The INFO Project Blog

We were glad to see an in-depth interview with Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) founder Moshe Pritsker on New England Cable News (NECN), the largest 24-hour regional news network in the country. I met Moshe at this year’s Science Blogging conference in North Carolina and pretended to know what filming “benchwork” entailed. It’s much easier to watch and find out how this innovative video magazine is breaking down language barriers and speeding science along.

For our Elements of Successful Family Planning Web site, we are talking to experts about what they feel the most important components of good programs are. While in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina for the Science Blogging 2008 conference, I caught up with several excellent sources of information on this topic at Family Health International world HQ, on an unremarkable strip of Highway 54. Unfortunately, INFO’s video camera was not working, so the audio recording of the conversations is what will go up on the Media Library of the Family Planning Success Web site when it launches later this month.

Here is a sneak preview of my conversation with Dr. John Stanback, Senior Research Associate for Family Health International. Dr. Stanback on Community-Based Distribution of Injectables.

In this clip, he argues in favor of providing injectable contraception without prescriptions from rural drug shops, based on his experience studying the way this works in Uganda.

CBDs [community based distributors] are typically para-medicals that have received a little bit of training; much less then a medical professional or anyone with clinical training. So far it seems that the CBDs can do just as good a job, if they are properly trained, as the nurses… If it can be made safe, it would be great opportunity to improve access.

Click here to hear from Dr. Stanback’s colleague Dr. Irina Yacobson, talking about the importance of well-trained family planning staff.

Anna Kushnir, a researcher at Harvard investigating STIs who I met at Science Blogging 2008, writes for the JoVE blog–that’s the Journal of Visualized Experiments, a much buzzed about site where you can watch scientists at work. She asked us how we use video now, and how we could use video in the future, to advance our project. So I emailed around these queries to INFO staffers, and got some interesting responses. This is what we talk about when we talk about video.

Also on the video tip… 

On Tuesday, Heather Sanders and I journeyed to the UN Foundation  at 1800 Massachussets Ave (a certified Green Building) to shoot an interview with Purnima Mane, the deputy executive director of UNFPA. We’ll post her interview up here shortly–she gives an amazing pitch for reinvesting in family planning–but the visit also gave us a great opportunity to see what the UN Foundation is doing with video these days. Not only do the have a podcast room (where we taped) but they are feeding at least one YouTube channel and building myriad other dynamic projects like Nothing But Nets, a malaria relief campaign that’s tapped NBA players and Sports Illustrated writers to fight a disease that infects more than 500 million people each year. Read the rest of this entry »

Open Notebook Science talk at 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference: An overview of the role of blogging in the dissemination of primary research data in the UsefulChem project, an open-source project in chemistry led by Drexel University’s Jean-Claude Bradley. Click to listen and scroll through slides, learn about Open Notebook Science, and find out why Bradley uses Second Life to teach chemistry. Hint: “You get to become a molecule and fly around.”

Science Blogging Session: Open Science Discussion leader is Dr.Hemai Parthasarathy (former editor at Nature and PLoS). Thanks to Wayne Sutton for capturing this–view his other footage here.