A coffee, a donut, and a defibrillator

By Leonard Bentley from Iden, East Sussex, UK – Iden, CC BY-SA 2.0 When someone has a heart attack, every minute counts. The American Heart Institute guidelines say that for every minute, the chances of a victim surviving decrease by 7 to 10 percent. To help save lives, Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs) have become more and more ubiquitous, and now can be found in many different locations, including coffee shops, banks, malls, and sports complexes. When…

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A better name for “non-communicable diseases”

I came across an interesting read last week in The Lancet. In it, Drs Allen and Feigl make an interesting case for changing how we refer to non-communicable diseases The global health community does not spend much time on branding, which perhaps explains why existing classifications for the three largest groups of diseases are both outdated and counterproductive. The first Global Burden of Disease study described infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and injuries. This grouping…

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2017: What can we expect?

Following up from the end of last year, I thought it would be fun to predict what I think the next 12 months will have in store for us. So lets get to it! 1. Repeal of the Affordable Care Act President Trump has already made it clear that this is one of his first priorities when he assumes office. The groundwork was already laid with the combination of the Senate passing a budget measure that…

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2016: A Year in Review

Thanks to all our old and new Public Health Perspectives readers for your support over the year. Your tweets, Facebook comments, and feedback are all really appreciated. Lets wrap up the year by reviewing our most popular stories of 2016. April 2016: Perhaps there is a drug that can prolong your life. It’s called money What makes New York different to other US cities? | Photo credit Kah-Wai Lin “A wise man once said that “mo’…

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A Hiatus of Sorts

There was a time when I aspired to post weekly, and then bi-weekly, maybe once a month, and now. . . very little. That’s not to say I haven’t been busy.  I’ve moved a lot of content over to a research website at http://goring.org, with a nice picture of the Wicked Witch of the East (that ought to be properly credited, I’ll fix that. . . ). I’ve also moved my social advocacy stuff to…

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Who is a Scientist – Reflections on #AAG2016

This is the first time I’ve really been to the American Association of Geographers meeting. Last year it was held in Chicago, which is really close to Madison, and I was invited to speak at a session called “The View from the Anthropocene” organized by two great Geographers from the University of Connecticut, Kate Johnson and Megan Hill, but I had the kids & really only spent the morning there.  I’m pretty sure there was…

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Semantics Shememantics

In science we work, more often than not, in teams.  Whether we work with one other individual, five individuals, or interact at workshops with hundreds of strangers, it’s important that we are clearly understood.  Clarity is critical, especially when explaining complex concepts.  KISS is my second favorite acronym, even if I can’t keep to the principle (NEFLIS, a camping acronym, is my favorite – No Excuse for Living in Squalor just because you’re out in…

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See you at #AGU2015

I’m heading to AGU early this year, part of the Neotoma Annual Meeting at Berkeley.  We’ve recently been awarded an NSF EarthCube Integrated Activities award to harmonize Neotoma and the Paleobiology Database (and other allied paleobiological archives), but we’ve also made some big gains in working with allied Plio-Pleistocene databases and researchers across the globe in...

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The interdisciplinary study of organic walled microfossils: A ramble.

Figure 1. That’s really a lot of pollen. A lot of pollen. Image by Brooke Novak It’s no secret to members of the Canadian Association of Palynologists (join now!) that the study of organic-walled microfossils is the most interesting branch of science, but it may come as a surprise to some of our colleagues. The...

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Helping to fill the cloud from the bottom up.

Open data in the sciences is an aspirational goal, and one that I wholeheartedly agree with. The efforts of EarthCube (among others) to build an infrastructure of tools to help facilitate data curation and discovery in the Earth Sciences have been fundamental in moving this discussion forward in the geosciences, and at the most recent...

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