by notsogoodphotography
Are scientists missing the boat?;.:
[Via Bench Marks]

….or has that boat already sailed?

I’ve read many a blog posting or magazine article declaring that scientists are behind the curve, and we biologists have been slow to pick up the new online tools that are available. I’ve repeatedly asked for examples of other professions that are ahead of the curve that we can use as models (are there social networks of bakers sharing recipes and discussing ovens?), but haven’t seen much offered in response. I tend to think that it’s not a question of scientists being slow, it’s that the tools being offered aren’t very appealing. Note how quickly scientists moved from paper journals to online versions, which only took as long as it did because of the slow progress on the part of journal publishers getting their articles up on the web. The advantages of online journals were obvious, and in comparison, the advantages of joining “Myspace for scientists” are less evident.

Are social networks )”Meet collaborators! Discuss papers!”) ever going to see heavy use from the biology community? Or are we starting to see that they’ve run their course in general, and scientists were prescient in not wasting their time?
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There are too many advantages that arise from using many of these Web 2.0 tools (i.e. the ability to leverage human social networks in order to examine large datasets). However, the race will not be to have 5000 friends, as often seen out in the wild.

I don’t think the next generation will shun these tools. They will just have a better idea of how to interact with them more usefully, with a focus that can really help their workflow.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

by NathanFromDeVryEET
Your personal health: Free means education:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

One more post today. Russ Altman talks about how the cost of genotyping is asymptoting to free
(eerie parallels to Chris Anderson’s Free). The post comes on the heels of the launch of Complete Genomics and that they will enable a $5000 genome in 2010.
But that’s not the part that I want to talk about. It’s another part of the post

We must work to educate every day people about how to interpret their genome and how to use the information beneficially. Trying to protect them in a paternalistic manner is going to fail, I fear–because it will be too easy to get the information cheaply. So solutions that rely on government regulations or mandatory insertion of a physician in the process of ordering genetic sequencing (don’t get me wrong, I love physicians–I am one) are not going to work.

Given past writings on this subject, no surprise, I agree wholeheartedly. We need to educate, and educate fast.

There are many things that will be changed when sequencing a genome becomes almost as fast in reality as it is on CSI. Without proper education about this, people will be open to really bad science.

The best approach may not be the government or physicians, who have no stake in really explaining things. Perhaps there will be trusted genome advocates whose job is to carefully explain to someone what their genome really means, in a way that truly educates them. And provide quarterly updates of new information for them.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

by kentbye
Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War:
[Via Enterprise 2.0 Blog]

You’d think Knowledge Management (KM), that venerable IT-based social engineering discipline which came up with evocative phrases like “community of practice,” “expertise locater,” and “knowledge capture,” would be in the vanguard of the 2.0 revolution. You’d be wrong. Inside organizations and at industry fora today, every other conversation around social media (SM) and Enterprise 2.0 seems to turn into a thinly-veiled skirmish within an industry-wide KM-SM shadow war. I suppose I must be a little dense, because it took not one, not two, but three separate incidents before I realized there was a war on. Here’s what’s going on: KM and SM look very similar on the surface, but are actually radically different at multiple levels, both cultural and technical, and are locked in an undeclared cultural war for the soul of Enterprise 2.0. And the most hilarious part is that most of the combatants don’t even realize they are in a war. They think they are loosely-aligned and working towards the same ends, with some minor differences of emphasis. So let me tell you about this war and how it is shaping up. Hint: I have credible neutral “war correspondent” status because I was born in 1974.

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A very clear post that describes the conflict between Boomer and Millennial thinking when it comes to dealing with large amounts of data. Knowledge management (Boomer) is a top-down put the data in the proper bin sort of approach. There are names for each bin and everything needs to fit in the correct one.

One way of thinking has to know whether Schrodinger’s cat is dead or alive, while the other is comfortable with knowing it is simultaneously dead and alive.

Biology needs the Millenial approach because it is creating data at too fast a pace to put it all into bins. Social networks can help tremendously with the filters needed to find knowledge in the huge amount of data.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

by blmurch
Magical Thinking:
[Via FasterCures]
Margaret Anderson, COO, FasterCures

I appreciated the message of Carol Diamond and Clay Shirky’s recent piece in the August 2008 Health Affairs titled “Health Information Technology: A Few Years of Magical Thinking?” In it they say that “proponents of health IT must resist “magical thinking,” such as the notion that isolated work on technology will transform our broken system.” It’s interesting to think about systems change at the front end, and how easy it is to get stars in our eyes about how things like health IT or personalized medicine will transform the world as we know it, and how all of our problems will then magically go away.

The article discusses how it might be easier to implement IT in health if the whole system is redone, rather than bolting on IT. IT will not fix the problems without key changes in how medicine is practiced.

A press release discusses some of their points.

Diamond and Shirky propose an alternative route to using health IT to help transform the U.S. health system. “This alternative approach would focus on a minimal set of standards at first,” they say, and would make utility for the user and improved health outcomes, rather than vendor agreement, the key criteria.

Diamond and Shirky’s alternative approach “would mean working simultaneously on removing other obstacles while concentrating on those standards necessary for sharing the information, however formatted in the short term, to flow between willing and authorized participants. Finally, it would require clear policy statements that will guide the design of technology.”

Sounds like a bottom up approach with the end user driving the technology, rather than health vendors. More from Margaret Anderson:

Cell phones, email, and the Internet have certainly transformed things in ways we couldn’t have imagined, but they’ve introduced problems we couldn’t have imagined. Technologies such as FAX machines have been leapfrogged over. Problems such as the overabundance of information, and the speed of information flow are here to stay it seems. In the case of health IT, FasterCures sees it as a vital bridge to the future of more rapid information collection, characterization, and analysis which could speed our time to cures.

But there needs to be careful attention to the fact that too much information, particularly in the health field, can make it much harder to make accurate decision. eventually we will get the complexity of the system under control but in the meantime, there will be some problems. Faster Cures is examining them.

We are working on a white paper for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about educating and building awareness among consumers about personalized healthcare. This is another area where we must resist “magical thinking” and get down to brass tacks. Too often, the discussion about personalized medicine has been at a 30,000 foot level. For this paper, we’ve talked to many patient advocacy and disease research groups and everyone holds their breath about the potential power that these technologies may hold for their disease areas. They all want more targeted therapies with fewer side effects, which is ultimately the promise of personalized medicine. But they also recognize its complexities. It needs to take into account the world of co-morbidities we all live in; even if baby boomers are out running marathons and eating their greens and blueberries, the reality is that many of us are living with many conditions and diseases, not just one. It will probably raise costs before it can lower them. It’s unlikely many diseases will yield to the relatively easy HER2-Herceptin gene-to-drug relationship. Patients are likely to get much more information about their genetic makeup than they can act on in the near-term.

Health care is still too complex in most cases. The real magical thinking comes in the form of so many fraudulent ‘cures’ that have plagued mankind for thousands of years. Perhaps as we really get IT involved in health, we can begin to gain a fuller understanding of what causes disease and how to attempt a cure.

Technorati Tags: Health, Science, Web 2.0

I use a RSS reader and read feeds because it is part of my writing process. Lately, my RSS reading habits have changed. I haven’t given up on it completely, but my process has changed. My feeds are organized into folders and the folders ordered by priority. Like a farmer tending his crops, I’d scan through each folder, each feed, bookmarking and annotating what caught my eye, and looking for patterns and connections. This scan, capture, analyze patterns, and write a blog post is a part of my routine.

It still is, but I now use other methods for scanning. It’s more like hanging out in a village square or a pub — conversations, news, and resources come to me. I’m finding new links and posts either through twitter, comments on my blog post, or through people who have linked to me.

So, it’s like I have a left brain, orderly, linear way to scan and a right brain, wildly creative way to scan.

I like how Chris Brogan describes his reading goals.

1. Reading what friends write.
2. Reading about the “new marketing” industry and the tech industry (fishbowl).
3. Reading what people recommend.
4. Reading off the wall stuff that inspires new thoughts (outside the bowl).

Michele Martin wrote a post summarizing a paper titled How Knowledge Workers Use the Web and pulls out some the classifications referenced in the paper. My RSS reading is mostly information gathering or browsing.

Finding–Looking for something specific, such as an answer to a specific question.
Information gathering–Less specific than finding, this is research that’s focused on a particular goal that’s broader-based than simply getting a specific piece of information.
Browsing–Visiting personal or professional sites with no specific goal in mind other than to “stay up-to-date” or be entertained.
Transacting–Using the web to execute a transaction, such as banking or shopping.
Communicating–Participating in chat rooms or forums (remember–this was done in 2002, prior to Facebook and the explosive growth of blogs, etc.)
Housekeeping–Using the web to check or maintain the accuracy and functionality of web-based resources, such as looking for dead links, cleaning up outdated information, etc.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0