Vacuum

Hey, you could do that even on paper rolodex cards! Giving up on Contactually for now

I wrote an early review of Contactually, and I signed up for their pro service after the trial period expired. I used the system for a couple of months, but have decided to back down from the pro version back to the free version for a while. Here are some reasons for that.

First and perhaps foremost, Contactually is relatively expensive at $20/mo. I looked at what I was spending (or not spending) on other internet services that I use and like. I don't have a Flickr Pro account, but I used to, and I could get a year of service for less than two months of Contactually. Similarly I could renew another year of Pinboard pro service for less than two months of Contactually. It's not that it's expensive in absolute terms, but relative to other things I want to spend money on online, it looks spendy.

Second - and this is as much of a criticism of my habits than of Contactually - I never really managed to get it to systematically unearth new people to contact that had fallen off my radar. Rather than provide an ever-changing set of new folks to prod me to reconnect with, it seemed to recommend the same people over and over. That was useful at first to be mindful of people a second time if I had passed them by the first time, but the net result was that there were fewer people than I expected that Contactually re-introduced me to.

I have an Android phone, and Contactually doesn't yet have an Android app. I don't think that's a deal breaker, but I'm hoping that they come out with something that's awesome - and I'm willing to re-up for pro service again in order to try it out if that's what it takes.

I'm still unhappy overall with the state of Android contact managers. I would have thought that everyone ever designing a contact manager would have an updatable field for "last contact date" that had some kind of easy to view screens to see how you're doing, and that would be smart about noticing phone calls, emails, text messages, and meetings from your calendar. Hey, you could do that even on paper rolodex cards! Contact management basics need to be better across the board so that your phone can prompt you on who to call next, a sort of predictive dialer for your life.

Alas, poor delicious, you knew us well

The scuttlebutt is that delicious is going to be axed by Yahoo. 

Once upon a time, I bookmarked everything interesting that came across my path to delicious (back when it was del.icio.us).  It was part of my routine, and a daily summary was posted through to this blog.

Delicious was from the tags era of the Internet, where in addition to noting that a thing existed you could add your own tags to describe it. Sometimes these were straightforward tags, like the 1533 pages I marked as "annarbor". Others were idiosyncratic, like the 5 pages I marked as "attention-to-irrelevant-details".

There are other, better ways to bookmark things so that lots of people see them. The facebook "like" button gets more page views without consuming any cognitive overhead about how to tag, whether to tag, and what you've tagged before. Actually writing about something is quite a bit better than just bookmarking it, because you get to be yourself for a little while and not just an automaton forwarding on links automatically.

Every bookmark I ever did on delicious, up until now, is archived for posterity here: vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/delicious-20101216.htm . As I review it, there really should have been more of them marked "attention to irrelevant details". It's hours of reading, though some of it goes by fast because the site that was linked to has disappeared, leaving only the bookmark and whatever clipping I managed to care about.

edit: now with more cognitive overhead

more delicious:

Les Orchard, Let a million bookmarks bloom. "Use the web. Host your own, pay for it, or find someone who values your data."

Stephen Hood, We can save Delicious, but probably not in the way you think. "The Delicious user community could organize to save the data themselves via a coordinated harvesting project." 

Edward Vielmetti is http://www.delicious.com/vielmetti.

Nathan Schneider defends the memory theater

An essay published in Open Letters Monthly.

What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters.

Any essay of lamentation about the end of books and the glory of human memory has to include some touchstones. Frances Yates is that touchstone here:

One of the books that I used to habitually pick up from my college library, and which, recently, I finally bought used, is Frances Yates’s classic The Art of Memory. First published in 1966, it chronicles lost mnemonic techniques, passed down from the ancient orators to the Renaissance humanists: spaces people would conjure in their minds to help them remember all the precious accoutrements of civilized knowledge.

One of the pleasures of writing incessantly online is the likelihood that you've run across something before, even if you don't have it in the top of memory. Prentiss Riddle wrote about The Art of Memory in 2003, apparently because I mentioned it on a mailing list, saying this:

[Frances Yates], [The Art of Memory] -- just getting started on this one, which is an account of the history of mnemotechnics: the art and practice of expanding and augmenting the human memory. The classical account of this goes back to Simonides of Ceos, who had memorized all of the names and seating arrangements of the attendees at a banquet while giving a speech to them and was thus able to identify the dead when the banquet hall collapsed. Ancient orators used these memory systems to memorize long, long speeches.

Now, armed with a new word "mnemotechnic", I can go through and pluck out this precious specimen from Google Books; the Phreno-mnemotechnic dictionary, a work from 1844 by Francis Fauvel-Gourand with a preface that illustrates the noted figures in the history of those who have an exceptional memory. The bulk of the work is a dictionary compiled along the principles of "soundex", where words with similar consonant structure are indexed together and given a number. Thus you will find on page 62 the entry for 382 ("homophony", "muffin"); to make this make sense, you need to get a mapping between the "m" sound and the number 3, "f" or "ph" and 8, "n" and 2, and then encode.

Could there be any practical use for this? Certainly; this is a learned synesthesia, where numbers turn into words. If you ever have had to memorize a license plate number (I am looking at one where the partial plate is "6981") you know it's hard. But knowing that 69 maps to "sheep" and 81 maps to "fat" means that this vehicle can be memorialized as "sheepfat", which is wonderful in its own way.

Now where was I? Distracted, I guess. Like Nathan Schneider, my memories are indexed in part through the books I have been reading. The bookshelf that he evokes, carefully collected, is the memory construct that says that when you pull in one book you want to be able to leaf through the one next to it on the bookshelf, or the whole shelf full of them assembled for a purpose. You judge the quality of a story told through books by the quality and comprehensiveness of the books invoked to tell it, and you look for the bibliography eagerly for texts you have missed.

My bookshelves are too small to hold all the books that might sit on them, but sometimes there have been ways to make up for that. The photo of the bookshelf provides some substitute to prove not only that you have had the books but also that you know that some go together with others.

Find the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226950018/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=superpatron-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0226950018">The Art of Memory</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=&l=as2&o=1&a=0226950018&camp=217145&creative=399369" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /> on Amazon.

Should I ditch my smart phone?

I have a shiny phone with more computing power than the first computer I ever owned.  I also have a shiny brick, because the phone isn't working now, and when I took it back to where I bought it they gave me a phone number to call to fix it.  (I call it my BrickBerry.  It's so bricked, it doesn't even play Brickout.) There's nothing worse than talking on the phone, trying to fix your phone.

Get in touch, free of charge: Just dial 611 from your T-Mobile phone or call 1-877-453-1304. Customer Care representatives are available from 3 a.m. to 10p.m. PT, daily. Automated account help is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

You can either call Toll Free # 1-800-937-8997 or we here in Technical Care web chat can assist you.

I am tempted to go back to the worst possible phone that could possibly work.  I had an old, old Nokia candybar-style phone, which at one point I called my "WAP phone" because I had to wap on the side of it to get it to work.  Yet it did work, and it made lots of phone calls, and it seemed cheap at the time.  And it was cheap - it had a monochrome screen, only the most rudimentary games, no camera, nothing.  Cheap but reliable.  

JVM Error 517

An unrecoverable error on the phone.

T-mobile policy for this error is to ship a replacement phone.

An inconsistency has been detected in the VM persistent object store.

Smart phones aren't cheap, but increasingly they don't seem all that smart either.  Shiny, yes; futuristic and wonderful, sure.  But smart, not so much.  Does your phone remind you of what you need to do, when and where you need to do it, but not so naggingly that you turn it off?  Probably not.  Does that smart phone make you look smarter when you're walking down the street punching buttons on it?  Not so sure. Twittering from the bus to let the planet know which bus has squeaky brakes?  Uh huh.

The trap, perhaps, is confusing "smart phone" with "smart person".  Does a smart phone make you smart?

One possibility is to ditch phones with contracts entirely and go to a prepaid plan, which means that every call would cost something and I've have to be smart about how to use my phone.  That turns out to be easier now that I have Google Voice, which gives me more tools than ever to not answer my phone but still get a message to me.  Google Voice lets me direct any call to any phone, and thus the cell phone simply becomes another selectable destination to originate or terminate calls on the same number.

Other people's take on this:

My monthly bill says buying a dumb phone would have been smarter.

mobile meeting notes and mobile social networks

You're at a meeting, somewhere, and you want to quietly and unobtrusively take meeting notes or some other record of the meeting while it's happening, and you have a mobile phone but nothing else.

What tool or application do you use?

Mobile twitter.  Twitter your short notes out to the world, or use a direct message to some bot of some kind that collects and gathers the notes for you.   Twitter's mobile interface is fast, simple, and reasonably complete.  Down side: no easy way to look up something about the person who just introduced themselves.

Mobile Facebook.  Write on the wall of people (or your own wall) as notes come up, and then somehow reconstruct it afterwards.  The people search tool is very handy for looking folks up on the fly, and you can send someone a followup about some question while you're still at the event.  Down side: Slow enough that if people are moving fast you don't keep up.

Mobile wiki (Socialtext Miki).  Keep notes on a scratch pad on a wiki that you edit on your mobile device. A perfectly good text input box and it makes refining your notes into something longer very easy (and you can go back and figure out more about what you missed).    Down side: no lookup on the fly, so if you fumble someone's name you can't look it up.

Other mobile contact network and social network managers - both Plaxo and LinkedIn have mobile versions, and I haven't tried to figure out how to use those while standing up and listening to be a bit more informed.

Notable here is that there isn't a single Google mobile tool in the arsenal.  The Blackberry native mail client is better than the Google Mail java client, and almost anyone can have a text box open, but if there's a mobile Orkut then my world of people doesn't use it.

If I had two hands free to do this I probably would have used delicious as a part of the process - I've gone to a bunch of lecture or seminar type events where my pattern is to google what the speaker says and delicious the results, and if the net is fast enough where that is you can almost do that in close enough to real time to keep up.   But that's too much and too rude to do in anything other than a lecture situation.

Paper has some tremendous uses here - one recent event I went to I used some of Dave Gray's visual thinking skills that he's taught and put into his new book and did things like sketch what the speakers were wearing in addition to taking notes on what they were saying.   I have a much clearer visual memory of that event, but I don't remember anyone's names.

A work in process to be sure.  There were 11 tables full of people, and I got almost everyone's names, and didn't quite catch everything I hoped to catch; thanks everyone for lunch.  The conclusion of the question at the table - would you buy a car from a bankrupt auto company? - is that most people would be worried about service and availability of maintenance and parts, and that a Cuban mechanic would be someone to keep in your rolodex, and that if the worst happens at least we can look forward to an expanded orphan car show in Ypsi.

Clinical reminder systems

Part of a series on reminder systems.

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One of the issues in medical care, especially care for patients with chronic conditions that require ongoing attention and monitoring, is making sure that both doctors and patients are reminded about appointments and tests according to what may be a complex schedule.  On any individual basis this is not too hard to follow, but as a practice gets busy there may be more future events to be aware of than any one person can keep in their head.

As an example of this (not the only example), there is a system developed at the University of Michigan called ClinfoTracker.   It uses information from patient healthcare records to remind patients and medical staff of expected upcoming dates for appointments and tests, and to remind doctors that if a test has not been completed that they should re-request it.  This complex data and protocol driven reminder scheduling is way beyond the postcard you get from your dentist, and as such it can provide some considerable addition support in working with people who may not remember all of the things that need to happen in the future.  Quoting now from a press release from the UMHS:

“We felt there was a need to develop a reminder and tracking system that could be generalized in very distinct, diverse practices. We found the ClinfoTracker system could fit relatively easily into routine patient care flow and was easy to implement into a practice,” says study author Donald Nease, M.D., associate professor of family medicine at the U-M Medical School and co-creator of ClinfoTracker.

 

The greatest improvements in screening rates occurred at practices that were more technologically savvy and practices where employees were more adaptable and worked well together.

 

Initially, ClinfoTracker was developed to help doctors track patients’ clinical problems and preventive care over time. The software can also assist with chronic care, such as diabetes testing, as well as with cancer screenings and other routine tests.

The ClinfoTracker site describes the operation at the clinical level:

Specifically, Cielo Clinic provides the clinician with a one sheet clinical summary (Encounter Form) that includes chronic and active problems, and needed services. Services that a patient might be eligible for are based on their age, gender and/or clinical problems. Following the principle that clinicians should only be prompted when necessary, prior to the visit, Clinic scans billing, lab and radiology databases to determine if an eligible service is up to date. If it is, clinicians are not prompted to perform it.

During the patient visit, the clinician markes updates to the problem list on the Encounter Form, and checks the appropriate boxes next to the prompted services. Services may be marked as having been "Done", "Discussed", "Ordered", "Patient refused", "Not a candidate", or "Not addressed." In this way, clinicians have flexibility in indicating how the prompt has been addressed, or whether the prompt is appropriate. For example, "Not a candidate" might be checked for a patient that is flagged as needing a pap smear, but has had a hysterectomy. This removes the prompt. A "Patient refused" check removes the prompt for one year.

The U of Michigan system is one of several such systems that use the phrase "clinical reminder system".  Some others include:

The Clinical Reminder System is a project of The Heinz School at Carnegie Mellon University and the West Penn Allegheny Health System:

The Clinical       Reminder System is a prototype Decision Support System that combines a       relational database, a knowledge base consisting of algorithms that       implement disease management guidelines, integration with hospital       information systems and a web-based interface allowing for physician       management of patient data and suggested medical responses. It is a joint       research project of The Heinz School at Carnegie Mellon University and The       Department of Medicine at The West Penn Allegheny Health System. This       application has been in use within a clinical setting since 2001.

There is a similar system in place at the VA hospitals; here's a review showing barriers to adoption: (Saleem and Asch, 2005)

Optimally using the CR system for its intended purpose was impeded by (1) lack of coordination between nurses and providers; (2) using the reminders while not with the patient, impairing data acquisition and/or implementation of recommended actions; (3) workload; (4) lack of CR flexibility; and (5) poor interface usability. Facilitators included (1) limiting the number of reminders at a site; (2) strategic location of the computer workstations; (3) integration of reminders into workflow; and (4) the ability to document system problems and receive prompt administrator feedback.

This set of tools uses "reminder system" as a part of a "decision support system" (both of which are lovely sets of words with a bunch of coded history and software tied around them).

One good contact in the Ann Arbor area is Kai Zheng who teaches a course, Introduction to Health Informatics, which covers this and other topics.

Reminder systems, a survey and overview

Part of what I hope will be a series of posts, and with that I hope some publishable output at the end; my guess is that if I write about this a dozen times I'll have 1800 publishable words on the topic when I'm done.

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Reminder systems are tools - paper, electronic, physical, or some mix of all of them - which prompt you to do something in the future.   The quick word check on the search engine shows up 400000+ uses of the term, and a handful of ads, which suggests that's a common phrase; you'll also see "reminder services", "appointments reminder", "meetings reminder", and a zillion others.  So this is not new ground, not by any means.

The particular chunk of this space I am interested in is the "note to future self"; the message that you send to yourself in the future to do or think of something, which comes to you as a message in some way.  Think of it as a time capsule that you open, or a package that you had forgotten and then reopened; some part of it will hopefully be novel and trigger some "that's easy" reaction rather than the "oh blah I still can't figure out how to do that".

My future self is a lot more capable than I am, as witnessed by all of the promises that my current self makes for my future self to do.  Sometimes these are things which sound easy in the instant but actually prove hard in the future; others are things which my current self has figured out in essence but just hasn't worked through in detail, and thus it needs a little nudge to push it back to that memory of how to solve it.  It always helps to have some sleep on problems.

So we remind ourselves.  We put notes on the door, post things on the fridge, leave out the shoes on the steps so that they go to the shoemakers, paste sticky notes on our laptops.  Elaborate tickler systems send us to the stores to buy forty three color coded folders, which get cut up and used by our children for craft projects.   Facebook tells us about our friends birthdays, but not quite in enough time to send them postcards; our dentist and insurance agent seem to be the most regular, if boring correspondents.

I'll collect the various systems I've used, am using, or gave up on in this category; there are some in the previous "Calendars" section which I'll mine for ideas.