Thursday, August 7, 2025

The Death of Traditional Medicine? AI's Impact on Healthcare and Modern Medicine: Free Webinar

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The Death of Traditional Medicine?

Co-Hosted By: IGI Global Scientific PublishingeContent Pro, and
Rittenhouse Digital
Sponsored By: The Open Science Education Institute (OSEI)
Original Air Date:  Wednesday, July 30, 2025
[About 1 hour]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming every aspect of healthcare and pharmaceuticals, from diagnostics and drug discovery to clinical workflows and administrative operations. As AI reshapes the field, questions around trust, transparency, equity, and the evolving role of healthcare professionals remain critical.

View Now [Requires free registration]


Here's a juicy quote by Dr. Sonnenberg that sums up the session -- and gives me hope for the future:

Here are my final thoughts: AI won't replace clinical judgement or human connection.  What it will do is challenge us to be more intentional -- about how we listen, how we learn, how we lead, and how we build trust.

As an educator, I see this as a teaching moment, one where we model curiosity, courage, and care.  Our job isn't to resist change, but to steward it ethically, relationally, and with equity at the core.

This isn't about what we're leaving behind.  It's about what we're building --and who we're building it for.

And at the center of it all is trust, because no matter how powerful the technology, its impact depends on the character of those who guide its use.

Or as we wrote in our CARE-AI book, 'Technology is only as ethical as the hands, and hearts, that guide it."

                                                                            -- Dr. Lyn K. Sonnenberg 


Tuesday, August 5, 2025

AI Literacy: Is it safe to use ChatGPT for your Task?

 


In the recent WHSLA Wisdom Chat about AI, WHSLA Member, Leslie Chistensen called out this very useful flow chart by Aleksander Tiulkanov.

For the sake of AI literacy, these are important questions to ask.

It's NOT ok to take AI answers at face value.  You need to dig in and evaluate the sources to make sure it's not hallucinating, like your drunk uncle.  

Once you evaluate all the sources, is it really a timesaver?

References:



Sunday, August 3, 2025

A rigorous evaluation framework for AI in healthcare - essential insights for medical librarians: August Webinar

 This one is sponsored by The Medical Library Association.

Elsevier ClinicalKey AI logo
As trusted guides in healthcare information, you understand the importance of rigorous evaluation when it comes to clinical resources.

Join Amanda Barry, MPH, Principal Clinical Analyst and AI Ethics at Elsevier, who has been at the forefront of developing evaluation protocols for generative AI tools since October 2023. Her work with Elsevier Health's AI evaluation team focuses on accuracy, safety, and mitigating demographic bias in healthcare AI systems like ClinicalKey AI and Sherpath AI.

This webinar is particularly relevant for medical librarians who are increasingly asked about AI tools by healthcare providers. Amanda's epidemiological background and 11+ years in clinical decision support allow her to provide unique insights into what makes AI tools truly reliable for clinical use. Her team's research methodology, recently published in JAMIA Open, offers a "clinician-in-the-loop approach" that ensures AI evaluation assesses what matters most to clinicians.

Don't miss this opportunity to enhance your ability to guide healthcare professionals toward trustworthy AI resources on Thursday, August 2025, at 1:00 p.m., central time.

Register

Saturday, August 2, 2025

TB: The Deadliest Infectious Disease of All Time

 

The Deadliest Infectious Disease of All Time - Crash Course Lecture (March 25, 2025)

This one is more of a formal lecture / documentary by John Green, author of Everything is Tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis is often thought of as an old-timey disease, but in reality, it continues to kill over a million and a half people per year, despite its known cure. How did we get here, to a world where decades of work toward a cure stalled in its dissemination around the globe? And how can understanding the history of TB point us toward a different future? If you’ve been following author and TB-hater John Green in any way for the last year or so, this video is the deep dive you’ve been waiting for…

Friday, August 1, 2025

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green - Interview on 99% Invisible   Podcast from 8 April 2025.

This is a fascinating interview with John Green about TB, "and how the world’s deadliest curable disease still thrives—and why everything, from [Taylor Swift] and cowboy hats to colonial borders, traces back to tuberculosis."

If you want to buy the book:





Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Registration is open for the free virtual 2025 SLA Midwest Symposium

 


 

***Please share with anyone who might be interested***

The 2025 SLA Midwest Symposium will take place on Friday, August 1, 9 a.m. - 2 p.m. Central. This event is open to anyone with an interest in specialized libraries and is not limited to the Midwest... The entire program will be held via Zoom.

  • Keynote 1 - Hildy Dworkin - SLA President Update
  • Keynote 2 - Brian Pichman - AI Tools That Do the Work (So You Don’t Have To)
  • Presentations will
    include: 
    • That's A Bad Word: Weeding in Special Collections
    • Reading for Well-Being: Examining the Engel Leisure Collection at a Duke Medical Center Library
    • Evaluating Commercial Data Quality
    • Adaptive Librarianship: Academic Data Services
      and Knowledge Synthesis
    • AND MORE…

Registration is FREE for speakers and registrants. All will receive the program with final details.

Register here: https://railslibraries.zoom.us/meeting/register/7rT-VZ6LSTSTQ5D7RWEI7A

Questions? Marydee Ojalamarydee@xmission.com

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: 2025 SLA Midwest Symposium. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

The 2025 SLA Midwest Symposium will take place virtually (via Zoom) on Friday, August 1, 9 a.m. - 2 p.m. Central, 10 a.m. - 3 p.m. Eastern. It is a free event for speakers and attendees.

Monday, July 14, 2025

Clowning around with AI: Experimenting with article PDF summarizer tools

Colorful assortment of balloons

There has been an explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) tools over the past few years. A category of AI tool that has been getting some traction is tools that summarize individual articles. A few such tools include Elicit, SciSpace, Perplexity, and EndNote 2025's new Key Takeaway tool (however, there are many, many more out there!). Among other things, these generative AI tools provide brief, easily digestible summaries of an article.

While these article summarizers have been lauded for their efficiency, there have been some concerns relating to their accuracy. Additionally, with the black box nature of AI tools, it can be difficult to determine just how much of an article AI tools are "looking at" when generating high level summaries.

Enter the Clown Shenanigans 

As someone who recently got access to EndNote 2025's Key Takeaway tool, I decided to play around (or, more aptly, clown around) with the tool. Using the text of an article I had published with JMLA, I systematically replaced different sections of the article with nonsense text to see if the Key Takeaway tool would pick up on the shenanigans. The "nonsense text" consisted of snippets of a fictitious study on identifying malicious clowns hiding within the general public, which I generated using Microsoft Copilot.

Findings 

In terms of replacing individual parts of an article, one section at a time, with clown nonsense, I found each and every replaced section (i.e., title, abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion, and references), by itself, managed to fly under the radar in the Key Takeaway tool (i.e., no clown shenanigans detected).

I also tested a few section combinations. My most interesting finding was that I was able to fully replace the methods, results, and references sections of the article (resulting in 47% of the article being comprised of text about clowns) without EndNote 2025's Key Takeaway tool mentioning anything about clowns in its generated summary!

Screenshot of EndNote's Key Takeaway tool. The methods section of the PDF has been replaced by clown nonsense, and the generated summary doesn't mention any clowns in it

I tested this same PDF (i.e., with nonsense methods, results, and references) out in SciSpace, Perplexity, and Elicit, and the clown shenanigans remained undetected in their generated summaries, as well (note that I only tested the high level summaries, and not the summaries these tools generated for each individual section of the article).

Takeaways

This fun little experiment only further illustrates the need to take caution with these AI summarizer tools, especially those that generate high level summaries. Though these tools can be handy, they can sometimes miss much needed context (or, in this case, clown shenanigans!) that may be buried in the full text of an article. 
 
While I would hope authors wouldn't replace entire sections of their manuscripts with nonsense, the fact that I was able to wholly replace vital sections of the manuscript, such as the methods section, without the text making its way into the high level summaries demonstrates how researchers relying on such summaries may miss necessary context or, perhaps most concerning, severe methodological flaws, if they don't take the time to read the studies in their entirety. To be fair, though, this is true of any high-level summaries, not just AI outputted ones.
 
Generative AI tools are ever evolving, and issues such as these may (hopefully!) be soon resolved. In the meantime, I encourage others to clown around with these tools to explore their strengths and limitations. For those wanting to conduct experiments of their own (or wanting a good laugh), here is a link to the different sections of text generated by Copilot (note that I didn't author any of the text, and the text is wholly the output of Copilot). See which sections of an article you can replace! Detection of clown shenanigans may vary.
 
Thanks for reading, and I hope everyone has a great week!