clinical practice. However, he missed
one that may ultimately surpass all
others—making medical data meaningful (and available) to patients—so
they can be more informed partners
in their own care.
Dr. Cantrill was not alone in appreciating the value of HIT this way.
Patient-facing electronic data presentation is consistently overlooked
in academic, medical, industrial, and
political discussions, likely because
it’s much more difficult to associate
financial value with patient engagement than with measurable ineffi-ciencies in medical practice.
Perhaps, too, computer scientists
have not let patients take advantage
of the growing volume of their own
electronic medical data; allowing
them only to, say, download and print
their medical histories is important
but insufficient. Medical data is (and
probably should be) authored by and
for practitioners, and is thus beyond
the health literacy of most patients.
But making medical data intuitive
to patients—a problem that’s part
pedagogy, part translation, part infrastructure, and part design—requires
a collaborative effort among researchers in human-computer interaction,
natural language processing, visualization, databases, and security. The
effort also represents a major opportunity for CS in terms of societal impact. Its omission is indicative of just
how much remains to be done.
Dan morris, redmond, WA
Release the Code
About the software of science, Dennis
McCafferty’s news story (Oct. 2010)
asked “Should Code Be Released?”
In the case of climate science code,
the Climate Code Foundation (http://
climatecode.org/) answers with an
emphatic yes. Rebuilding public trust
in climate science and support for
policy decisions require changes in
the transparency and communication
of the science. The Foundation works
with climate scientists to encourage
publication of all climate-science
software.
In a Nature opinion piece “Pub-
lish Your Computer Code: It Is Good
Enough” (Oct. 13, 2010, http://www.
nature.com/news/2010/101013/
full/ 467753a.html), I argued that
there are powerful reasons to publish
source code across all fields of sci-
ence, and that software is an essen-
tial aspect of the scientific method
despite failing to benefit from the
system of competitive review that has
driven science forward for the past
300 years. In the same way software is
part of the scientific method, source
code should be published as part of
the method description.
The Brain’s inner
Computer is analog
I continue to be amazed by the simplistic approach pursued by computer scientists trying to understand how
the brain functions. David Lindley’s
news article “Brains and Bytes” (Sept.
2010) came tantalizingly close to an
epiphany but didn’t quite express
what to me is fundamentally wrong
with most research in the field. There
is an appreciation of the statistical nature of the brain’s functioning at the
microscopic, cellular level, a realization that complete predictability is
not only not achievable but actually
completely inappropriate.
Lindley referred to an event (“neu-
ral firing”) as a binary process, despite
being statistical in its occurrence.
Lacking personal experience (so un-
fettered by knowledge), I claim this
represents the fundamental obstacle
to achieving a true understanding of
how the brain works. A neuron firing
or a synapse transmitting the result
is neither binary nor random; rather,
the shape and strength of the “sig-
nal” are critical in achieving under-
standing, and are, for the most part,
ignored.
Communications welcomes your opinion. to submit a
letter to the editor, please limit your comments to 500
words or less and send to letters@cacm.acm.org.
© 2010 aCm 0001-0782/10/1200 $10.00
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Using Simple Abstraction
An Interview with
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Cloud Computing
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The Business of Software
Law and Technology
ACM’s F Y10 Annual Report
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