Miguel PdL

I hear again and again all the positives about eHealthcare, it’s seems to be the only way to go, which is why I’ve found this OA paper asking a very interesting question “Do Electronic Health Records Help or Hinder Medical Education?” and I wonder in the same way will electronic health records help or hinder (my) medical anaylsis in the future?

It is becoming clear that hospitals are implementing, and in some ways are being forced to implement massive electronic health record (EHR) systems, but in this implementation are they considering the end user …. sorry I should say patients needs, wants and cares in its implementation? And what about the people entrying the data from admin staff to nurses to doctors, are their needs being considered?
On similar massive projects it simply hasn’t been the case and I do wonder!
So to the powers that be, please note the authors conclusion when it comes to the educational side of using EHR

that the mere presence of the EHR will not improve practice quality, and will not make education better or more efficient ………
………. if the EHR is used as a tool rather than an end unto itself, it will improve our education of young physicians as well as the care of our patients.

While compiling my last entry on the map of science it did make me think that in this day and age data visualisation in the ICT world should be more interactive, like this visualisation of the Linux kernel.
What caught my eye was this work by Tony Hirst on visualising the lap time data from Australian F1 grand-prix in 2009 using ManyEyes, which has led onto some very interesting social commentary on the visualisation of UK MP’s expenses.
But is all these cases of visualisation research an after the fact activity with steady data sets and results.

But I wonder can macro architectural network patterns married with micro network component specifications and fused in a data visualisation tool, be a way to address future Internet design, pre-deployment?
And to make this happen, what exact “steady” data would I need to realise such a wonder?

I’ve always had an interest in data visualisation, one of my most viewed blog entries is on a data visualisation of the relationships between different scientific disciplines, which is currently framed and hanging on my home office wall (the only one!), so this recently published map of a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains has had me interested again.
This time the data visualisation is based on the collection

of nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia. The resulting reference data set covers a significant part of world-wide use of scholarly web portals in 2006, and provides a balanced coverage of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. A journal clickstream model, i.e. a first-order Markov chain, was extracted from the sequences of user interactions in the logs. The clickstream model was validated by comparing it to the Getty Research Institute’s Architecture and Art Thesaurus. The resulting model was visualized as a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains ….

and is full recorded in a paper by Johan Bollen, Herbert Van de Sompel, Aric Hagberg, Luis Bettencourt, Ryan Chute, Marko A. Rodriguez, Lyudmila Balakireva, “Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science”
What results is a map that

represents the structure of scholarly activity from an observational perspective, not from a prescriptive or motivational one. User interactions with scholarly web portals are shaped by many constraints, including citation links, search engine results, and user interface features. In this paper we do not attempt to explain or motivate these interactions, but merely to demonstrate how their overall structure can be charted and described from clickstream maps of science.

The PLoS site related to this paper has some interesting comments and the related article from the NY Times: Map of Knowledge offers some further insight from the authors.

I recently finished an intriguing book with the history of the pencil … yes the pencil.

Maybe it doesn’t sound too exciting but really the story touches on the pencil as it emerges as a new writing technology, to the over-mining of plumbago and over-cutting of cedar trees its base components.
The need for research, development and innovation in the creation of new writing lead, the centuries of secrecy around that combination of graphite & clay mixture in the lead (Conte).
How the industrial revolution created a situation were there was 10 pencils for everyone on earth, the subsequent price fixing, international trade wars, standardisation (of lead grading), regulations and industrial consolidation.
To the threat of the mechanical pencil and ink pens, then typewriters, computers and many others and yet 4 centuries later I look at my desk at work and see 5 pencils, I’ve no idea were they have come from, who made them or how, but I know why they are there, I’ll continue to use them for scribbling transient notes and now at least I have a little more insight on the pencils history.

…. Agricultural Sciences.

And that’s according to Thomson Reuters National Science Indicators, 1981-2007.
This is were Thomson Reuters have taken

Ireland’s world share of science and social-science papers over a recent five-year period, expressed as a percentage of papers in each of 21 fields in the Thomson Reuters database.

Ireland’s citation impact compared to the world average in each field, is also highlighted were

Ireland exceeded the world average by 15% (3.38 citations per paper for Ireland versus a world mark of 2.93 citations) [in Agricultural Sciences]. Ireland also scored well in relative impact in immunology (26% above the world mark), physics (23% above), materials science (+22%), and chemistry (+15%).

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Looks like Ireland will have to pull its socks up when it comes to Computer Science and Mathematics and when it comes to Economics & Business, well it looks like this report came too late!
But when I look at this topic of impact factors, citations and the h-index a little closer, things are not so clear cut, to a point of being fairly questionable.
Which has lead me to this very interesting paper by Allen L, Jones C, Dolby K, Lynn D, Walport M (2009) Looking for Landmarks: The Role of Expert Review and Bibliometric Analysis in Evaluating Scientific Publication Outputs. PLoS ONE 4(6): e5910. were the authors were looking

To compare expert assessment with bibliometric indicators as tools to assess the quality and importance of scientific research papers.

And they found that

When attempting to assess the quality and importance of research papers, we found that sole reliance on bibliometric indicators would have led us to miss papers containing important results as judged by expert review. In particular, some papers that were highly rated by experts were not highly cited during the first three years after publication. Tools that link expert peer reviews of research paper quality and importance to more quantitative indicators, such as citation analysis would be valuable additions to the field of research assessment and evaluation.

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After all of that I’m left wondering, have you got the h-Factor?

At the start of each year (usually the January issue) I have a little look at the full subject index page for the previous years articles in the IEEE Communcations magazine, just in case I missed an article I was interested in, and something pops out at me. In carrying out this task recently I noticed for 2008 there were no communication research topics under the alphabet heading of J, Y or Z. So I’ve checked the 2007 index and the same again, no topics under J, Y or Z.
Shouldn’t there be a paper on “Jitterless yobibyte service bus for a ZSL” or “Zoning of jumbo frame networks: Yobibyting more than you can chew”. Hey I might trademark that last one!