This report in Scientific American, just in time for the Halloween season, demonstrates that incorporeal beings take great interest in obesity, adipokines and leading laboratories at Harvard University. Perhaps they tired of the irreproducibility of their paranormal experiments.
Hat tip: Rachel Ramoni
This (http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pdf) is a report that Professor Abelson helped author on the behalf of MIT. It is chock full of lessons for education institutions, libraries and the larger academic ecosystem, including the ancillary industries. Although section V is focused on questions for MIT, many of those same questions will find wider resonance.
I was recently called out by one of my colleagues for saying that ontologies were boring, this despite my own doctoral work on knowledge representation. Motivating my glib comment was an image of a group of pasty-faced individuals gathered around a large boardroom table and discussing which angel fit on which pin. Events from this past weekend are a reminder why such glibness is not helpful.
The American Psychiatric Association has just approved a set of updates, revisions and changes to the reference manual (DSM5) used to diagnose mental disorders. Among the changes are those redefining the inclusion and exclusion criteria for autistic disorders. By changing which children are classified as having an autistic disorder, parents will be made to feel more or less comfortable having a child carrying the diagnosis. Just as importantly, insurance companies and school programs might shift their criteria that determine which child and family gets what kind of support and at what cost. In the near term, clinical trials for the treatment of autism may not include the same patients as they would have prior to this retaxonomization.
So, are ontologies boring? Perhaps. But they certainly belong to the class of hugely important societal constructs.
Hat tip: David Osterbur.
I recently obtained a copy of a presentation by Elsevier representatives describing how they price their publications for different academic (i.e. university) customers. They describe how they place each institution into one of a small number of pricing tiers. How do they decide this categorization? A major component of the decision is the research intensity of the institution to which they were selling access to their publications. What was the measure of research intensity? Publication volume as measured by the SCOPUS database (an Elsevier product).
To better understand this policy, I contacted Elsevier and spoke by phone with a very cordial and clear executive. I asked why it seemed that the more we published, the more we were going to be charged by Elsevier to read these publications?
He explained that research intensity served as a proxy for the value that institutions might place on these publications. After all, if we value these publications, then we are more likely to download/use them. And pricing should reflect value.
I then asked why they were not simply measuring the download rate for each journal to directly charge for usage rather than using a proxy measure. The executive explained that their advisory board had recommended not to use the download rate as that might reduce usage thereby impeding scholarship.
So solicitous of the publisher. I knew it would be futile to bring up the effect on scholarship of inflation rates of publication prices that would make the rate of medical care inflation appear flat by comparison. A continual record of inflation that reduces every year the fraction of their own scholarly output made available to scholars throughout the world's academic institutions.
Many of us worry that the last three decades of scholarship will be lost to posterity because we have yet to provide an institutionalized set of mechanisms for preserving the digital output of academia that are as durable and accessible as our accreted analog/paper-based records. Now here comes word of an equally worrisome trend, the empirical evidence that worries about the effect of copyright on the access to important cultural, literary and scientific works, may be well-founded. A recent article in the Atlantic Monthly describes a yawning gulf in the sale of new books from recent decades such that there are more new books sold by Amazon from 1850, than there are from 1950. In their analyses, the investigators provide intriguing circumstantial evidence suggesting that the copyright laws may be responsible. More detail in this lecture by Paul Heald.
Hat tip: David Osterbur
Among the most productive constructs of the enlightenment are the modern taxonomies. These have been helpful in bringing order to the chaos of signs and symptoms and other clinical findings and were central tools in achieving our 20th century understanding of pathophysiology. They have also have an influential role to play in reimbursement for medical services. With the dawn of high-throughput molecular diagnostics many of us recognize that we are going to be able to be far more precise in our diagnostic and therefore therapeutic approach to diseases and their prevention.
Nonetheless, as we approach the systematization of medicine, we will be reminded often that nature may not hew to the simplified models that we are developing. This recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, just does that by demonstrating directly that within a "single" tumor there exists a large multiplicity of tumor types, each with its own genomic characteristics and therefore particular therapeutic responsiveness (or lack of it). It can be argued that this is another instance of the tension between the "neats" and the "scruffies" but perhaps it is a foreshadowing of the decreased effectiveness of taxonomies as a cognitive tool for biomedical discovery and clinical care. If indeed, the underlying substructure of physiology is best represented by a probabilistic network model that can only be best grasped and managed through the use of computational tools, we have to seriously re-evaluate both our approach to disease definition and biomedical education.
A wonderfully clear accounting of the growing movement to boycott the publisher Elsevier can be found here.
Yet another powerful example of the novel syntheses in which the aggregation of individual knowledge sources becomes a lot more than the sum of its parts: Using only the most well accepted and conventional of compedia of drug characteristics, Cami et al. demonstrate the power of integrative reasoning and systematic applications of "guilt-by-association" to predict accurately, across an interval of 5 years, hundreds of novel adverse events across more than 800 drugs. This performance is likely to improve further as they proceed to integrate healthcare data from electronic health records from consumers. The addition of molecular characterizations are also anticipated to provide further precision and individualization of these predictions.
These developments will be further accelerated if we can liberate data gathered with public funding for the public good.
This piece from the WSJ ("How I Became a Best-Selling Author: Self-publishing is upending the book industry. One woman's unlikely road to a hit novel.") points to a model that academia (except the physics and a few other quantitative science communities) has been slow to embrace. Who will serve the role of Amazon.com to disrupt the current, expensive model? Will it be the open access journals? The current large science publishers? Or a new platform? Or Amazon.com?
Hat tip: Victor Zak
This post: http://www.mozilla.org/sopa/ is a timely reminder of the risk to untrammeled sharing of communications (including those that are scholarly) that a blunt and overstepping use of the law is likely to pose. Unless we act now.
Hat tip: Ben Adida.
I was just reminded of an excellent review of the various forms of transmission of authoritativeness and outright falsehoods through citations by Steve Greenberg when I saw this all too accurate portrayal of citogenesis.
or environmental effects
in child development, or the value of a prostate specific antigen test, or the meaning of a genetic mutation, one group's truth is another's discredited hypothesis or outdated approximation. Of course, there some facts whose authoritativeness are beyond doubt, such as the speed of light. Well, maybe. Certainly, until that eschatological moment when we will all know the absolute truth, those of us who are entrusted with the curation and dissemination of knowledge, in its various guises, will have to provide tools to manage the growing multiplicity of perspectives.
In that spirit, I have unearthed a piece I wrote with Russ Altman over a decade ago about authoritativeness in the peer review process and how it could be managed ecumenically. We'll see if our futurology was authoritative.
Much has been written about the importance (or lack of it ) of happenstance in browsing through books on shelves and what we have lost with web-borne search. Thanks to Juliane Schneider, we are exploring how to augment the moment of serendipity using QR codes that students armed with a common "smart phone" can scan and thereby scoop up more information at a glance. Check out our 3rd floor for these codes printed on cards inserted in shelves. Paper chase now has web hints.
Researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) of the 1980’s, librarians and aficionados of the Semantic Web have a shared faith: The unique value of human-designed knowledge structures whether they be taxonomies, ontologies or metadata. These knowledge representations are seen as providing important leverage in information retrieval, knowledge discovery, and decision-support. In this context, I was recently reminded by Alal Eran of an article by researchers at Google about the value of BIG data. These researchers (one of whom wrote a wonderful book on Common Lisp—Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp
For those of us in libraries and those of us who are librarians, there is now an active debate that has yet to achieve resolution on what value there is in human annotations and metadata. If there is value, at what cost? And if it is cost-effective, how do we demonstrate the efficacy? Our Universities' leaders will be interested in the answers and so will our colleagues at Google.
This twitter feed of returns of items borrowed from the Countway Library provides a glimpse of the vibrant engagement of our community with the scholarship of the present and past. These include The Anatomy of madness : essays in the history of psychiatry, Calories don't count by Herman Taller, Tachycardias--mechanisms, diagnosis, treatment, and Observed brain dynamics by Partha Mitra. One could presume that these were not all borrowed by the same patron, but if they were, what questions were they asking?
A nice appreciation for National Librarian Week can be found here.
Hat tip: Daniel Masys
