I hope you had a wonderful Christmas Fort McMurray. May you now have a day off to reboot for the New Year’s celebrations that are just around the corner. No wonder we suffer from the January blues when we jam so many visits, parties and fun into one week and then we are bored out of our minds when January rolls around.
The last few years my family has been lucky enough to fly south to break up some of the winter blahs, but with hubby still off work, we cannot see it happening this year. But I still “travel” almost every Friday.
As I sit with my morning coffee, I take a half hour or so to look up a new country or vacation destination and read a bit about it to see why I might want to travel there someday. When we decide to go on a trip I go into overdrive, and I am sure I drive hubby and the kids crazy with details about the place we will visit. I scope out restaurants, visit online pages of local businesses, and find us a few different things to do before we even leave the house.
Over the years my pre-travel research has allowed us to stay at luxury resorts at discount prices, beat the lines at Disney World and have meals at exotic locations that only the locals usually know about. But beyond all that, it allows me to leave my kitchen for a little window of time and use my imagination to take me places that I have never heard of before.
Of course, the most fun is when I read about places, imagine myself in some pictures at that location, and then actually get to go and take those same pictures.
Last year for the first time in 17 years we took a trip just for the two of us, without the kids. It was a bit difficult to relax the first day and a half or so. Then by the end of the week, all we did was talk about our kids and show their pictures to other parents staying at the resort.
We realized that as long as they were still living with us, we would probably not take another trip for that long without the kids. It is always more fun with the kids if you ask me — they see and want to do things we might not have noticed. They keep us busy, and of course, it is always more fun at the pool to play with the kids than to just sit there.
The resort we visited last year is one that we know we will return to someday, as it was the ultimate relaxation destination, and we even had our own pool and bartender outside our door during the day. If you ever get the chance to stay at a Karisma hotel, do it — they cater to the entire family, and go beyond when trying to please the kids, which makes the whole trip so much more enjoyable.
The amount of data that comes in and out of a typical clinic or hospital every day is mind boggling. Records, receipts, prescriptions, case notes, insurance information - the list is endless. Crowdsourcing has already gone a long way towards making it all the more manageable by allowing people to transcribe doctor's notes and medical information over the internet. Other measures include scanning of medical records into computer readable formats and sorting them into easily searchable databases. Through utilizing systems such as captchas (automated Turing tests) and others, companies have been able to crowdsource transcriptions and check tasks by distributing as little as one word at a time to hundreds of people worldwide.
Earlier this year, scientists from the University of Southampton, The Masdar Institute, MIT, and the University of California came together to create a potentially life-saving map of Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs) in Philadelphia. The MyHeartMap Challenge invited members of the public to participate by sending in geo-tagged pictures of AEDs that they saw around Philadelphia. The objective of the challenge is to quickly and efficiently gather the location of as many AEDs as possible. This project makes use of the information-gathering abilities of the crowd by challenging the general public to gather the information and collaborate to produce an extremely helpful health tool.
The greater degree of interconnectivity between patients, medical professionals and experts has meant that social networking sites have been used to discuss diagnoses and get feedback on treatments, speeding up the process of getting healthy immensely. The increase in speed, efficiency and reliability of medical processes is obviously important to many people. One such instance of an important project is a current competition looking for ideas of how to speed up identification of pancreatic cancer. Often when symptoms occur, it is already too late. InnoCentive's Global Solver Community has teamed up with The Sandler-Kenner Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer to incentivize people to produce new ideas on how to reliably detect pancreatic cancer earlier. Winning Solvers will split an award pool of $10,000 and most importantly, the winning idea will become part of the medical handbook for dealing with pancreatic cancer. Financial incentive is possibly not the best way to handle what should be a kind-hearted endeavour, however, it is still work to create these solutions and offering prizes is the easiest way to get the workforce energized.
When Prize4Life's $1 million incentives were unveiled, neurologist Dr. Seward Rutkove was suitably energized and won the first challenge by creating a device that could recognize signs of muscle deterioration linked with Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS). The non-profit is offering another $1 million for a treatment or cure that extends the life of ALS mice by 25% in lab experiments, no experiment to date has come close to those results. However, crowdsourcing has turned up extraordinary results before. Life Technologies has also offered multiple prizes in exchange for medical breakthroughs.
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