Citizenship

I don't remember attending a major political event, except at very local levels like campus student bodies, or speakers on campus. In the just finalized federal elections, I was involved with Elections Canada as an employee.

More than being a very shot term employment opportunity, what I've found is that the experience of getting involved has given me a sense of citizenship that no other events have.

It is common for politicians in campaigns or speeches to claim how being in campaign tours had brought them close to the voters - that they have seen and heard voters and have come to understand their concerns first hand.

There may be some truth to it, aside from it being a campaign cliche...

What impressed me during the training day was the diversity of the trainees. Our age ranged from a girl who I would say is just out of high school or even still in high school, to a man who must have voted in the last seven elections. I don't know if that were the shared sense of responsibility in understanding well and following the electoral rules or the interactive nature of the training that gives one a sense of citizenship for being part of the process.

On election day, I had a glimpse of what politicians may call the "fabric of the society." The voter turnout (which I thought was descent, given the number of polls in our location), the order of the process and great discipline that everyone involved showed. There were the elderly voter, the first time voter who needed to register just because she turned 18 last week, the pregnant woman, the dad with twins in a stroller, the businesspeople who just got out of work and came in rushing to vote before it was over, and there was the lady in a wheelchair who knew exactly which station she was going to vote in. From my observation, it was by no means a fully representative voting crowd (college-aged young people were not as visible, for example), but it were representative enough for one to see what the society is made of.

And then there was the voter who drove back to her house and dutifully brought her proper identity, and the other voter who was very insistent in voting and having her voice heard and made two trips to another voting location that the records showed she was eligible to vote in, only to come back to our location because she "lives next door."

It is easy enough to see that outside this particular event, these people are businesspeople, dads, moms, doctors, retirees, nurses, caretakers, customer servers, TV show hosts, and so on. But on this particular day, they were all citizens who wanted to make their voice heard, who wanted to make sure that the voting process was fair and error free, and that the rules were followed and respected -- the latter often enforced passionately and forcefully.

What I've been up to

Inside the Mind of a Third-Grader

I asked a grade 3 student to draw anything that comes to his mind so we can describe it in Tigrigna, as part of a Tigrigna lesson; and this is what he got:

Tech Ease

Why are online newspaper articles on current events easier to read than, say, an academic article that deals with even a slight deviance from the area of the reader's interest? Well, some of the answers are as obvious as pointing out the fact that news articles and analysis are going to be readable simply because they are intended for an average consumer with the most standard and comprehensible language possible. But other less obvious answers may be that these online articles are presented in the most readable format. My attention was brought into this thought by a function on Safari browser that I just discovered. It is a "reader" function located at the rightmost side of the URL box. I was about to give up reading an article until I discovered this function and changed my mind and went back to reading it from the first paragraph.

Seeing is believing:

Here is a shot of the article in its original form:




And here is the same page after reader is activated:

Hooked

My eShelf

I never thought I'd find myself in another phase of awe after I transitioned from a "basic" phone to a Blackberry last year. Back then, playing around with the smartphone was such a novel and exciting experience. The excitement wasn't a fleeting one, like what I usually find is the case with new technology. It was just another level from which I didn't see myself turning back.

And then there's the iPhone. I'm as excited about this phone as I was for the Blackberry, which is to say that I'm very very curious to know how thin thing operates and what I can do with it. It turns out that I can do A LOT. I've had the machine for only a day and half, and I've to admit that I spent half of that time with it. Actively exploring.

It appears as if there is nothing this machine won't do that a regular computer can't (especially given that I've been using the computer mostly for internet browsing lately, and so this is not a mere exaggeration).

So far, I would say I've explored half of the functionality I need to know to effectively use the iPhone. Given the amount of stuff that I can do with it, I won't be surprised to find out later that I've overestimated what I know of its workings.

I'll have more to say about the phone -- if we should call it one -- soon, but this is what I've spent the last couple of hours doing: Filling my eShelf with books. Before I could realize my dream of having to have a great shelf-full of great books, I've virtually built one on this tiny machine and stacked it with books (picture above). iBooks is an app that allows you to purchase, download, and organize eBooks on the iPhone. If the size of the screen is going to make it convenient enough to read these volumes of books that I've already shelved is to be seen, but for now, I've a stack of books that I'll be carrying in my pocket everywhere I go.

EMR: Good or Bad?

A physician blogging at the NYT describes what she sees as glitches with the electronic medical records (EMR) system.

To me, what she points out to be the problems, if they are what she sees as the major problems, seem fairly minor. One of the problems was the limitation the system puts on the number of characters they physician can input into an assessment field. This problem, from a programmer's point of view is not a difficult one. Viewed from a higher view, it is a matter of altering parts of the program and changing the allowed character numbers to one that is determined to be sufficient. It shouldn't be a major problem from a storage point of view either, as plain text doesn't take up much storage space. Of course, there could be other reasons behind the initial design and decision to make the limit of 1,000 characters. Still, this is a simple issue that can be resolved by a better communication with the physicians/management and software developers/management.

The second "glitch" Dr. Ofri points out is:

...Nobody, for example, leafs through a chart anymore, strolling back in time to see what has happened to the patient over many years. In the computer, all visits look the same from the outside, so it is impossible to tell which were thorough visits with extensive evaluation and which were only brief visits for medication refills. In practice, most doctors end up opening only the last two or three visits; everything before that is effectively consigned to the electronic dust heap.

The root of this discomfort is also, I think, similar to the first problem. It could be simply a matter of the physician being resistant to change (for, people are almost always unappreciative of changes to any part of a frequently visited web site or blog, even if that means the new design will have a better functionality, let alone a change from a paper-based work that has been in place for decades to a computer based one).

If resistance to change is really not the major problem, then the issue can be easily resolved or improved, again, with more (or better) communication among the users and the designers of the programs. It seems to me just a matter of enhancing the interface of the program to make it visually easier for the physician to see what Dr. Ofri would like to see -- make a color based button for each visit on the top right hand corner of the window to show if this visit were extensive or brief, etc. In fact, I see a better outcome from such design than the paper-based record. For example, assuming that an extensive visit in the traditional visit meant that there were more paper work for that particular day than others, the major visual indicator of the type of visit would have been the size of the pile of papers. On the other hand, adding a brief/extensive visit field to indicate the type of visit in the electronic system would make it easier to visualize and access. More helpful detail would be made easily accessible through the EMR than would have been through the traditional paper-based record system.

A Rare HIV Cure

A formerly HIV positive man who had undergone a blood stem cell transplant to treat leukemia, is reportedly clear of the virus:

It is a rare case of fortunate coincidences though, and it may not be very practical: the donor happens to have had an HIV resistance gene mutation, the procedure is complex and expensive.

Still, a glimpse of hope and perhaps a lead towards different approaches of researching HIV infection cure.