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Will, common sense, elbow grease
When I starting writing this entry, my goal was to refer you to a
segment of a podcast that I listened to on a hike last night, because it
dovetails nicely with yesterday's screencast
about medical expert systems. But I fell
down a rabbit hole while trying to find links and identify audio
segments. This kind of information always seems to be at our
fingertips. But when we reach for it, we realize that it's not.
In this case, I decided to record and examine the
normally tacit process of connecting the dots. Here is the sequence of
obstacles I had to overcome.
Obstacle 1: iTunes
iTunes remains my podcatcher, even though I almost never
use my iPod. (The Creative MUVO -- cheap,
standard rechargeable AAAs, no attitude -- is my
workhorse MP3 player.) But I curse iTunes when I need to recover the
source of a podcast. It will show you where a feed comes from -- in this
case, webcast.berkeley.edu/events
-- but can't be bothered to provide a clickable, or even copyable,
link. So, as I've grumbled
about elsewhere, I had to type it in.
Obstacle 2: Search gymnastics
I knew the title of the talk I wanted to cite: The (Real) State of the
Union: Atlantic Monthly Panel. But it took a while to find it on
the site. My search strategy went like so:
| query | outcome |
| state union | fail |
| state of the union | fail |
| "state of the union" | fail |
| atlantic | succeed |
Should've let
Google do it, maybe, but in any case I found my way to the home
page for the event. I was seeking two facts. First, the name of the
woman whose 9-minute segment of the hour-and-a-half panel impressed
me. Second, the timecodes for that segment. The event page provides neither.
Obstacle 3: More search gymnastics
It wasn't easy to find the speaker's name. Here was the search strategy:
| action | outcome |
| listen to podcast intro | partial success (sounds like
Shannon Branley or Brantley or Bradlee, with the Numerica Foundation) |
| google query: shannon branlee | fail |
| google query: numerica foundation | fail |
| google query: ted halstead (also mentioned in connection with the
foundation) | partial success (refine query to New America Foundation) |
| google query: new america foundation | partial success (found the organization) |
| new america foundation query: shannon | success (it's
Shannon Brownlee) |
Obstacle 4: Media formats and wrappers
Three formats are offered:
- Watch. ("Streaming" RealVideo, via RTSP, for RealPlayer)
- Listen. ("Streaming" MP3, via RTSP, for RealPlayer)
- Download ("Downloadable" MP3, via HTTP, for any player or device)
As the scare quotes around "streaming" and "downloadable" suggest,
these words don't map very well to the concepts they appear to name. And those concepts are
more political than technical. But that's a topic
for another essay. For now, let's just say that I used one or
another media player to figure out that Shannon's talk begins at
33:42 and ends at 42:55.
Now, how do I connect you that segment? If you are willing to use
RealPlayer and be tethered to your computer for 9 minutes, I can offer
you these links: audio,
video.
Not bad! Except:
- You probably don't want to be tethered to your computer.
- Or be forced to watch or listen in the Real player.
- And good luck figuring out how create and publish these kinds of
links for yourself.
In theory, my MP3
clipping service can solve the first two problems, and ameliorate the
third. In practice it doesn't work in this case for reasons I've yet
to sort out.
Where was I?
Oh, yeah, now I remember. Shannon Brownlee spoke lucidly about the
relationship between poor information management and poor health
care. For example, she pointed out that 90,000 Americans die each year as a result
of just the sorts of medical errors that the triage
application we saw yesterday is designed to prevent.
Technology can help improve our ability to manage medical
information and transmit medical knowledge. But, as Don Thomas
says in yesterday's screencast, the active ingredients of the solution
are will, common sense, and elbow grease.
The same holds true in general. So while I endorse Shannon Brownlee's
analysis, I don't buy her concluding appeal for a new federal
agency to collect and analyze information about health care delivery and
outcomes. I wouldn't expect the government to do that any more than
I'd hold Google and Microsoft and Yahoo! responsible for taming the cornucopia
of general information and knowledge. We produce those
goods. We'll be rewarded when we make them well-structured, well-connected, and
therefore discoverable. And we'll be punished when we don't.
How do we get it right? Will, common sense, elbow grease.
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