Harvard Medical School has just released HMSMobile Swine Flu Center, a $1.99 app that offers all sorts of stuff that doesn't quite seem worth $1.99. This includes:

-Videos on how to protect yourself (spoiler: wash your hands)

-A quiz on whether or not you have swine flu (spoiler: you don't)

-An outbreak tracker to see if the fever has swept through your area

-Advice about survival kits, just in case shit gets really fucking serious

Combine this with the Pedophile Finder app and the HealthMap app and you'll scare yourself into never leaving the house. Awesome? [HMSMobile Swine Flue Center]

Jobs, for all of his virtues, clings to the Great Man Theory of Leadership - a CEO-centric model of executive power that is outmoded, unsustainable, and, for most of us mere mortals, ineffective in a world of non-stop change. A Wired magazine cover story from last year made the point well. The article begins with a memorable anecdote - the CEO, in search of a space in the company's crowded parking lot, regularly leaves his Mercedes in a handicapped space, sometimes taking up two spaces. The pattern became so noticeable that employees, according to the article, put notes on his windshield that read, Park Different.

"Jobs' fabled attitude toward parking", writer Leander Kahney says, "reflects his approach to business: For him, the regular rules do not apply." That means shrouding his company in secrecy; treating his employees to tyrannical outbursts; and refusing basic accommodations that would make beautifully designed products more customer-friendly. (As one wise-guy blogger commented, in decidedly bad taste: "I can't believe Steve Jobs's liver is replaceable but the battery in my iPhone is not.")

So to all those execs that are looking to Steve Jobs to emulate? Cut it out. Emulate his good points, like the ability to get products out the door, but not his lousy points. [Harvard Business via PC World]

"Over the centuries we've been eating smaller and smaller quantities at shorter and shorter intervals," Edwards said. "It seemed to us that eating was tending toward breathing, so, with a mix of culinary art and aerosol science, we've helped move eating habits to their logical conclusion. We call it whiffing."

In high school I called it huffing, but that might have been something else entirely. This version comes in four chocolate flavors: mint chocolate, raspberry chocolate, mango chocolate, and milk chocolate.

If it can curb people's appetites as advertised, great, no complaints here. But my snap reaction is this is just another way to boost chocolate consumption amongst members of the population that enjoy sticking things in their noses. [Le Whif via Boing Boing Gadgets]

The iShoe actually began life as an experiment Lieberman conducted as an intern at NASA. Astronauts routinely return home with a host of balance issues thanks to the weightlessness of space, so Lieberman and the rest of the iShoe team created a new algorithm that was capable of looking at the pressure distribution of proprioceptors on the feet and analyze what that data meant. Proprioceptors, in case you didn't know, are sensory receptors which tell your brain where body parts are in relation to other body parts and the objects around you.

It took a family emergency to show Lieberman that the iShoe had ramifications beyond just a few drunken astronauts. When Lieberman's grandmother had a bad fall, he knew the tech could be used as a "balance diagnostic" to help doctors and their patients prevent falls before they occurred. The device's super-sensitive insole would measure the pressure of the foot and report data to the doctor, and in extreme cases an alarm would alert family or care givers to a fall. "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up," would be quickly replaced with "Hey, I can walk just fine! Get off my damn lawn." [MIT]

By repeating the process, and varying the agitation rates and the shape and size of the tissue bricks, structures like branches and cubes can be built up. The team has also built very complex structures that resemble blood vessels running through tissue, and know that yet more complex and "realistic" structures are possible.

While this is a technology in its infancy, it has advantages over current tissue-engineering techniques (which rely on a sort of "top-down" system, tying cells to a polymer mould) in that it has the potential to emulate natural repeating units in organs like the liver, pancreas, heart-muscle and so on. There are plenty of challenges before we can, for example, grow artificial pancreatic tissue, but this is a pretty amazing start. The results are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Technology Review]

No other company has ever received that kind of attention for a product launch...It's unprecedented