This short SEED Magazine piece describes some of the efforts to incorporate behavioral science into the design of user interfaces.  The examples focus on government programs and websites.  One of the recent waves of popular science books has focused on such shaping of public action, including Nudge.  One of the co-authors of Nudge, Cass Sunstein, has been nominated to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget, so it’s possible this kind of behavioral thinking could further influence regulation.

While the science behind some of this design and thinking is new, it’s important to note that this is a more explicit treatment of the kind of behavior shaping that law and policy do all the time – limiting choice or designing systems to privilege particular outcomes or products.  What makes things different now is a greater ability to design things in advance with some notion of how people will react.  This makes discussion and debate over these issues more important before critical decisions were made, rather than trying to revisit them later.

With the proliferation of online votes on questions, blogs and video, the White House website is taking the lead in terms of a government online presence.  The National Science Foundation, which sponsored some of the critical research in the emergence of the Internet, has been slow to respond.  One step toward a stronger web presence is the development of Science Nation (H/T Framing Science), what promises to be a weekly online multimedia resource highlighting research.  The current ‘issue’ focuses on extremophile hunters.  While this may not seem cutting edge to some, it is an additional tool NSF can use to communicate news on the research it supports.  Perhaps for the next edition of Science and Engineering Indicators they can take their charts and graphs to the next level.

In what might be a microcosm of the pending struggle over the nation’s health care system, a radiologist has proposed in Nature magazine that stablizing tumors at a manageable size, rather than eliminating them entirely (H/T 60 Second Science Blog).  This is a significant shift in traditional strategy, which is usually to knock out the cancer – sometimes repeatedly, should it recur.  Put another way, treat the disease as chronic and manage it with smaller doses of chemotherapy, rather than seeking the death strike and risk the potential of resistant cells returning with a vengeance.  Robert Gatenby, the radiologist behind this idea, compares this different strategy to the integrated pest management approach to invasive species, which was accepted by the Agriculture Department as far back as the Nixon Administration (as it happens, the beginning of the War on Cancer can be traced to the Nixon Administration as well).

A parallel with the upcoming debates over the U.S. health care system would be the current emphasis in the United States on treatment and prolonging the last years of life over prevention and other longevity measures.  While it may be an open question in either situation whether or not changing tactics would be more effective, there will be significant resistance to entertaining the idea in either case.

I’m not speaking about the ongoing sea changes in print journalism, but about the tendency of researchers to submit, and scientific publishers to print, successful research and ignore the failures.  While anyone in any field can learn from what went wrong, certain areas of research (medicine and engineering come to mind) are in stronger positions to make meaningful contributions to knowledge and to the use of that knowledge from reporting what failed.  The same is true of history, where learning why something didn’t happen can provide insight.  Understanding that something didn’t work in a field can shift choices in products purchased, treatments sought, or services offered.  Yet most published research excludes that kind of result.

One small step to addressing the ignorance of failure is starting with the journal Restoration Ecology.  According to Nature, the editors of Restoration Ecology will host a regular section in their journal for reports on experiments and projects in the field that did not meet expectations.  Understanding the baggage attached to the work failure, the section is titled “Set-Backs and Surprises.”  Perhaps this will catch on with other journals, especially if the setback or surprise is couple with some kind of analysis or discussion of lessons learned.  While policymakers are often focused more on the successes than what didn’t work, they do respond to lessons learned.  In that way, they may have a healthier attitude toward failure than the researchers they support.

The new Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Margaret Hamburg and Joshua Sharfstein, outlined their priorities for the FDA in a recent Perspectives article in the New England Journal of Medicine.  Acknowledging the stumbles of the FDA in the last few years, they seem concerned about making sure the FDA is more of a supporter than a hindrance to action in public health and food safety.

“From our vantage point, the recent salmonella outbreak linked to contaminated peanut butter represented far more than a sanitation problem at one troubled facility. It reflected a failure of the FDA and its regulatory partners to identify risk and to establish and enforce basic preventive controls. And it exposed the failure of scores of food manufacturers to adequately monitor the safety of ingredients purchased from this facility.”

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This article at Science Progress describes an oversight in research funding proposals – both from funding agencies and from those seeking grants.  The scientific equipment, and more importantly, the personnel necessary to operate and maintain it, don’t get much attention in funding.  The main recommendations from the author, a Ph.D. candidate in Biochemistry:

“In order to stay globally competitive, the federal government must invest in developing a sustainable and professional technical research workforce to supply research demands at both our nation’s institutes and universities. This could be undertaken by:

• Boosting job stability in this sector by increasing the number of state and federal positions for permanent university research staff
• Restructuring the grant process with an emphasis on personnel and service contracts in conjunction with new equipment
• Sponsoring the creation of university degree programs for technical training in the laboratory sciences.”

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The House Science and Technology Committee will consider H.R. 2407, the Climate Service Act of 2009, during a markup hearing on June 3.  The bill was introduced by the Committee’s Chairman, Rep. Bart Gordon, so it stands a decent chance of passing out of committee.  I have no idea how far it might move after that.  An open question is how closely the fate of this bill is tied to the fate of Waxman-Markey.

The bill would establish a stand-alone National Climate Service within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  The purpose of the service would be to:

(1) advance understanding of climate variability and change at the global, national, and regional levels;

(2) provide forecasts, warnings, and other information to the public on variability and change in weather and climate that affect geographic areas, natural resources, infrastructure, economic sectors, and communities; and

(3) support development of adaptation and response plans by Federal agencies, State, local, and tribal governments, the private sector, and the public.

More specific functional responsibilities of the proposed Service are in Section 4(c)(5) of the bill.  If the bill is passed, the NOAA Administrator would have to develop an implementation plan that would provide more detail about the responsibilities for the NCS and how it would fit with the rest of NOAA.

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An arrangement between a Kansas university and an online education provider highlights the tensions between online education and the traditional higher education model (H/T Yahoo! News).  Fort Hays State University has teamed with StraighterLine to allow students who take the introductory level StraighterLine courses to continue work at Fort Hays with credit for the intro courses under the Fort Hays name.  As you can read in the article, not everyone is happy with the partnership.  Other companies and universities are teaming up in similar arrangements, so what used to be a brighter line between online learning and traditional higher education is softening.

The sheer economics of higher education explain some of this movement.  Paying big school tuition for introductory courses doesn’t make sense for the vast majority of students, especially with many faculty avoiding these courses and universities cutting costs by hiring adjuncts to teach them.  Speaking as someone who has taught a completely online introductory course (for a state university), the educational experience is not necessarily of lower quality because the course is online.  There are reasonable questions about how to effectively accredit online offerings, regardless of who provides them, but this is a phenomenon that will not go away.

From the New England Journal of Medicine we have this review of digitally-enabled public health surveillance.  The recent online activity over the swine flu and Google Flu Trends are only the latest efforts in activity that go back 15 years.  What started with reporting systems has grown to include news aggregation, mashups, and, yes, even the Internet darling of the moment, Twitter.  The authors are concerned, however, that the increasing online capacity for assessment and analysis not displace the work of public health practitioners and clinics.  Put another way, its fine to look up symptoms online, but you should still see a doctor if needed rather than self-diagnosing.  There are other concerns:

Information overload, false reports, lack of specificity of signals, and sensitivity to external forces such as media interest may limit the realization of their potential for public health practice and clinical decision making. Sources such as analyses of search-term use and news media may also face difficulties with verification and follow-up. Though they hold promise, these new technologies require careful evaluation. Ultimately, the Internet provides a powerful communications channel, but it is health care professionals and the public who will best determine how to use this channel for surveillance, prevention, and control of emerging diseases.

Given the title of the NEJM piece – “Digital Disease Detection – Harnessing the Web for Public Health Surveillance” – I think another pair of concerns to add is privacy and security.  If IP addresses can be tracked, which is true with some of these cases, then it is possible to connect particular incidents to particular individuals.  Unless its necessary to communicate with specific individuals, measures should be taken to preserve the anonymity of those whose information supports this public health monitoring.  The security of the databases and other systems using this information need to be strong enough to guard against breaches and inadvertent exposure.

Amongst the recent appointment announcements is the news that Paul Anastas, a synthetic chemist who coined the phrase ‘green chemistry,’ was nominated to head the EPA’s Office of Research and Development (H/T ScienceInsider).  As the EPA’s green chemistry efforts are in a different part of the agency, the choice of Anastas was not necessarily expected.  While currently at Yale, Dr. Anastas has worked at the agency before, and just might shift some of the research and development initiatives at the EPA to incorporate green chemistry.  This might prompt a scenario where there is greater attention paid to designing and innovating new products that reduce environmental impact.  It would be nice to have additonal policy choices besides traditional limits on exposure and similar regulatory restrictions.