Harvard Medical School

Via We Love Beantown.

The Supreme Judicial Court today ruled against a Canton company that makes padded hip protectors, saying a Harvard Medical School researcher did not libel it in a medical-journal article that said the devices did not seem to do much to protect the elderly from broken hips.

The state's highest court said HipSaver of Canton failed to prove that Dr. Douglas Kiel and his co-authors had written anything false in their 2007 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Kiel, a specialist in hip fractures among the elderly, was the lead reasearcher in an $8.4-million federally funded study, in which residents of nursing homes wore a hip protector on one hip but not the other. In their article, the researchers wrote it became so obvious the pads were failing to stop broken hips that they called off the study early.

The study did not include any HipSaver products, which the court said also doomed its claim, because Massachusetts defamation law requires proof a statement was aimed at the plaintiff:

John Halamka, in charge of network computing at both Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, considers recent public cloud outages (from Amazon to Blogger), says he remains optimistic about the basic concept, in part because:

Problems on centralized cloud architecture that is homogenous, well documented, and highly staffed will be more rapidly resolved than problems in distributed, poorly staffed one-off installations.

He describes some of the issues his own campus clouds have had over the past year, including:

HMS has clustered thousands of computing cores together to create a highly robust community resource connected to a petabyte of distributed storage nodes. In theory is should be invincible. In practice it went down. A user with limited high performance computing experience launched a poorly written job to 400 cores in parallel that caused a core dump every second contending for the same disk space. Storage was overwhelmed and went offline for numerous applications.

The Herald reports six scientists and students drank poisoned coffee from a single-serve coffee machine in August.

Paul Levy, CEO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, wishes to address students at Harvard's medical and public-health schools who are riding their bikes to school now that the weather is nice: Put your damn helmet on and stop riding like a moron:

Today's quiz: What do we call a Harvard student who rides a bicycle in the wrong lane without a helmet?

Answer: An organ donor.

Kristin Huang is a first-year student at Harvard Medical School. First year means dissection and it's pretty rough (and then, the next day, even rougher). Definitely NOT for the squeamish (her subject lines begin with "Dismemberment" and "Mutiliation"), but it can give you some idea of what doctors in training have to go through.