Then and now

A couple of weeks ago I posted on the Flickr pool "Looking into the Past". I'm getting a chance to do some similar work now:


One of our librarians wanted to create a poster of an "architectural history" of medicine at the University of Michigan, displaying photos of major medical buildings. I'm taking that a step further: creating photos that juxtapose the past with the present, and a KMZ file that can be displayed in Google Earth to locate each building's footprint on a current map.

I start with a Sanborn map fitted to the street grid and any still-existing landmarks. Then I plot the shape of the buildings according to the map, like so:


After that, it gets complicated. I can measure the true dimensions of a building and compare that to the apparent dimensions of the same building in a photograph to calculate the angle at which the photographer was viewing it. Or, as in the photo at top, I might be able to see the corner of one building lines up with a certain section of another building or landmark. If I have more than one line, I should be able to triangulate a nearly exact location for the camera:


Of course, it's not really exact, due to errors in my calculations, my alignment of the Sanborn map, and small inaccuracies in the Sanborns themselves. But it's surprisingly close and saves a lot of time when I go to reshoot the scene. When you're trying to match up two photographs, it only takes a small difference in vantage point - like ten feet - to spoil the effect, so if I had to do it all by guestimating, it would take an enormous amount of trial and error before I found the correct spot.

Even then, the trouble isn't over. The new photo and the historic photo have different dimensions, so one of them will have to be resized. How much? It can be tough to tell. In the example above, I originally had the old buildings much too large and only realized it by comparing the sizes of the two figures on the sidewalk. After I made the adjustment, I went back to Google Earth and drew some new lines, confirming that yes, most of the third building would have been visible around Angelo's restaurant.

Here is what the scene looks like today, with the Taubman Medical Library partially obscured by Angelo's:


The historic photo, showing the University Hospital in 1915, can be seen here at the Bentley Historical Library site.

On homeopathy

The Snark-of-the-Month award goes to PZ Myers for this line:

Of course, he is a homeopath. Maybe to him, a twitter award is like an infinitely diluted Nobel Prize, and is especially potent.

Starve a cold, feed a fever, and prattle away the flu

God is in his heaven, telling Gabriel, "Look what I can get them to do now!" I hope someone is tracking infection rates before and after the treatment and comparing them to seasonal norms.

Can't argue with this

Song, memory, and DON'T be still, my beating heart

One of our staff members emailed this article from CNN:

"Disco Tune Saves Man's Life"

A couple are out hiking, the man suddenly drops to the ground without a heartbeat, and his wife recalls hearing an American Heart Association public service announcement about giving chest compressions to the beat of the Bee Gees song, "Stayin' Alive." She does, and her husband lives.

What's special about the song? Just the fact that it's sung at about 100 beats per minute, which happens to be just how frequently you want to apply your chest compressions. The article quotes another doctor who states that Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" works just as well, but for some reason the AHA preferred the other title.

The magic here, of course, is that incredible power that music has to be memorable. Anyone who knows the Bee Gees song will readily remember the correct tempo. Songs are so memorable that most people would probably notice if the same band sang it in a different key, even if they couldn't quite place what was different. Lesson for today - if you need to remember something, set it to music.

Is this why we buy health insurance?

Medical bills underlie 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies

Harvard researchers surveyed some 2000 people who filed for bankruptcy in 2007. Their findings:

While only 29 percent directly blamed medical bills for their bankruptcy, 62 percent had medical bills that totaled more than 10 percent of family income, said an illness was responsible, had lost income due to illness or some other medical factor.

Even more shocking is the fact that 78% of these - or almost half of all bankruptcy filings - involved people who had health insurance. These were, in the main, middle class Americans with decent jobs and health insurance, yet a severe illness still throws them into economic distress. Part of the problem, as the report notes, is that too often you're only allowed to buy health insurance if you don't ask for health care:

"Nationally, a quarter of firms cancel coverage immediately when an employee suffers a disabling illness; another quarter do so within a year," the report reads.

And once you've lost it, good luck trying to ever get insurance again with a preexisting condition. So what good is health insurance? Hard to tell from the newspaper accounts of this study and, from the description of the method, I'm not sure this study adequately addresses the question. The key stat would be the proportion of insured families declaring bankruptcy v. the uninsured and I don't think the statistics are here to determine that. I don't find the study available yet at the American Journal of Medicine, but it will be worth taking a closer look at.


Edit: I neglected to point out that this data is from 2007, before the current economic troubles. This situation must be far worse right now.

Wal-Mart enters the med-tech field

Bet you didn't see this coming: Wal-Mart Plans to Market Digital Health Records System

EHR - electronic health records - offer a way to improve health care and hospital efficiency by allowing easier access to patient records and easier sharing of critical information between different offices. The problem is that the systems are expensive, so while large hospitals may be using EHR, your private physician probably isn't. Which means, say, if you go to the hospital, your regular doctor can't easily give another doctor your file and all that potentially helpful information it contains. Enter Wal-Mart, who aims to make EHR affordable for the individual doctor or a small office.

“We’re a high-volume, low-cost company,” said Marcus Osborne, senior director for health care business development at Wal-Mart. “And I would argue that mentality is sorely lacking in the health care industry.”

Truer words were never spoken.

Jose Perez

I came across a book of Jose Perez paintings this morning and thought I would share them. Rather Norman Rockwell-like, with more of a fantasy element..

This is the orthopedist: