« December 28, 2002 | Main | December 31, 2002 »
December 30, 2002
Blogging and Academic Research
Jon Udell references articles from Andrew Odlyzko and Sˇbastien Paquet in an article about peer review, academic research, and blogging. Being a once and future (I hope) academic, I have given some thought to this question myself.
I think Sˇbastien misses a very important point on why more academics don't blog as part of their research efforts: tenure and promotion. Tenure and promotion depend on one thing (protestations about teaching aside): published papers in established research journals. In this false economy, every other activity, including blogging, is in constant competition for the resources that could be applied to publishing in peer reviewed publications of note.
The problem that this poses, is that this system is not necessarily the best one for measuring the importance or impact of a scholar's work---its simply the one that is trusted the most. This is especially true in the field of information technology. By the time something makes it into a printed journal, the research is almost certainly 3-4 years old. So, right now you could expect the first papers based on research done in 1998. That simply isn't fast enough in the fast paced world of IT. When you want to find out what's innovative in computing, you don't turn to the Journal of the ACM, you open up InfoWeek or some similar trade magazine.
Will this change? I agree with Andrew that its changing already, albeit slowly. There are other indications of a researchers innovation and impact, like the number of readers of a blog or work with a company. The problem is that its hard to count and comes up against a measurement system that is trusted, for good or bad, by nearly everyone. Academics will take their own sweet time, but eventually come to grips with new modes of communication and how to measure it. Whether these other indications ever play a part in tenure and promotion decisions remains to be seen.
10:43 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Your Medical Record: Technology is the Prescription
Two weeks ago, my mother-in-law had surgery on her wrist. Last night she was in some pain, so my sister-in-law called the doctor and he phoned in a perscription. They picked it up, got it home, and went to use it only to discover that it contained Ibuprofen. My mother-in-law is allergic to Ibuprofen.
This sort of thing must be very common. The Center for Drug Safety reports 2.1 million cases of adverse drug interactions each year with 100,000 deaths. Other sources report similar numbers. Many of these could be prevented by a simple technique that has nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with IT: unique records.
Its perfectly plausible that one's medical record could be kept in a single location and accessed and updated via the Internet by each doctor, hospital, emergency room, EMT, and pharmacy you use. Provisions of HIPPA even makes keeping such a record up to date relatively automatic--providing common codes for different procedures and standardized ways of processing payments. Its frustrating to me to see a technically sound solution to a problem that could save many lives and untold suffering and not see it implemented.
What would it take to make this a reality? I think a large insurer like Blue Cross could make it happen now, if they were of a mind to. They already get your information and could store it. They could make using the online medical record by the doctor a condition of payment or give some other incentive. Why don't they? I don't know. I think it probably has something to do with controversy over who owns and controls the data in the medical record: you, the insurer, or the doctor? (HIPPA says the patient does, I believe) There's probably also some concern for liability. But I'm just guessing. Anyone else care to hazard any guesses?
08:52 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Another Entry in the Utah Blogroll
A friend of mine, Pete Kruckenberg, is a network engineer for UEN, the Utah Education Network. Pete's responsible for some very forward thinking there, including GigE lines to the Uintah Basin for connecting rural Utah schools to the net at high speeds and the use of local exchanges. Pete has recently started a blog and I'm anxious to read what he has to say.