Voice Activated PDA for Blind and Low Vision Users from LS&S Now Offered by Rehabmart

One of their popular devices for blindness and low vision is the TapMemo Voice Activated PDA, a cutting-edge, handheld, voice activated personal assistant. Battery powered, the TapMemo features only one multi-functional button and two volume buttons, making it easier for most users to operate.

Elberton, GA (PRWEB) January 05, 2013
Rehabmart.com, an online e-commerce company that sells rehabilitation and medical supplies, has joined into a distribution collaboration with LS&S, LLC, to offer their TapMemo Voice Activated PDA to a wider consumer marketplace. Specializing in daily living aids and assistive technology for blindness, low vision, deafness and hearing issues, LS&S (Learning, Sight and Sound Made Easier) offers a wide variety of innovative and easy-to-use products to help the disabled to participate more fully in their day to day life experiences. This professional, family owned business realizes how important a resource they are for those with low vision or hearing loss, as these issues have touched this family personally with the founder's own father developing macular degeneration.
One of their popular devices for blindness and low vision is the TapMemo Voice Activated PDA, a cutting-edge, handheld, voice activated personal assistant. Battery powered, the TapMemo features only one multi-functional button and two volume buttons, making it easier for most users to operate. Since all of the verbal commands are 'speaker independent', the user does not need to 'train' the unit, it will simply work right out of the box. This special PDA comes complete with a charging jack, earphone jack, belt clip, and a hidden reset button in case the user needs to perform a hard or soft reset.
The TapMemo is profuse with features that set it way above the competition because it is powered with a very strong Lithium-Ion based battery that can be fully charged in less than four hours and will supply more than ten working hours and more than eleven months in 'standby' mode between each charging cycle. The main features of this voice activated device include a memo pad, phone book, calendar, and alarm clock. Other capabilities include a locking command to protect against unwanted use and to safeguard personal data, a unit locator that responds to the users' whistling and emits a high volume short phrase that helps the user to find the unit, talking time and date, and an ability to check the battery level along with an alert when it is low.
“We are so pleased to introduce the TapMemo Voice Activated PDA from LS&S to more consumers,” said Hulet Smith, OTR/L, MBA and CEO of Rehabmart. “This feature-rich personal assistant is perfect for those who have blindness or low vision disabilities, helping them to more easily participate, communicate and function in today's modern world. You can even place the unit next to a regular telephone handset and the unit will emit DTMF tones that correspond to the number, and the phone will dial them without having to push any buttons. We are very proud to offer this, and all of the great assistive devices for blindness, low vision, deafness and hard of hearing issues from LS&S to our customers at Rehabmart.com.”
About Rehabmart.com:
As an Occupational Therapist, the founder of Rehabmart, Hulet Smith, has the breadth of knowledge and experience necessary to match the needs of his customers with the very latest innovative products in the field of medical supplies and rehabilitation equipment. As a parent of special needs children, he has a personal interest in finding the best products to improve the lives of those who are disabled and medically challenged. Rehabmart.com is committed to provide superior customer service, competitive pricing and exceptional product offerings.

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Cricket-Sri Lanka not good enough in Australia, says Jayawardene

SYDNEY, Jan 6 (Reuters) - Mahela Jayawardene signed off his second stint as Sri Lanka captain in disappointment on Sunday after a 3-0 series sweep in Australia and said the bottom line was his team had just not played well enough.
After arriving in Australia confident they could finally win a first test Down Under, Sri Lanka fell to defeat by five wickets in Sydney following an innings and 201 humiliation in Melbourne and an 137-run reverse in Hobart.
"I think Hobart was a good fight, tough conditions, I thought we hung in pretty well there," Jayawardene told reporters. "Melbourne, we never showed any fight in that test match which was pretty disappointing.
"Here, I think we fought really well, but it wasn't good enough. The Australians played some really good cricket, they did give us a few chances but we weren't good enough to take control and push forward.
"When you are competing at this level, I think we need to be much better prepared and show more character to win test matches in these conditions."
The defeat in Sydney was particularly galling because Jayawardene finally got the scenario he wanted, prolific wicket-taking spinner Rangana Herath bowling at an Australian team chasing a victory target on a turning wicket.
"I think this would have the perfect script, bowling on the fourth day in Sydney," he said. "If we had kept them close to our score in the first innings things would have been different. But we let (them) get away from us, dropped a few catches.
"And even second innings we batted well, put some pressure on the Australians, maybe if we'd had another 60, 70 runs... but, we're not good enough to do that."
Injuries forced the Sri Lankans to blood some younger batsmen in Australia and the likes of Dimuth Karunaratne, Lahiru Thirimanne and Dinesh Chandimal showed they had the potential to play at the top level.
Jayawardene, one of a quartet of Sri Lankan batting greats now in their mid-thirties who will be retiring over the next few of years, said they still had a lot of hard work ahead of them.
"I think the more opportunities they have to play in these conditions their game will improve but talent alone will not carry them forward," he said.
"It's much tougher. Thinking processes, you need to identify your weaknesses, you need to know your game better, you need to see what the opposition is doing and build innings and bat for longer.
"They all have talent and that's why they're here. As long as they willing to learn and work hard, they will get big scores and be the future of Sri Lankan cricket.
"But they need to work hard, they need to realise what they need to do and where they need to toughen up. It's not just technical, it's mental too."
Another of the quartet of experienced batsmen, Thilan Samaraweera, had a particularly poor series but Jayawardene was in no mood to start picking out scapegoats.
"Unfortunately he did have a bad series, but that happens. I think it's unfair to pick on individual players after a series defeat like this and say it was their fault," he said.

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Tennis-Kvitova thrashed in final Australian Open warmup

Jan 6 (Reuters) - World number eight Petra Kvitova's preparations for the Australian Open suffered another setback when she was thrashed by Dominika Cibulkova in the first round of the Sydney International on Sunday.
The fifth-seeded Czech, who had lost to Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova in the second round of the Brisbane International last week, was thumped 6-1 6-1 by her Slovak opponent at the Sydney Olympic Park Tennis Centre.
"I played really badly and I wish I knew what I could say but I don't know," Kvitova, the 2011 Wimbledon champion and a semi-finalist at last year's Australian Open, told reporters.
"I'm not feeling very well right now in my confidence but I'm always looking forward to playing grand slams and I hope everything will be better there than here."
Former world number one Caroline Wozniacki got her preparations for the first grand slam of the season, which starts Jan. 14 in Melbourne, back on track with a confident 6-1 6-2 win over Poland's Urszula Radwanska.
After suffering a shock first-round loss to qualifier Ksenia Pervak in Brisbane, the Dane rediscovered her touch to record a first victory of 2013.
Wozniacki has spent 67 weeks at the top of the rankings in her career but the 22-year-old slipped to number 10 after a poor season in which she suffered first-round exits at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.
With boyfriend and world number one golfer Rory McIlroy cheering her on from the stands, the Dane said she believed she could climb her way back to the top.
"Within myself, I believe I can get back there," Wozniacki said. "But it's a lot of hard work and there are a lot of great players so you never know what's going to happen.
"The most important thing is that you're healthy and I'm going to play as best I can and win as many tournaments as I can and the ranking will come if you play well.

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Kvitova thrashed in final Australian Open warmup

(Reuters) - World number eight Petra Kvitova's preparations for the Australian Open suffered another setback when she was thrashed by Dominika Cibulkova in the first round of the Sydney International on Sunday.
The fifth-seeded Czech, who had lost to Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova in the second round of the Brisbane International last week, was thumped 6-1 6-1 by her Slovak opponent at the Sydney Olympic Park Tennis Centre.
"I played really badly and I wish I knew what I could say but I don't know," Kvitova, the 2011 Wimbledon champion and a semi-finalist at last year's Australian Open, told reporters.
"I'm not feeling very well right now in my confidence but I'm always looking forward to playing grand slams and I hope everything will be better there than here."
Former world number one Caroline Wozniacki got her preparations for the first grand slam of the season, which starts January 14 in Melbourne, back on track with a confident 6-1 6-2 win over Poland's Urszula Radwanska.
After suffering a shock first-round loss to qualifier Ksenia Pervak in Brisbane, the Dane rediscovered her touch to record a first victory of 2013.
Wozniacki has spent 67 weeks at the top of the rankings in her career but the 22-year-old slipped to number 10 after a poor season in which she suffered first-round exits at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.
With boyfriend and world number one golfer Rory McIlroy cheering her on from the stands, the Dane said she believed she could climb her way back to the top.
"Within myself, I believe I can get back there," Wozniacki said. "But it's a lot of hard work and there are a lot of great players so you never know what's going to happen.
"The most important thing is that you're healthy and I'm going to play as best I can and win as many tournaments as I can and the ranking will come if you play well."
Australian Olivia Rogowska was overwhelmed in a 7-5 6-2 loss to Russian Maria Kirilenko in another first round match while home favorite Samantha Stosur will begin her campaign on Monday against China's world number 26 Zheng Jie.

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No full talks in NHL labor fight

 Any momentum gained from a long night of negotiations between the NHL and the players' association seemed to have been lost Thursday when the sides remained mostly apart.
A meeting that Commissioner Gary Bettman said would begin at 10 a.m. EST didn't start until several hours later, and then ended quickly.
That one hour of talks centered on the reporting of hockey-related revenues by teams, and both sides signing off on the figures at the end of the fiscal year. The problem was resolved.
An NHL spokesman announced shortly before 9 p.m. that federal mediator Scot Beckenbaugh was still working with the sides, but they would not get back to the bargaining table before Friday morning.
The players' association didn't immediately comment.
The key issues that are still threatening the hockey season weren't addressed early in the day, but a small group of players and other union staff returned to the NHL office shortly before 6 p.m., to hold another meeting regarding the contentious pension plan. That wrapped up about two hours later.
Union head Donald Fehr didn't take part in either of the two sessions Thursday.
The players' association held a conference call at 5 p.m. to discuss starting another vote among union membership that would give the executive board the power to invoke a disclaimer of interest and dissolve the union.
Members gave overwhelmingly approval last month, but the union declined to disclaim before a self-imposed deadline Wednesday night. It wasn't immediately known when a new authorization would expire. Players are expected to have 48 hours to vote, as opposed to the five days they were given the first time.
With the lockout in its 110th day, both sides understand the urgency to save a shortened season. They have several key issues to work out — pensions and salary cap limits, among them.
Bettman has said a deal needs to be in place by next week so a 48-game season can begin Jan. 19. All games through Jan. 14 along with the All-Star game have been canceled, claiming more than 50 percent of the original schedule.
The sides met in small groups throughout the day Wednesday. They held a full bargaining session with a federal mediator at night that lasted nearly five hours and ended about 1 a.m. Thursday.
The biggest detail to emerge was that Fehr remained as union executive director after players passed on their first chance to declare a disclaimer that would turn the union into a trade association. The disclaimer would allow individual players to file antitrust lawsuits against the NHL.
Fehr wouldn't address the issue Wednesday, calling it an "internal matter," but added that the players were keeping all options open.
"The word disclaimer has yet to be uttered to us by the players' association," Bettman said Wednesday. "It's not that it gets filed anywhere with a court or the NLRB. When you disclaim interest as a union, you notify the other side. We have not been notified and it's never been discussed, so there has been no disclaimer."
It was believed the union wouldn't take action Wednesday if it saw progress being made. Neither side would characterize the talks or say if there was any movement toward common ground.
"There's been some progress but we're still apart on a number of issues," Bettman said. "As long as the process continues I am hopeful."
In a related move, the NHLPA filed a motion in federal court in New York on Thursday seeking to dismiss the league's suit to have the lockout declared legal. The NHL sued the union in mid-December, figuring the players were about to submit their own complaint against the league and possibly break up their union to gain an upper hand.
But the union argued that the NHL is using this suit "to force the players to remain in a union. Not only is it virtually unheard of for an employer to insist on the unionization of its employees, it is also directly contradicted by the rights guaranteed to employees under ... the National Labor Relations Act."
The court scheduled a status conference for the sides on Monday morning.
That still gives them time to get back to the table to try to reach a deal. There won't be one, however, if they don't resolve the differences regarding the players' pension.
Bettman called the pension plan a "very complicated issue."
"The number of variables and the number of issues that have to be addressed by people who carry the title actuary or pension lawyer are pretty numerous and it's pretty easy to get off track," Bettman said. "That is something we understand is important to the players."
The union's proposal Wednesday makes four offers between the sides since the NHL restarted negotiations Thursday with a proposal. The league presented the players with a counteroffer Tuesday night in response to one the union made Monday.
Fehr believed an agreement on a players-funded pension had been reached before talks blew up in early December. That apparently wasn't the case, or the NHL has changed its offer regarding the pension in exchange for agreeing to other things the union wanted.
The salary-cap number for the second year of the deal — the 2013-14 season — hasn't been established, and it is another point of contention. The league is pushing for a $60 million cap, while the union wants it to be $65 million.
In return for the higher cap number players would be willing to forgo a cap on escrow.
"We talk about lots of things and we even had some philosophical discussions about why particular issues were important to each of us," Bettman said. "That is part of the process."
The NHL proposed in its first offer Thursday that pension contributions come out of the players' share of revenues, and $50 million of the league's make-whole payment of $300 million will be allocated and set aside to fund potential underfunding liabilities of the plan at the end of the collective bargaining agreement.
Last month, the NHL agreed to raise its make-whole offer of deferred payments from $211 million to $300 million as part of a proposed package that required the union to agree on three nonnegotiable points. Instead, the union accepted the raise in funds, but then made counterproposals on the issues the league stated had no wiggle room.
"As you might expect, the differences between us relate to the core economic issues which don't involve the share," Fehr said of hockey-related revenue, which likely will be split 50-50.
The NHL is the only North American professional sports league to cancel a season because of a labor dispute, losing the 2004-05 campaign to a lockout. A 48-game season was played in 1995 after a lockout stretched into January.

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Little talking or movement in NHL labor fight

 If there is going to be a hockey season, the NHL and the players' association can't afford many more days like this.
A long night of bargaining Wednesday that stretched into the early morning hours didn't end well and likely kept the sides apart for most of the day Thursday. No new full-scale negotiations took place, and outside of a few relatively brief, small sessions on specific topics, it was basically a lost day.
This is now January, and time is limited to reach a deal that would allow for a shortened hockey season. An agreement this week could have led to a 52-game season. That seems all but lost now.
If the sides can't find common ground within the next week, a 48-game season — the shortest NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said the league would play — will become impossible, too.
The tenor of the talks appeared to take a downward turn late Wednesday after the players' association passed on declaring a disclaimer of interest that would have dissolved the union and turned it into a trade association.
The discord carried over to Thursday morning, when Bettman had said he expected to resume negotiations at 10 a.m. at the request of a federal mediator, but the union was holding internal meetings then and didn't arrive at the league office until a few hours later.
And when players and staff did get there, they did so without executive director Donald Fehr. The group discussed a problem that arose regarding the reporting by clubs of hockey-related revenue, and how both sides sign off on the figures at the end of the fiscal year. The union felt the language had been changed without proper notification, but the dispute was solved and the meeting ended in about an hour.
The wait for more elaborate talks went on, and didn't end until the players returned — again without Fehr — for a small meeting about the contentious pension plan. That one lasted just under two hours, and again the waiting game ensued.
But this time there wouldn't be any talks, big or little. Neither side issued a statement, and Bettman was seen leaving league headquarters shortly after 9 p.m.
An NHL spokesman said discussions would resume between the NHL, the union and federal mediator Scot Beckenbaugh on Friday morning.
The players' association held a late afternoon conference call to initiate another vote among union membership that would give the executive board the power to invoke a disclaimer of interest.
Members gave overwhelming approval last month, but the union declined to disclaim before a self-imposed deadline Wednesday night. It wasn't immediately known when a new authorization would expire. Players are expected to have 48 hours to vote, as opposed to the five days they were given the first time.
With the lockout in its 110th day, both sides understand the urgency to save a shortened season. They have several key issues to work out — pensions and salary cap limits, among them.
Bettman has said a deal needs to be in place by next week so a 48-game season can begin Jan. 19. All games through Jan. 14 along with the All-Star game have been canceled, claiming more than 50 percent of the original schedule.
It was believed the union wouldn't take action Wednesday if it saw progress being made. Neither side would characterize the talks or say if there was any movement toward common ground.
"There's been some progress but we're still apart on a number of issues," Bettman said Wednesday. "As long as the process continues I am hopeful."
That optimism took a hit on Thursday.
The NHLPA filed a motion in federal court in New York seeking to dismiss the league's suit to have the lockout declared legal. The NHL sued the union in mid-December, figuring the players were about to submit their own complaint against the league and possibly break up their union to gain an upper hand.
But the union argued that the NHL is using this suit "to force the players to remain in a union. Not only is it virtually unheard of for an employer to insist on the unionization of its employees, it is also directly contradicted by the rights guaranteed to employees under ... the National Labor Relations Act."
The court scheduled a status conference for the sides on Monday morning.
That would still give them time to get back to the table and reach a deal. There won't be one, however, if they can't resolve the differences regarding the players' pension.
Bettman called the pension plan a "very complicated issue."
"The number of variables and the number of issues that have to be addressed by people who carry the title actuary or pension lawyer are pretty numerous and it's pretty easy to get off track," Bettman said. "That is something we understand is important to the players."
The union's proposal Wednesday made it four offers between the sides since the NHL restarted negotiations with a proposal a week ago. The league presented the players with a counteroffer Tuesday night in response to one the union made Monday.
Fehr believed an agreement on a players-funded pension had been reached before talks blew up in early December. That apparently wasn't the case, or the NHL has changed its offer regarding the pension in exchange for agreeing to other things the union wanted.
The salary-cap number for the second year of the deal — the 2013-14 season — hasn't been established, and it is another point of contention. The league is pushing for a $60 million cap, while the union wants it to be $65 million.
In return for the higher cap number players would be willing to forgo a cap on escrow.
"We talk about lots of things and we even had some philosophical discussions about why particular issues were important to each of us," Bettman said. "That is part of the process."
Both sides seem content on the deal lasting for 10 years, but they have different opinions on whether an opt-out should be allowed to be exercised after seven years or eight.
The NHL proposed in its first offer on Dec. 27 that pension contributions come out of the players' share of revenues, and $50 million of the league's make-whole payment of $300 million will be allocated and set aside to fund potential underfunded liabilities of the plan at the end of the collective bargaining agreement.
Last month, the NHL agreed to raise its make-whole offer of deferred payments from $211 million to $300 million as part of a proposed package that required the union to agree on three nonnegotiable points. Instead, the union accepted the raise in funds, but then made counterproposals on the issues the league stated had no wiggle room.
"As you might expect, the differences between us relate to the core economic issues which don't involve the share," Fehr said of hockey-related revenue, which likely will be split 50-50.
The NHL is the only North American professional sports league to cancel a season because of a labor dispute, losing the 2004-05 campaign to a lockout. A 48-game season was played in 1995 after a lockout stretched into January.

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NHL-League and union resume separate mediation sessions

Jan 4 (Reuters) - The National Hockey League (NHL) and the union representing its locked-out players met separately with a U.S. federal mediator on Friday with a week to go before the deadline to reach a deal and salvage a shortened season.
The two sides met with a mediator in New York but there has been no decision on whether the league and union would hold face-to-face negotiations on Friday, according to a report on the NHL's website.
In addition to meeting separately with the mediator on Thursday, officials from the NHL and NHL Players' Association met together Thursday for small-group discussions on some key issues.
With half of the 2012-13 regular season already lost to the labor dispute, the NHL has set a Jan. 11 deadline for a new deal so that a shortened 48-game campaign could begin eight days later.
The lockout, which the league has said is costing it about $18-$20 million a day, began in mid-September when the previous collective bargaining agreement expired with both sides at odds over how to split the NHL's $3.3 billion in revenue.
The dispute, which follows a lockout that wiped out the entire 2004-05 campaign, is now centered around the salary cap number for the 2013-14 season, the pension fund and length of player contracts.

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Quadruple Amputee's New Hands

It's the simplest thing, the grasp of one hand in another. But Lindsay Ess will never see it that way, because her hands once belonged to someone else.
Growing up in Texas and Virginia, Lindsay, 29, was always one of the pretty girls. She went to college, did some modeling and started building a career in fashion, with an eye on producing fashion shows.
Then she lost her hands and feet.
Watch the full show in a special edition of "Nightline," "To Hold Again," TONIGHT at 11:35 p.m. ET on ABC
When she was 24 years old, Lindsay had just graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University's well-regarded fashion program when she developed a blockage in her small intestine from Crohn's Disease. After having surgery to correct the problem, an infection took over and shut down her entire body. To save her life, doctors put her in a medically-induced coma. When she came out of the coma a month later, still in a haze, Lindsay said she knew something was wrong with her hands and feet.
"I would look down and I would see black, almost like a body that had decomposed," she said.
The infection had turned her extremities into dead tissue. Still sedated, Lindsay said she didn't realize what that meant at first.
"There was a period of time where they didn't tell me that they had to amputate, but somebody from the staff said, 'Oh honey, you know what they are going to do to your hands, right?' That's when I knew," she said.
After having her hands and feet amputated, Lindsay adapted. She learned how to drink from a cup, brush her teeth and even text on her cellphone with her arms, which were amputated just below the elbow.
"The most common questions I get are, 'How do you type,'" she said. "It's just like chicken-pecking."
PHOTOS: Lindsay Ess Gets New Hands
Despite her progress, Lindsay said she faced challenges being independent. Her mother, Judith Aronson, basically moved back into her daughter's life to provide basic care, including bathing, dressing and feeding. Having also lost her feet, Lindsay needed her mother to help put on her prosthetic legs.
"I've accepted the fact that my feet are gone, that's acceptable to me," Lindsay said. "My hands [are] not. It's still not. In my dreams I always have my hands."
Through her amputation recovery, Lindsay discovered a lot of things about herself, including that she felt better emotionally by not focusing on the life that was gone and how much she hated needing so much help but that she also truly depends on it.
"I'm such an independent person," she said. "But I'm also grateful that I have a mother like that, because what could I do?"
Lindsay said she found that her prosthetic arms were a struggle.
"These prosthetics are s---," she said. "I can't do anything with them. I can't do anything behind my head. They are heavy. They are made for men. They are claws, they are not feminine whatsoever."
For the next couple of years, Lindsay exercised diligently as part of the commitment she made to qualify for a hand transplant, which required her to be in shape. But the tough young woman now said she saw her body in a different way now.
"People used to turn and look at me when I walked down the street because of how beautiful I was," Lindsay said. "Now they turn and look at me because I'm in a wheelchair and have no hands and feet. The type of person that I was would be the type of person I would hate now. I used to care way too much about what I looked like. What does it matter what my hair looks like? What does it matter what I'm wearing so much?"
Lindsay had to wait for a donor. Dr. Scott Levin, her orthopedic surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said if was preferable if Lindsay's donor hands were female, and had a size and skin color that matched hers.
Waiting for a donor was the part that Lindsay said she found the most difficult.
"I hate thinking about that," she said. "I think that whoever's hands will be with purpose, not just used to look pretty." "In Lindsay's case, the hookup of the new hand is relying on her nerves growing into the new muscles from the donor," Levin said. "The nerves have to grow into those muscles, takes months, it can take a year."
And there is still the possibility that the surgery can fail.
"Failure means the part that doesn't survive and we have to re-amputate the transplant," Levin said. "That's failure."
For nearly 12 hours, two separate teams of surgeons, one dedicated to the left hand, the other to the right, worked to perform an operation so cutting-edge that it has been done more than 70 times worldwide in the past 15 years.
After the surgery, Lindsay was in a cocoon of bandages. Levin said the initial signs for recovery were good.
"This is more than we could ever hope for," he said. "Her blood pressure is good, all the parameters related to how to blood flow in and out of her new arms. This is, if you will, a picture perfect course so far."
Less than a month after her surgery, Lindsay was out of the ICU and working on a therapy regime. The skin color of her new hands and arms wasn't exactly the same as her upper arms. They still looked like they belonged to someone else.
"The first couple of days I refused to look at them," Lindsay said. "It was kind of like one of those scary movie moments. I'm too scared to look because it's reality [but] I'm so grateful to have them that I just don't really think about it superficially."
Four months after her surgery, in January 2012, Lindsay's doctors said they continued to be amazed at her recovery. They said they didn't expect her to have fine motion control for another 12 to 18 months, but her muscles were reacting well. She could even pick up lightweight objects.
In February, Lindsey was allowed to go home for the first time since the surgery five months before. Levin said the prognosis for both hands couldn't be better. Even so, rejection was still a huge concern.
Tune into a special edition of "Nightline," "To Hold Again," TONIGHT at 11:35 p.m. ET on ABC to find out what happens to Lindsay and how she moves forward.

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How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: The Value of Creativity and Imagination [Excerpt]

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., Copyright (C) 2013 by Maria Konnikova.
"It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science," Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman once told an audience. Not only is that view patently false, but "it is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition."
Imagination takes the stuff of observation and experience and recombines them into something new.
In 1968, the high jump was a well-established sport. You would run, you would jump, and you would make your way over a pole in one of several ways. In older days you'd likely use the scissors, scissoring out your legs as you glided over, but by the sixties you'd probably be using the straddle or the belly roll, facing down and basically rolling over the bar. Whichever style you used, you'd be facing forward when you made your jump. Imagine trying to jump backward. That would be ridiculous.
Dick Fosbury, however, didn't think so. All through high school, he'd been developing a backward-facing style, and now, in college, it was taking him higher than it ever had. He wasn't sure why he did it. He didn't care what anyone else was doing. He just jumped with the feeling of the thing. People joked and laughed. Fosbury looked just as ridiculous as they thought he would (and his inspirations sounded a bit ridiculous, too. When asked about his approach, he told Sports Illustrated, "I don't even think about the high jump. It's positive thinking. I just let it happen"). Certainly, no one expected him to make the U.S. Olympic team--let alone win the Olympics. But win he did, setting American and Olympic records with his 7-foot-4.25-inch (2.24-meter) jump, only 1.5 inches short of the world record.
With his unprecedented technique, dubbed the Fosbury Flop, Fosbury did what many other more traditional athletes had never managed to accomplish: he revolutionized, in a very real way, an entire sport. Even after his win, expectations were that he would remain a lone bird, jumping in his esoteric style while the rest of the world looked on. But since 1978 no world record has been set by anyone other than a flopper; and by 1980, thirteen of sixteen Olympic finalists were flopping across the bar. To this day, the flop remains the dominant high jump style. The straddle looks old and cumbersome in comparison. Why hadn't anyone thought of replacing it earlier?
Fosbury wasn't even a particularly talented jumper. It was all in the approach. Imagination allows us to see things that aren't so, be it a dead man who is actually alive or a way of jumping that, while backward, couldn't be more forward looking.
Keep Your Distance
One of the most important ways to facilitate imaginative thinking is through distance. In "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans," a case that comes quite late in the Holmes-Watson partnership, Watson observes:
One of the most remarkable characteristics of Sherlock Holmes was his power of throwing his brain out of action and switching all his thoughts on to lighter things whenever he had convinced himself that he could no longer work to advantage. I remember that during the whole of that memorable day he lost himself in a monograph which he had undertaken upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus. For my own part I had none of this power of detachment, and the day, in consequence appeared to be interminable.
Forcing your mind to take a step back is a tough thing to do. It seems counterintuitive to walk away from a problem that you want to solve. But in reality, the characteristic is not so remarkable either for Holmes or for individuals who are deep thinkers. The fact that it is remarkable for Watson (and that he self-admittedly lacks the skill) goes a long way to explaining why he so often fails when Holmes succeeds.
Psychologist Yaacov Trope argues that psychological distance may be one of the single most important steps you can take to improve thinking and decision-making. It can come in many forms: temporal, or distance in time (both future and past); spatial, or distance in space (how physically close or far you are from something); social, or distance between people (how someone else sees it); and hypothetical, or distance from reality (how things might have happened). But whatever the form, all of these distances have something in common: they all require you to transcend the immediate moment in your mind. They all require you to take a step back.
Trope posits that the further we move in distance, the more general and abstract our perspective and our interpretation become; and the further we move from our own perspective, the wider the picture we are able to consider. Conversely, as we move closer once more, our thoughts become more concrete, more specific, more practical--and the closer we remain to our egocentric view, the smaller and more limited the picture that confronts us. Our level of construal influences, in turn, how we evaluate a situation and how we ultimately choose to interact with it. It affects our decisions and our ability to solve problems.
In essence, psychological distance accomplishes one major thing: it engages System Holmes. It forces quiet reflection. Distancing has been shown to improve cognitive performance, from actual problem solving to the ability to exercise self-control. Children who use psychological distancing techniques (for example, visualizing marshmallows as puffy clouds) are better able to delay gratification and hold out for a larger later reward. Adults who are told to take a step back and imagine a situation from a more general perspective make better judgments and evaluations, and have better self-assessments and lower emotional reactivity. Individuals who employ distancing in typical problem-solving scenarios emerge ahead of their more immersed counterparts. And those who take a distanced view of political questions tend to emerge with evaluations that are better able to stand the test of time.

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Copying common in electronic medical records

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Most doctors copy and paste old, potentially out-of-date information into patients' electronic records, according to a new study looking at a shortcut that some experts fear could lead to miscommunication and medical errors.
"The electronic medical record was meant to make the process of documentation easier, but I think it's perpetuated copying," said lead author Dr. Daryl Thornton, assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland.
Electronic health records have been touted as having the potential to transform patient data from indecipherable scribbles into easy-to-read, searchable, standardized documents that could be shared among hospital staffers and a patient's various other health care providers.
In 2011, the U.S. government started giving financial incentives to hospitals for adopting electronic medical recordkeeping. Those incentives will expire in 2015.
Many electronic recordkeeping systems allow text to be copied and pasted from previous notes and other documents, a shortcut that could help time-crunched doctors but that could also cause mistakes to be passed along or medical records to become indecipherable, critics argue.
To see how much information in patient records came from copying, Thornton's team examined 2,068 electronic patient progress reports created by 62 residents and 11 attending physicians in the intensive care unit of a Cleveland hospital.
Progress notes are typically shared among doctors, nurses and other hospital staff and are meant to document the progression of a patient's tests and treatments.
Using plagiarism-detection software, the researchers analyzed five months' worth of progress notes for 135 patients.
They found that 82 percent of residents' notes and 74 percent of attending physicians' notes included 20 percent or more copied and pasted material from the patients' records.
In their report, published in Critical Care Medicine, Thornton and his colleagues did not examine what motivated physicians and residents to copy and paste, or whether the shortcut affected patient care.
In one case, though, Thornton told Reuters Health, a patient left the ICU and was readmitted a couple of days later. The patient's medical record included so much copied and pasted information, the new team of doctors wasn't able to decipher the original diagnosis. In the end, the new team called the physicians who originally diagnosed the patient.
Nothing about a patient - length of stay, gender, age, race or ethnicity, what brought them into the ICU or how severely ill they were - affected how often a physician copied information into the medical record.
Although residents' notes more often included copied material, attending physicians tended to copy more material between notes. They also tended to copy more of their own assessments from other notes.
Experts suggested that copying signifies a shift in how doctors use notes - away from being a means of communication among fellow healthcare providers and toward being a barrage of data to document billing.
"What tends to get missing is the narrative - what's the patient's story?" said Dr. Michael Barr, senior vice president in the Division of Medical Practice, Professionalism and Quality at the American College of Physicians. Barr was not involved in the current study.
In an unrelated editorial published this week in The Journal of Urology, Dr. Deborah Erickson points out that summarizing a patient's history at the start of notes is longstanding tradition, and it's just as easy to carry forward an error in handwritten or dictated notes as in electronic records.
Erickson worries more that repeatedly copying and pasting large chunks of text, possibly along with images and other records, will result in "a long, rambling note that does not make clear points." Moreover, for a physician's own thinking process, she writes, "It is much better for each day's note to synthesize and interpret the prior data, leaving out old information that is no longer relevant."
"If your communication isn't accurate, timely, complete and factual, then you really could be transmitting bad information forward that then creates this tumbling effect," said Ann Gaffey, president of Healthcare Risk and Safety Strategies, a consulting firm in Arlington, Virginia.
In her own study, Gaffey found copying and pasting to be common in over 50 physician practices that use five different electronic medical record programs.
Part of the problem is that doctors may not have the time to fully learn the new medical recording systems and may resort to short cuts, said Gaffey, who was not involved in the current research.
Ellen Balka, medical communications professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, cautioned that copying might not lead to poor care for patients.
"In general, physicians want to provide good care," Balka, who was not involved in the current study, told Reuters Health. "If they're engaging in a practice like copying, there must be a reason for it.

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