Regarding cloud computing and the risks - I think we need to be careful with the assumption that corporations do not act in the interests of their customers or are incapable of acting in a socially responsible way - despite all of the rhetoric about Google and Microsoft being in a position to do nasty things with our data - they haven't - and their business models essentially preclude them from doing so.

The UWA CSP provides "cloud" or hosted clinical management functionality  - we do this because we believe that it makes running eHealth affordable and frees clinicians and health professionals from running expensive IT infrastructure or of being IT managers. We are well aware of the privacy issues and take them seriously. We, and other health companies, wouldn't be in business for long if we didn't.

A data visualisation service run by IBM called "many eyes" (http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home) allows researchers to upload data and choose from one of a number of different and innovative visualisations that have proved to be the spark for comment and debate. Of course, as the site shows, this may also just allow people to misrepresent the data in a more colourful and supposedly authoritative way as this image or workers in the US who would pay more tax under Obama...

Sweden's defense industry has combined with a gaming company to produce a 3D rendering of Stockholm (available as a Java applet) (in case you don't speak swedish, click "Till 3D-kartan" – the rest is pretty self-explanatory). The clever thing about all of this was that it was produced from the automatic conversion of 60,000 aerial photographs in 8 days. This compares to the process that Google uses for its street view that involves a car travelling around taking photos. Of course, the Street View allows you to see more detail (and yes, the Europeans weren't being paranoid – you can recognise people coming out of dodgy places even though Google obscures faces) but given the speed at which the Swedish system works, you could 3D most of the world more rapidly and with less controversy than the Street View approach.

I have recently attended a meeting run by Deloitte soliciting input into a suggested national e-Health strategy that will be presented back to the Council of Australian Governments. I was part of a group representing GPs and primary health practitioners (another hat I wear) through the work my research group does with the GP networks in WA. It is fair to say that Australia is lagging in its implementation of e-Health but there have been pockets of innovation and excellence around the country. Overall, I was quite impressed by the Deloitte consultants – they actually seemed to know something about the subject matter and the organisation of their meeting left me with some hope that our concerns and requests would be incorporated into their report. It is difficult to summarise everything that was covered but the discussion really boiled down to a question of what can be done at a national level compared to state or regional. In our case (UWA's), we have benefited enormously from central funding through the Department of Health and Ageing. What we would ideally like to see though are the time frames for this funding being extended to 3 years as the current 12 month time frame is optimistic at best. Nationally, there is a role for standards to be set and possible bodies responsible for accreditation but implementation is best left at the local level. Now if we could only get state health to engage in the same way...

The recent case of Bill Henson's photographs being deemed "pornographic" has brought a renewed discussion about artistic freedom to the fore. What interested me were the parallels with "academic freedom" and another case recently in the news about academic Paul Mees who was going to be the subject of a misconduct case brought by the University of Melbourne. He called some government bureaucrats "liars and frauds who should be in jail" at a conference. Both cases seem to me to be similar in that artists and academics enjoy a freedom to explore and investigate, challenge and provoke but that this has to happen within a context and that that context has to be justified and justifiable. In both situations, it seems to me that this was the case. Tony Abbott claimed in the Australian that he couldn't see the difference between "images of naked children as pornography when they're on a computer but as art if they're in a gallery.". Tony's skills of perception aside, there is a big difference and in fact this is recognised in law since the police will have to show that Bill Henson set out with the intention to use the images for pornographic purposes.

The problem with stating artistic/academic freedom as a shibboleth for any sort of (in)activity is that it is quite often invoked in the absence of the context and justification and this is where the trouble starts.

A great UWA site from students taking the communication studies unit "Digital Communication & Participatory Culture" that was run by Dr Peter Morse last year. Not really about research but it shows the potential of video blogging and it is entertaining and educational as well.

Do you know what astroturfing means? Watch Angela Caple's 2 vlogs : Episode 1 and Episode 2

Researchers at the University of Heidelberg have shown that emails sent out to advertise information concerning drug interactions during pregnancy were more likely to be effective (i.e. people clicked on a link to find out more information) if the email used (in order of effectiveness):

1. a static graphic design
2. an animated graphic design
3. text in Times New Roman or Arial font

and least effective if the email was plain and used the Courier font. (http://www.klinikum.uni-heidelberg.de/JAMIA_english.110587.0.html)

The interesting thing about this was that actually the important factor in their evaluation was how many times people clicked on the link and the study didn't factor the differences in the ways the links were presented to the recipient. There is a big difference between getting an email which has a link that says http://aid/newsletter7/schwangerschaft.php?modus=1 and a button with text next to it that says Klicken Sie hier:

So why did they assume that it was the font and graphics that made the difference? A review of their methodology should have highlighted the problem with the experimental design?

Abstract: http://dx.doi.org/10.1197/jamia.M2503

A friend of mine brought the news to my attention of Nick Cave being awarded an honorary PhD by Monash University – Nick managed 2 years of his arts degree (actually at the Caulfield Institute of Arts and Technology before it was subsumed by Monash) before giving up and embarking on a career as a musician and sometime author. His contribution? Being popular and promoting Australia internationally according to Monash's VC Richard Larkins. Perhaps we will see Paris Hilton being conferred a PhD at Harvard soon? To be fair, Nick has been awarded an LL.D or Doctor of Laws and so the sanctity of the PhD has been preserved for now.

Blackboard, developer of the learning management system of the same name and the owners of WebCT are suing a company (Desire2Learn) based on their claim that they invented online learning management systems (http://noedupatents.org/wiki/index.php?title=Blackboard%E2%80%99s_US_patent_6%2C988%2C138) – not something that would necessarily endear the education community to a company? They claim that they will only go after the commercial vendors and not the open source LMSs like Moodle and Sakai. Fortunately, the US Patent Office has issued preliminary statement rejecting all 44 claims – including things like a patent for having files on a server and allowing students and lecturers access to them! What is needed perhaps is peer-review in patents – or actually no patents for software at all.

A new bibliometrics service has been made accessible from within UWA Scopus (http://www.scopus.com) provides reference and citation data in a similar way to Thomson Scientifics' Web of Knowledge/Web of Science. It is not clear yet how the two services compare. If you have access to the University's research quality management system, Socrates, you will be able to see the Thomson citations and Scopus citations for your publications. Just looking at my publications, one of the good things about Scopus is that it indexes First Monday (an online open access journal) and has picked up an IEEE bulletin (Thomson didn't) – on the negative side, it shows fewer citations for my journal publications than Thomson.

An ABC story reports that blogging can help you feel less isolated, more connected to a community and more satisfied with your friendships, both online and face-to-face, new Australian research has found (I added the bit about sex and research).

There has been a proposal to move to a standard internet quota for all postgraduate students of 2GB per year. This is apparently what Melbourne does for its students. I would be interested to hear whether people think that this is going to be sufficient. Given that my quota at home is 25GB per month, I would suspect not?

We all are, it seems. An interesting report commissioned by the British Library and JISC has looked into the way the so-called google generation of users will utilise libraries and their resources in 5 - 10 years time. Observations from the report include:

• there is far less difference in behaviour between google geners and older researchers (e.g. professors) than people imagine – their search habits are similar all ages displaying an impatience with finding information and navigation through web sites
• younger people will search first, preferring Google searches for information than more sophisticated search facilities provided by libraries
• younger people's search skills are not necessarily very well developed

The message in the report for libraries seems slightly grim:

"The significance of this for research libraries is threefold:

• they need to make their sites more highly visible in cyberspace by opening them up to search engines
• they should abandon any hope of being a one-stop shop
• they should accept that much content will seldom or never be used, other than perhaps a place from which to bounce"

As New Year brings around its annual reminder to dust off your best intentions and charge them with a raft of resolutions that will make you slimmer, brighter, more generous and altogether a better person, I have been thinking about the slightly more mundane application of resolutions, to the way that I work. I realised that something had to be done when my email inbox got over the 500 mark, my to-do list was following the same growth curve and some of those good intentions (do more research and write papers) were starting to blur with childhood memories they were becoming that old. The question immediately presented itself as to what you are supposed to do about all of this without being seen browsing the self-help section of the local bookshop.

For me, as I suspect for most people, my work revolves around a lot of interrupt-driven activities like email, phone calls, people drop-ins and meetings. Around all of this I have software, reports and grant applications to write, people to manage, a business to run and theoretically at least, a research program to oversee. The efficiency of all of this, or lack of it, mostly revolves around time management issues and for the bigger pieces of work (like writing software), how I actually do that work. I suspect that how we do the bigger pieces of work greatly influences the time management aspects – because I am not necessarily efficient at doing things like writing for example, I tend to put this off because it takes too long for what I seem to achieve). However, this is something to tackle once the basics have been dealt with.

Reading a copy of Wired magazine, I came across a time-management method called Getting Things Done (GTD) (you can read the article). GTD has a cult following and is largely common sense with some practical rules for implementing a process. I won't describe the process here as you can read a decent article about it on Wikipedia. Suffice to say, this is my new year's resolution and one which I will try and measure its progress.

Interested to hear any other approaches that have worked for anyone out there.

Having sat through the last US election where initial predictions gave victory to the Democrats only to see weeks of legal wrangling resulting in Bush's re-election, the early returns from the current election gave me a sense of deja vu. However, it was not to be and the anihalation that the liberals feared eventuated. The interesting thing about this was waiting for the point in the election that the liberals acknowledged the data that was being presented to them. I was astounded at the way that people (well, politicians) were still willing to ignore the data and basic statistics that were being presented to them until they were finally told that we had passed from almost absolute certainty to complete certainty. I wonder if we operated research on this basis, where we would be? And of course, the thing we never heard was that with an "average" swing that this was not going to be equally distributed across the country and that the actual swings in key seats was going to be greater.

I will spare everyone my thoughts on the departing government other than to say that the champagne corks are popping...

See you all on monday for a new era.