Update-yness!

Hello!

Long time no speaketh! I've been extremely busy just recently, not that that really surprised me. Ahh we have done so much, and in such a short period of time.

The lectures continue to come thick and fast. My OneNote system is working fantastically for me, allowing me to organise all of my notes and include helpful diagrams as well. OneNote doesn't do much tracking of the notes you write but you can export it as a PDF, then import that PDF into Word...anyway, so right now I have about 65000 words of notes, over more than 300 pages! We look at each other and wonder how on Earth we're going to study all of that for the final end of year exams, where everything that we've learnt in the year will be assessed. It's going to be intense I'm sure.

Speaking of assessment, I had one of those recently! It was our first one. Below is the very nice bell curve of results:

Guess where I was! Right smack bang on top of that curve. I got basically the average mark, which is far, far from where I want to be unfortunately. So it's time to knuckle down and get my groove on! The test was on only lecture content that we did between the start of the year and the day of that test, but we have a test coming up in I think about 4 weeks that will assess the lectures we've had since, PLUS the content of the labs from the whole year thus far! I have a few friends that are second year med students here, and they say that everyone sort of does ok in the first test, and then gets demolished in the second test. I intend to not be one of those people that gets demolished :P Things will be better for the next test!

Some exciting news! The QS World University Rankings just released their 2012/13 lists, and Medicine at the University of Melbourne is number 9 in the world! We're basically only behind big names like John Hopkins, Oxford, Harvard etc! That blew my mind, and I think I have told everyone I can about it. I am so proud to be here, and hope my cohort can be the one to take us higher!

We have been doing some pretty interesting things here recently. In our Principles of Clinical Practice subjects we sometimes get patients to come in so that we can practice interviewing them, in a fishbowl format so that the other people in the class sit there and watch you, so that you can get feedback on your interviewing afterwards. I did mine last week, and I stressed about it a lot beforehand. When he introduced himself he said he had shortness of breath, and that's fine, but then he said he also had a smoker's cough...well, basically I had to interview him not just about his shortness of breath, but his cough too, AND his smoking habits haha. It actually went extremely well though! The patient, when the interview was finished, basically as soon as our tutor asked him to give feedback he pretty much exploded with praise, he was so animated and it seemed like he was extremely impressed! He said that he felt extremely comfortable with my interview style, that there was a great flow and he felt like I had really given him a lot of sympathy and listened to what he had to say. I was stoked with that!! Then other people in the group were able to give me feedback, and it was all much the same. I was pretty happy with that!

I think the last time I posted I was still doing cardiovascular medicine? Well, we're actually up to gastrointestinal medicine now, having completed respiratory already. Basically, everything we do seems to revolve around diarrhoea. We have seen some not so pretty pictures, let me tell you that...the worst have been pictures of parasitic worms. My god. And someone had the idea of eating parasites so that they would eat all the extra food that we eat that we don't need, to stave off obesity...no thanks.

College is going great too. I probably aren't leaving my room as much as I should though, because it's so easy to stay in my room! The meals here seem to have become stuck in a rut of not being all that great...having said that, there was a curry tonight that was pretty good! They have a fondness for soggy brown rice, which is disgusting.

That's probably a big enough post now, I'll post again soon when I think of something interesting.

Regards,

Circle

It's Snowing...

...snowing assignments.

In the free time that I've had in the past few weeks I've watched a program that I've taped called 'Living With the Amish', and it has been truly eye opening. There is a teenager on the progrom from England that I have felt I can partially relate to -- he is heavily educated at Eton and has enormous pressure on him to succeed, which is more my scenario than the others, who seem to have been chosen simply because they don't represent the best of English youth -- so it has been great to see them from his eyes as well.

Basically, the Amish for the most part live as though technology doesn't exist. They hand make all of their clothes, they work the farm by hand (not a hard and fast rule, but some of them do), and they drive around in horses and carts. They do use dollars, but I presume they don't need to apply complex economics to anything. And while on the face of it you might reel in horror at the thought of living without say, electricity, these people are the happiest group of people that I have ever seen. It may be that I have a hidden side where I actually love getting in the dirt and working a hard day, but it has made me think on numerous occasions that living with the Amish actually wouldn't be so bad.

It has been interesting to watch something like Living With the Amish at a time when my university workload has been dialled up to maximum. I yearn for that simple life, where you can take things on face value and the amount of money you bring home depends on how hard you work, not on the relative demand for your work (these things are intrinsically linked, but in reality they are far apart sometimes). I yearn for the simple life, but I'm propelling myself into certainly not an easy profession to either get into or stay in. In the name of passion? Passion may yet prove to be the most dangerous fuel.

Wikipedia Editing

Hello!


I've come to rely on wikipedia (hereafter called wiki) for a lot of my research into the human biology that I'm learning. Far from the days where the information it contained was put there by vandals or non-expert editors, wiki now enjoys a large audience of passionate editors who can and will get into heated edit wars over the smallest fact in an article. It is now, arguably, the foremost source of knowledge on the internet (I was going to say information, but really Google has to claim that crown). I like wolfram alpha, but it doesn't really offer much more and it doesn't have the glorious blue links that take you on a 3 hour long journey of discovery like wiki does. I am still laughed at in my university classes when I say that I heard something on wiki, but I have no doubt that the time will come when wiki is a valued source of general scientific knowledge in the next few years. Plus, you know that even if they don't admit it, almost everyone uses it.

But there are just those times when it doesn't have exactly what you're looking for. Take the example I'm currently struggling with -- I want to find a good, labelled diagram of the mouth with an elevated tongue. Simple, you'd think. The wiki entry for 'human mouth' is our first stop. Of course here the main picture of interest is the Gray's anatomy drawing -- an all too common sight on human biology pages. While these are generally very well labelled in bone/muscle related articles (pictures like this one are just on another plane of helpfullness), when the topic is anywhere bordering on niche they quickly defer back to the unlabelled form, which doesn't even represent an attempt to cover bases. Without a picture the article is not of much help, but even the text doesn't help very much. It covers only the basics of the biology, and barely any anatomy. Who searches up the wiki entry for the mouth wanting to find out how to use it? This is, as they call it, a stub.

What do we do when wiki fails us? If you're anything like me then you reel for a moment, to think that you're going to have to go back to that search results list and have to sift through any number of useless wikianswers results to find a reputable second source. Having been in and out of several pages (some of them copies of the wiki entry, of course) you finally find the exact thing you're after. You write it down, and move on to the next question, right? That, my friends, is the crux of this post: the fact that we just move on. How many of us have laboriously clambered over the exact same obstacles, only to leave them on the road for the next hapless person to come across? I could very easily edit the wiki entry on the human mouth to make it much more knowledgeable and helpful, and it wouldn't take very much of my time. Certainly less time than it's taken to write this blog post. But the thing is that I don't even remember that it needed working on. Once I leave the page to search elsewwhere, it vanishes into nothingness in my vacuous head. And this is a problem for our beloved friend, the great wiki.

This editing crunch, so to speak, has not escaped the notice of active editors on wiki. This great piece by wiki user Timeshifter shows the dramatic drop off in editor numbers, compared with how many more articles there are. There simply aren't the incentives to stick around and share what you learn after you have to trawl through the 'unclean' web. I have the knowledge (not meaning to sound arrogant) to make the human mouth page much more useful. I could even label that gray's anatomy picture. But will I? Will anyone?

Do you edit wiki articles when you find them lacking? Do you not, but then get annoyed when they don't serve your needs (like me)? Leave a comment! Leave a comment if you can think of any ways this can be solved, too. Perhaps an API, much like the ubiquitous facebook 'like', that would send the text you highlight to a 'database' for the wiki page you designate so that it can be reviewed later by someone editing it?


Cheers,
Circle

EDIT: Ok, the drawing on that page isn't a Gray's anatomy drawing, but it sure looks like it.