It's late, and I have a VERY busy schedule this week

that includes large clinics, an audit I do [oops, that's next week, thankfully], a person coming in to determine my process for the data entry job, and (finally) getting my permanent crown on my tooth, and of course, being Sunday, I've been up since 6 am and have played several hours of Call of Cthulhu--but--I stayed up to finish something.

I just took the final to the Power Searching with Google course and got 100% on the first try. And while some of the it was stuff I already knew, about 1/3 of the class was totally new to me, like dragging and dropping images into the search box, or using whois, how to download Google Earth files, and those sorts of things.

Thanks Google for the lessons!

Good things

1. The library got my application and it has been referred on. They're having trouble with the system that sends a verification, but it did go through.
   
2. I'm halfway finished with Google's Power Searching with Google class. Much of the early stuff I'm familiar with already, but I am learning a few tricks I didn't know. I finished the mid-class assessment with a 100%.
   
3. I'm feeling much better today. I wasn't sure this morning, but I perked up and was very productive.
   
4. I have managed to answer some questions from a friend that might stump lesser librarians, although I'm still working on a few things for him that might be beyond me, like locating a book by its colour and weight. :)
   
5. I got a ride home from work.
   
6. I have the dates for the trip to Chicago (got that last week). It'll be in November this year, on a Thursday and Friday, which will be better for me in terms of the data entry/referral duties at work.
   

A way to judge your hospital

Hospital death rates for key conditions unveiled

Hospital Compare allows you to find out death rates for individual hospitals by condition.

They also let you compare things like patient satisfaction and number of medicare patients treated for various conditions. Ours, being a tertiary-care facility, isn't in their database, but I checked other primary care facilities in Lexington. St Joseph (the main one) seems to have the highest patient satisfaction; Central Baptist seems to have a higher percentage of meeting standards of care. UK lags behind in both, but I'm not surprised. I'm not impressed by what I've seen of the university's health care system. I have a friend who works there. He never sees the same doctor twice. Their health insurance means they go through UK HealthCare, and there seem to be an inordinate amount of hoops to jump sometimes. I like the choices I have with my insurance better.

A really neat idea for a search engine

TinEye is a search engine in beta that allows you to upload a picture and it will find other instances of that image for you. For example, I put in the Argentinian flag image and came up with 42 hits.

Thanks to Kathy Evans of Purdue for this one.

A new tool

Relemed, from the University of Virginia School of Medicine
Still in its infancy, it tells you how relevant (and ranks results that way) a citation is to your search in MEDLINE, but it doesn't tell you how many results or allow advanced searching yet. In the meantime, try HubMed. And, of course, if sorting by date is fine with you, there's the gold standard of PubMed.