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I just can't get enough of Google Trends. If you haven't heard of it, Trends is one of many amazing marketing tools in Google's repertoire which can be used any any interested party. I'm not sure if it has a lot of practical value, but it sure is fun. Basically, Trends allows you to view the popularity of any search term you can think of over the past 5 years (ca 2004). Moreover, Google even matches the popularity to news breaks current as of that time. Just for fun I did a few random searches. Health Care
Here you can see that searches for "Health Care" jumped within the past 5 or so months - more or less congruent with references in the news. Interestingly, it appears that searches are lowest in December. ADHD
If you want an example of yearly trending, check out "ADHD." It's no surprise that searches for ADHD are lowest in May, June and July. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that school influences cultural interest in ADHD. Medical School
I thought this one was pretty interesting. It seems searches for "Medical School" have been dropping steadily over the past 5 or so years. Could it be that people are losing interest in pursuing medical school? Is there another factor at work? I can't explain this one, but if you've got any suggestions, I'd be interested in hearing them. Apparently Google limits the amount of searches you can perform in a day, but still a cool tool. |
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It's official! I'm an Iowa Paramedic Specialist. I probably would've been certified a month ago, but there was a big paperwork mixup. Still, it all worked out. Now, I just need Wisconsin to sign off on me. |
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Looks like I may have a new website in the works. This one's a volunteer site, but if everything goes according to plan, it could do a lot of cool things. High exposure and a great cause. I'll post more later. |
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Ever wander what your brain looks like in real life? It turns out I had the random good fortune of seeing MRI scans of my own brain. Lucky for me, none of it appears to be missing... Without further ado, the human brain:  I've been a "demo patient" and had an echocardiogram and several EKGs before, but it's too bad I don't have any pictures. |
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Several months ago I actually had some free time, so I made an artificially intelligent bot. In layman's terms, it's a computer program that talks to you. Since it's not completely finished, it occasionally gives odd answers, or it just ends up speechless. Let me know what you think of it. This was only made for Firefox and not Internet Explorer. Explorer seems to work, but it's pretty glitchy as far as typing in responses goes. Your mileage may vary. Warning: Geek Speek Below Try out the AJAX version. (It's not better; just more interesting from a programming standpoint) This bot is driven by a combination of PHP, SQL, AJAX, and AIML. AIML stands for Artifical Intelligence Markup Language. It's basically a set of structured text (XML to be exact) which contains wildcard responses to natural human language. This specific set was developed by Noam Chomsky, a professor at MIT. I chose it because his set was by far the most developed though the original A.L.I.C.E. set was fairly comprehensive. The A.L.I.C.E. set just doesn't sound quite as human. The AIML set is then loaded into a MySQL database. I'm not sure how many basic responses are loaded, but I think it's over 100,000. Next, I loaded a PHP program called "Program E" onto my server and created an AJAX user interface to communicate with it. My interface calls Program E, an AIML interpreter, in real time. Program E then queries the SQL database for matching templates and returns the result to my interface. If you've made it this far, I'm pretty impressed. :) I'm kind of a geek when it comes to computer AI. |
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