Mixing Science.gov, Coffee, and a Laptop
Yesterday my son had an emergency appendectomy – these days a pretty routine procedure. But far from routine was the array of drugs offered to get him through the long night ahead.
What were the side effects behind these strange-sounding names? How would they affect his recovery? Would all these drugs interact minus a negative outcome? And were they even necessary?
Happily, my job is community outreach for OSTI which hosts Science.gov. So, armed with a laptop in a corner coffee shop with wifi connectivity, I knew I could log onto Science.gov for a quick and thorough search of government science information.
Why not Google or Yahoo? Well, certainly I could get science information from many of the popular science engines. In fact, I often use these sites in combination with Science.gov for an extensive and comprehensive search. But I didn’t want to spend a lot of time sorting through Internet noise on popular Web searches. (No drug ads, no hits on the drug habits of rock bands!) I simply wanted information that was directly related to the drugs my son might take that night. And I wanted the information quickly so I could get back to the hospital room and spend time with my son. So I chose Science.gov.
Of note: Science.gov is a lot more than medical info. You can find winter weather safety tips, science internships, supernova Web sites … all kinds of science information available for free.
Final word: Happy 5th Anniversary Science.gov!
Cathey Daniels, OSTI Editor
We welcome your comments and look forward to civil discourse on a variety of science and technology information topics. We will review comments before posting and we reserve the right to not post comments. You are fully responsible for everything that you submit in your comments, and all posted comments are in the public domain. This means that your comments could be distributed widely.
By providing the correct answer to this math question, I accept these terms and conditions for comments I submit to the OSTI Weblog.
This technique for treating otitis media was subsequently abandoned when people became concerned about potential long term effects of radiation. Eventually, my parents wondered if I might suffer delayed adverse effects from my treatment. There is a group that sustains itself by calling attention to this fear.
Today, the National Institutes of Health has a great database of journal literature called PubMed, which is available to the public. It is widely believed to be the most heavily used science-oriented database of the federal government. For the casual user, however, PubMed poses a bit of a challenge. It does not offer relevance ranking nor an alert service. Thus, it often happens that patrons who search PubMed get flooded with hits which they have no easy way to sort through. And, if such patrons want to stay current on a topic, they must repeat their search periodically. PubMed can be a chore for casual users.
Thankfully, Science.gov extended the capability of PubMed. Science.gov brings back hits in relevance rank order. It also offers patrons an alert service whereby patrons receive a weekly notifice of new items posted in the past week. Partly to test the alerts system and partly to satisfy a personal curiosity, I have Science.gov access PubMed and send me an alert regarding nasopharyngeal irradiation. I use Science.gov just as would anyone else in the world with internet access.
One morning in 2004, I received a Science.gov Alert e-mail with a hyperlink to a PubMed item, which reported the results of a massive study about potential long term adverse effects of nasopharyngeal irradiation. The PubMed article concluded, reassuringly, "No convincing evidence for a causal relationship ....."
I am glad to report that Science.gov has come through for Cathey and me, as well as for science-attentive-citizens everywhere.
Walt Warnick
Director, Office of Scientific and Technical Information
Office of Science
Posted by Walt Warnick on December 12, 2007 at 03:54 PM EST #