Preventing data loss & Essential Lit Search tools & software for TCM Professionals

[Guest guest]

Hi All,

 

An unfortunate colleague (name omitted to spare his/her blushes!) wrote:

> Dear Phil: I had a computer disaster and lost my hard drive (my fault,

> mea culpa)

 

Ouch - There but for the Grace of G_d go I or any of you!

 

If you have not done so, consider the following immediately:

 

Make it your top priority to buy a fast and reliable EXTERNAL hard drive (for

example Seagate http://tinyurl.com/37kzrd ) with 250-500 Gb storage

capacity.

 

You can use that drive to offload old files to free-up your PC's internal drive,

and ALSO to act as a backup to ALL your data files.

 

Ask a computer-literate youngster to PARTITION your external drive into at

least two areas: (a) WORK AREA and (b) BACKUP AREA.

 

Then ask the youngster to move any old (not often used) files from your

computer to the WORK AREA of the external drive.

 

Then ask him/her to set up your system so that all changes that you make

to your files on your hard drive OR in the WORK AREA of the external drive

are copied automatically to the BACKUP AREA on the external drive.

 

Do it ASAP.

 

> You once sent out an email with all the different URLs you use to

> search the research " out there " ... if you still have it, can you

> forward it to me? If not, just send me your top 3, if it's not much

> trouble, please.

 

You may want to BOOKMARK some or all of these tools if you have not

used them before:

 

SPECIAL TOOLS for laptops/PCs:

 

1. Copernic Desktop Search - essential to find data that you KNOW are

" somewhere " among thousands of files on your system. It is amazing

software. Download (free) from:

http://download3.copernic.com/copernicdesktopsearch2.exe and set it up to

read your EXTERNAL drive also.

 

2. Google Desktop Search [a similar tool to Copernic Desktop Search] but,

IMO not as good. Download it from http://desktop.google.com/

 

3. NJStar Chinese-English Dictionary Software [ http://njstar.eaxon.com/ ]

 

4. Wenlin Chinese-English Dictionary Software [

http://www.wenlin.com/index.htm ]

 

TOOLS FOR LITERATURE SEARCHES:

 

PubMed Medline [

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?DB=pubmed ] (mainly

abstracts)

 

PubMedCentral [ http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ ] (has free full-text

scientific / medical articles & reviews

 

Acubriefs [ http://www.acubriefs.com/ ]

 

SEARCH ENGINES that I use for WWW searches are

 

Google Scholar Advanced [

http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search ]

 

Google Advanced [ http://www.google.com/advanced_search? ]

 

AltaVista Advanced [ http://www.altavista.com/web/adv ]

 

Advanced [ http://search./web/advanced?ei=UTF-8 ]

 

Excite Advanced [

http://msxml.excite.com/info.xcite/search/advanced/web.htm? ]

 

Copernic Desktop Search (see above) because it doubles as a WWW

search engine also.

 

My main TRANSLATION tools (free on WWW) are

Google Translate [ http://www.google.com/language_tools ]

Babelfish [ http://babelfish.altavista.com/ ]

 

Both of those give pretty good machine translation from one Euro language

to another. Try it! However, their translation of oriental languages (Chinese,

Korean, Japanese) is, at best, poor. Without additional language translation

software on your PC it is most unsafe to rely on Google or Babelfish

translations for accurate work.

 

Top Ten AP Pts for Common Conditions: Fast Find Page

http://homepage.eircom.net/~progers/ff.htm

 

Top Ten AP Pts for Common Conditions: Introduction

http://homepage.eircom.net/~progers/adtop.htm

 

For other useful links to material on acupuncture & TCM, see

http://homepage.eircom.net/~progers/infosource.doc

 

PS: It goes without saying that all PCs that access WWW need top-class

ANTIVIRUS software and a FIREWALL to reduce the risk of virus attack.

 

Those who use WWW for several hours daily also need good

ANTISPYWARE software.

 

Best regards,