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Category Archives: academia

Making a quick, single PDF file

Posted on November 5, 2018 by phil Posted in academia, geekery, optometry

I now more-or-less exclusively reach for my iPad for both reviewing documents (papers, agendas, minutes etc.) and when I need to have information available at my fingertips for meetings and the like. Increasingly, I seem to receive paperwork for meetings as a single, often long, PDF which is great.  This file format is, of course, is the digital lingua franca for bringing together documents which were originally generated from a range of programs.

Sometimes, though, I have the very first world problem of needing to review some work which is presented as a number of files of one or more formats.  Today, for example, I was about to board a plane (a prime paper reviewing opportunity) and recalled that I had recently been asked to review a paper for Contact Lens and Anterior Eye.  I pressed the various on-screen buttons to accept this invitation and was quickly able to download the five files – four Word documents and one image.  To generate a single PDF for airborne review would mean converting the Word files individually in some way and then either adding the image or converting them separately.  A bit tedious; and also slow when the queue was already beginning to form at Gate 206.

Some time ago, I found the easyPDF web site which allows you to drag in a bunch of files and it quickly generates a single PDF file for download.  As a default, it adds the the files in alphabetical sequence so some changing of file names might be required but apart from that, it works perfectly.  There is an iOS (and presumably an Android) app to act as the front end for this, also.  The site allows conversion of up to five files as part of its free tier.  It does other conversion magic as well although I’ve not used those other features.

I have previously struggled with methods to automate this process on my Mac (PDF creation means shoving information through a printer driver rather than a simple conversion process) so this is a much better solution which can easily be done when on the move.  The system is cloud-based so may not be suitable for sensitive of confidential documents but for other bits of work, it’s a great option.

 

Working with old PowerPoint files

Posted on October 7, 2018 by phil Posted in academia, geekery, lectures, optometry

Bit of a funny one, this.  Over the years, I’ve bemoaned the fact that I’ve not been able to open PowerPoint files from the mid 1990s and earlier.  This has never really been critical; key slides continued to migrate into newer versions of presentations (now regrettably commonly termed slide decks in US corporate vernacular) and survive to this day like a well maintained classic car.

However, I am occasionally curious about files from that era but they do not open with current (or the previous two versions) of PowerPoint on my Mac.  (As an aside, PowerPoint on the Mac pre-dates its launch for Windows).  I think they are older than the  ‘1997-2003’ file format which will still open today.

Every year or two, I explore this again but fail – until yesterday.

I have been preparing for a talk, given today in Utrecht at the Jaarbeurs conference complex, returning to a venue I came to a few times in the mid 1990s when Dutch optometry was developing quickly and there were lots of CET meetings and speaking invitations for those of us working in the contact lens area.

I found a presentation from September 1, 1997 which I gave at the same venue and thought it would be fun to look at the talk and see what it looked like (and include the opening slide in today’s talk under the guise of ‘I’ve been coming here a long time’ sortathing).

After yet more Google searching on the topic, I fluked on some information which – remarkably – worked.  It turns out it’s easy and requires the use of the Zamzar conversion site.  Here is the recipe:

  1. Duplicate the file (for safety) and edit the suffix to .pps
  2. Go to zamzar.com and upload file.
  3. Choose PPT (1997-2003) as the desired file format.
  4. Wait for e-mail from zamzar.com
  5. Download new file
Warning: this reveals the garish state of slide design in the 1990s when we were excited by colours on slides; or maybe that was just me.  I’m also not sure that the kerning is correct but I might not have the correct fonts any longer.
Proviso: this worked on a couple of files.  I didn’t check not changing the suffix so variants on this approach might work.
Note 1: I have not used PowerPoint routinely for many years as I am a convert to Apple Keynote.
Note 2: AV guys at conference centres remain sniffy about Keynote files.
Note 3: Keynote export to PowerPoint is now excellent and almost perfect with the exception that start/end times of movie clips are not respected so you can always fall back on this as I had to today (see Note 2).
Note 4: Always have a PDF back up on a USB memory stick of a conference talk just in case.
Note 5: I still give a variant of Dk – don’t know? today.

How we can improve patient compliance

Posted on May 19, 2017 by phil Posted in academia, lectures, optometry

Screen Shot 2016-01-17 at 22.03.26

This note gives a number of references and resources for my talk on how we can help our patients improve their compliance and in doing so, help them minimise the risk of keratitis during contact lens wear.  Many of the links are to articles in the literature.  Full access to most/all of these papers is available to members of the College of Optometrists via an Athens account as I have written about here.

The Science of Compliance booklet

Inflammation on Wikipedia

Efron editorial on contact lens wear being an inflammatory stimulus

Suzi Fleiszig’s brilliant review of microbial keratitis in contact lens wear

The Epidemiology of Contact Lens Related Infiltrates

ISO 18259

Risk factors for acanthamoeba keratitis in contact lens users: A case-control study

Trends in UK contact lens prescribing 2015

Graeme Young’s 49 steps for contact lens compliance

The Incidence of Contact Lens-Related Microbial Keratitis in Australia

An international analysis of contact lens compliance

Case care and lens rinsing can be improved

Handwashing can get better

NHS guide to handwashing

Impact of air-drying lens cases in various locations and positions

Toilet aerosol effect

Contact Lens Wearer Demographics and Risk Behaviors for Contact Lens-Related Eye Infections

BCLA guidance for the public on the use of contact lenses

Innovations in contact lenses

Posted on June 13, 2016 by phil Posted in academia, lectures, optometry

the-belfry-hotel-resort

This page provides links and other supporting information for my talk at the BCLA UK meeting at The Belfry in June 2016.

‘Athens’ access to journals through the College of Optometrists

EU population projections

Contact lens prescribing in 2015

Electronic liquid crystal contact lenses for the correction of presbyopia

Graphene electrodes for adaptive liquid crystal contact lenses

Novartis to start human tests with Google lens in 2016

Johnson & Johnson business review web cast

A single-pixel wireless contact lens display

Triggerfish lens for glaucoma monitoring

Innovega system

Myopia control review in Optician

Prevalence and progression of myopic retinopathy in an older population

The impact of contemporary contact lenses on contact lens discontinuation

Effect of Three Interventions on Contact Lens Comfort in Symptomatic Wearers: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Friction and comfort

Incidence and epidemiologic associations of corneal infiltrates with silicone hydrogel contact lenses

Is contact lens wear inflammatory?

Stepping up to the demands of today’s contact lens wearers

Posted on January 30, 2016 by phil Posted in academia, lectures, optometry

blue eye

This lecture explores the rationale for fitting daily disposables vs. reusable lenses, and also conventional hydrogels vs. silicone hydrogels.  In the list below is a range of papers and other resources which support my presentation.  Some are full documents – others feature at least the abstract of the paper.  Access to full papers is generally available to those accessing from a university (or similar) IP address or those with ‘Athens’ access.  Members of the College of Optometrists have ‘Athens’ accounts as part of their annual membership.  I explain this here.

Dumbleton, K., Woods, C. A., Jones, L. W., & Fonn, D. (2013). The impact of contemporary contact lenses on contact lens discontinuation., 39(1), 93–99.

TFOS report on contact lens discomfort (free download)

Peterson, R. C., Wolffsohn, J. S., Nick, J., Winterton, L., & Lally, J. (2006). Clinical performance of daily disposable soft contact lenses using sustained release technology. Contact Lens and Anterior Eye, 29(3), 127–134. 

Morgan, P. B., Efron, N., Hill, E. A., Raynor, M. K., Whiting, M. A., & Tullo, A. B. (2005). Incidence of keratitis of varying severity among contact lens wearers. British Journal of Ophthalmology, 89(4), 430–436.

Stapleton, F., Keay, L., Edwards, K., Naduvilath, T., Dart, J. K. G., Brian, G., & Holden, B. A. (2008). The Incidence of Contact Lens-Related Microbial Keratitis in Australia. Ophthalmology, 115(10), 1655–1662.

Dart, J. K. G., Radford, C. F., Minassian, D., Verma, S., & Stapleton, F. (2008). Risk Factors for Microbial Keratitis with Contemporary Contact Lenses. Ophthalmology, 115(10), 1647–1654.e3.

Chalmers, R. L., Keay, L., McNally, J., & Kern, J. (2012). Multicenter case-control study of the role of lens materials and care products on the development of corneal infiltrates. Optometry and Vision Science, 89(3), 316–325. 

Morgan, P. B., Efron, N., & Woods, C. A. (2013). Determinants of the Frequency of Contact Lens Wear. Eye & Contact Lens: Science & Clinical Practice, 39(3), 200–204. 

Efron, N., Efron, S. E., Morgan, P. B., & Morgan, S. L. (2010). A “cost-per-wear” model based on contact lens replacement frequency. Clinical & Experimental Optometry : Journal of the Australian Optometrical Association, 93(4), 253–260.

Efron, N., Morgan, P. B., Woods, C. A., International Contact Lens Prescribing Survey Consortium. (2013). An international survey of daily disposable contact lens prescribing. Clinical & Experimental Optometry : Journal of the Australian Optometrical Association, 96(1), 58–64.

Morgan, S. L., Morgan, P. B., & Efron, N. (2003). Environmental impact of three replacement modalities of soft contact lens wear. Cont Lens Anterior Eye, 26(1), 43–46.

Diligent Disinfection in 49 Steps

Morgan, P. B., Efron, N., Toshida, H., & Nichols, J. J. (2011). An international analysis of contact lens compliance. Cont Lens Anterior Eye, 34(5), 223–228. 

Dumbleton, K., Richter, D., Woods, C., Jones, L., & Fonn, D. (2010). Compliance with contact lens replacement in Canada and the United States. Optometry and Vision Science : Official Publication of the American Academy of Optometry, 87(2), 131–139. 

Navascues-Cornago, M., Morgan, P. B., & Maldonado-Codina, C. (2015). Effect of Three Interventions on Contact Lens Comfort in Symptomatic Wearers: A Randomized Clinical Trial. PloS One, 10(8), e0135323–13. 

Korb, D. R., Greiner, J. V., Herman, J. P., Hebert, E., Finnemore, V. M., Exford, J. M., et al. (2002). Lid-wiper epitheliopathy and dry-eye symptoms in contact lens wearers. The CLAO Journal : Official Publication of the Contact Lens Association of Ophthalmologists, Inc, 28(4), 211–216. 

Roba, M., Duncan, E. G., Hill, G. A., Spencer, N. D., & Tosatti, S. G. P. (2011). Friction measurements on contact lenses in their operating environment. Tribology Letters, 44(3), 387–397. 

Maldonado-Codina, C., Morgan, P. B., Schnider, C. M., & Efron, N. (2004). Short-term physiologic response in neophyte subjects fitted with hydrogel and silicone hydrogel contact lenses. Optometry and Vision Science : Official Publication of the American Academy of Optometry, 81(12), 911–921.

When you get asked for comments on a document….

Posted on January 10, 2016 by phil Posted in academia, geekery

Email.001.001

I presume that everyone in academia, the corporate world and in many other walks of life regularly receives e-mails like this; a request to comment on an attached file which is commonly a Microsoft Word document but could be a PDF, a Pages document or indeed anything else.

As I receive this sort of request daily, I became frustrated with the processing needed on such a file.  It needs moving from the e-mail into somewhere sensible like the Desktop, probably having some sort of personalisation (e.g. adding initials and perhaps a date to the file name), before opening and editing.  (Admittedly, this is very much a First World Problem).

On a Mac, it’s easy to prepare a small application to process this request for you.  If you open Automator on your Mac from the Applications folder and opt to create an Application when asked, you can simply pull in three steps into the workflow like this:

Screen Shot 2016-01-10 at 20.25.52

In the middle step, you can add your initials (as I have done) or the date, or various other terms, to the file name.

This workflow can be saved as an Application with a name of our choice onto your hard drive and then I suggest you place it as a permanent icon in your Dock – it needs to be somewhere which is easily accessible.  Then, when you get a please review e-mail, just drag the attachment icon onto this new application.  Almost immediately, a copy with your initials (date, whatever) will be saved onto the Desktop and then opened in the appropriate program for you to edit.  Thereafter, your edits and comments will be saved to this new file on the Desktop, ready to go back to your colleague.

If this sounds a bit geeky, I’ve recorded a short video here to outline how this is done step-by-step in Automator.

Why we need 2FA in our lives

Posted on December 28, 2015 by phil Posted in academia, geekery 4 Comments

skitch

Something that may not be immediately apparent about accessing the various cloud-type services which have proliferated in recent years is that they can be equally accessed from any Internet-capable computer, phone or tablet in the world (and not just yours).  As there are now more mobile phones than people on the planet, this means that (allowing a little poetic licence), everyone has potentially ready access into your Dropbox, Google, Evernote, Facebook, Twitter et al. accounts.  This includes all manner of ne’er-do-wells.

In the olden days (i.e. pre-2010), I recall that many services required you to select a username as well as a password.  This was an inherently more secure approach than the current norm which is to use an e-mail address in lieu of a username because now, the bad guys only need to work out one mystery term rather than two.

The bad news here is that by their very nature, e-mail addresses are somewhat publicly available and easy to find.  We put them on websites, on articles, in our Facebook accounts.  Pick a university department anywhere in the world and you could probably find out the e-mail address of the Head of Department within a few minutes.  That HoD probably has a Dropbox account with his/her e-mail address as its ‘username’.  You could go to the standard Dropbox web site, input that e-mail address and you are a password away from full access into potentially juicy morsels. 

(As an aside here, Dropbox seems especially vulnerable to me because there is something of a need to use your best known e-mail address as your username because others want to share folders with you and they will automatically assume you use your ‘official’ e-mail account.)

The point here is that bad stuff can be done to your accounts from any computer or phone in the world.

Early in 2015, all this was beginning to trouble me and I decided to enable Two Factor Authentication (‘2FA’) for all my web accounts offering this service.  Essentially, this reduces the number of devices which can get into my accounts from perhaps 10 billion to a handful.  After switching this on, the first time I visited Dropbox, Evernote and all the rest, the ‘system’ sent me a numeric code to my phone via SMS which needed to be entered into the site before access was allowed.  The sites then ‘remember’ the device (presumably via its MAC address or somesuch) and future access is allowed unhindered.

The text message in this example is the second factor in 2FA, the first being the usual username/password combo.  Other approaches can and are used. Google will call you up on the phone.  Other systems use USB dongles and the like. For this WordPress site, I use a fancy app on my iPhone.  But the SMS message is the most commonly used approach.

Like most people, 99% of the time I am accessing my sites via one of a couple of devices; in my case, all my computing is done on a MacBook Air and I am a heavy iPhone user too.  Because 2FA is usually a once-only process, I don’t need any of the SMS set-up business on a day-to-day basis.  

Of course, setting this up in the comfort of your own office is easy.  The challenge is always the later situation when you find yourself in unfamiliar surroundings and you need access to your stuff, now (e.g. you’re at a conference and you need that presentation in your Dropbox folder and you are at at someone else’s laptop).  Here’s a recent example of how this worked for me.

Earlier this month, I attended an excellent course on MatLab hosted by our IT Research group.  I took along my laptop and phone but the course required use of one of the PCs in the lab where it was hosted.  I wanted to record relevant notes, links, files and images in my Evernote account and the easiest method was to use Evernote’s web-based access on the lab computer.  After entering my username and password into the site, I was immediately sent to a further page where I needed to enter the numeric code which was sent to my phone.  This arrived in seconds and I was up and running.  Of course, this process adds a little extra inconvenience on the rare occasion when I am using a device for the first time, but I am greatly reassured that my own little working world is more secure that it might be.

When might this fall down?  I think the only realistic situation is if you find yourself without signal to your mobile phone, and if you are in such a place, you are probably not in work mode in any case.  Most of the services also provide a final level of access by issuing recovery codes which you can save offline (e.g. somewhere safe on your phone) so you have a get-out even then.  In practice, I find that the numeric codes arrive almost immediately and it works internationally.

All-in-all, it’s a big win.  Give it a go.

Site-specific instructions:

Dropbox

Evernote

Google

Facebook

Twitter

Apple ID

WordPress

Wenn es hart auf hart kommt, bleiben nur die Harten am Ball

Posted on March 29, 2014 by phil Posted in academia, lectures, optometry

A.-Front3This post provides key links and references to my talk on the management of presbyopia, When the going gets tough, the tough get going.  The presentation was first delivered in Hamburg, thus the German title which is (apparently) a reasonable translation from the English.  The best management of presbyopes with contact lenses presents a range of challenges to the optometrist or optician and this lecture outlines that we are generally reluctant to fit presbyopes with the best form of correction and then how we can target comfort and vision as the main stumbling blocks to successful ongoing wear.  A number of relevant links are provided below:

Billy Ocean in Wikipedia

International contact lens prescribing in 2013

Statistisches Bundesamt

An international survey of contact lens prescribing for presbyopia.

Prevalence of refractive error in the United States, 1999-2004.

The impact of contemporary contact lenses on contact lens discontinuation.

TFOS workshop on contact lens discomfort

Overview of factors that affect comfort with modern soft contact lenses.

Consequences of wear interruption for discomfort with contact lenses.

Lid-wiper epitheliopathy and dry-eye symptoms in contact lens wearers.

Friction measurements on contact lenses in their operating environment.

Hubner thesis on lens edges

Contact lens-induced circumlimbal staining in silicone hydrogel contact lenses worn on a daily wear basis.

Characterization of soft contact lens edge fitting using ultra-high resolution and ultra-long scan depth optical coherence tomography.

Protein deposition and clinical symptoms in daily wear of etafilcon lenses.

Assessment of stromal keratocytes and tear film inflammatory mediators during extended wear of contact lenses.

Early symptomatic presbyopes–what correction modality works best?.

Visual comparison of multifocal contact lens to monovision.

Utility of short-term evaluation of presbyopic contact lens performance.

 

Sorting out e-mail

Posted on September 17, 2013 by phil Posted in academia, geekery

Like millions of people, I receive millions of e-mails. Actually, this is getting to be almost literally true. My e-mail folders contain more than 275,000 messages. Like everyone, keeping on top of this is a priority in my daily workflow.

In essence, I try to maintain a Inbox Zero approach to managing this daily beating around the head. I don’t quite make it usually, but I generally have fewer than 15 messages in my Inbox by the time I go to bed.

An important change I made in my daily routine some years ago was to abandon the rigmarole of pulling each e-mail message into an appropriate folder after dealing with it, on the basis that I could go back and find it later on. At some stage, the search power of my mail client (Apple Mail) became so good, that it was possible to very quickly and accurately find that message from six months ago from that person. That was all well-and-good, but the other big piece of the jigsaw was to reduce the mouse usage required to put each dealt-with message into my shiny new, all encompassing, Archive folder.

I think minimisation of mouse usage is key to an efficient daily workflow for keyboard warriors such as myself which is why I think launcher applications (such as the brilliant Launchbar) are critical. So, I needed to be able to get my selected e-mail message(s) into my Archive folder using the keyboard only. This is simply done with an add-on program for Apple Mail, Mail Act-On.

Mail Act-On

This extends the versatility of Mail’s rules system and means that selected messages can be routed into an Archive folder (or indeed, many other actions) can be achieved with a selected keystroke; in my case this is control-A. I must use this more than a hundred times each day to the point where it is now an involuntary action for carefully storing old e-mails. It’s great.

iPads and vivas

Posted on March 23, 2013 by phil Posted in academia, geekery, optometry

20130323-110327.jpg
Leaving aside that the term viva is a bit of a funny one (the important bit of viva voce is missed out; I’m sure it should be pronounced v-eee-va and not v-eye-va; there was a now-considered-hilarious 1970s car of the same name) this oral examination is a key part of the postgraduate research assessment process. In the UK at least, it remains essentially the only way in which the work of a PGR student is examined.

To head off on a brief tangent, this is not the case in Australia or the United States. In the former, at least in my direct experience, three external examiners receive copies of the final thesis and provide detailed written comments which go to a panel which gathers all the opinions and comes to a final verdict.

Students in the US defend their work but this part of the process can be something of a formality and it’s perhaps not quite the same as the traditional see-the-whites-of-their-eyes all-or-nothing high adrenaline British method.

Anyway, the approach I have used myself over the years as an examiner is to read through the weighty tome and make various comments in a separate word processing file and perhaps add various Post-It notes into the thesis to keep track of the key pages. This method comes with a large administrative overhead. For example, you are obliged to type something like ‘Change the term ‘staining of the corneal epithelium’ to ‘corneal epithelial staining’…’ in your list of recommend amendments. Repeat. Many times. It’s burdensome and it does my head in, as the kids say.

Last week I had the opportunity to run the whole process on my iPad. Theses are now routinely provided to examiners as PDF files, and so it was a simple process of using a PDF annotation app (I’m currently using iAnnotate but there are lots available) to work through the report, making edits, adding comments and so on. It was a breeze to work through these during the viva because the program has a button which allows you to advance sequentially through the edits. Extra thoughts and ideas were noted as we discussed the work and it all ended up added into the PDF.

At the conclusion of the process, the student needs to see the examiner comments and again, it was trivial to email a copy of the comments and edits. In fact, the automated email included the annotated PDF and a separate list of each change. This is much better for the examiners, but also an improved situation for the student who receives a more informative list of changes more rapidly.

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