IT : Buzz

A surgeon at Baltimore's Sinai Hospital is turning heads for how he's using Twitter. He has said he will ask an associate to "tweet" updates of his gastrectomy surgery on a 362-pound patient.

An excerpt from the article reads:

The 40-year-old man weighs 362 pounds. His ideal weight would be 159 pounds, said Dr. Alex Gandas, head of Bariatric and Minimally Invasive Surgery at Sinai Hospital.

The procedure involves removing as much as 85 percent of the stomach to create a small sleeve that holds food and creates a feeling of fullness with a small meal, Gandas said. Unlike a gastric bypass, the sleeve procedure involves no rerouting of the small bowel, and no plastic devices used in stomach banding, Gandas said.

The gastric sleeve is faster and less complicated than gastric bypass and is safer for patients suffering severe heart ailments, he said.

Read the entire article here.

The introduction by Washington state-based Clearwire Corporation of WiMax service last winter has made Baltimore one of the country's most "wired" cities. Reporter Peter Wayner tries out the "4G" network and reports on speed, ease, and areas for improvement.

Excerpt:

For the last six months, I've used a full WiMax/4G equipped netbook to test the service around Baltimore. The Acer Aspire One with a Sprint U300 WiMax card I used is an ideal companion for sending and receiving e-mail messages. It's small enough to take almost everywhere but it's large enough to act like a PC � a PC that's always connected to a very big Wi-Fi hotspot.

Adding WiMax to a laptop may make it easier to read e-mail messages often, but the real value of the bandwidth becomes apparent when the PC does something more than just send text. VoIP software like Skype turns it into a video phone, a browser pointed at Hulu acts like a television that can fetch shows on command and there's also GPS service for finding directions. It's a smartphone with a normal keyboard and a very open software marketplace. All of the PC software built for the desktop also works with the small package.

Read the entire article here.