Build it and they will come . . .

One of the great things about the Internet is its ability to deliver information to you in an automated way. We all have favourite sites that we visit regularly: blogs, social networking, podcasts, the news, and so on. Did you know that you can subscribe to the RSS feeds provided by your favourite sites, and then have all of the new content delivered automatically to your desktop or email? To subscribe to a site, and receive content as it is updated, find the RSS icon on the site.

Click on it and then choose where you want the content delivered to. The easiest way is to use an RSS Reader – these collect updated info from everything you have subscribed to and then deliver it to you. There are readers that work with your Internet browser, like FeedDemon 3.0 for Windows, Safari, and Firefox. There are also online readers like Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Bloglines, Pageflakes, and Netvibes. All of them do basically the same thing, although their appearances are different – check out a couple to see what format you prefer.

Once you have your Reader set up, start adding feeds from your favourite sites. You will only get content as it is updated – nothing new = no update. You don’t need to check the original website.

You can also have content delivered to your email if you prefer. Whatever method you choose, using a feed reader is a good time management technique – instead of visiting every web site separately, let the content come to you. I used RSS to deliver photos from Flickr to this blog.

Feeds are also available where you might not expect – you can subscribe to a Google search for something and then receive new hits as they appear online, using Google alerts. iTunes offers thousands of audio and video podcasts – each with its own feed.

If you have your own blog or website, you can publish your own RSS feed that lets people subscribe to your site and get content as you update it. This blog is written using WordPress which automatically generates an RSS feed.

Having fun with the brain – hypo the llamas . . .

Learning the parts of the brain is challenging. This video by Michael Britt of the psych files podcast is both funny and informative – Michael shows you how to use mnemonics to remember what part of the brain is responsible for what. Hypothalamus? Hypo the llamas – you’ll have to watch the video to see how memorizing hypothalamus involves spraying hot and sweaty llamas with water . . .

I highly recommend watching this – and checking out the rest of the psych files. And if you have another idea for a mnemonic, post it here!

Bad journalism – when critical thinking flies out the window and science gets misinterpreted.

This week you are doing some thinking about thinking – how to evaluate ideas using a set of intellectual standards. You might enjoy this 10-minute impromptu video (filmed in a men’s washroom!) of an interview with Ben Goldacre of Bad Science. You’ll recognize his blog from this week’s discussion forum (where the need for critical thinking is abundantly demonstrated in the video you are evaluating!). He talks about why the reporting of science is often badly done, why it is critically important to get it right, and how blogging might ultimately replace print journalism. Some of the context is more relevant to the UK, but the reasoning is universal.