Author: Katja Reuter

Medicine 2.0 Conference

/ Katja Reuter

September 16/17th, 2009 in Toronto …

…also known as the World Congress on Social Networking and Web 2.0 Applications in Medicine, Health, Health Care, and Biomedical Research.

The conference program includes aspects of “Web 2.0 Web-based services for health care consumers, caregivers, patients, health professionals, and biomedical researchers, that use Web 2.0 technologies as well as semantic web and virtual reality tools, to enable and facilitate specifically social networking, participation, apomediation, collaboration, and openness within and between these user groups”.

New Clinical and Translational Science Network

/ Katja Reuter / 1 Comment

In the spirit of people being the prerequisite for success a new Clinical and Translational Science Network (CTSciNet) was recently launched by Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It is described as a “career-development Web portal for clinical and translational investigators with an experimental, evolving communications infrastructure”. The portal provides articles and perspectives about training and career-related issues, resources, and partners in clinical and translational science. As it develops, CTSciNet’s online professional network intends to connect clinical and translational science communities worldwide. I like the Forum Primer that provides answers to the Forum’s most frequently asked questions and links back to the original Forum discussions.

The Password Dilemma: Federated Identity Management launched at Indiana University

/ Katja Reuter

No more lists with numerous usernames and passwords that get lost in the end anyway. There is a solution and the University of Indiana is among the masterminds to make it work. Indiana’s federated identity management system allows researchers from across the country to access resources using the user ID and password of their home institution. If you like, take a closer look at Indiana’s CTSI website.

Mini, here is a statement by Bill Barnett: “By deploying federated identity support, the Indiana CTSI HUB can create a trusted online environment in which people can come together, easily access state-of-the-art technologies and services, and use them to work collaboratively to improve health care practice and outcomes while protecting patient privacy.”

Kristine, I remember you mentioned InCommon. The “Indiana CTSI HUB is a participant in the InCommon identity federation which currently claims 95 participating institutions; federal organizations such as the NIH, the National Science Foundation, and The Energy Sciences Network; and industry partners including Microsoft and Apple”.

Text Miners: The “Power of Semantic Enhancement”

/ Katja Reuter

I find this an excellent example how a basic review article originally published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases can be enriched in its content. Even though this might be more relevant to general knowledge management, I would be interested in exploring whether we could apply some of these tools to the Virtual Home portal.

Computational biologists used tagged terms such as disease names, institutions, places, people, organisms, which can be turned off and on. If you click on document summary you will find not only a study summary, but also a tag cloud of highlighted terms, tag trees of individual semantic classes of highlighted terms, ontology terms, document statistics, and a citation analysis.

As Evie Browne, Publication Manager, PLoS Computational Biology writes: “With a single click you can re-arrange the reference list by number of times each paper is cited, or add in the authors’ analysis of how the reference is used in the paper (obtains background from, confirms, extends, shares authors with, uses method in). The group has also provided interactive versions of some of the figures: compare the original, static Figure 3 to the moveable, overlaying, enhanced version.”

More information about semantic publishing is available in the original article.

Twitter – a powerful platform?

/ Katja Reuter / 2 Comments

The debate on the usefulness of Twitter is ongoing and whether it could serve communication and promotion efforts at big research institutions in one way or another. I am still befuddled what Twitter could offer that email and text messaging are not doing already.

I came across the post “Nine Ways to Use Twitter” by John C. Dvorak who explains why he thinks Twitter is a valuable service. Some of his arguments may be interesting to some of you. Surprisingly, he concludes that there may be nothing to get from Twitter, unless one invents a use, which – I guess – leaves all options open for further discussions.

Some of Dvorak’s use cases:

  • Tweeting about an event: something solitary is turned into an interactive, shared experience.
  • Spread of breaking news updates/announcements/ public address system: “when a major event happens, often a Twitterer will be there tweeting about it on the spot”.
  • Contact multiple people who work within an organization using the mobile service feature to easily broadcast a quick message to all of them.
  • Easy feedback mechanism for writings etc.
  • Asking and answering questions is easier than with e-mail, almost instantaneous
  • Poll people/crowd-sourcing information/audience voting

Research Networking: “Scientists caught up in fictional friend network on Facebook”

/ Katja Reuter

Since research networking resounds throughout the scientific community, the article “Fake Facebook pages spin web of deceit” awoke my interest. It talks about a new case of a bogus network on Facebook of  “more than 100 scientists, policy-makers and journalists linked to stem-cell research, whose identities have been purloined.”  Even though the perpetrators and their motives remain unknown, an interesting assumption was made that through a false profile and a network around it a researcher may obtain “sensitive information from a hoodwinked competitor”. I am not sure that I understand completely how that would work in detail, but maybe some of you can offer more explanations. Other than that, the article also helps to understand the reluctance of some scientists concerning research networking.

Tangential Thoughts: Data collection with mobile phones and human-tracking systems in scientific research

/ Katja Reuter

 

I call this post Tangential Thoughts, since it focuses on what the research community things about communication technology, which might be interesting to some of you.

I found two articles: One talks about how researchers more and more use mobile phones to collect data. In “Personal technology: Phoning in data” Roberta Kwok explores how “budget-conscious” and “digitally savvy scientists can write and distribute mobile-phone software for everything from monitoring traffic to reporting invasive species”. Maybe this is something for us to keep in mind and exploring?

Another article titled “Big Brother has evolved” by Jerome E. Dobson mentions human-tracking systems in scientific research. Dobson argues that the “social-networking benefits of human-tracking systems will surely be substantial” and that” the technology is bound to alter all sorts of social relationships”, including the one between researcher and subject. Yet, “investigators need to understand the risks as well as the benefits of new research opportunities”. His conclusion is not at all comforting, though: “We have entered a grand social experiment as momentous as any in our past and yet one so insidious that hardly anyone seems to have noticed”.