Author: leslieyuan

The “first follower” is as important as the leader

/ leslieyuan

 I was forwarded a great video from Opinder Bawa (UCSF’s CTO) today —  here’s the video and Opinder’s lead in. 

Kevin Grumbach mentioned in conversation the wonderful 5 minute video from a Ted talk about how being a “first follower” is as important as being a leader.

 Do check out the link below and I think you will find it as relevant as I did for what we are trying to do with team research, community engagement, health professional education, health care teamwork and the like.

Google Scholar Citations – an easy way to get citation metrics into UCSF Profiles?

/ leslieyuan / 3 Comments

Recently Google launched Google Scholar Citations: a simple way for you to compute your citation metrics and track them over time, per this blog post.

I went in to check it out on July 25, 2011 and ‘signed up’ – and here’s what I found. NOTE: apparently this is a limited launch with a small number of users, so if you can’t sign up, you can provide your email address to be notified when they open it up to everyone.

1. I went to: http://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=new_profile

2. I logged into my Google account and then followed their 4 step process of claiming my citation profile. Here are the steps:

3. Step 1 was creating the Google scholar Profile – this entailed putting in my name, title, institution email address. (sorry no screen shot).

4. Step 2 is to import “Your articles.” The system automatically shows me what it found and then I went in to “claim” which articles were mine. Once I click the “This is mine” button next to every article that is mine, the button changes to “Remove” (if I want to change my mind). A few notes here:

a. The Google search found my articles in PubMed, and also some patent applications, but I know I had one article that isn’t it PubMed and this one was not found.

b. It was easy for me to claim my articles as I only had 3 items. For people with hundreds of articles to claim, I’m not sure how easy they make it to claim your work.

5. Step 3 is to configure your updates for Google scholar

6. Step 4 – Go to view your profile, which is private by default. Change this to public if you want others to find it (and if you want to create a link to it from your UCSF Profile)

Clicking on a specific article gets you to:

7. If you’ve made your Google Scholar Profile public, you can grab this Google URL and easily create a link to citation metrics in your UCSF Profile. Log in to UCSF Profiles and edit the Websites associated with your profile. See a screenshot of mine below, or view it live.

We’ve got some other ideas on how this work can intersect with UCSF Profiles and our work with research networking tools … in more robust ways than this. But in less than 10 minutes, I was able to do the above.

visualcomplexity.com | A visual exploration on mapping complex networks

/ leslieyuan / 1 Comment

visualcomplexity.com | A visual exploration on mapping complex networks.

I found an interesting site for interesting visualizations of networks… here’s their description of what this site is about:

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

The “green” font…

/ leslieyuan

We’ve recently had discussions about the font of the VH site, changing it for readability etc.  And now, for another interesting take on fonts… the ‘green’ font.  From the AP, a recent news story from the UW – Green Bay.

UW-Green Bay: New e-mail font will save money

Associated Press
Updated: 03/25/2010 08:48:18 AM CDT

A Wisconsin college has found a new way to cut costs with e-mail — by changing the font.

The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has switched the default font on its e-mail system from Arial to Century Gothic. It says the change sounds minor, but it will save money on printer ink when students print out e-mails in the new font.

Diane Blohowiak, the school’s director of computing, says the new font uses about 30 percent less ink than the previous one.

That could add up to real savings, since the cost of printer ink works out to about $10,000 per gallon.

Blohowiak says the decision is part of the school’s five-year plan to go green. She tells Wisconsin Public Radio it’s great that a change that’s eco-friendly also saves money.

—

I looked this up online and the story got picked up by several newspapers. Below a link to the story in the Washington Post — read the comments below the actual story.  Some funny analysis as to whether this really is green…

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/campus-overload/2010/03/font_change_could_save_money_p.html

Twitter, revisited….would we or should we use it? Here are 11 Commandments to ponder.

/ leslieyuan / 1 Comment

I read a short article this morning about the fact that the Department of Defense issued its social-media policy, and essentiall gave it the thumbs up.   The article goes on to discuss rules of engagement for employees’ use of social media, or lack thereof.  The author puts forth The 11 Commandments of Corporate Tweeting and while these are focused on the use of Twitter in corporate America, I think the 11 are straightforward and rational, and would apply to our setting as well.  A few of them are listed below.

– We can articulate the company vision in 140 characters or less, minus PR puffery and cliché.

– We are willing to give credit to cool, innovative, or thought-provoking ideas, even if coined by someone else.

– We are willing to challenge a potentially destructive position even if our position generates criticism.