Communications - December 2010

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.

Coming Next Month in COMMUNICATIONS

A Firm Foundation for Private Data Analysis Using Simple Abstraction An Interview with Fran Allen Cloud Computing at our Doorstep Follow the Intellectual Property Q&A with Ed Lazowska Technology Strategy and Management The Business of Software Law and Technology ACM’s F Y10 Annual Report