Links for 2006-12-23

• Eakins Painting to Stay in Philadelphia
  "The Gross Clinic," a graphic 1875 canvas that depicts surgeon Samuel Gross teaching Jefferson students the finer points of 19th century surgery, was designed to illustrate Philadelphia's groundbreaking scientific and artistic achievements.
• O'Reilly Radar > Mechanical Turk is a Community Substitute
  Amazon's Mechanical Turk is great as artificial, artificial intelligence. It is perfectly designed to facilitate humans (or Turkers) transcribing podcasts, fixing MP3 metadata, and picking the best picture of a storefront.
• Henry Kissinger On Colbert Greenscreen Challenge: "It Is Time To Rock"... | The Huffington Post
• Italian Poet Dies With Help From a Doctor - New York Times
  Piergiorgio Welby, who had eloquently begged Italy's leaders to let him end his life legally, died late Wednesday after a doctor sedated him and removed the respirator that had kept him alive for nine years.
• UnSpun by Amazon: Community Opinions ... Ranked!
• Amazon Mechanical Turk: Work on a Random Unspun List
• Reuters/Second Life » Warren Ellis to write weekly SL column for Reuters
  Writer Warren Ellis, author of comic books, graphic novels, and two forthcoming novels, is bringing his "Second Life Sketches" to the Reuters Second Life News Center as a weekly column beginning next month.
• British Medical Journal Christmas Issue (December 23 2006, 333 [7582])
  Free Full Text.
• How Web 2.0 is changing medicine -- Giustini 333 (7582): 1283 -- British Medical Journal
• Hilarious Journal Articles #71: Sword swallowing and its side effects -- Witcombe and Meyer 333 (7582): 1285 -- BMJ
  We had information from 46 sword swallowers. Major complications are more likely when the swallower is distracted or swallows multiple or unusual swords or when previous injury is present.
• Hilarious Journal Articles #72: Subcutaneous inflammation mimicking metastatic malignancy induced by injection of mistletoe extract -- Finall et al. 333 (7582): 1293 -- BMJ
  We describe the histological features of subcutaneous inflammation induced by mistletoe, a popular Christmas decoration, when used as an anticancer complementary therapy.
• Hilarious Journal Articles #73: Phenotypic differences between male physicians, surgeons, and film stars: comparative study -- Trilla et al. 333 (7582): 1291 -- BMJ
  Male surgeons are taller and better looking than physicians, but film stars who play doctors on screen are better looking than both these groups of doctors. Whether these phenotypic differences are genetic or environmental is unclear.
• Hilarious Journal Articles #74: Time to stop sniffing the air: snapshot survey -- Johnson and Goodman 333 (7582): 1295 -- BMJ
  To determine whether the phrase "sniffing the morning air" is useful in positioning patients for tracheal intubation.
• NYC by Night - a photoset on Flickr
• The world is in your hand | haha.nu