I started a new project I'd like to present. As a programmer I spend a non-trivial amount of time searching StackOverflow for information and answers to coding questions, as I'm sure most readers of this blog do as well. It's an interesting site, merging the Q&A model with that of a wiki/crowdsourcing community, causing it to attract a lot of expertise and become extremely popular in the software community. They explain it better than I do.
I'm pleased to announce that CHService v1.0 has just been published at Github!
CHService is a small open source project, born out of my irritation at writing essentially the same Windows Service over and over. »
Automated disease tracking, sometimes known as Biosurveillance, is the process of collecting and analyzing a variety of forms of data to determine disease trends. I briefly worked in this field, which makes me believe I know something about it. For a while now, I've been considering the utility of status updates posted on social networks as a potential source of public health information, and it looks like I'm not the only one. »
An interesting article was recently published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The authors note that the number of scientific researchers, and therefore the number of research publications, has increased dramatically in the past few decades, and claim this is indicative of an "avalanche of low-quality research" that must be quelled for the good of science. With all due respect to the authors, I'd like to address this cynical and short-sighted view of scientific research in the modern information-centric world.
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