passing Stranger,” is a site-specific audio tour that guides listeners through the history of the neighborhood’s interconnected writers and shakers, with interviews, archival recordings and recitations of poems. Narrated by the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, with music by John Zorn, it is a literary and geographic keepsake, a portrait of a bohemian community that still resounds.
On April 15, it will officially make its debut with a reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, the last stop on the tour, but the guide is already available as a free MP3 at eastvillagepoetrywalk.org. Listeners can download it and stroll through the tour anytime (or just imagine the sights mentioned from their couches).
The project, supported by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, was five years and more than 40 drafts in the making, whittled from nearly 100 hours of tape, Mr. Malinovski, a freelance radio producer, said. The idea came to him when he first moved to the city, and lived in the East Village. He read Daniel Kane’s “All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s,” and walked around, envisioning the Beats and the generations of New York School poets who followed. A map began to form, and a natural chronicle.
In today's edition, The New York Times tells a wonderful story of a walking tour through the East Side focusing on the writers of New York. The usual suspects are there—Ginsberg and Kerouac—but William Burroughs, Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, and LeRoi Jones find their way into the piece. The real surprise for me is the opening—Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, was once buried in New York City! I've gone out of my way to visit sites associated with Antonin Dvorak, Bela Bartok, and William Dean Howells, but this is a pilgrimage I've yet to make.
- Apr 01, 12
These 5 cities have highly functional mobile apps - on.mash.to/H5KQ5h
— Conan O'Brien (@mashable) April 1, 2012I have a dream that I'll see Fairfax County, Virginia, mentioned someday.
- Apr 01, 12
The first offering, which appeared in subway cars Tuesday, is "Graduation," by Dorothea Tanning, an American poet who died this year at the age of 101 in New York:
"He told us, with the years, you will come
to love the world.
And we sat there with our souls in our laps,
and comforted them."
via news.yahoo.comJust in time for National Poetry Month, too. I used to love the poems I saw on the Washington Metro.
- Mar 31, 12
#DGovQt: "Great things are done by a series of small things brought together." Vincent Van Gogh
— Disability.gov (@Disabilitygov) March 31, 2012 - Mar 29, 12
They always find new stuff for me to do at rehab. Today I used that large blue ball like a chair—standing up and sitting down, 10 reps, 2 sets. Later in the session I got surprised with a soft wedge I used for sets of squats. The bonus for today was letting my therapist talk me into shelling out-almost-for MLB AtBat for the season. - Mar 28, 12
CultofMac calls attention to the adoption and use of iPads by doctors
Since then, Dr. Halamka has been raising awareness about the dangers of distracted doctors. His efforts included an interview with NPR that ran earlier this week. In that story, NPR’s David Greene also interviewed Dr. Henry Feldman (also from Beth Israel in Boston) who is a such a big proponent of mobile technology and iOS devices in medicine that his collegueas have dubbed him the iDoctor. He points out the advantage sof the iPad, including during patient consultations and notes that he can easily switch off distracting devices.
This story raises the question of whether iPhones and iPads can be too distracting to doctors. A report that coincided with the NPR story from Kaiser Health News cites multiple studies about thedangers of distracted doctoring over the past two years including incidents that occurred during surgery. At the same time, a recent study from the University of Chicago illustrated that iPads made residents more efficient and effective.
I've seen concerns like this raised at least once before, but I've posted before about the advantages of iPads on medicine and my frustration when technology isn't applied to a patient's advantage. I think I like the common-sense solution CultofMac points out.
In the end, as with other distracted driving, the crux of the issue really isn’t about the mobile devices themselves, it’s about how doctors and other healthcare workers choose to use them. As Dr. Feldman points out, anyone can turn a distracting device off – or at least turn off notifications from potentially distracting apps. Setting policies around that idea is actually the approach that Beth Israel Medical Center has adopted to prevent such incidents.
Jay Parkinson, and lots of others I hope, are looking for ways to use technology to serve patients better and make the most of their time.
- Mar 27, 12
This just showed up in InovaHealth's Twitter stream:
In 10 years each individual will have their own health data cloud - @ISBLeeHood. #P4Med
— Inova Health System (@InovaHealth) March 27, 2012Fascinating idea; frustrating that Twitter makes so few details available. Might be possible to learn more from Lee Hood's organization, The Institute for Systems Biology.
- Mar 26, 12
Not your typical "scientific" video, but lots to think about and marvel at here. - Mar 25, 12
Just saw this via Lucien Engelen but can't digest it fast enough. This is a whole new way to approach medical care—actually could make conversations with a doctor more practical and less of a black box. There's potential for helping users see what they're doing to their bodies and the effect their behavior is having on their health. Even though this seems like an application for the future, it looks like the developers have already made public demonstrations. They claim that this kind of visualization of personal medical data can actually lower the costs of health care.
- Mar 23, 12
Forget the 80-degrees, the flowers, the cherry blossoms, the lawn mowers that have been running, and even the barbecue grills that have scented the neighborhood. Today we picked up our first crop share of the season, from a new market this year. Among the goodness—spinach, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, onion, zucchini, and white potatoes. It's gonna be a tasty summer! - Mar 21, 12
.@TaxiCanada Declares War On Potholes With An iPhone App (And big marketing stunt!) is.gd/ksLRoP via @FastCoCreate
— Fast Company (@FastCompany) March 21, 2012@FastCompany returns to the pothole theme.I'm intrigued by the willingness of Canada to encorage drivers to report potholes by offering a reporting championship. Mostly I wonder how to encourage the same kind of engagement with citizens in Fairfax County, Virginia. Most of the time when I report a road problem here, the reponse I usually get is VDOT is reponsible (AKA it's not my problem. And VDOT is the most unresponsive agency I can name!).
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Posts
Proof that summer is here—the farmer’s market in Kingstowne is open. This photo is almost an afterthought. It shows only a small part of all the good things we saw.
A thought-provoking and apparently controversy-causing TED presentation. I agree with Hanauer and really like his recognition that it’s a web of relationships between the middle class and the wealthy that makes for a healthy economy. I don’t think that he spends enough time making a persuasive argument, and I’m not really surprised that TED didn’t release this video directly. Still, this a video that deserves to be seen and discussed widely, and Hanauer’s is a voice that should be heard from more often.
(via The Idea TED Didn’t Consider Worth Spreading: The Rich Aren’t Really Job Creators | Open Culture)
Background and more at the Washington Post
- Patient-centered care
But some hospitals around the nation are trying to make their patients’ stays a little less unpleasant.
They’re members of an organization called Planetree, which was founded by a patient named Angelica Thieriot, who had a not-so-good hospital experience back in the 1970s. “She herself became very ill and was hospitalized,” says Planetree President Susan Frampton. “And while she felt she got good clinical quality care, she was really horrified by the human experience that she had. So she founded Planetree with a very lofty goal: to change the health care system to be more patient- and family-centered. And that has been our mission … for the last three and a half decades.”
Today Planetree has certified, or “designated,” 30 hospitals and nursing homes in the U.S. and four countries as meeting a specific list of criteria that qualify them as providing truly patient-centered care.
The idea seems like a no-brainer, but the number of hospitals that Planetree has certified is shockingly low. Julie Rovner’s story catalogs some of the thoughtless details that make a patient’s stay uncomfortable and lists some ideas to make a stay more comfortable that seem simple, creative, and effective. I really like the idea of displaying local art and selling it every month to support the hospital.
It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.
If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.
On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.
Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future. And it is precisely the mix of these two modes of thought that is central to the success of science.
- Music Helps TBI Patients Unlock Memories
Dr Baird — who is now conducting the same study with a larger group of brain-injured patients — said her research had shown the potential for music to help restore personal memories in that group.
“It’s something that we know very well in everyday life — we all put on songs that bring back memories from the past — but it’s something that hasn’t been researched that well to date,” she said.
And I’m listening to covers of Buddy Holly songs right now. Here’s a related post.
Glad to see the Bozzelis back in Springfield at Sandwich Republic. I tried Tandoori chicken on my first visit, liked it, and look forward to a lot of return visits—there’s a lot of choices on the menu.
We modern people are problem-solvers, but the demand for answers crowds out patience — and perhaps, especially, patience with mystery, with that which we cannot control. Intolerant of ambiguity, we deny our own ambivalences, searching for answers to our most anguished questions in technique, hoping to find an ultimate healing in technology.
The Spirituality of Imperfection – wonderful 1993 read on storytelling and the search for meaning (via explore-blog)- From Cradle to Grave?
First, from the Diane Rehm show this morning
Today @ 10 (ET): Diane and guests consider the risks and benefits of exposing toddlers to touch-screen devices: bit.ly/JU1aGu
— The Diane Rehm Show (@drshow) May 23, 2012Then, not too long later, from Cult of Mac
How The iPad Is Saving The Elderly From Dementia cultm.ac/Jxxhh5
— Cult of Mac (@cultofmac) May 23, 2012 Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think.
Neil deGrasse Tyson via @LifeHackerThe word “listen” contains the same letters as the word “silent.
Alfred Brendel via @IntrovertCoachA waggish comment is watch Lanier blame Facebook for the Great Recession. But there’s great analysis and wisdom here—maybe a convincing argument for why we should all be creators. Catch the video and commentary by Jason Gots at Big Think.
Steve Blank expresses another view via @SocialMedia411.
- Probably beats some of the exercises I've done
It’s no fun recovering from a stroke and relearning to do simple things that were once totally natural. That’s being offset by new video games that refine patients motor skills by having them play games that, for once, actually look fun.
It may not be fun—that’s definitely true—but it is rewarding. That’s why I’ll check out these games reported by Gizmodo and spread the word about them where I can. For the record, the graphics and the challenges presented in the demonstration video definitely rate higher with me than the stuff I’ve seen for WII.
- Monet's Garden
I have long marveled at Claude Monet’s ability to create such beautiful, even tranquil, paintings at a time that must have been so trying—he was losing his sight, the war was raging all around him. In a piece about a recreation of Monet’s gardens at Giverny, the New York Times gives some insight.
It is an intriguing juxtaposition. In 1900, though Monet was wealthy and famous, his days as an innovator would have been thought long past, eclipsed by Cézanne, van Gogh and other Post-Impressionists, and soon to be pushed further back by Fauvism and Cubism. In 1915, with war raging all over Europe, few would have singled out Monet’s painting as particularly relevant to the art historical or sociopolitical moment.
But war was on his mind. In June 1918, then 77, he wrote in a letter to one of his dealers: “What an unnerving life we are all living. I sometimes wonder what I would do if the enemy suddenly attacked. I think that it would be necessary to leave everything like everyone else.”
Then, a week later, he wrote another of his dealers, “I do not want to believe that I would ever be obliged to leave Giverny, as I have written; I would much rather die here in the middle of what I have done.”
These quotations evoke a mood like that of “Irises”: a mix of anxiety, depression and determination, now and then punctuated by moments of visionary exultation. Decades later, the Abstract Expressionists of New York would take a similar spirit of existentialist despair and defiance and run with it. He was, after all, ahead of his time.
- Parking Meters
In this particular case: why bother have a meter at all? After all, the state knows my license plate, the state has a billing relationship with me, the state can (and does) collect money for my driving behaviors (like EZ Pass). So why not drive into the space and have the space just take care of all the paperwork and billing? No tickets, no meter readers. If you don’t want local merchants to park in the good spaces, no need to spend a lot of time searching them out…
Parking meters lead Seth Godin to some real insight. I think he’s on the right track but can quickly see a potential problem. In Virginia, there’s been some move to start charging a small service charge for using EZPass. But EZPass may soon be required for drivers who use the HOV, and the service charge would effectively become a fee for something that is now available free and the incentive for car pooling would be reduced. Not a good situation.
The PBS News Hour reports on technology that lets people control motion with their thoughts. The look of satisfaction on Cathy Hutchinson’s face after she has served herself coffee for the first time in fifteen years is one to treasure.
- Rewiring
A 71-year-old man who was paralyzed in a 2008 car accident has regained motor function in his hands thanks to Washington University doctors who rewired his nerves to bypass the damaged ones. Though the patient could move his arms, he had lost the ability to pinch and grab with his fingers.
…
Still, this is potentially a glimpse into a future where more complex techniques and breakthroughs could someday lead to restoring movement and feeling all over the body. And that’s what make’s today’s announcement so exciting.
Click through for a remarkable story.
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson via @InovaHealth- Strength and Disability
He appears to embrace Edmund Wilson’s argument in “The Wound and the Bow” that “superior strength” is “inseparable from disability” and disaster of various kinds.
A review of Lives of the Novelists contains this gem, which should launch me on a study of Wilson. I firmly believe and I’ve been amazed that I think a stroke has actually made me stronger in many ways because I’ve worked harder and more seriously at relearning how to do things.
…don’t ever forget that!
And don’t say “I’ll never be good”. You can become better! and one day you’ll wake up and you’ll find out how good you actually became.
Truth from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, he of great wisdom.
