Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.

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	August 5, 2005

Consumer Reports' Best Medical Info Website List Consumer Reports has just reviewed and rated 20 online healthcare information sites. The ratings are only available to subscribers, but here are their six top-rated sites with my thoughts on each: Kidshealth.org: This site is run by Dupont's Nemours Foundation. Its orientation is towards the health of children and teenagers, with different sections for each group and a separate section for parents. Comprehensive but very timid (abstinence is the most recommended means of birth control). The kids section has a ton of material for school projects, and I'd guess this site is used more for that than for personal health questions. Mayoclinic.com: I found this site shallow, conservative (they don't question the use of ECT shock therapy for depression), self-serving (aggressively hawking the clinic's books, which have information they don't provide online) and generally not very useful. Medicinenet.com: This site from the publishers of Webster's medical dictionary has way too many ads and Big Pharma 'sponsors'  for my liking. Many of the ad links are to WebMD sites (see below). Warnings about adverse drug reactions and contraindications are not easy to find. The search engine is feeble (poor sorting, and if you misspell or put in an extra hyphen you're out of luck) and the site as a whole is very text-heavy. If you're looking for the morning-after pill you need to know it's under "emergency hormonal contraception". I like the fact that most of the articles are attributed to the doctor who wrote it, with a link to their credentials. Medscape.com: Registration (free) is needed for most content on this site. The site claims to be "from WebMD" (see below), and most of the content meant for non-medical practitioners is verbatim from that site. Same caveat about search engine as for Medicinenet. The site is designed mainly for use by medical practitioners, some of the content is very technical, and some requires payment to view more than an abstract. Lots of 'industry news' (press releases from Big Pharma) on the site, though they're clearly identified, and the site seems slightly less timid than others about discouraging overprescription. It also has a comprehensive drug interaction and contraindication database and a novel online Flash-based interaction checker (you put in all your drugs, and the checker identifies all possible interactions). There is more content here than in the other sites on this list, if you're prepared to wade through it and aren't intimidated by technical terminology. NIH.gov: The only government site on the list, this is the best of the lot, and free of the ads and 'sponsorships' that plague (and make somewhat untrustworthy) some of the other sites on this list. The writing is non-technical, thorough, objective, concise and plain-spoken. Information abounds on interactions, contraindications, warnings, alternative therapy (this site both mentioned St. John's Wort as an herbal treatment for depression, and provided unbiased evidence suggesting it is ineffective), self-diagnosis and self-care options, and just plain good cautious advice. The site, as CR points out, is a bit hard to navigate (it bounces you around among the dozen or so different NIH institutes' and National Library Medline sites, which are all good but each different in layout). But this site and Medscape are the only two I deemed worthy of bookmarking, and I'd generally start here. Big Caution: These government sites appear to have been infiltrated by anti-reproductive rights ideologues in the Bush administration. Look elsewhere for information on abortion, birth control, or any sexual health issues, starting with Planned Parenthood. WebMD.com: Again, like Medicinenet, this site is frighteningly full of Big Pharma ads and links to sites of Big Pharma 'sponsors' with biased and self-serving disinformation (BTW, did you know that the US and NZ are the only industrialized nations on Earth that allow advertisements of prescription drugs directly to consumers -- who can't buy them, and hence waste doctors' time "asking if they're right for them"?). You have to dig for drug interactions, warnings and contraindications, though they are there. There is a fair bit of detailed content here, though all of it and more can be accessed through the Medscape site (see above). What's missing for me is more objective, unbiased information on alternative therapies. There are a ton of really scary sites offering all kinds of dubious (and sometimes expensive) miracle cures, and offering to supply drugs and herbs at 'discount' prices. What's sad is that people will be desperate enough, and so put off by the apparent pro-drug bias and excessive cautiousness of legitimate sites (some of the legalese on the sites above essentially tells you not to trust or believe anything you read online unless it is directly and personally verified by your doctor), that they'll send off money to online con artists. Two sites I trust for alternative therapy information (and when appropriate, debunking) are The People's Pharmacy (now part of the Dr Dean Edell HealthCentral.com site) and the Linus Pauling Institute's nutritional supplements site. 3:11:42 PM  trackback []  comment []

Seeking Some Help With My Table of Contents From reviewing the inbound links to my blog, it is clear that my (woefully in need of updating) Table of Contents is quite heavily used by readers, especially the index of my business ('Working Smarter') and technology articles. But it is both difficult to maintain (it is kept in six HTML files which I update manually) and awkward to use. I don't mind the maintenance, but I'd like to make it more user-friendly. At present, the TOC is accessed through the right sidebar. The six major categories and 21 subcategories are displayed, and when you click on them the actual TOC pages you go to have a total of 53 sub-subcategories, with about 1000 of my articles (the ones that I hope may be of some enduring value) indexed and abstracted within those sub-subcategories. The problem is that listing all 53 sub-subcategories in the right sidebar would push my blogroll down another eight inches into virtual obscurity. Besides, the sidebar is too narrow to contain the full names of some of the sub-subcategories, and a simple list of all 53 would be visually boring and tedious to navigate. I can imagine two ways of making the TOC easier and more intuitive to navigate, but I don't have the HTML or CSS skills to do either: I could move the left sidebar over to the right side, which would double the width available for the TOC and other sidebar content. Or just widen the right sidebar to 300px. Then I could use outlining, with the 6 main categories opening to show the sub-subcategories either when you scroll over them or click on them. If you 'opened' all 6 categories you'd see something like what is displayed at right. Clicking on one of the 53 buttons would then take you to the list of articles for that sub-subcategory. I could instead put a graphic of the whole TOC, something like what is shown at right but with some better design than I am capable of, at the bottom centre of the Home Page (or even on a separate page), with a link from the top of the page to it. Then when you click on any of the 53 buttons it would take you to the list of articles for that sub-subcategory. In either case I'd like to start adding a 'Posted in Category:' link at the bottom of each article that would likewise take you to the TOC where other articles in the same sub-subcategory are listed. So what, oh HTML-and-CSS-savvy readers, is the simplest way to do this? TABLE OF CONTENTS (MOCK-UP) Technology      Weblogs Social Networks / Blogs in Business Communications & Presence Technology & Society New Technologies Working Smarter Knowledge Management Personal Knowledge Management Personal Productivity / Getting Things Done Complexity & Discovery The Innovation Process Industry-Specific Innovation Collaboration The Wisdom of Crowds Innovation & Society Advice for Entrepreneurs Natural Enterprise Saving the World Diagnosis Prescription: This Way Out   A Different Way of Thinking Overpopulation Activism: What You Can Do Community / ICs Gift & Other Alternate Economies Animal Rights The Educational System Society           Writing Fiction Writing Non-Fiction Conversation & Language Narrative & Story-Telling The Arts Science & Health Culture Being Human (Psychology etc.) Miscellany Politics / Economics War & Peace Global Democracy Canadian Politics US Politics Bush vs Kerry 2004 Third World Politics MidEast Politics The Political Process The Media Frames, Left & Right Corporatism ' Free' Trade Consumer Power Economics Creative Works    Memoirs & Dispatches Short Stories Poetry Satire & Fables Art & Photography 9:38:44 AM  trackback []  comment []

The Personality of Bloggers After learning that Aleah is an INFJ, I was inspired again to try the Myers-Briggs test. After schizophrenically jumping between eNTj (the General, in my people-loving moments) and iNTp (the Architect, in my contemplation-loving moments) for a decade before I took up blogging, I was surprised last year to find I had moved over to eNfP (the Champion), with the (P)erceptual second only to the i(N)tuitive in dominance. Neither the (e)xtroversion energy focus nor the (f)eeling decision-making style was beyond the 55% level, however, so I was still not that far from iNtP, the Architect role that governed my personality in my quieter moments in the previous decade. But after taking three variants of the test today, I was consistently over the 60% mark in all four dimensions that prevailed last year, so I'm now a full-fledged ENFP (Champion). But I've concluded that Sensing is a misnomer: The answers that correspond to an S are all about a preference for facts and rigorous analysis, and I would argue that a better term would be Analytical. In fact, strong sensory awareness, as opposed to intellectualization and abstraction, seems to me to be reflected in the (P)erceiving score. With those clarifications I'm content that the results of the test do reflect my personality today: The E reflects my preference for conversation over personal reflection, and my decreasing need for privacy (though I still value time for contemplation, I have learned to fit it in effectively in the spaces between interactions with others, which I find more valuable and productive) The N reflects my right-brained, lateral-thinking, instinct-trusting personality, and my impatience with excessive analysis and abstraction The F reflects my growing emotionalism, and conviction that what we feel is more important than what we think, though I suspect that this puts me offside the majority of my fellow progressives The P reflects my open-mindedness and comfort with ambiguity, and my gradually improving ability to pay attention to what is happening in the real world It is interesting to compare the profiles of bloggers with those of the population at large. Averaging data from several sites I came up with these numbers: 73% of bloggers are I rather than E, compared to 60% of the population as a whole 74% of bloggers are N rather than S, compared to 64% of the population as a whole 53% of bloggers are F rather than T, compared to only 38% of the population as a whole 67% of bloggers are P rather than J, compared to only 35% of the population as a whole (but 64% of Rhodes scholars!) So while bloggers are even more reflective, contemplative, lateral-thinking and creative than the average citizen, they are starkly different in their emotional and sensitive, rather than analytical, approach to decision-making, and in their open-minded and adaptable, rather than decisive and disciplined, approach to personal life management. I differ from the prevailing personality of bloggers only in the first dimension -- I am decidedly more outgoing and less private than the majority of bloggers. If blog readers are more like the population in general, how should bloggers tailor their INFP writing to a predominantly INTJ audience? According to this site, they should lay out the objective of their writing up-front and make their writing clear, concrete and action-oriented (T personalities prefer this), and they should be brief, well-organized, useful and unambiguous (J personalities prefer this). This also suggests that online debates and blog posts that include two sides of an argument without a clear resolution are more likely to appeal to other bloggers than to their readers. This is a generalization, of course, but worth thinking about. 9:17:58 AM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2005 Dave Pollard. Last update: 29/08/2005; 3:57:56 PM.