opinion : the death of google labs (especially health)

It is a sad day, as I found out that Google is shutting down at labs applications. I've long been a fan of this part of the company and it will be disappointing to see it go I am particularly annoyed that many good applications are going to simply stop existing, particularly Google health. It is a little bizarre when you log on and they tell you to “please switch your information to Microsoft”. Looking at their blogs, it appears that Google closed the project down because it did not get the number of users that they had intended. Google is being foolish here however, as Health never got popular because it was never really marketed properly , or at all for that matter. Many people in healthcare did not even know that it existed, including many of my colleagues. Had Google advertised it to all these people using its other services(gmail or search ads), I have no doubt that the health service would've spread.

Google has clearly not learned its lesson from the days of Google video. Google video was a service similar to YouTube (but technically superior) that Google did not do much marketing for either. As a result Google video was crushed in popularity by YouTube and Google was forced to spend billions of dollars to buy YouTube to compete in the segment that they had innovated in. This is a great example of how a company will suffer if it has many great engineers but not enough good business people to capitalize on their innovations. Google health is not the only labs application that has suffered in this regard. I'm sure that many more people would've used Google squares and several other innovative programs had Google pushed them on its regular users more aggressively.

The fact that Microsoft is going full speed ahead with their health portal also suggests this is a big area in the future. It is a matter of time before electronic medical records become common, and as patients become more interested in seeing in controlling their data, the appeal of health records applications will be huge. Google will learn its lesson when future versions of Microsoft Office are sold to doctors at marked up prices because they include health vault software, and will then be forced to buy some start up competitor to compete.

Now let's just hope that they do not get rid of Google Body - my current favorite Google application.

TV review : House MD

Tonight is a season premier of my favorite TV show, House MD. on the surface this is a show about a misanthropic doctor and his associates. Every episode follows a similar formula: first a patient collapses, then they try treatment that repeatedly do not work. Towards the end of the show, House will get a brilliant idea and treat the patient. There is also a little bit of the personal life storyline for the characters in every episode as well. But the show is actually much much deeper than it would initially appear.

House MD is really a show about two different styles of practicing medicine. In the 60s and 70s the style of medicine known as paternalism was taught and widely practiced. Paternalism is roughly defined as a style where the doctor knows all and the patients except his wisdom without question. Believers in this practice saw patients as weak and saw science is all-powerful to solve diseases. The competing philosophy of that is humanism, in which the physicians sympathize with their patients and work with them to find a common solution to their problems. Physicians who practice in the style try to use a holistic approach and appreciate patient's feelings and moral values.

As a doctor, House represents the alpha paternalist doctor. He is absolutely brilliant as a scientist and always right, but disdains patient interaction. He is thrust in to a modern hospital however, and forced to confront several of the changing aspects of medicine. His boss is a woman, as as one of his fellows. He also has a minority fellow, to go along with a fellow who is a rich white legacy. While he is an angry paternalist, his fellows all believe strongly in humanism. The overriding premise of the show is that his paternalist style can solve all of his patients problems but ironically enough, he cannot solve his own. For his personal struggles, he needs but resists the humanism of his colleagues.

It should also be noted that House with his fellows must confront all of the major problems facing modern medicine. There are episodes about, pharmaceutical companies trying to buy influence, fetal rights, patient rights, rights to treatment of prisoners and poor people, and personal struggles with drug addiction and dishonest relationships. Some episodes tend to confront the philosophical topics, such as how to spend the last moments of one's life, were facing up to mistakes. Further episodes comment on politics or current events. The topics on the show read like a list of topics from an actual medical bioethics class and are deeper than almost any other show on television..

While the cases that appear on the show are unusual and unlikely to occur in the number that they do, the actual medical dialogue on the show is surprisingly accurate. The treatments and symptoms are generally right from the textbook. While the show rarely betrays the long and often tedious work involved in being a physician, it does accurately portray the roles that students and attending physicians have in a modern hospital. Of all the medical shows on television, House easily is the most interesting to someone who understands or works in medicine.

Opinion : New Kick-ass Radio Station

last month, a coworker brought a new radio station to my attention. It quickly became the permanent station on all day at work and also in my car. This station is 104.5 owned by clear channel, and it is an interesting experiment in modern radio. It is a station that has no talkshows or DJ's. It is simply a computer that plays songs over and over. And because there is no staff overhead, they never play more than 60 seconds worth of commercials at a time. The format is a mix of modern rock, 90's alternative, with a rare 70's or 80's classic. Only the new songs seem to repeat and even then only once a day (I listen to this station for 8hrs straight, so this is really appreciated) The combination of song range and no commercials or annoying talking make this simply the best station I have ever heard. I hope that this station stays around and that it doesn't get big and start airing a lot more commercials.

As I now listen to a station run entirely by computers, I am starting to wonder if this is the future of radio. A similiar alternative concept has also started broadcasting nearby my apt, a station calling itself Skin Radio. A bunch of hipsters seem to have bought AM bands on the cheap as the believe HD tech and the internet will allow them to compete with FM stations. While this maybe the ultimate answer to the Clear Chanel beast, my tastes are a bi more mainstream to care at this point. As long as Clear Channel keeps innovating, they are fine by me.