Virtual schizophrenia comes to Second Life
Besides covering an interesting article, this posting is testing BlogJet, a new blogging software that works with a variety of Blogware services. So if it looks funny, that's why.

Cory Doctorow: Wagner James Au sez, “A medical doctor/computer programmer recently built a simulation of visual and aural hallucinations in Second Life, based on the descriptions of real schizophrenics. In other words, it's a virtual, first-person recreation of the illness, and the potential applications (therapeutic, neurological, social, etc.) are pretty exciting. Also eerie, disturbing, and likely to disturb your sleep for a day or two afterward.” Link (Thanks, James!)

An article on CrossRef describes how academic research can more easily be searched through creating a stable location and protocol for citing and cross-referencing documents (using the DOI for the more technical readers out there).

“Nearly 600 primary publishers, libraries, affiliates, agents, and journal-hosting platforms currently use CrossRef. [this has since grown to over 650]… All told, the network has registered 10.3 million content items, representing more than 9,200 journals, in addition to several thousand books and conference proceedings.” Publishers pay as little as $250/year for access to the CrossRef service, based on their publishing revenue. (Charges go up to $30,000/year for the huge ones.)

According to CrossRef, “A truly comprehensive linking network for online research content is probably within reach within a five-year timeframe”.

To see what a search might look like, check out the CrossRef/Google pilot test here. It includes only 29 of the 650 publishers that use CrossRef.

There's a systematic bias in published medical research whereby 'successful' studies are far more likely to end up in the literature. There are two reasons. One is the tendency of medical journals to only accept studies with exciting findings (rather than studies that don't find any effects). So, for example, imagine that a drug is studied in 50 different clinical trials, and in 49 trials there is no significant difference between the treated groups and the control groups. 49 of the studies would be boring. Only the 1 in 50 study would be published, leading readers to the conclusion that the drug works. This is a serious and continuing problem with scientific literature in general, but has more immediate consequences in medical research. The other reason is similar, but involves the reluctance of pharmaceutical companies and other sponsors to publish negative results for their own products. Often only the successful studies are submitted to medical journals and the rest are buried.

Some of the leading medical journals are now addressing this problem. “If pharmaceutical and medical device companies want their studies published in some of the world's most prestigious medical journals, they will have to report studies that usually never see the light of day, commonly referred to as secret studies…. Currently, 11 publications, including the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, will require companies to register all clinical trials in a public trials registry if they want their studies considered for publication.

“”If all trials are registered in a public repository at their inception, every trial's existence is part of the public record and the many stakeholders in clinical research can explore the full range of clinical evidence,” said a statement on all 11 journals with the new policy…. For the most part, negative studies never get published in medical journals, because companies don't submit the “bad news”, the new policy will help eliminate selective reporting, which distorts the body of evidence available for clinical decision-making. “

From Healthtalk.

Some preliminary studies tracking the eye movements of people looking at web sites suggest that, “The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for some time did their eyes explore further down the page.” The eye patterns are shown below.

Combined with usability studies, this research could lead to more effective web site designs. Thanks to BoingBoing.