Clippings

Beat Down Blood Pressure Video Challenge

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in partnership with Million Hearts, an HHS initiative to prevent a million heart attacks and strokes in five years, and the American Heart Association announces the Beat Down Blood Pressure Video Challenge (#HealthIT4UBP).  We invite the general public to create short (<2 min long), compelling videos sharing how they use health IT or consumer e-health tools to manage high blood pressure. Videos will demonstrate how health IT is used to support blood pressure control through activities such as routine monitoring of blood pressure, taking blood pressure medications as prescribed, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle that helps lower blood pressure.  High blood pressure (aka “hypertension”) affects one in three adults in the U.S. and is sometimes referred to as the “silent killer” because it damages the brain, heart, eyes, and kidneys while causing no symptoms.  If left untreated, high blood pressure can result in strokes, heart attacks, and kidney failure. Fortunately there are steps that each of us can take to prevent or manage high blood pressure and change our future health for the better.
via bloodpressure.challenge.gov

Thrilled to see that there's a national coordinator for health information technology and that there's a contest to find out how people are using technology to manage blood pressure. I can't wait to see the entries and the prizewinners. I don't think (oh, call a spade a spade—I know) I'm not doing anything prizeworthy. Still, I wonder if I could use this as my justification to buy a video camera?

Metrics for Self-knowledge

So I finished a round of rehab, spent a few minutes yesterday looking for a Just Do It t-shirt and a few minutes this morning looking for a pedometer app for my iPhone so I could monitor my activity (I was overwhelmed by the choices), and then I stumbled across this video. Talk about reinforcement!

Participatory Budgeting

About 100 people bumped and jostled their way to the snack table lined with bowls of popcorn and pretzels. Eager presenters button-holed passers-by. It looked like a middle-school science fair. But the buzz in the room wasn’t over homemade solar system models or photosynthesis; it was the sound of revolutionary civics in action.

Facing that article about poetry is a fascinating story of participatory budgeting in New York City. The scope is small for a place like New York City—$1 Million in each of four city council districts—and participation wasn't huge—"over the past six months, 250 regular New Yorkers jumped into the trenches and dirtied their hands with democracy"—but this seems like a great start. The model for this trial was developed in Brazil.

More for poetry month

Billed as an East Village poetry walk, the project, “Passing Stranger,” is a site-specific audio tour that guides listeners through the history of the neighborhood’s interconnected writers and shakers, with interviews, archival recordings and recitations of poems. Narrated by the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, with music by John Zorn, it is a literary and geographic keepsake, a portrait of a bohemian community that still resounds.

On April 15, it will officially make its debut with a reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, the last stop on the tour, but the guide is already available as a free MP3 at eastvillagepoetrywalk.org. Listeners can download it and stroll through the tour anytime (or just imagine the sights mentioned from their couches).

The project, supported by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, was five years and more than 40 drafts in the making, whittled from nearly 100 hours of tape, Mr. Malinovski, a freelance radio producer, said. The idea came to him when he first moved to the city, and lived in the East Village. He read Daniel Kane’s “All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s,” and walked around, envisioning the Beats and the generations of New York School poets who followed. A map began to form, and a natural chronicle.

In today's edition, The New York Times tells a wonderful story of a walking tour through the East Side focusing on the writers of New York. The usual suspects are there—Ginsberg and Kerouac—but William Burroughs, Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, and LeRoi Jones find their way into the piece. The real surprise for me is the opening—Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, was once buried in New York City! I've gone out of my way to visit sites associated with Antonin Dvorak, Bela Bartok, and William Dean Howells, but this is a pilgrimage I've yet to make.