Society
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On Jan. 27, Western Union transmitted its last telegram. While most considered the 162-year-old dots-and-dashes technology quaint, it easily leads the list as the communication medium that had the most dramatic impact on society.
The Internet, the printing press and radio all changed culture in important ways; but they all grew out of previous communication forms. The electromagnetic telegraph was fundamentally different from anything that came before. Once telegraph wires came to town, the community was connected to the world. Messages from across the nation, and eventually around the world, could be sent and received almost instantly. The results of elections, military battles and the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk were known within hours, rather than weeks.
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The stethoscope is a timeless tool in the medical profession.
But according to a Time magazine article, today’s medical students are often less competent and comfortable with stethoscopes. Instead, they increasingly opt for expensive, high-tech tests to diagnose conditions that could be detected by careful listening through a stethoscope.
A Temple University doctor may have a solution. Time reports that Dr. Michael Barrett, in an American Journal of Medicine study, “concluded that medical students improved their stethoscope skills dramatically if they listened to certain digitally recorded soundtracks that mimic the distinctive vibrations produced by various valve problems and other cardiac conditions.”
Barrett created a recording of stethoscope sounds heard when a patient has an abnormal heart. Students downloaded the recording to an iPod and listened for two hours. The results were impressive: After listening to the iPod recording, students could correctly identify 80% of the sounds (up from 30% without the recording).
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Blogs
There is a new report that has just been released. Technorati, the blog search engine, now keeps tab on over 27 million blogs. There are 60 times as many blogs as there were three years ago. At the present rate of growth, they will double every 5.5 months.
Most of these blogs are not written by professional writers or journalists. Only a few of these will gather a large audience. But, when there are 75,000 new blogs added each and every day (about one per second), they will have an effect on how and where people spend their time online. It is now estimated 25 percent of the Web content output daily is consumer-generated media (CGM) with blogs playing a major role. This is long past a fad and well into a major trend reshaping our information society.
iTunes
Apple’s online iTunes store growth has soared 241 percent in the last year. It had over 20 million unique visitors in December.
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The Internet should present a variety of opinions… unless those opinions make you look bad or your opponents look good.
That’s been the approach of some in Congress who have recently been caught editing Wikipedia listings with a heavy hand.
Last week, the Lowell (Mass.) Sun reported that Rep. Marty Meehan’s (D-Mass.) staff admitted altering his listing to remove unflattering information, including a broken term-limit promise and his accumulation of $4.8 million in campaign funding, a figure far beyond that of any other House member.
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While many would argue that opening up business relationships in China has lead to greater freedoms, it’s also put businesses in a position to impact human rights issues.
As noted in an earlier blog, a few U.S. companies have been criticized for helping totalitarian governments censor the information and sites that users can access. Now, Yahoo has come under fire from Amnesty International for identifying a Chinese journalist who had disclosed a Communist Party directive instructing the media to downplay the June 4 anniversary of Tiananmen Square Massacre.
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