Monday morning matter: intriguing new blog discoveries

December 4th, 2006 by Julie Ferguson

When we launched this blog some three plus years ago, finding related topical blogs was quite the task – the landscape was fairly barren. But it seems that nearly every week now, we are discovering terrific weblogs that are either new or that we just hadn’t found before. We thought we’d share a few of our recent discoveries:
Effect Measure – according to this blog’s “about” page, “the editors are senior public health scientists and practitioners whose names would be immediately recognizable to many in the public health community,” but who choose to blog anonymously to allow maximum freedom or expression. Topical matter revolves around far-ranging issues related to public health matters and epidemiology, and it’s quite a fascinating read. See the recent post on Polonium-210 poisoning. which offers informed commentary about potential public health risks that goes beyond the mainstream news snippets. Another post of interest to any who may be keeping an eye on potential pandemics is the post entitled cholera, bird flu and humility in science, which discusses John Snow’s search for the cause of cholera in Victorian London and the theory of poultry as a vector for the spread of bird flu today. We were also interested in the post on construction scaffolding spam in New York. In addition to being illegal and a public nuisance, these posters and advertisements are often a public safety hazard: “Often these oversized parapets are a safety hazard because they catch the wind like giant sails, making the entire structure more likely to collapse.”
Enterprise Decision Management – this is a weblog by James Taylor and colleagues at Fair Isaac. The blog focus is on the latest uses of business rules and decision automation, covering such topics as Business Activity Monitoring, Business Agility, Compliance, and Business Process Management. James recently posted about the LA Times article on the changing face of risk, which Jon Coppelman blogged about here last week. His recent post about Enterprise Fraud discusses a recent Towers Perrin report and adds his perspective.
Health Affairs Blog – we cited this blog once before when it was just launching, but we thought we would point it out again now that it seems to have its sea legs. This is the weblog adjunct to the respected Health Affairs Journal. Currently, many of the posts and essays revolve around health and human rights since this was the theme of November’s gathering of 13,000 attendees at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting in Boston. The most recent post informs us that more than half the uninsured can’t afford health coverage and are ineligible for public programs. The post offers free limited-time access to an Urban Institute research report on this topic.