Wall Street Journal Finally Gets It

The first purchase I made on the iPad back in April when I received the first day delivery was to sign up for the Wall Street Journal subscription. At $3.99 per week, it is not inexpensive, but the Journal has very good content and I faithfully read it every day. I had been reading it on the Kindle but for newspaper reading, the iPad is better, so I cancelled the Kindle subscription. I then realized that my “electronic” subscription (on the web) was about to expire and I was solicited by email to renew. But wait! I have to pay to read the WSJ on the web, pay again on the iPad, pay again on the Kindle, Android, print, the next new gadget too? Yes, to all of the above. This clearly makes no sense. Many of us writing about publishing models called out for a “pay once, read anywhere” model. It seemed to be falling on deaf ears until I received the following email on the day before Thanksgiving. Publishing models of all kinds are under attack but a single subscription with ability to read on the device or devices of your choice is clearly the only rational way from a consumer perspective. Publishers will have to negotiate with Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and others and it does not make their life easier but it is the only way they can survive.

As a valued customer of The Wall Street Journal for iPad™, you now have full access to WSJ.com and WSJ Mobile Reader, at no additional cost. To start enjoying The Journal from your mobile phone, desktop or laptop, just log in using your existing user name and password for iPad. In addition, your WSJ for iPad subscription includes full access to our new Android Tablet app, currently available on the Samsung GALAXY Tab.

Start Enjoying Full Access Now

If you have any questions, please contact our Customer Service team at 877.975.2897 or tablet@wsj.com.

We hope you continue to enjoy The Wall Street Journal, anytime, anywhere.

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Tags: ipad, journal, publishing, wall street journal

Scrolling on the iPad

When browsing web sites it is essential to use the scroll bars. Scroll bars have been a fixture of web sites for as long as I can remember and we all know intuitively how to use them. No training is required. We see a list of items or icons in a window and when the window gets full the scroll bars automatically appear allowing us to scroll through the expanded content.  With the introduction of the iPad, we learned a new way to scroll–using our fingers.

Some web sites have windows within the main window. Examples would include the photo selection window in Flickr or an edit window in a new blog page at WordPress or one of the classroom forum windows in an online learning page at the University of Phoenix. The iPad has no scroll bars and so it is not so obvious how to use sites such as these. Like me, you may have become frustrated by an apparent bug in Safari–it has no scrollbars–therefore making it impossible to perform certain functions.

Doing some research on this problem I found TheDesignspace, a site for “web development & elearning solutions, tutorials, great ideas”, who said that the lack of scrollbars “is not a bug, it is by design”.  They explain that scrolling inside of windows on the iPad is done using a two finger scroll. “Hold two fingers together and brush up and to the right across the area you want to scroll. If two fingers does not seem to work, try three. When it is working it is quite easy and smooth.” I tried it on all my problem sites. Sure enough, it works great! I learn something every day.

Tags: ipad, scroll, scroll bar

Health Discussions Forum

A new friend in Florida invited me to give a talk about the Future of the Internet. Approximately 50 people came on election day for a buffet lunch and an informal talk with Q&A. My intensified interest in healthcare has caused me to orient most of the Internet technology examples toward clinical cases or health policy. (The latest slides from my presentation can be found here). The Q&A session was dominated by healthcare questions–it is clearly a subject on most of our minds. My new friend, Eric Lutker, is a retired psychologist and lifelong learner. He suggested that we start a new blog to focus on, guess what? Healthcare. So, the early part of the weekend was spent setting up the new blog which we named the Healthcare Discussions Forum and you can find it at healthdiscussions.net. So far there are a half-dozen posts by Eric and me but Eric has let a few hundred of his friends know about it and by this post I am sharing it with patrickWeb readers. Who knows where this is headed but, if you are interested in what we are doing, please stop by the Healthcare Discussions Forum.

Tags: blogging, florida, health, Healthcare, Internet Technology

Blogging Reflection

My friend Irving commented that he is not so sure about my conclusion in the BioEverything post that the trend toward The Singularity is underway. Irving may be right although the things going on in bioengineering seem to fit the pattern that Ray Kurzweil describes in his book. More on that another time. What got me thinking from Irving’s comment is more about blogging. Now that I have been a student in the doctoral program for a couple of months I can see quite a contrast between scholarly writing with critical thinking and the world of blogging.

In scholarly writing it is important to back your assertions and conclusions with research and to provide a citation for all the reference material that you use. It is also important to think critically about what you read and to not jump to conclusions. Various points of view that you uncover should be compared and contrasted to bring out differences. The goal is to create new knowledge by extending or enhancing what you learn from others.

Blogging is quite a different process. Although it is certainly possible to provide a reference list and citations it is generally a much more informal communications vehicle. A skeptic might call it “winging it”. I am the first to admit that the things I write in my blog are not vetted in any way. The things I say are my opinion. I have many readers who trust me as a source but it is certainly not peer reviewed. An advantage of the blog however is that an author can easily change their mind and express a new opinion as a result of learning or feedback such as was provided by Irving. My book about the Internet took me six months to write. It took the publishing process more than six months to get the book on the shelves of book stores. In the world of Internet technology a lot changes in six months. With the blog as my book follow-on I can write weekly what I have learned and include things that have changed and in some cases caused me to believe something different than what I believed at the time I wrote the book.

The first thing students are advised in the doctoral program is to avoid using Google, Wikipedia, social networking sites, or general purpose websites and instead to use the thousands of journals containing peer reviewed points of view. Fortunately, the university library provides on-line access and search tools to utilize these journals. I completely agree with the university’s point that the easy access and availability of so many search engines can provide an avenue for poor quality work. I also agree with caveat emptor. There is a lot of great information on the web and a lot of not so great and some that is completely fraudulent. The ease of creating and finding information both has risks.

With regard to the peer review process I am not sure it is perfect. Perhaps it is like the jury system. It is not perfect but it is better than the alternatives. Shattell (2010) found that slightly more than 25% of authors found peer reviews to be less than constructive. Editors revealed issues with inconsistency, insufficient feedback to the author, reviewer bias, and disrespectful tone. The Internet has created a more level playing field and it is beginning to have an impact on processes that have previously been considered sacred. I believe the peer review process is critical to the integrity of scholarly learning and to the University of Phoenix Scholar-Practitioner-Leader model but I further believe that the peer-review process will evolve by using the power of the Internet to make the process more inclusive. Dan Cohen at George Mason University (Cohen, 2010, August 23) is one of the advocates for a more open web-based approach to the review of scholarly works. The New York Times article on this subject is enlightening and I am sure there will be significant research done on the points raised in the Times story.

Cohen, P. (2010, August 23, 2010). Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review, New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html

Shattell, M. M., Chinn, P., Thomas, S. P., & Cowling, W. R., III. (2010). Authors’ and editors’ perspectives on peer review quality in three scholarly nursing journals. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 42(1), 58-65. doi: 10.1111/j.1547-5069.2009.01331.x

Tags: bio-engineering, blogging, e-learning, irving wladawsky, irving wladawsky-berger, Kurzweil, peer review, peer reviewed, singularity, university

BioEverything

In 1963 there were two tracks that an electrical engineering student at Lehigh University could choose from — electronics or power. Electronics was about solid state devices such as transistors. (The Intel 4-bit 4004, was not to come until 1971). The “power” track was mostly about electric motors and power generation. There was no computer science program, but the university had recently acquired a GE 225 which occupied a good part of the basement floor of Packard Laboratory. Nearly every department at Lehigh began to include computer programming as part of their curricula. Some departments evolved toward strong computer orientation more rapidly than others but eventually computer science and computer engineering became formal programs of their own.

Fast forward forty years and you can see a very similar evolution occurring with regard to bioengineering. Initially “bio” was a special interest area that spread roots from the biology department into various engineering disciplines. Bioengineering has already become a structured curriculum for students interested in the intersection between engineering and biological sciences. The bioengineering faculty is drawn from several departments in the college of engineering and applied science and the college of arts and sciences. Bioengineering combines engineering principles with the life sciences. There are three tracks available to students. Biopharmaceutical engineering encompasses biochemistry and chemical engineering. Bioelectronics/biophotonics focuses on applications of electrical engineering and physics in bioengineering such as signal processing, biosensors, and biochips. Cell and tissue engineering straddles the fields of molecular and cell biology, materials science, mechanical and electrical engineering and encompasses biomaterials and biomechanics. Studies range from cells and tissue to organs and systems. Sound a bit different than transistors and electric motors?

This week I received a copy of resolve magazine, a biannually published magazine from the college of engineering and applied science at Lehigh. Resolve is all about a focus on Lehigh engineering.  I think many of us have certain things in mind when we hear the word engineering. Perhaps we think of electronic circuits, chemical interactions, structural and designs, or automotive and aeronautical endeavors. The first two stories in resolve leaves a different impression. The first article was “Measuring the stiffness of a single living cell”, a story about how changes in the mechanical properties of biological cells may be a major contributing factor to the development of bone, kidney, and vascular disease. The second story was “Mending a wounded heart”, a story about how heart attacks can cause extensive scarring of the cardiac muscle tissue and how inadequate structural remodeling can be supplemented with an implanted cardiac patch composed of heart muscle cells grown on a porous polymer scaffold. A third story talks about the mechanics of  proteins — how protein molecules are made from a linear chain of amino acids that fold into a 3-D globular form. The bottom line is that engineering is not what it used to be! Engineers still design bridges and circuits but now bio-engineers are working at the molecular level to improve the quality of life by by redesigning parts of the human being and designing new components to take the place of those in our body that may have worn out.

The exciting part of all this is that engineering students with “bio” in their pedigree have a much broadened career potential including healthcare, biomedical, pharmaceutical, biomaterials, and medicine. Even more exciting is the possibility for those of us who started out back in the days of the transistors and motors and now have aging bodies that some day we will benefit from bio-engineered “components”. The implantable pacemaker was just the beginning. Bioengineering graduates will be developing pacemakers for the brain, cochlear implants for hearing deficiencies, artificial cartilage for our knees, devices to enable the blind to see, and cures for today’s incurable diseases. At some point a nanotechnology “cocktail” will bring nanobots to our internal systems to replace faulty cells with newly engineered ones. Just like computers have become ubiquitous, it is clear that bio-everything is on the horizon. Bioethics will become a larger concern but it is clear that the trend toward The Singularity is underway.

Tags: bio, bio-engineering, bioengineering, engineering, lehigh, singularity