Nursing Central

With the Nursing Central application a student can have instant access to all sorts of detailed information relevant to the nursing world. The information is written by and for nurses so you know they know what they’re talking about. There’s information on more than 4,500 drugs, and more than 56,000 dictionary terms available. With Nursing Central you’ll get Taber’s Medical Dictionary, Davis’s Drug Guide, unbound MEDLINE and much more. This application requires a registration at the cost of $159.95.

Eponyms For Students

Eponym, by Pascal Pfiffner, gives a student a brief description of more than 1,700 common and not-so-common medical eponyms. No more trying to remember what the meanings of medical eponyms are anymore. Reach for your Eponyms by Pfiffner and have the answer quickly and easily at your fingertips.

Epocrates Rx

With this iPhone application you’ll have immediate access to drug information, OTC medications, pill ID, drug interaction information, tables and calculations, and formulary information. What’s the beauty of this application? It’s updated weekly and is absolutely free. Sweet!

Netter’s Atlases of Human Anatomy

Netter’s is the best selling anatomy atlas out there. Now you can have it at your fingertips. Have access to Netter’s anatomy flash cards, musculoskeletal flash cards, neuroscience flash cards, advanced head and neck flash cards, Histology flash cards, and the complete Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy application. The illustrations are beautifully colored and extremely accurate.

Stanza

Stanza, by Lexcycle, allows you to read books on your iPhone. Many users agree that Stanza’s interface is unrivaled in its clarity, and is extremely easy to use. There is a selection of more than 50,000 titles available through a number of different partners, or you can choose from an additional 50,000 free ebooks. You can also transfer any existing ebooks you currently have on your computer to your iPhone using the Stanza desk top application feature.

Skyscape

Here’s a little of what you’ll get with the Skyscape application for iPhone.

Medical calculators
Drug info
Formulas
Algorithms
Health alerts
The latest medical guidelines.
Hundreds of valuable medical resources
Content from top publishers
Current guidelines
Drug guides
Interactive algorithms
Student rebates
Test Preparation
…and much more

Do yourself a favor, and get these iPhone applications if you’re a nursing student. They’ll make your life so much easier.

T. Buck writes about how to find nurse practitioner programs.

IP telephony service providers include or soon will include local telephone companies, long distance providers such as AT&T, cable TV companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), and fixed service wireless operators. IP telephony services also affect vendors of traditional handheld devices.

Currently, unlike traditional phone service, IP telephony service is relatively unregulated by government. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulates phone-to-phone connections, but says they do not plan to regulate connections between a phone user and an IP telephony service provider.

VoIP is an organized effort to standardize IP telephony. IP telephony is an important part of the convergence of computers, telephones, and television into a single integrated information environment. Also see another general term, computer-telephony integration (CTI), which describes technologies for using computers to manage telephone calls.

Though VoIP has been challenged to comply with the traditional e911 system, the same cannot be said for new systems designed to provide seamless communication for first responders and emergency services, even when communication infrastructure has been widely destroyed by monstrosities such as a hurricanes.

Two new services -one for municipalities trying to unite disparate radio systems and another for communication in large-scale disasters-use VoIP as the unifying technology connecting the other elements of the system.

GlobalTel IP, a provider of group communications for mission-critical services, is planning to launch X-Stream Access, a managed service for emergency communication interoperability.

X-Stream Access is notable because it will include WAVE, the most widely deployed hosted group-communication software. This will enable smaller municipalities and counties to use the sophisticated features of the software service without having to deploy and maintain the complex software themselves.

WAVE enables many different emergency communication systems, such as radios (operating at many different frequencies, such as the UHF and VHF bands), traditional analog phone systems, IP phone systems, PCs, PDAs and industry-specific proprietary devices, to interoperate. Voice from each source is converted to VoIP, using small gateways placed at a strategic location for each system, and then connected under the control of WAVE.

“Doesn’t matter what frequency they are on. As long as they have one of our gateways, we can make them communicate with each other,” says Larry Reid, president & CEO of GlobalTel IP. “Chances are that, if anything is not on our list, we could make it talk to all those other devices out there.”

WAVE, a product developed by Twisted Pair, includes other features important to emergency services such as high levels of security and access control with varying levels of permissions for access to the system, the ability to support thousands of user groups, support for push-to-talk communication among disparate devices and an intuitive management interface.

One driver for GlobalTel IP to offer WAVE on a hosted basis is the availability of grants from Homeland Security under a program called SAFECOM. Smaller organizations have been at a disadvantage in applying for these grants, which require interoperable communication, because of the expense of setting up interoperable systems. With X-Stream Access they can enable WAVE interoperability for as little as $1000 a month, says Reid.

Mobile to VoIP for Disaster Relief

Rivada Networks also brings together multiple communication technologies using VoIP, but the company focuses on using existing and widely deployed wireless technology, namely CDMA, for much of the communication during emergency situations.

Bob Duncan, senior vice president for government services with Rivada was Coast Guard district commander during Katrina. He observed his junior officers using their personal Blackberries and other handhelds to communicate, not just with voice, but also with pictures and text messaging. “I thought, what a good idea! We can take advantage of what is there already.”

Rivada took stock of the available technologies and opted for CDMA because it provided enough bandwidth for voice and data, especially with EVDO, which soon will be part of the Rivada System. Rivada can use existing CDMA infrastructure or can provide portable CDMA transmitters if infrastructure has been damaged. The company has agreements with wireless operators to use their existing spectrum for emergency services.

“The real novelty is to tie everything together in a way that has not been done before,” says Duncan. “We are taking all the investment in cellular networks and putting it at the disposal of emergency providers.”

The VoIP backbone of the system is provided by Cisco, which links all the various wireless and wired technologies after they are converted to VoIP.

For radio interoperability Rivada deploys a unit by Raytheon, called the ACU-1000, that can bring in signals from multiple incompatible radio systems.

“We tie in all the LMR (land mobile radio) systems, all the walkie-talkies that are out there because you can’t leave those out. We had 76 different police units show up for Katrina, and only three had LMRs compatible with state police.”

Rivada’s portable units resemble a component home-entertainment system and can be mounted in a variety of environments, ranging from Humvees to FEMA trailers. After Katrina one unit was lifted by helicopter to the top of a large building in New Orleans to provide mobile communication. The portable units also include a satellite dish to establish communication where no landlines are available.

More and more, Duncan says, those in charge, such as state governors or even the president, want a real-time view of what’s going on. “I don’t have to know how CDMA works as long as I can do what I have to do and talk to the president, because they want to know what going on in the Ninth Ward or on the fire line.”

SONET – Synchronous Optical Network
SONET is a physical layer network technology designed to carry large volumes of traffic over relatively long distances on fiber optic cabling. SONET was originally designed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) for the USA public telephone network in the mid-1980s.
SONET possesses several characteristics that make it appealing on the Internet today:
• SONET defines clear interoperability standards between different vendors’ products
• SONET can carry nearly any higher-level protocol (including IP), and
• SONET includes built-in support for ease of management and maintenance.
Generally speaking, SONET performs at very high speeds. At the base signalling level called “STS-1,” SONET supports 51.84 Mbps. The next level of SONET signalling, STS-3, supports triple the bandwidth, or 155.52 Mbps. Higher levels of SONET signalling increase the bandwidth in successive multiples of four, up to approximately 40 Gbps!
The speed and cost of SONET make the technology competitive with alternatives like ATM and Gigabit Ethernet.

Frame Relay
Frame relay is a telecommunication service designed for cost-efficient data transmission for intermittent traffic between local area networks (LANs) and between end-points in a wide area network (WAN). Frame relay puts data in a variable-size unit called a frame and leaves any necessary error correction (retransmission of data) up to the end-points, which speeds up overall data transmission. For most services, the network provides a permanent virtual circuit (PVC), which means that the customer sees a continous, dedicated connection without having to pay for a full-time leased line, while the service provider figures out the route each frame travels to its destination and can charge based on usage. An enterprise can select a level of service quality – prioritizing some frames and making others less important. Frame relay is offered by a number of service providers, including AT&T. Frame relay is provided on fractional T-1 or full T-carrier system carriers. Frame relay complements and provides a mid-range service between ISDN, which offers bandwidth at 128 Kbps, and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), which operates in somewhat similar fashion to frame relay but at speeds from 155.520 Mbps or 622.080 Mbps.
Frame relay is based on the older X.25 packet-switching technology which was designed for transmitting analog data such as voice conversations. Unlike X.25 which was designed for analog signals, frame relay is a fast packet technology, which means that the protocol does not attempt to correct errors. When an error is detected in a frame, it is simply “dropped.” (thrown away). The end points are responsible for detecting and retransmitting dropped frames. (However, the incidence of error in digital networks is extraordinarily small relative to analog networks.)
Frame relay is often used to connect local area networks with major backbones as well as on public wide area networks and also in private network environments with leased lines over T-1 lines. It requires a dedicated connection during the transmission period. It’s not ideally suited for voice or video transmission, which requires a steady flow of transmissions. However, under certain circumstances, it is used for voice and video transmission.
Frame relay relays packets at the data link layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model rather than at the Network layer. A frame can incorporate packets from different protocols such as Ethernet and X.25. It is variable in size and can be as large as a thousand bytes or more.

ATM – Asynchronous Transfer Mode
ATM is a high-speed networking standard designed to support both voice and data communications. ATM is normally utilized by Internet service providers on their private long-distance networks. ATM operates at the data link layer (Layer 2 in the OSI model) over either fiber or twisted-pair cable.
ATM differs from more common data link technologies like Ethernet in several ways. For example, ATM utilizes no routing. Hardware devices known as ATM switches establish point-to-point connections between endpoints and data flows directly from source to destination. Additionally, instead of using variable-length packets as Ethernet does, ATM utilizes fixed-sized cells. ATM cells are 53 bytes in length, that includes 48 bytes of data and five (5) bytes of header information.
The performance of ATM is often expressed in the form of OC (Optical Carrier) levels, written as “OC-xxx.” Performance levels as high as 10 Gbps (OC-192) are technically feasible with ATM. More common performance levels for ATM are 155 Mbps (OC-3) and 622 Mbps (OC-12).
ATM technology is designed to improve utilization and quality of service (QoS) on high-traffic networks. Without routing and with fixed-size cells, networks can much more easily manage bandwidth under ATM than under Ethernet, for example. The high cost of ATM relative to Ethernet is one factor that has limited its adoption to “backbone” and other high-performance, specialized networks.