Plan Your Estate covers everything from the basics of wills and living trusts to sophisticated tax-saving strategies. The authors give you explanations of every significant estate-planning option available, so you can make the best decisions for you and those you love.

“Lose a laptop and you’re out $500 to $600. Lose your client’s sensitive information — well, that’s a different story.”

If you find the encryption process a little daunting, attend Dan’s new ethics CLE class, Practical Encryption for Attorneys.

“Five years ago, I wouldn’t have known about Randy Pausch, let alone seen his last lecture. I’ve watched the complete 76-minute lecture three times now. YouTube has made it is so easy for me to do this. . . . But for every Randy Pausch, there’s a hundred Tricia Walsh-Smiths,” said Jenkins Law Internet Librarian Dan Giancaterino.

A report prepared by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn for the California HealthCare Foundation entitled The Wisdom of Patients:  Health Care Meets Online Social Media, details how social media on the Internet is educating health care consumers and providers.   Social media includes social networks (MySpace, FaceBook), blogs, wikis, picture-sharing (Flickr) and video-sharing (YouTube) sites, as well as web-based ”communities” where patients with the same disease/condition can meet.  Social media appeared as the Internet evolved from strict information retrieval with read-only capability (Web 1.0) to the interactive Web 2.0, which allows people to post, share, and comment-on information.   Ms. Sarasohn-Kahn refers to this sharing of health-related information as Health 2.0 and describes how this new medium facilitates the grouping together of people with similar health concerns.  This results in the posting of  health information that is more important and relevant to the individual consumer.  These online collaborations are changing the way that patients, health care providers, and researchers learn about therapeutic regimens and disease management.   In her comprehensive report, she  details the positives and negatives of Health 2.0 and predicts how it will evolve in the future.    

One example in the report really demonstrated to me how this dynamic  medium can be useful to an individual patient.  On a social network called PatientsLikeMe, “Joe” posted  that he had been trying for 10 years to manage his leg spasticity, a common symptom of multiple sclerosis.  His doctor had prescribed a low dose of Baclofen, a muscle relaxant, telling him that a higher dose would cause him problems.  After “Joe” joined the network, he learned that people in the MS online “community” were taking up to 10 times the dosage that his doctor had prescribed for him.  “Joe” then asked his doctor to increase his dosage and his condition improved.   If it hadn’t been for the social network that “Joe” joined, he would still be suffering from leg spasticity.  Thinking about this example, I also thought how the network had encouraged “Joe”’s doctor to try a new treatment regimen that he ordinarily never would have tried, and how this new regimen turned out to be quite successful for ”Joe”.     

Ms. Sarasohn-Kahn includes a glossary of social media terms and a list of useful Health 2.0 websites in her very interesting report.  Definitely good  reading!

Fastcase is the next-generation legal research system of choice for legal professionals everywhere. Jenkins has Fastcase available at the workstations in the Jenkins’ Reference Room so come visit us to try it out.

This book answers questions you may have as you begin your legal studies. It also explains and gives examples of the best methods for studying and for taking exams. It describes the opportunities that will be available to you during your second and third years of law school; such as law journals, law clinics, internships, joint degree programs, and study abroad programs. It also provides information about the types of legal practice that are available to you when you graduate.

In general, guardianship is defined as a legal relationship between a capable adult-known as a “guardian” and an individual who, by reason of infancy or legal disability, is unable to care for his or her own personal needs and/or manage his or her financial resources. The Guardianship, Conservatorship and the Law discusses the appointment of a guardian and a conservator, and their respective duties.

For visual instructions on many Hein products check their presence on YouTube.

Bad: Windows.  But since it isn’t going away, we have to deal with it.  Windows XP Service Pack 3 is due to be released on Monday, April 28.  Get it while you can.

Hungry: Google employees.  According to one person’s estimate, Google spends more than $72 million on free food for its employees each year.

To further demonstrate how Details works, check the Details section of the PubMed tutorial.  The searcher enters the text terms “zinc infant growth” into the query box.  The search engine “OR’s” in the MeSH terms “zinc”, “infant”, “growth”, as well as the subheading “growth and development”.  Now your search is comprehensive and complete - searching for text words in the title and abstract and MeSH terms as indexing terms.   

I recently used the Details feature to solve a “mystery” that I encountered while demonstrating an author search during my class.  Searching for the author’s name (e.g. ”walker am”) gave me 458 results.   Searching for the author’s name, specifying the search in the author field only, (e.g. ”walker am [au]”) gave me 457 results.  Checking the Details feature revealed that searching “walker am” was searching both the Author field and the Investigator field.  Checking the Details feature while searching “walker am [au]” revealed that I was indeed just searching the author field.   

So, PubMed searchers, be sure your “attention to detail”includes Details!