SCIENCES links: Holistic Bliss or Tristram Shandy ... V

Finally: what of the content of the SCIENCES links page? Firstly, a little background -

Hodges' model has a key role to play in engagement. In health this means helping people to help themselves. Assist them to use the knowledge and experience they have of their illnesses. When necessary educate them - patients, carers and the general public. Use the latest research to further health promotion and preventive measures. These efforts, these messages though must compete with an awful cacophony of noise - political and cultural in the media - that is frequently itself awful dross.

Little wonder then that the science, educational and political communities are so concerned about the public switch-off, with citizens ill-equipped to critique and engage in debate on key SCIENCE issues - biotechnology, nanotech, astronautics - funding!

Engagement is not for everyone of course, but surely we can do better this?

Over on this right-hand MECHANISTIC side of h2cm what should political expectations (aspirations!) be regards the holistic bandwidth of a given citizenry? What does the 21st C. curriculum for the citizen look like? Is it as taught, the written, the learned, DIY, the 'take away', the media delivered or the hidden, ...?

Back to the task at hand: Like all the links pages SCIENCES also places health related subjects uppermost for ready access together with selected conferences. Not surprisingly ANATOMY & PHYS are first on the top row, followed by selected NURSING AND CARE THEORIES. If the h2cm website has any roots as a project it started here and spread.

The media in general and IT commentators in particular stress information overload. The relentless increase in the volume of information year-on-year has a prime contributor amongst the research community in medicine.

When we speak of General Practitioner (family physician) it seems increasingly difficult to determine what is general? There are so many branches of medicine even before specialised directions must be taken. The costs and risks associated with 21st C. medicine mean that filtering the research literature to find the treatment pearls is crucial to effective practice, outcomes, management and policy. So, EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE (EBP) that utilises e-libraries and electronic databases is the tool of our times and with QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH completes the top row.

Before moving down a peg (if digression sensitive turn away now).

If you look at Hodges' model and its quadrants with a nurse's eye, you know for intramuscular injections the dorsogluteal - the upper-outer quadrant of the buttock - has been cited as a preferred site. How fitting then that the upper-right quadrant in h2cm is the SCIENCES. Problem is of course upper-outer translates as upper-right AND upper-left and sticking needles in people is a pretty invasive and mechanistic task. That upper-outer LEFT quadrant in h2cm translates to the humanistic [INTERPERSONAL] domain, so sticking needles there may be anatomically correct, but epistemologically speaking where are the talking therapies? (The model also at this point invites dialogue and debate on addiction.)

Recently, I've been researching a paper on socio-technical structures (which will also attempt to explain the hyphen), this project-making or -breaking conjunction of the social and technical for me begs the question of the locus of INFORMATICS. There are many schools of informatics in addition to HEALTH INFORMATICS I & II. If it is sensible to ask of these informatics fields, which h2cm domains would they claim as their primary home? [COMMUNITY INFORMATICS is listed in the political domain.] The great and ongoing efforts in CLINICAL CODING AND CLASSIFICATION within medicine are also listed here.

I've often wondered about how much duplication there is in the various electronic databases that are available? What metrics would you use? There's a major Phd study for someone there if not already completed or under way? We see rationalisation in other industries, business sectors until then (or the semantic web) the plethora of available resources in INFO SOURCES further extends EBP. In artificial intelligence pruning the search is an essential strategy. Is the internet tree still growing or shrinking? I understand it is actually shrinking - rationalisation has begun?

The next three categories represent a key personal interest of mine. IMHO graphics, diagrams and visualization can help conjoin health, informatics, h2cm and the wider world; hence DIAGRAMS and VISUALIZATION I & II. Is there a role for DIAGRAMmatic reasoning in health and social care?

It could be argued (and has been) that visual literacy is yet another educational milestone.

PROGRAMMING is great fun - if you are not concerned with hydraulic control systems, air traffic control software, or clinical systems. MARKUP LANGUAGES variations of XML have proved revolutionary. In reading about and my initial tinkering with Drupal, XML is in there (and so much more). In education and nursing theory much is written about the need to bridge the theory-practice gap. Perhaps the gap is necessary: a velodrome has to have a centre. XML is a software technology that can bridge gaps in transforming data, information and knowledge.

As in other domains I wondered where to place ENVIRONMENT & ECOLOGY? In the four introductions to the website, I've stressed the relationship (dependency) between green issues, health and our quality of life. ENVIRONMENT & ECOLOGY should ideally reside in each of the domains, or at the centre the 5th domain - the spiritual - made up of all four.

Our VIRTUAL creations and worlds are presented next. IF you want to conjoin data sources, users, and present information & engage users, THEN use the senses that are available. Health and social care records can benefit from visualization as tantalisingly glimpsed in early work on visualization in the social sciences. (I'll see if I can switch these around a bit.)

Next: ASTRONOMY: Orion - you started this journey from my bedroom window. Rising in Winter standing tall then giving way to Spring. We need to give the real stars back to the people:

Turn off the light,
take a deep breath and relax

[Engima - Mea Culpa]

SCIENCE could comprise so much more space permitting just one scratch of this surface - pharmacology, chemistry, physics the new disciplines all deserve listings of their own.

SCIENCE is most clearly evinced in MATHS & LOGIC that provide the basis for ENGINEERING. The final two categories return to programming. Compared with the others this final row is smaller. I have to contain this pantological journey. The H2CM links pages are big enough: I know my limits.

The final category RUBY [TOOLSET] is perhaps poetic justice since programming is oft described as SCIENCE and ART. One thing that Hodges' model is about -

folding time and space.