Tasmanian IT Blog   •   March 15, 2019

Each week, we post a “Take 5” article to our website with tips, tricks, thoughts and actions we’ve come across during the week that we feel you may benefit from too.

It’s designed to be short and sharp that you can read when you need to “Take 5”.

Grab a drink, give yourself a (productive) break and check out our latest 5 below.

1. Feed the brain – Harnessing Health Technology

Here at Tasmanian IT we are very interested in the future of Health in Tasmania and beyond. As such we came across this Ted Talk and thought it was worthy of our Take Five blog.

At MIT, Dina Katabi and her team are working on a bold new way to monitor patients’ vital signs in a hospital (or even at home), without wearables or bulky, beeping devices. Bonus: it can see through walls. Interesting isn’t it and you can hear this brief Ted Talk Q&A with TED curator Helen Walters here.

Link: https://www.ted.com/talks/dina_katabi_a_new_way_to_monitor_vital_signs_that_can_see_through_walls

2. Crowd source meeting schedules

Sometimes trying to find a good meeting time for a group of stakeholders that are across multiple organisations (or even within organisations) can be like herding cats!  You’re never going to win…

Until now – doodle.com has the answer, and yep, it is safe for work…

Doodle.com is a website designed to find the best time for an activity for a group of people – that is all it is designed to do.  Because of this niche focus, they’ve developed an online product that is exceptionally good at this.

It’s a simple process of suggesting a list of dates and times for an event, invite the membership you wish to join, let them choose the preferred time-slot, then book the meeting based on feedback.

Save yourself some time booking the next meeting and checkout doodle.com

Link: https://doodle.com/

3. Happy Birthday World Wide Web

This week celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web, first proposed on March 11th, 1989, by Tim Berners-Lee.

The simplicity of this system was what allowed the general public (not just scientists and engineers) to make use of this vast, complex network. The reality is that the web has changed the way we work, receive our news, debate various topics, stay in touch with friends and play in ways we could never have dreamed of 30 years ago.

Tim-Berners Lee has been in the media recently discussing both the good and the bad that has developed over the three decades – specifically looking at ethical use and the effects of the networks ability to spread negative content including fake news.  He is currently working on two major initiatives to combat this – which we’ve linked to below.

Tasmanian IT acknowledges the genius of Tim Burners-Lee on this the 30^th anniversary of an “interesting idea”.

Link: https://www.cnet.com/news/tim-berners-lee-still-believes-the-web-can-be-fixed-even-today/

4. Take your reading skills to the next level

Reading words is for most of us, easy. You were taught how to do this in school. But just because you read the words doesn’t mean you read well. These days with our ever increasingly busy lives it has become even more important to ensure that we are reading ‘well’.

Taking in exactly what we are reading and storing it for retrieval when required is actually a significantly complex process. If you are interested in knowing what to read and when this is a fabulous article points to over a dozen resources to get you started. And no, there won’t be a test at the end!

Link: https://fs.blog/reading/

5. Quote of the week

“Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window”.

— Steve Wosniak

Have a great week from the Tasmanian IT Team