AAMC publication "Diversity in Medical Education: Facts & Figures 2012"

AAMC has published "Diversity in Medical Education: Facts and Figures 2012," the 17th data book in the Facts & Figures Data Series. This publication provides students, medical educators and administrators, researchers, policymakers, and the general public with a compendium of detailed statistical information on race and ethnicity and gender in medical education in the United States for the 2011 academic year as well as nearly a decade’s worth of trending information for select topics. The publication also includes data related to the pre-college component of the education pipeline leading to the M.D. degree and other health sciences and health professions careers.

Diversity in Medical Education: Facts & Figures 2012

Workaround for viewing PDF articles in Ebscohost

We've recently had reports from students unable to view PDF articles in Ebscohost databases on their home computers. Databases we've heard about include Health Business Full Text Elite and Professional Development Collection. CINAHL is likely affected as well.
The problems seem to be specific to a combination of Ebscohost, Adobe Reader, and Internet Explorer 9. Ebscohost embeds a PDF viewer, but you should be able to workaround the problem by opening the PDF in a new browser window:

1. First, add your articles to a Folder in Ebscohost then go to your Folder.
2. Right-click on one of the PDF Full Text links there.
3. Select either "Open in new window" to view the PDF in your browser or "Save target as..." to immediately download and save the PDF file.

Watch our short video below for a demonstration.

Aside from the workaround demonstrated in the video, here are some possible, but unverified, long-term solutions to the problem:

• We've heard from one campus Support Technician that just uninstalling IE9 may resolve similar problems in other browsers you might have installed, such as Firefox and Chrome. IE9 includes many additional security features that interfere with opening and viewing files from the web.
• If your computer's operating system is a 64-bit version of Windows, try switching to 32-bit Windows and 32-bit browsers.

Basic LTI in Ares, Ares Virtual Conference Notes

Following are my notes from today's Basic LTI session of Atlas System's Ares Virtual Conference. We're planning to take advantage of Basic LTI once Blackboard replaces Angel as the primary course management system on campus. Basic LTI between Ares and LCMS+ is also likely assuming LCMS+ adds support for Basic LTI.

Atlas Systems Ares Course Reserves Basic LTI webinar

LTI v1.0, released May 2010
  : No support for callback messages from Ares to CMS. Such callbacks are supported in LTI v1.1, but Ares never passes data back to CMS. Data flow is one-way from CMS to Ares:
  : CMS -> Basic LTI -> Ares Web Service -> Ares Web DLL (pages)
Basic LTI points to "responder", Ares in this case.
  : Term "responder" is confusing; it's really a "consumer" of CMS info, but "consumer" is used to refer to the CMS' relationship to Ares? Strange.
Ares config
  : LTIConsumers Table
    : Ares Web URL field designates the page to display (e.g. for different audiences, CMSs. We might want the Ares response page for BlackBoard to look different from LCMS+).
  : LTIFieldMappings
    : Map Ares fields to LTI fields. Limited by values sent from CMS.
CMS config
  : "Launch URL" = http://ares.host.name/ares/webservice/BasicLTI
  : Consumer Key and Secret
  : view all available CMS params with Ares test link = http://ares.host.name/ares/webservice/BasicLTI/ShowLTIParams