Liberate the Data!

I have a new moto: liberate the data!

I think its very appropriate to the work I am doing here in Salvador, which is basically taking medical charts and reading them. carefully.  I am trying to find a lot of information from charts that are handwritten and in Portuguese, no easy task

I did not find this motto by myself, but the geeky, global-health, data-part of me was extremely happy to see this post http://aidwatchers.com/2010/03/new-portal-seeks-to-liberate-the-aid-data/ on the Aid Watch Blog (William Easterly).
here is a taste of the article...
New portal seeks to liberate aid data

By Laura Freschi
Published March 25, 2010

AidData, a new development finance data portal, was launched on Tuesday along with a companion blog called The First Tranche. From their inaugural post:
AidData 1.0, …assembles more aid projects from more donors totaling more dollars than have ever been available from a single source before. AidData catalogues nearly one million projects that were financed between 1945 and 2009, adding or augmenting data on $1.9 trillion of development finance records. We currently have data from 87 different donors, and data from even more donors will come online every few months.

Today I observed a lumbar puncture on a woman with encephalitis.  It was over 90 degrees in the room and the physician could not find any of the CSF fluid.  The whole time I thought I was going to faint because it was so hot.  But it was interesting to see a patient.  I am going to try to observe other procedures.
 
I went to the beach yesterday and walked past a church that had a huge cage of hundereds of guinea pigs.  I think they were for eating and they reminded me a lot of rats.  It was the first time a guinea pig freaked me out.  I think large numbers of small rodents are particularly scary.  I also went to get ice cream with the two students who live in the same apartment as me.  They study a lot and I have not had much of a chance to interact with them (that and I dont speak very well),  But we had a hilarious conversation about university.  I made some funny language mistakes, like accidently calling them cooks rather than cousins :).