American Airlines Retirees Committee Medical Blog

Today’s news summary – December 13, 2011

Here is a summary of the important news from today.

• ‘Ecstasy’ May Cause Long-Term Changes in Brain Chemistry
• Many Toddlers Wind Up in ER After Accidental Overdose
• Chewing Khat Raises Heart Disease, Death Risk: Study
• Health Highlights: Dec. 13, 2011

Today’s news summary – December 9, 2011

Here is a summary of the important news from today.

• Americans Encouraged to Get Flu Vaccine
• ‘Love Hormone’ May Buffer Kids From Mom’s Depression
• Health Highlights: Dec. 9, 2011
• FDA Panel Wants More Risk Information on Yaz Pills

Today’s news summary – December 6, 2011

Here is a summary of the important news from today.

• Steroids May Boost Survival for Very Preemie Babies
• Hormone Drugs Might Not Raise Heart-Related Deaths in Prostate Patients
• FDA Targets Homeopathic Weight Loss Products
• If Parents Drink and Drive, Their Kids May Too: Study
• Vitamin D Levels Tied to Diabetes Risk in Obese Kids
• Targeted Drugs, Lung CT Screening Top Cancer Advances in 2011
• Health Highlights: Dec. 6, 2011

The Visual Thesaurus and their word of the Day is a tremendous learning tool. It is based on the Thinkmap® software environment. At $20/yr it is the best investment we can make in our ongoing knowledge quest. They have a forum of guest writers who write on the various subjects that are introduced in the words of the day It is my goal to feature the works of a different writer a week, plus to introduce you to the various other tools they have developed.

I have been a “Mind Mapper” for almost ten years (I am age 70) and this is the best “Mind Mapping” kind of application that I have run across. I wish that I could convince the “Thinkmap® software” people that they should adopt the more “open source” software model, that they would make at least 10x factor in the increase of their profitability.

Why you may ask?

Market place share! The growth of the interest would grow at exponential rates. They risk losing their advantage by someone developing a much better product. Take a look at what has been happening with the development of the Axon Idea Processor.

“Axon Idea Processor was written in Visual Prolog by Mr. Chan Bok from Singapore as a tool for computer-assisted thinking and problem solving. Mr. Bok is a life member of the Operational Research Society of Singapore

The processor is used for organizing ideas, brainstorming, concept mapping, mind mapping, analysis, flowcharting, and creative writing. A highly heuristic multi-level user workspace is manipulated using a wide array of linguistic, analytical, graphical and compositional idea generation tools. As a sketchpad for visualizing and organizing ideas, the Idea Processor exploits visual attributes such as color, shape, size, scale, position, depth, shadow, links, and icons. Visual cues help the user to facilitate recall, association, and discovery. Diagrams assist modeling and solving complex problems. Visualization tools reinforce short term memory and stimulate creativity.

Pre-defined templates as well as models provided by collaborative users have been developed for a wide variety of pre-defined creative, analytic or problem-solving graphical formats, such as:

1. hierarchical
2. flow-chart
3. critical-path
4. logical
5. data-flow
6. associational
7. contextual
8. pathway

”
Excerpted from:

Axon Idea Processor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I have used Mr Bok’s program for several years (both the free and the commercial version)as well as some 15+ different mind mapping programs. I find it appalling that the educational institutions of our country(USA) have chosen to ignore to a large extent these excellent learning tools.

One question – does anyone know of a complimentary type of tool to the Visual Thesaurus for construction (particularly grammatical compliance)? If we could do that along the lines of sentence diagramming we would have a “real world” application.