Healthy Communities Data Summit

May 23, 2013 by Leave a comment

The Healthy Communities Data Summit held at UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus, organized by Health 2.0, the Foundation for Healthcare Innovation and sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation, attracted a mix of civic leaders, medical/health professionals, academics, hackers and communicators – all eager to gain a better understanding and share the innovative uses of open health data.

Key topics from the event included cooperation and trust building between government, community and enterprise players, along with high impact applications by making health data accessible to the public (See tweets below).

As a communicator, I took a particular interest in the “A Better Pie Chart & Beyond: The Evolution of Visualization & Analysis” panel. Wess Grubbs, founder of Pitch Interactive, emphasized the human element behind all this data, and reminded users to prioritize the narrative when communicating health data. Although data is lifted from its silos and becomes easily accessible through visualizations, it should tell a complete story – not just grab for views, or “instant gratification.”

Here’s an event summary from the California HealthCare Foundation’s California Healthline.

Filed under Communications, Open Access, Open Science, Visualizations, Web Analytics

CTSA 2013 Annual Face to Face: The Power of Storytelling

April 9, 2013 by Leave a comment

Hosted by: University of New Mexico’s Health Sciences Center (HSC) in cooperation with UNM’s Clinical and Translational Science Center (CTSC)

This year’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) communications key function committee (CKFC) Annual Face to Face  focused on the critical role of storytelling to lift research of out its silos to a wider audience.

Richard Larson, MD, PhD, UNM HSC Vice Chancellor for Research compared communicators to ambassadors of information – after all, “research ignored is research wasted.”

Purpose/Objectives of the Annual F2F:

  • Increase understanding and support of NCATS and NIH priorities
  • Improve awareness of CTSA value, dissemination of key information, and collaboration among key stakeholders across the consortium
  • Inspire CKFC members through new connections, skill building, clear direction, and storytelling

Here’s a selection of tweets by CTSA communicators during the two-day conference:

Read more of this post

Filed under Communications, CTSI at UCSF, Print Media, Public Outreach, Research, Research Impact, Social Media, Twitter, Upcoming Conference, Video on the Web, Visualizations

ORNG at AMIA conference, in tweets

March 21, 2013 by Leave a comment

Eric Meeks from CTSI at UCSF presented on ORNG at the AMIA 2013 Joint Summits on Translational Science:

Filed under OpenSocial, Profiles Research Networking Software

Study: The Science Behind Twitter ‘Tribes’

March 18, 2013 by Leave a comment

The article ‘You Are What You Tweet’ from MediaBistro alluded to a recent study by EPJ Science finding that ‘word usage mirrors community structure in the online social network Twitter.’

It made me think about how we communicate with people interested in accelerating biomedical research – do we employ a unique language pattern? On the flip side: How should our language change when trying to reach a wider audience (outside our social network), engage new communities and partners?

Image

EPJ Abstract
Background: Language has functions that transcend the transmission of information and varies with social context. To find out how language and social network structure interlink, we studied communication on Twitter, a broadly-used online messaging service.

Results: We show that the network emerging from user communication can be structured into a hierarchy of communities, and that the frequencies of words used within those communities closely replicate this pattern. Consequently, communities can be characterised by their most significantly used words. The words used by an individual user, in turn, can be used to predict the community of which that user is a member.

Conclusions: This indicates a relationship between human language and social networks, and suggests that the study of online communication offers vast potential for understanding the fabric of human society. Our approach can be used for enriching community detection with word analysis, which provides the ability to automate the classification of communities in social networks and identify emerging social groups.

 

Filed under Collaboration Tools Tagged with , , ,

Wanna Play? Computer Gamers Help Push Frontier Of Brain Research

March 5, 2013 by Leave a comment

berger-cube_dendrites-1Here is a fascinating NPR news story about using people’s addiction to computer games to advance science.

People can get pretty addicted to computer games. By some estimates, residents of planet Earth spend 3 billion hours per week playing them. Now some scientists are hoping to make use of all that human capital and harness it for a good cause. Read more…

Filed under Crowdsourcing, Public Outreach, Research, Research for Better Health, Research Tools

Making Science Greater

March 5, 2013 by Leave a comment

A new laboratory in ViCOSrginia, the Center for Open Science, is (according to its website) “dedicated to improving the alignment between scientific values and scientific practices to improve the accumulation and application of knowledge. Operating with a technology start-up atmosphere and mindset, the COS team moves quickly, identifies problems and creates solutions, encourages risk-taking, blends science and technology, and is collaborative, high energy, and dedicated to openness.”

The Center has already launched a signature project—the Open Science Framework, allowing scientists to store and share all aspects of their work.

A news story at NationalGeographic.com notes: “failed experiments, the minutiae of methods, the genesis of ideas… these are often omitted from published papers or left to languish in personal file drawers. That creates strong biases in the literature, and makes it harder for people to check and reproduce each other’s work.”

It adds that the Center is “less about doing great science than about making science greater. It will try to foster a new approach to research that will produce more reliable results.”

 

Filed under Collaboration Tools

Computer files stored accurately on DNA in new breakthrough

January 25, 2013 by Leave a comment

dna

Via telegraph.co.uk

Scientists have recorded data including Shakespearean sonnets and an MP3 file on strands of DNA, in a breakthrough which could see millions of records stored on a handful of molecules rather than computer drives. Read more

Filed under Collaboration Tools

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