Joe S passes along this for those of you who record lectures, or who download the lecture mp3s from the library e-reserves:
I have been using Express Scribe Transcription Playback Software to speed up audio lectures to 140%+ without pitch change/distortion: http://nch.com.au/scribe/index.html
It’s free & available for Windows, Mac & Linux as well. I find it invaluable to listen to lectures at a faster pace with no pitch distortion. It saves me time and I hope it helps you as well.
Showing posts with label learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label learning. Show all posts
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Monday, February 12, 2007
Auscultation: more heart sounds
'Tis the season: more heart sounds.
My latest favorite, since I find the HeartSounds software that came with our book to be pretty irritating to navigate, and non-productive in that you have to hold down the mouse button for as long as you want to hear a sound, is the American College of Cardiology's Heart Songs. Though the CD costs $50-100 (which I'm going to ask the library if they'll purchase), they have a few sample MP3s, each of which are 7-9 minutes long, with lots of explanation, lengthy sound segments, and most importantly, repetition. The quiz that's available on that page is high quality, and though it delays feedback until the end and you can't go back to listen to the ones you missed, the quizzes increase in complexity and thus fit my favorite criteria for learning tools in that they are scaffolded.
Other favorite tutorials/quizzes remain the Cardiology Site and Blaufuss's Heart Sounds Tutorial and Quiz.
We can also finally settle the debate over the 3M tunable bell/diaphragms:
Bell Mode (low-frequency)
For low-frequency sounds, light contact is used on the chestpiece. The diaphragm membrane is contained by a flexible surround that actually suspends it, allowing the membrane to resonate low-frequency sounds.
Diaphragm Mode (high-frequency)
For high-frequency sounds, firm contact pressure is used on the chestpiece. By pressing on the chestpiece, the diaphragm membrane moves inward until it reaches an internal ring. The ring simply restricts the diaphragm membrane's movement. It blocks, or attenuates, low-frequency sound and allows you to hear the higher frequency sounds.
I've been wrong along! Good to know. I still <3 my Littman Cardiology III.
My latest favorite, since I find the HeartSounds software that came with our book to be pretty irritating to navigate, and non-productive in that you have to hold down the mouse button for as long as you want to hear a sound, is the American College of Cardiology's Heart Songs. Though the CD costs $50-100 (which I'm going to ask the library if they'll purchase), they have a few sample MP3s, each of which are 7-9 minutes long, with lots of explanation, lengthy sound segments, and most importantly, repetition. The quiz that's available on that page is high quality, and though it delays feedback until the end and you can't go back to listen to the ones you missed, the quizzes increase in complexity and thus fit my favorite criteria for learning tools in that they are scaffolded.
Other favorite tutorials/quizzes remain the Cardiology Site and Blaufuss's Heart Sounds Tutorial and Quiz.
We can also finally settle the debate over the 3M tunable bell/diaphragms:
Bell Mode (low-frequency)
For low-frequency sounds, light contact is used on the chestpiece. The diaphragm membrane is contained by a flexible surround that actually suspends it, allowing the membrane to resonate low-frequency sounds.
Diaphragm Mode (high-frequency)
For high-frequency sounds, firm contact pressure is used on the chestpiece. By pressing on the chestpiece, the diaphragm membrane moves inward until it reaches an internal ring. The ring simply restricts the diaphragm membrane's movement. It blocks, or attenuates, low-frequency sound and allows you to hear the higher frequency sounds.
I've been wrong along! Good to know. I still <3 my Littman Cardiology III.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Embryology: Urogenital development
Female Urogenital Development
Male Urogenital Development
(Originally posted on Pharyngula, and I saw them on The Well-Timed Period.)
YouTube actually has quite a few cool science-related videos stashed away under the giant mountains of bored kids with webcams. This one is my favorite: The Inner Life of the Cell.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Auscultation tutorials
We're coming up on auscultation quizzes in Physical/Clinical Diagnosis, so I've been sorting through tutorials online. I need lots of repetition for tasks that involve memory-based auditory discrimination, so the more the better.
All in all, the winner is Blaufuss: Heart Sounds Tutorial.
Oh, and an amazing database of ophthalmology images.
- Blaufuss -- some very nice tutorials with clinical scenarios, visual depictions and testing. I looked at "Heart Sounds Quiz" in particular.
- Cardiology site has a very extensive site of heart sounds, including many pathological.
- a basic set of lung sounds from RALES
- basic set of heart and lung sounds from 3M
- nice set of lung sounds from UC Davis, the one from which I made an iFlash deck of flashcards
- and lastly, if you own Bates Guide to Physical Examination, there are updated versions of HeartSounds available, most importantly one that runs kindof-natively in OS X. (I was really impressed that I was able to get the author's email from the readme on the CD, email him, and get a response with the updated app info directly from him within a day. Thanks, Dr Pitts!)
All in all, the winner is Blaufuss: Heart Sounds Tutorial.
Oh, and an amazing database of ophthalmology images.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
OS X: Flow charts and schemas
In Clinical Diagnosis we started off having to make a bunch of clinical diagnosis decision-making schema. People used Powerpoint, Word, OmniGraffle, and other disasters-fests; the situation was dire! Thankfully someone in my group had Visio, so it was up to him to produce our Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase Deficiency schema.
Hands down, the best flow chart / schema software is yEd Java Graph Editor. It's available for just about every OS, so there's finally something useful in this blog for Windows users.
The image in this post is the giant master schema I made for one of our exams -- don't copy it because there are mistakes in it that I've caught since then, and it's not logically sound, but admire its vastness! -- there are nice PNG (image) and PDF exports (so you can share it with people who don't have the software and print it anywhere), it can print across multiple pages (very handy for giant messes like that one), it has snap-to grids, you can set the default node properties (including size, shape, background and text color), and you can have it do all sorts of fancy graph analysis and redistribution. The arrows are flexible, the labels are flexible, and it's absolutely the best tool I've found.
There are some user interface quirks that are frustrating, especially for novice users. Clicking once creates a new node, but clicking an existing node isn't enough to edit it -- you have to hit F2 to edit the label, whether that's the node label (the text inside) or the arrow label (the text accompanying the label). If you have a Mac laptop and your F2 is truly a function key (like screen brightness), you either have to hit Function-F2 to get the F2 yEd is expecting, or you have to override the setup in the keyboard preferences in the System Preferences (Keyboard & Mouse :: Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features). Overall, you can be very productive with yEd after 5-10 minutes of basic acclimation, and it's well worth the time investment.
The other tool I found was Gliffy, but that was mostly because they have cool room layout modes where you can drag couches and bookcases around, and as someone who's tried everything from construction paper to Photoshop to mock up a room, that's very cool.
Have you been using yEd? Any tips for readers? Is there some other software you've found productive? Please comment!
OS X: Flash cards and quizzing
Once a software engineer, always a software engineer. And once stubborn -- well, still stubborn. I tend to have an idea, code it poorly, work on it for a long time, then look around and find someone else has done it already, and way better than I ever would.
As is the case with flash cards / quizzing applications. A few years ago I wrote a PHP/MySQL web site for flash cards and shared it with my Anatomy & Physiology class. It was clumsy, web-based, I was the only one who could add cards, but it worked for me. It wasn't the solution I needed for med school though, so I finally looked around for OS X software to do the job.
I found two:
iFlash is $12 and has some excellent features -- your cards can have multiple "sides" (which is handy given that there's more than one thing we need to know for each herb, for example), and they can have embedded sounds, which means that I just made a deck of cards incorporated the lung sounds I downloaded from somewhere. There's a free 30-day trial, which I'm still working from. [iFlash review and iFlash download]
Genius is free and has a cool quizzing algorithm. One of the features I liked about the tool I wrote was that you had to get questions right more than once in order to have them deemed "known," and the more you got them wrong, the more you had to get them right to get back in the black. Genius has a similar idea going and seems like an excellent tool. [Download Genius]
What's your impression? Are flash cards helpful for you in learning? Do you find added value from computer-based flash cards instead of that huge deck of 3x5s fraying in your back pack?
As is the case with flash cards / quizzing applications. A few years ago I wrote a PHP/MySQL web site for flash cards and shared it with my Anatomy & Physiology class. It was clumsy, web-based, I was the only one who could add cards, but it worked for me. It wasn't the solution I needed for med school though, so I finally looked around for OS X software to do the job.
I found two:
iFlash is $12 and has some excellent features -- your cards can have multiple "sides" (which is handy given that there's more than one thing we need to know for each herb, for example), and they can have embedded sounds, which means that I just made a deck of cards incorporated the lung sounds I downloaded from somewhere. There's a free 30-day trial, which I'm still working from. [iFlash review and iFlash download]
Genius is free and has a cool quizzing algorithm. One of the features I liked about the tool I wrote was that you had to get questions right more than once in order to have them deemed "known," and the more you got them wrong, the more you had to get them right to get back in the black. Genius has a similar idea going and seems like an excellent tool. [Download Genius]
What's your impression? Are flash cards helpful for you in learning? Do you find added value from computer-based flash cards instead of that huge deck of 3x5s fraying in your back pack?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
