What is ebounce.info?

ebounce.info is a website offering free online tools for purposes related to gathering, sorting, presenting and digesting of information, mostly related to health and science. They are all in evolving phase. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Who is behind this website and why?

Everything on this website is created by a single invidual. My name is Marko Seppänen. Think me as a common man, without background of actual health care related education. This website is partly a way to practise my programming skills, handling information in databases and creating user interfaces. Other reasons involve interest to find answers to complex questions and to find patterns of how to search for certain information. Answers to following kind of questions interest me (for example):

• “What’s wrong with my corpus callosum, why does it look like that?”
• “How does nutrition/sport/sleep affect my mood, attention span, ability to retrieve and store memories, etc.”
• “Why is it often so hard for me to take in use those things I’ve learned earlier, in another context?”
• “Do I actually differ from common people in anyway, even when I’ve got this diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome?”
• “Does some gene (related to serotonin and/or dopamine perhaps) have affect to how easy it is to feel being as a whole person instead of being more or less identityless or is it just about how one lives his life?”
• “Why do I have this smoky vision in front of everything I see? Is it because of my eyes or is there something wrong in my brain? Does this has something to do with the way I feel the world, including all the objects and other human beings?”
• “Would it be possible to think in full blown colors when awake, but eyes closed, like when viewing very vivid and real looking colors in a lucid dream?”
• “Did Einstein had larger amount of certain brain cells?”
• “Do words set limits of what can be thinked?”

What is CriteriaGame?

It’s odd how common it is to think, that everyone labeled with same syndrome would all have same symptons or characteristics, which would be caused by same reasons (etiology). And I mean cituations, where “one doesn’t really think, what he is thinking about and his thoughts are driven by associations”. Less one knows about certain syndrome and people labeled with it, more probably one will think exactly that way. On CriteriaGame-page I try to explain, with visual aids, that syndromes have multiple etiologies (reasons, causes..). Trying to understand syndromes, without accepting them having multiple etiologies, will only lead to very high cognitive load in your mind and you could never “fit all the pieces together” (you would have to leave out most of the pieces from your conclusions).

Main features

FeedReader

• shows latest titles & summaries from selected sources (no search option)
• results are cached for a hour

PubMedTool

• searches for abstracts from PubMed
• links corresponding words in abstract text to Wikipedia pages, on demand
• clipboard
• results for first resultpage are cached for a hour

Nutriputri

• shows nutriotional values for selected foods (based on USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 18)
• 7000+ food descriptions, 60+ nutritions
• search by selecting a food group or by keywords
• optional indicator for selected nutrition
• saveable foodlists
• results can be viewed as sum, seperately or as fork

Infobait

• searches latest titles & summaries from Yahoo News, Technorati Blogs and Google Search
• wordcounter
• results are cached for a hour

ImageFinder

• searches relevant images from Yahoo Images and Flickr
• results are cached for a hour

QueryMaker

• creates search links for multiple targets

Tutorials

Tutorial for Nutriputri

Spending few minutes by going through these instructions, will save you lots of minutes later. Most important is to learn the elements. This won’t take long and it helps your mind to work more organized later. While reading this part, take a look at each element and tell yourself what it does (internally, by thinking it).

Element group 1: List of food groups, Search field, Nutrition indicator
Element group 2: List of selectable foodnames, Selected foods, Saved foodlists, Show nutritions -command

Let’s learn the elements backwards.

• Before pressing Show nutritions -button, you must have a list of foods (Selected foods) to show nutritions for. List of foods can be loaded from a foodlist saved earlier (Saved foodlists) or if you yet haven’t saved any foodlists of your own, you can use example foodlists (visible only if there’s no foodlists of your own). Just click a name of a foodlist and contents of it will be loaded to Selected foods -element.
• Foods, which you are able to include to your Selected foods -list are available in Selectable foods -list. What is visible in that list can be changed by selecting (by clicking) a food group or by using the search function. Search string must be atleast 3 characters long and it can contain only characters from a to z (max 30). Click items in Selectable foods -list to include them to your foodlist. You can remove items from a visible foodlist by clicking them (this won’t affect saved lists).
• Nutrition indicator is used in both cases, by using search function or clicking a food group. It doesn’t affect the actual results, what you see after pressing Show nutritions, but it highlights items, which meet choosen criterion.
• Finally, take a closer look at foodgroups. For better understanding about what kind of foods are available go through all the food groups. No need to memorize them, but quickly scroll through. You will also notice, that there are multiple versions of same food listed. They are different serving sizes of the same food. In upcoming versions of the tool, you can select to use 100g as serving size also. Ethnic Foods -food group had no service sizes (in USDA-database) at all, so in this version it is shown as empty.

Tutorial for keyword lists

To help yourself in remembering your earlier searches or just to remember good keywords, you can make list of keywords and save them for later use. Click keywords in the list of keywords to add them to search string. Currently there’s no limits in number of keywords nor lists. Also currently your lists of keywords are saved only for an hour.

Other information

Do these work with browser X?

Javascript is required to be available. In practise, these should work in any modern browser.

Disclaimer

All tools provided are on an “as is” basis without warranty of any kind. However author tries to use resonable care while developing the website and its services. And as it makes sense, author reserves right to change the rules (disclaimer, terms of use, etc..) at any time without notification.

Terms of use

You are free to use services on this website. Just don’t break anything. You are not allowed to use use these services remotely, like calling them from another website (except when is told be ok).

How about the privacy issues?

No personal or any other information is collected, what could be traced back to you. Some services save a cookie on your computer. It doesn’t contain any sensitive information, just a pointer to a saved list on server, for example. Lists on server aren’t deleted after your cookie expires as they may be used for general statistical purposes or in other ways, what might help developing the services further. No information is shared with any third party.

References

All nutritional information used in Nutriputri is from installed USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference (Release 18) -database, created by United States Department of Agriculture. USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory Home Page, http://www.ars.usda.gov/ba/bhnrc/ndl