Category: academics

  • The Imposter Phenomenon

    I attended a fascinating presentation earlier this week. The presentation was about the “imposter phenomenon” by Diane Zorn (PhD candidate at York University). The Imposter Phenomenon is when high achievers (e.g., graduate students, professors, lawyers, physicians, etc) are “plagued by the fear that they are not as capable or intelligent as others think they are,…

  • To PhD or not Phd?

    I’ve been asked on several occasions about studying ehealth/health informatics at the graduate level (i.e., masters or doctoral/PhD degrees). Some seem to be interested in advancing their own knowledge so that they can use their new found knowledge and skills to further their career in the workplace. For those interested in pursuing a doctoral degree…

  • Reference manager, electronic databases, and other thoughts from a systematic review

    Here are some thoughts as I work on my systematic review. Electronic Databases I’ve been searching Medline and EMBASE and I have as good a search strategy that I’ll get. Since I’m mostly looking for theory-type papers, I think I’m going to get a considerable amount of “noise” – okay, I can deal with that.…

  • Free thinking Fridays

    I just returned from one of my regular meetings of the “Monday Morning group” (we now meet on Fridays). Today’s discussion was tentatively about Michel Foucault, using Discipline and Punish as the text. We weren’t able to get into a real in-depth discussion because the group had difficulty understanding the text. Why is it that…

  • Thoughts for a rainy Wednesday

    I’m experiencing “bad” network traffic here at the Centre today. It’s raining outside, and I just got back from a presentation by Anna Gagliardi. Anna was doing a dry-run of her dissertation defence on June 22, 2005. Her topic was “Patient and professional perspectives on performance measurement in oncology”. I won’t divulge the details of…

  • Publication Update – What is eHealth?

    Great news. My article (Oh, Rizo, Enkin, Jadad – What is eHealth (3): A Systematic Review of Published Definitions) is now indexed on PubMed/Medline. You can see the page here. Okay, now for my second update. To my surprise, another paper on the same topic was published just a month after mine in the Journal…

  • Baffle ’em with BS

    A few years back, when I was a co-op student, a manager gave me a piece of advice that I’ll never forget: “When in doubt, baffle them with BS”. In his many years of experience, he found that most people will try to *sound* impressive by using big words in non-coherent sentences. When challenged (which…

  • I am the guinea-pig (not the walrus)

    Recently, I had an opportunity to participate in a research study as a study participant/subject. I wanted to experience for myself what it was like to be on the “other side”, since most of my experience with research is as a researcher. The details of the study itself aren’t so interesting, so I won’t describe…