From CNET: 

The term "information overload" has floated around for years and been the topic of much analysis, but the situation remains. According to recent research by enterprise research firm Basex, these distractions are now costing the American economy more than $650 billion in lost productivity, and taking up 28 percent of workers' time.

Such numbers led Intel engineer Nathan Zeldes and other tech industry insiders to form the new Information Overload Research Group. The nonprofit consortium--whose members include Microsoft Research, IBM, and Google employees--held its first conference this week in New York, with members meeting at sessions with titles like "No Time to Think" and "Visionary Vendors."

Now that the group has had its inaugural gathering, Zeldes, its president, said IORG will continue to recruit members and financial sponsors from a scope of business sectors. With more minds applied to finding a solution to what IORG calls "the world's greatest challenge to productivity," Zeldes hopes to generate innovative ideas that can benefit both businesses and individuals.

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http://www.nber.org/papers/w14159 

Influence, Information Overload, and Information Technology in Health Care 

James B. Rebitzer, Mari Rege, and Christopher Shepard 
NBER Working Paper No. 14159 

July 2008 

We investigate whether information technology can help physicians more efficiently acquire new knowledge in a clinical environment characterized by information overload. Our analysis makes use of data from a randomized trial as well as a theoretical model of the influence that information technology has on the acquisition of new medical knowledge. Although the theoretical framework we develop is conventionally microeconomic, the model highlights the non-market and non-pecuniary influence activities that have been emphasized in the sociological literature on technology diffusion. We report three findings. First, empirical evidence and theoretical reasoning suggests that computer based decision support will speed the diffusion of new medical knowledge when physicians are coping with information overload. Secondly, spillover effects will likely lead to "underinvestment" in this decision support technology. Third, alternative financing strategies common to new information technology, such as the use of marketing dollars to pay for the decision support systems, may lead to undesirable outcomes if physician information overload is sufficiently severe and if there is significant ambiguity in how best to respond to the clinical issues identified by the computer. 

© 2008 by James B. Rebitzer, Mari Rege, and Christopher Shepard. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. 

Scour is a search tool that blends results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN together in one stream. You can hot-swap between the three, or break out any single result into another search. If you come across a bad result, or one you think should go above the others, you can also vote it up (or down) or leave a comment--something similar to what Wikia did with its hackable search engine.

On top of the basic layer of search interaction there's also a paying element to the site. Every query you make has a certain point value, with interactions like commenting and voting giving you more points. Once you reach a certain point limit you can then convert points you have into a cash gift card. There's also a referral program where you get a small percentage of the points from the searches your friends do. 

HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.

Cite Check

Citations figure prominently in academic promotion and peer review. Theoretically, scholarly references serve a dual purpose: They indicate an author’s familiarity with established literature and assign credit to previous work, while from the other direction many would argue they signal a paper’s relevance and standing within a discipline.

That’s, of course, in theory. The reality may surprise many academics who might not stop to think about the system they rely on for the production of knowledge, or who studiously ignore those little superscript numbers that indicate (again, in theory), Read the referenced paper to learn why the preceding assertion is correct.

What if it isn’t correct? What if the authors didn’t even read half of the papers they cited?

Like any self-enclosed, loosely policed network, citations are far from perfect. It’s well documented, for example, that researchers tend to cite papers that support their conclusions and downplay or ignore work that calls them into question. Scholars also have ambitions and reputations, so it’s not surprising to hear that they might weave in a few citations to articles written by colleagues they’re trying to impress — or fail to cite work by competitors. Maybe they overlook research written in other languages, or aren’t familiar with relevant work in a related but different field, or spelled an author’s name wrong, or listed the wrong journal.

All of these shortcomings are reviewed and discussed in an article published this year1 in the management science journal Interfaces along with the critical responses to it.2

As it turns out, scholars have already done some work quantifying problem citations, divided into two categories, “incorrect references” and “quotation errors.” The authors of the paper, J. Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Malcolm Wright of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, write of the former type, “This problem has been extensively studied in the health literature ... 31 percent of the references in public health journals contained errors, and three percent of these were so severe that the referenced material could not be located.”

More serious than such botched references are articles that incorrectly quote a cited paper or, as the authors put it, “misreport findings.” For example, in the same study of health literature3, they write, “authors’ descriptions of previous studies in public health journals differed from the original copy in 30 percent of references; half of these descriptions were unrelated to the quoting authors’ contentions.”

It wasn’t until Wright noticed that a paper Armstrong co-authored in 1977 had been inaccurately cited that they realized the extent of the problem, Armstrong said in an interview. It was Wright who suggested investigating the problem further in a more systematic way. So they focused on that specific article, which outlines a precise method for estimating the extent to which non-responses to mail surveys bias the results. Since the article has been heavily cited and the method it describes can be identified, they were able to trace how well articles that reference it represent the original material.

Using a combination of Google Scholar searches and the ISI Citation Index, Armstrong and Wright found results that are disconcerting even when acknowledging that Google doesn’t crawl every academic paper: Among academic studies using mail surveys, only 6 percent mentioned the non-response problem at all, and of those, 2.1 percent (339 articles) cited the 1977 paper. The authors found 36 variations of the paper’s citation among those that referenced it, with an “overall error rate” of 7.7 percent.

By analyzing a sample of 50 papers (out of 1,184) that cite the 1977 article (including the 30 most frequently cited of the bunch), the authors also found significant inaccuracies. By their standards, those papers didn’t fare especially well either: “In short, although there were over 100 authors and more than 100 reviewers, all the papers failed to adhere to the [1977 paper’s] procedures for estimating nonresponse bias. Only 12 percent of the papers mentioned extrapolation, which is the key element of [the paper’s] method for correcting nonresponse bias.”

The paper concludes: “Given the understandability of the recommendations and the fact that no one contacted Armstrong or [his 1977 co-author] for clarification, one might question whether the citing authors read the ... paper. To present their studies in a more favorable light, some authors may have wanted to dispel concerns about nonresponse bias; thus, they cited [it] for support for their own procedures. Interestingly, one of our colleagues said that it is common knowledge that authors add references that they have not read in order to gain favor with reviewers. One wonders: If it is possible to write a paper without reading the references, why should the authors expect readers to read the references?”

If the problem is as widespread as Armstrong and Wright suggest — and Armstrong said he believes the findings generalize to other scientific fields — then a more systemic fix might be warranted. They provide several common-sense remedies intended to address what the peer review system currently, it appears, is unable to counteract ("My experience is most peer reviewers don’t seem to be competent to do the job,” Armstrong says). “When an author uses prior research that is relevant to a finding, that author should make an attempt to contact the original authors to ensure that the citation is properly used,” they write.

“As I point out in the paper, I’ve been doing this for years, and it doesn’t really require that much work,” Armstrong said. “Generally, I found it to be easy to do. I do it as an author; I hardly get anybody asking me — they just go ahead and quote me incorrectly.”

The paper also argues that researchers should have to verify to journal editors that they’ve tried to contact the relevant authors, and that they’ve read the papers they cited. Furthermore, they suggest, there could be a solution waiting on the Web — one that sounds a lot like a cross between the Wikipedia model and Amazon.com reviews: “Journals should open Web sites (free to nonsubscribers) that allow people to post key papers that have been overlooked, along with a brief explanation of how the findings relate to the published study.”

Already, Interfaces and a journal Armstrong co-founded, the International Journal of Forecasting, are planning to introduce those suggestions into their editing processes. Rob J. Hyndman, the forecasting journal’s editor-in-chief, said in an e-mail that within two weeks, the Web submission system will include a check box with this text: “Confirm that the list of references has been checked carefully for accuracy and that each of the references has been read by at least one of the authors.”

And the 2008 paper? For the record, Armstrong said he and Wright followed their own advice in publishing their research: “Oh yeah, we talked about that. We had to make sure that each one of us had read every one of the papers.”

1Armstrong, J. S., M. Wright. 2008. The Ombudsman: Verification of Citations: Fawlty Towers of Knowledge? Interfaces 38(2) 125-139.

2This paper is available to download, in PDF format, by clicking here.

3See previous paragraph.

— Andy Guess

Electronic Papyrus: The Digital Book, Unfurled

By ANNE EISENBERG

CONSUMERS like large displays on the mobile devices they use for reading an e-mail message or an e-book, but they also like to tuck those devices into their pockets. But the bigger the screen on a cellphone or an e-reader, the sooner it outgrows pocket size.

Now a hallmark feature of these screens — their rigidity — is changing. New technologies are developing that make displays flexible, foldable or even as rollable as papyrus, so that large screens can be unfurled from small containers.

One new mobile device, the Readius, designed mainly for reading books, magazines, newspapers and mail, is the size of a standard cellphone. Flip it open, though, and a screen tucked within the housing opens to a 5-inch diagonal display. The screen looks just like a liquid crystal display, but can bend so flexibly that it can wrap around a finger.

Because the Readius is pocket-sized, but has a generous, supple screen, people with five minutes to spare in a taxi, bus or subway can use the dead time to open it, read a page or two of a book and then return the device to a shirt pocket, said Karl McGoldrick, the chief executive of Polymer Vision, the company in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, that created the device.

The Readius may even help stop people from obsessing over their e-mail: with the device, spare moments for reading may be put to a possibly better use — say, a novel by Stendhal. But if their good intentions fail, the device has a wireless connection to download e-mail as well as books.

The black-and-white display holds about 22 lines of a book page, depending on the font, all shown in the crisp black type provided by technology from E Ink, also used in Amazon’s Kindle and other e-readers. The screen changes from one page to the next in about half a second, at the touch of a thumb.

The Readius will be introduced in England, Italy and Germany this fall, and in the United States early in 2009, Mr. McGoldrick said. Its battery lasts for about 30 hours of reading — long enough to get through “The Red and the Black,” and possibly a chunk of “War and Peace.” Pages can be read under a variety of lighting conditions, even including full sunlight, he said. The price is not yet set, but Thomas van der Zijden, vice president for marketing and sales, said the Readius would be more expensive than the Kindle, which now is selling for $359.

The Readius is not the only entry in the area of flexible displays. “It’s an exciting example, but there are going to be a slew of other devices coming soon, too,” said Shawn O’Rourke, director of engineering at the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University at Tempe, which focuses on the technology’s future commercialization.

Mr. O’Rourke defined flexible displays as “different than a BlackBerry or notebook,” with their traditional glass backings. “These displays are thin, lightweight and rugged — and they bend,” he said. The underlying substrates that support the display are typically either plastic or metal foil.

The market for flexible displays is likely to grow rapidly, said Jennifer Colegrove, an analyst at the iSuppli Corporation, a market research firm in El Segundo, Calif. “Flexible displays are the crucial enabling technology for a new generation of portable devices that are mobile, but also have compelling user interfaces,” she said.

Flexible displays offer the advantages of easy, relatively inexpensive and safe shipping and handling, compared with conventional rigid screens, she said. Her firm forecasts that the total market for flexible displays will grow to $2.8 billion by 2013.

Paul Semenza, vice president for display research at iSuppli, says that flexible displays are not entirely new on the market, but that previous ones have been relatively low-resolution applications — like those in smart cards and point-of-purchase signs — “not high-resolution ones that have the kind of image quality that users expect.”

The Readius images have this potential, he said, because the displays are powered by what is called an active matrix — transistors behind each pixel that can potentially provide fast switching and high performance.

“Polymer Vision’s technology is unusual,” Mr. Semenza said. “It’s hard to make an active matrix on something other than glass.”

If Polymer Vision succeeds in “making these transistor arrays,” he said, “you’ll have the ability to make high-performance displays on flexible substrates that look as good as a notebook display on any high-performance L.C.D.”

THE Readius, which so far displays 16 shades of gray on its screen, is not at that state yet, but Polymer Vision is hoping to add color and video capability in the future, Mr. McGoldrick said. A prototype for a color model was demonstrated at a trade show in May.

Mr. O’Rourke of the Flexible Display Center likes the look of the new generation of supple screens, but he also likes their toughness. “Some of them we’ve beaten with hammers, and they still run,” he said. “No one could do that with a BlackBerry.”

The real cost of communicating scientific research worldwide--including publishing, distributing, and reading journals--is about $115 billion, according to a report from the U.K.-based Research Information Network (RIN). Of that, $3.7 billion is spent in the form of time donated by peer reviewers.

The figures are based on cost and salary information from publishers and libraries. The group concluded that the United Kingdom is more than doing its bit. It has 3.3% of the world's researchers, but they're shouldering 8.7% of the worldwide cost of peer review. And U.K. publishers put out more than 20% of the world's scientific literature.

The average cost of producing a scientific article is roughly $8000, RIN estimates, and there are limited ways of shaving costs. If 90% of their material appeared only online, publishers would save $2.1 billion on printing and distribution. And getting authors to pay for publication would save publishers and libraries $1 billion. The bulk of the overall price tag represents consumption: Academics devote an estimated $66 billion worth of their time to reading articles.

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

By Chris Anderson  06.23.08

Sensors everywhere. Infinite storage. Clouds of processors. Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology. As our collection of facts and figures grows, so will the opportunity to find answers to fundamental questions. Because in the era of big data, more isn't just more. More is different.

The End of Theory:

All models are wrong, but some are useful."

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That's why Google can translate languages without actually "knowing" them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German). And why it can match ads to content without any knowledge or assumptions about the ads or the content.

Speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this past March, Peter Norvig, Google's research director, offered an update to George Box's maxim: "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them."

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

The big target here isn't advertising, though. It's science. The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years.

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete.

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How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand

By Michael Erard  06.23.08

The targeted offenses: if you are stolen, call the police at once. please omnivorously put the waste in garbage can. deformed man lavatory. For the past 18 months, teams of language police have been scouring Beijing on a mission to wipe out all such traces of bad English signage before the Olympics come to town in August. They're the type of goofy transgressions that we in the English homelands love to poke fun at, devoting entire Web sites to so-called Chinglish. (By the way, that last phrase means "handicapped bathroom.")

But what if these sentences aren't really bad English? What if they are evidence that the English language is happily leading an alternative lifestyle without us?

Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it's escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.

In China, this sort of free-form adoption of English is helped along by a shortage of native English-speaking teachers, who are hard to keep happy in rural areas for long stretches of time. An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don't get enough quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese.

It's not merely that English will be salted with Chinese vocabulary for local cuisine, bon mots, and curses or that speakers will peel off words from local dialects. The Chinese and other Asians already pronounce English differently — in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, in various parts of the region they tend not to turn vowels in unstressed syllables into neutral vowels. Instead of "har-muh-nee," it's "har-moh-nee." And the sounds that begin words like this and thing are often enunciated as the letters f, v, t, or d. In Singaporean English (known as Singlish), think is pronounced "tink," and theories is "tee-oh-rees."

English will become more like Chinese in other ways, too. Some grammatical appendages unique to English (such as adding do or did to questions) will drop away, and our practice of not turning certain nouns into plurals will be ignored. Expect to be asked: "How many informations can your flash drive hold?" In Mandarin, Cantonese, and other tongues, sentences don't require subjects, which leads to phrases like this: "Our goalie not here yet, so give chance, can or not?"

... 

I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip

By LUIS SUAREZ

EARLIER this year, I became tired of my usual morning ritual of spending hours catching up on e-mail. So I did something drastic to take back control of my productivity.

I stopped using e-mail most of the time. I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return. It becomes a vicious cycle. By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of e-mails that I receive by 80 percent in a single week.

It’s not that I stopped communicating; I just communicated in different and more productive ways. Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others. I also started to use the telephone much more than I did before, which has the added advantage of being a more personal form of interaction.

I never gave up my work e-mail address, because I still need it for some work-related activities — for example, for one-on-one discussions that are too private and confidential to discuss publicly.

I was in a good position to give up most of my other e-mail because I’m a “social computing evangelist” for I.B.M. and have used social software tools for years to collaborate on projects and to share knowledge. I live in the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain and report to managers in the United States and the Netherlands. Between time differences and participation in various projects, it’s important that I spend my time efficiently.

I have had continuing support from my management in this effort, because I’ve been able to prove how much more I can accomplish by answering a question, and posting it on a blog, for example, than I can by answering the same question over and over. I still help people, but in a more open and collaborative fashion. Other people can join in the discussions — maybe they will have a better idea than mine.

I started this experiment by announcing my intention on a couple of blogs, like my personal one and blogs inside I.B.M.’s firewall. The postings in response were overwhelmingly positive — but I also encountered some skepticism. Many people wondered how I would manage to communicate and collaborate with my peers without using e-mail.

...