Enginering Division News

The objectives of the Engineering Division are to provide an association for those having an interest in library and information science as they apply to engineering and the physical sciences and to promote the use of materials and knowledge for the benefit of libraries and other educational organizations

Engineering Division News

The objectives of the Engineering Division are to provide an association for those having an interest in library and information science as they apply to engineering and the physical sciences and to promote the use of materials and knowledge for the benefit of libraries and other educational organizations

Building Sector-Based Consensus: A Review of the EPA\u27s Common Sense Initiative

In the late 1990s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted what the agency considered to be a bold experiment in regulatory reinvention, bringing representatives from six industrial sectors together with government officials and NGO representatives to forge a consensus on innovations in public policy and business practices. This paper assesses the impact of the agency\u27s experiment - called the Common Sense Initiative (CSI) - in terms of the agency\u27s goals of improving regulatory performance and technological innovation. Based on a review of CSI projects across all six sectors, the paper shows how EPA achieved, at best, quite modest accomplishments. The paper explains how EPA\u27s decision to rely on consensus as a procedural rule contributed to CSI\u27s failure to meet the agency\u27s ambitious goals. Faced with delays, CSI participants tended to work on projects over which agreement was possible, such as on the development of training manuals or production of case studies, instead of tackling more significant issues. These information-gathering and educational projects avoided the kind of conflicts that would have arisen over more ambitious efforts, but at the expense of making more meaningful economic or environmental improvement. The EPA\u27s experience with CSI provides cautionary lessons for regulators in any policy area who might contemplate using consensus as a decision rule

Developing predictive models of health literacy.

IntroductionLow health literacy (LHL) remains a formidable barrier to improving health care quality and outcomes. Given the lack of precision of single demographic characteristics to predict health literacy, and the administrative burden and inability of existing health literacy measures to estimate health literacy at a population level, LHL is largely unaddressed in public health and clinical practice. To help overcome these limitations, we developed two models to estimate health literacy.MethodsWe analyzed data from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), using linear regression to predict mean health literacy scores and probit regression to predict the probability of an individual having 'above basic' proficiency. Predictors included gender, age, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, poverty status, marital status, language spoken in the home, metropolitan statistical area (MSA) and length of time in U.S.ResultsAll variables except MSA were statistically significant, with lower educational attainment being the strongest predictor. Our linear regression model and the probit model accounted for about 30% and 21% of the variance in health literacy scores, respectively, nearly twice as much as the variance accounted for by either education or poverty alone.ConclusionsMultivariable models permit a more accurate estimation of health literacy than single predictors. Further, such models can be applied to readily available administrative or census data to produce estimates of average health literacy and identify communities that would benefit most from appropriate, targeted interventions in the clinical setting to address poor quality care and outcomes related to LHL

Guerrilla Open Access

In the 1990s, the Internet offered a horizon from which to imagine what society could become, promising autonomy and self-organization next to redistribution of wealth and collectivized means of production. While the former was in line with the dominant ideology of freedom, the latter ran contrary to the expanding enclosures in capitalist globalization. This antagonism has led to epochal copyrights, where free software and piracy kept the promise of radical commoning alive. Free software, as Christopher Kelty writes in this pamphlet, provided a model ‘of a shared, collective, process of making software, hardware and infrastructures that cannot be appropriated by others’. Well into the 2000s, it served as an inspiration for global free culture and open access movements who were speculating that distributed infrastructures of knowledge production could be built, as the Internet was, on top of free software. For a moment, the hybrid world of advanced Internet giants—sharing code, advocating open standards and interoperability—and users empowered by these services, convinced almost everyone that a new reading/writing culture was possible. Not long after the crash of 2008, these disruptors, now wary monopolists, began to ingest smaller disruptors and close off their platforms. There was still free software somewhere underneath, but without the ‘original sense of shared, collective, process’. So, as Kelty suggests, it was hard to imagine that for-profit academic publishers wouldn't try the same with open access

The Social Licence for Research:Why care.data Ran Into Trouble

In this article we draw on the concept of a social licence to explain public concern at the introduction of care.data, a recent English initiative designed to extract data from primary care medical records for commissioning and other purposes, including research. The concept of a social licence describes how the expectations of society regarding some activities may go beyond compliance with the requirements of formal regulation; those who do not fulfil the conditions for the social licence (even if formally compliant) may experience ongoing challenge and contestation. Previous work suggests that people's cooperation with specific research studies depends on their perceptions that their participation is voluntary and is governed by values of reciprocity, non-exploitation and service of the public good. When these conditions are not seen to obtain, threats to the social licence for research may emerge. We propose that care.data failed to adequately secure a social licence because of: (i) defects in the warrants of trust provided for care.data, (ii) the implied rupture in the traditional role, expectations and duties of general practitioners, and (iii) uncertainty about the status of care.data as a public good. The concept of a social licence may be useful in explaining the specifics of care.data, and also in reinforcing the more general lesson for policy-makers that legal authority does not necessarily command social legitimacy