On Saturday I attended ChangeCamp Toronto at the MaRS Centre, a full day conference on using information and communication technology to increase participation in government.
Detailed notes are available at the ChangeCamp wiki (based on Mindtouch DekiWiki which was interesting to play with). For example, The Grid is a summary of all of the small group sessions of the day, and links to individual wiki pages on each session. Participants can add notes or files (some sessions have video segments), and can create pages describing themselves.
The conference itself was in a beautiful space at the MaRS centre, offering Wifi internet access and power cords along each row of seats so that we could plug in our laptops. (MaRS was one of the event sponsors as part of its Social Innovation program.)
Some of the really interesting sites included:
Fixmystreet – a U.K. based site that allows neighbourhoods to report problems (like potholes, graffiti, street lighting, garbage, etc.) and track fixes. It is being used by municipal services and community groups to identify problems that should be repaired or escalated. See the summary of reports for the Barnet Borough Council as an example. Residents can subscribe to RSS feeds to get updates on their neighbourhoods.
Fixmystreet.ca is being launched in Ottawa this spring and a version for Toronto is in development.
Everyblock.com – A set of sites covering 11 U.S. cities that scrapes information from multiple sources to provide a detailed interactive portrait of cities and neighbourhoods. It’s an extraordinary resource. See for example Everyblock Chicago’s page on crime statistics.
MIT, including the Sloan School of Management, is posting their course readings and assignments under a Creative Commons license.
MIT Sloan has launched a web site offering case studies, teaching videos and other innovative instructional resources to anyone with access to the Internet. The site was developed to provide access to MIT Sloan’s most current work and developments at no charge. ….
As an example, you can download the materials for their new course on ‘Managing Innovation and Entrepreneurship’ –
Major topics include how the innovation process works; creating an organizational environment that rewards innovation and entrepreneurship; designing appropriate innovation processes (e.g. stage-gate, portfolio management); organizing to take advantage of internal and external sources of innovation; and structuring entrepreneurial and established organizations for effective innovation.
MIT OpenCourseWare | Sloan School of Management | 15.351 Managing Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Spring 2008 | Home.
I use this blog partly to keep track of interesting articles or resources that I’d like to find quickly in the future. (To track project research and literature reviews, I use Zotero as a replacement for Endnote.)
The Guardian’s list of 1000 novels everyone should read (link below) will be handy in selecting public domain and online library books to download into ebook readers. Most of these books, despite The Guardian’s claim that the novels are “from any decade and in any language”, are in English and within the last century or so, but there are still lots of choices in the public domain. Also, many are liable to be available in your local public library’s online collection. (I am a non-resident member of the New York Public Library, which gives me access to 10,000 ebooks for $100 US/year. The Toronto Public Library has only about 350 downloadable ebooks.)
23 Jan 2009:
Selected by the Guardian’s Review team and a panel of expert judges, this list includes only novels – no memoirs, no short stories, no long poems – from any decade and in any language. Originally published in thematic supplements – love, crime, comedy, family and self, state of the nation, science fiction and fantasy, war and travel – they appear here for the first time in a single list
1000 novels everyone must read | Books | guardian.co.uk.
The annotated list of recommended science fiction is worth reading; there are many books I’ve never heard of as well as lots of choices I agree and disagree with.
It seems like such a simple change. Yet asking people to introduce themselves and describe their function in the operating theater before an operation starts turns out to have a significant impact on the operation’s outcome. That is just one of the findings in a recent study by Atul Gawande (the study includes more than a dozen other authors as well), just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, that has created quite a buzz in the healthcare community.
That requirement, along with 18 others, forms part of a checklist adopted by surgical teams at eight hospitals. Over the course of the year the teams saw their death rates fall by 40% and their rate of complications by almost a third. The researchers weren’t able to attribute the success to any one of the items on the checklist and concluded that it was the behavioral changes occasioned by the checklist (and the fact that they were part of an experiment) that improved the outcomes of the operations conducted by the team.
Small Changes make Big Differences – HBR Editors’ Blog – HarvardBusiness.org.
This comparison matrix of collaborative software was created in March 2008 and includes Alfresco, Plone, Sharepoint, Google Docs and various groupware platforms.
The purpose of this study is to analyze current technologies for Collaborative Working Environments (CWEs) and their trend in the future. The study is particularly focused on CWEs suitable for large-scale, multi-national organizations, such as the European Space Agency (ESA). In this study we select a list of state-of-the-art CWEs and review them based on a list of evaluation parameters characterizing the collaborative work in large-scale, multi-national, geographical distribution organizations.
Current and Future Technologies for Collaborative Working Environments study – Autocompwiki.
The following excerpt is from Physics of the Impossible, by Michio Kaku, 2008. Kaku is a theoretical physicist long inspired by Star Trek, and has written an entire book on the plausibility of science fiction concepts like force fields, invisibility, teleportation, time travel and so on. For each concept, he divides them into three classes of impossibility:
- Class I impossibility: consistent with the known laws of physics and might be realized within the next century or so.
- Class II impossibility: lies at the edge of known physics and, if possible, might be invented for at least millenia.
- Class III impossibility: defies known laws of physics and would require a fundamental revision of our scientific knowledge in order to function.
One of the most rigorous, but also controversial, studies on psychokinesis was done at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Program at Princeton University, founded by Robert G. Jahn in 1979 when he was serving as dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. The PEAR engineers were exploring whether or not the human mind by thought alone was capable of affecting the results of random events. For example, we know that when we flip a coin, there is a 50 percent probability of getting heads or tails. But the scientists at PEAR claimed that human thought alone was capable of affecting the results of these random events. Over a twenty-eight-year period, until the program was finally closed in 2007, engineers at PEAR conducted thousands of experiments, involving over 1.7 million trials and 340 million coin tosses. The results seemed to confirm that the effects of psychokinesis exist—but the effects are quite tiny, no more than a few parts per ten thousand, on average. And even these meager results have been disputed by other scientists who claim that the researchers had subtle, hidden biases in their data.
(In 1988 the U.S. Army asked the National Research Council to investigate claims of paranormal activity. The U.S. Army was anxious to explore any possible advantage it could offer its troops, including psychic power. The National Research Council’s report studied creating a hypothetical “First Earth battalion” made up of “warrior monks” who would master almost all the techniques under consideration by the committee, including the use of ESP, leaving their bodies at will, levitating, psychic healing, and walking through walls. … The report concluded that there was “no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomenon.”) (pg 220 in Mobipocket edition)
Kaku goes on to point out that it is already possible for human minds to affect material objects through brainwaves connected to computers, wheelchairs and robots.
The Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care funds a Medical Advisory Secretariat (MAS) that publishes systematic literature reviews on health issues with the potential for significantly improving health and/or reducing health care costs. In October 2008, MAS published their report:
a mega analysis of approaches to lengthening and maintaining people’s ability to Age in the Community. An evidence-based review of the literature identified the following four drivers of long-term care admission :
* Falls and fall-related injuries
* Urinary incontinence
* Dementia (patient and caregiver-focused interventions)
* Social isolation
MOHLTC – MAS – Aging in the Community.
This is a beautiful example of a evidence-based literature review that could have a significant impact on community services. See the 5 page summary of conclusions and recommendations or the entire 373 page report.
Here’s an entertaining talk by Malcolm Gladwell on market research and the limitations of approaches that ask people what they want (e.g., focus groups and interviews).
Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce | Video on TED.com.
The TED site has many fascinating talks, including one by Jonathan Haidt on the biological roots of morality and how liberals and conservatives differ in their moral principles; Philip Zimbardo on how ordinary people become monsters; Steven Pinker on violence; Hans Rosling on global indicators of health and poverty.
This article was cited in the online MIT Sloan Management Review and is interesting because it addresses the benefits of collaboration in creative work. Collaboration is costly and there are lots of questions about whether the time it takes is worth its contribution. In the human services, large groups of collaborators may appear to be spinning their wheels.
From the following article, it looks as though collaboration involving large and diverse teams may be effective in reducing the risks of doing something stupid, as well as increasing the chances of doing something smart – this could be relevant to other arenas besides technological breakthroughs:
How does collaboration influence creativity and, in particular, the invention of breakthroughs? Recent research has attempted to resolve this question by considering the variance of creative outcomes, implicitly assuming that greater probability of breakthroughs comes at the cost of greater probability of particularly poor outcomes. However, through an examination of the overall distribution of outcomes in the context of patented inventions, we demonstrate that collaboration can have opposite effects at the two tails of the distribution: it reduces the probability of very poor outcomes while simultaneously increasing the probability of extremely successful outcomes. We find that these effects are at least partially mediated by the technical diversity of team members and by the size of team members’ external collaboration networks. We also find that large teams exhibit greater extent and breadth of technological search than small teams or lone inventors, and that such search behavior is associated with greater impact.
SSRN-Lone Inventors as Sources of Breakthroughs: Myth or Reality? by Lee Fleming, Jasjit Singh.
“It has been going on nine years now, but finally there are formal standards for Web accessibility for technologies other than HTML. They ask that you start with the press release (lots of links), but regulars might be more entertained by the last time WCAG made the front page here. Many folks here will point out that web accessibility is old hat, and by implication this is hardly news, but if you do Web development for any government organization, you should expect that accessibility is a base requirement. The Section 508 standards are to be updated (relatively) soon too.”
Slashdot | Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Now Final.
It’s about time. These guidelines should apply to Canadian government organizations also. The Internet Look and Feel Guidelines published by the Government of Canada’s Treasury Board Secretariat refer to the old web accessibility guidelines, but I’m sure that developers could make a solid case for using the new ones.
“Amazon just launched its Public Data Sets service (home). The project encourages developers, researchers, universities, and businesses to upload large (non-confidential) data sets to Amazon — things like census data, genomes, etc. — and then let others integrate that data into their own AWS applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all of AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they consume with their own applications. Data sets already available include various US Census databases, 3-D chemical structures provided by Indiana University, and an annotated form of the Human Genome from Ensembl.”
Slashdot | Amazon Launches Public Data Sets To Spur Research.
The New Yorker is running a piece by Atul Gawande that starts by describing the everyday miracles that can be achieved in a modern medical intensive care unit, and ends by making a case for a simple and inexpensive way to save 28,000 lives per year in US ICUs, at a one-time cost of a few million dollars. This medical miracle is the checklist. Gawande details how modern medicine has spiraled into complexity beyond any person’s ability to track — and nowhere more so than in the ICU.
Slashdot | Saving 28,000 Lives a Year.
More from the article:
“A decade ago, Israeli scientists published a study in which engineers observed patient care in ICUs for twenty-four-hour stretches. They found that the average patient required a hundred and seventy-eight individual actions per day, ranging from administering a drug to suctioning the lungs, and every one of them posed risks. Remarkably, the nurses and doctors were observed to make an error in just one per cent of these actions — but that still amounted to an average of two errors a day with every patient. Intensive care succeeds only when we hold the odds of doing harm low enough for the odds of doing good to prevail. This is hard.”
Full article is at
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande?printable=true
Some new-ish data mining or search services for international indicators:
The United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) has launched a new internet-based data service for the global user community. It brings UN statistical databases within easy reach of users through a single entry point (http://data.un.org/) from which users can now search and download a variety of statistical resources of the UN System.
UNdata | about us. See http://data.un.org/ for the search page.
Also see Gapminder [pointed out by Blogoscoped] which offers visualizations of complex information, including, in the following bubble chart, the relationship between national income and health:
Canadian boards of directors are accountable to more interests than just shareholders’, unlike US boards according to a recent decision from the Supreme Court.
Dec. 19 2008 (Bloomberg) — Canadian directors’ primary duty is to do what’s best for their corporation, not stakeholders such as shareholders and bondholders, Canada’s highest court said in an explanation of its approval of BCE Inc.’s buyout.
No principle of Canadian law says one set of interests, for example those of shareholders, should prevail over another, the Supreme Court of Canada said in a decision released today in Ottawa. …
“The reasonable expectation of stakeholders is simply that the directors act in the best interests of the corporation,” six members of the court said in a 75-page ruling issued in all their names. …
The decision contrasts with a U.S. standard set out in a 1985 case involving Revlon Corp. The Delaware Supreme Court found a board’s responsibility is to shareholders, not the company, when it is being sold.
It just got easier to keep track of newly published research in academic journals. Until now, I have mostly subscribed to email updates, which mostly consist of plain text emails containing an inscrutable list of titles (e.g., “Design and development of a concept-based multi-document summarization system for research abstracts”) leading directly to the publisher’s site which may or may not offer a decent abstract. I’ve been waiting impatiently for a good consolidated RSS feed for academic journals, and one has just been launched:
The ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents service makes it easy for academics, researchers, students and anyone else to keep up-to-date with newly published scholarly material by enabling them to find, display, store, combine and reuse thousands of journal tables of contents from multiple publishers.
ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents Service.
This new service is still pretty clunky to set up, but it works beautifully. I registered and then located relevant journals using keyword searches. ticTOCS currently offers tables of contents from 11,867 scholarly journals and 426 publishers. Below is my initial list of monitored journals:
Then I exported my list into a small OPML file that I imported into my RSS feed (I use
Google Reader). Presto! – I now subscribe to RSS updates for all of those journals. My next step will be to monitor the feeds and remove the ones that aren’t helpful. For example,
Canadian Public Policy and the
International Review of Qualitative Research provide entire abstracts in their feeds (that’s good), whereas
Disability and Rehabilitation just provides titles and author names (that’s not so good).
Hopefully they will continue to add journals. They don’t yet have Harvard Business Review or MIT Sloan Management Review, for example.
From a recent article in Global Public Health that compared face to face training with videoconference-based training in Pakistan:
The developing countries are currently facing a double burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases. Physician-scientists, trained in patient care and research skills are crucial in performing cutting-edge clinical research in the developing countries. A major unmet challenge has been the lack of local expertise and the increasing problem of ‘brain drain’. The current study was an effort to present and assess a model of research training to health-care professionals in Pakistan in order to increase the research skills. The objective of the current study was to assess the effectiveness of two different methods of research training. An epidemiologic research training workshop was offered to health-care professionals in Pakistan by face-to-face (F2F) and video-teleconferencing (VTC) methods. A total of 38 F2F and 18 VTC participants were included in the workshop which was conducted by research faculty from the University of Pittsburgh. To assess knowledge, pre- and post-test were done. Within each group, paired sample T-test showed significant improvement in scores after the completion of workshop (p<0.001 for F2F and VTC). In the F2F group, mean scores increased from 11.13 (pre-test) to 15.08 (post-test) and in the VTC group, scores increased from 10.67 (pre-test) to 13.22 (post-test). Two sample T-test was found statistically significant (p<0.001). We present a model for training physicians in public health by providing in-house research skills training which can be used to strengthen the local capacity and reduce increasing problems of brain drain.
