BMJ No 7107 Volume 315
Information in practice Saturday 30 August 1997
Netlines
The medical establishment on the web
 | Most of the royal medical colleges now have a presence on the web: the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh on http://www.rcpe.ac.uk/, the Royal College of Surgeons of England on http://www.rcseng.ac.uk, The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh on http://www.rcsed.ac.uk/welcome.htm, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland on http://www.rcsi.ie/, the Royal College of Psychiatrists on http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/, the Royal College of General Practitioners on http://www.rcgp.org.uk/, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists on http://www.rcog.org.uk/, and the Royal College of Anaesthetists on http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~nrcoa/. Each web site provides general information on the relevant college, with specific information on its education, research, and college services. The Royal Society of Medicine can be found on http://www.roysocmed.ac.uk/. Sadly, I can find no evidence of a web presence for the General Medical Council nor for my own college, the Royal College of Pathologists. |
The power of plug-ins
| After surfing the web for a while, you can become blasé and think that you have seen it all. I was recently shocked out of such complacency when I installed some new plug-ins into my web browser. These small pieces of software add extra functions to your web browser, so that, for example, it can play movies or sounds or display molecular structures within a web page - for a full list of plug-ins see BrowserWatcher's Plug-In Plaza (http://browserwatch.internet.com/plug-in.html). | |
| I installed HotSauce (http://hotsauce.apple.com/), which allows you to navigate through the web by flying through a virtual 3-D space (termed XSpace). It certainly gives a fresh perspective on the web - as the promotional material says, "Why surf when you can fly?" While flying through the XSpace of the Plant Cell Biology site (http://plantcell.lu.se/), I experienced another shock of the new when I came across a web page (http://plantcell.lu.se/Research/lhcii_mov.html) that not only displayed an embedded QuickTime movie of the rotating 3-D structure of a protein - accessible because I had installed the QuickTime plug-in (http://quicktime.apple.com/) - but also played Bach's Fugue in G minor in the background. Never has net-surfing been so civilised. |
The Dearing report on line
| Even as wired a journal as the BMJ sometimes slips up. In the issue of 2 August it pointed out that you can obtain a "dead-tree" version of the 1700 page Dearing report on the future of higher education for £135. The BMJ forgot to mention that you can access the entire report for free on the web on http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/. That way you avoid lugging five volumes around, and you can even search the entire report on line. Read what Dearing has to say about the UK Joint Academic Network (JANET) on http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/nr_169.htm and http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/nr_207.htm. And you can see what the National Union of Students thinks of the report on http://www.nus.org.uk/dearnews.html. |
Anaesthetics on the web
| Netlines is grateful to Steve Yentis for providing the following starting places for exploring anaesthetics on the web: his departmental web page on http://www.cxwms.ac.uk/Academic/Anaes/mdahome.html, Wright's Anaesthesia and Critical Care Resources on the Internet on http://www.eur.nl/FGG/ANEST/wright/contents.html, and the Virtual Anaesthesia Textbook on http://www.gasnet.eur.nl/mirror/vat/VAT.html. |
Compiled by Mark Pallen
email
m.pallen@qmw.ac.uk
web page
http://www.qmw.ac.uk/~rhbm001/mpallen.html
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