Richard Thomson has research interests in quality in health care and health services research. He previously headed the Northern Regional Health Authority's multidisciplinary quality directorate with responsibility for facilitating audit and quality assurance activities across the region. He has contributed to several national groups concerned with influencing policy on audit, including that at...

This paper explores the role of ethics in higher education by examining the academic training and departmental home of professors who teach courses in ethics. In particular, it examines the extent to which individuals teaching courses related to ethics have formal disciplinary education either in philosophy or in religion, the two academic disciplines that historically have been most closely as...

John S. McCartney received BSCE and MSCE degrees from the University of Colorado Boulder and a PhD degree in civil engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. McCartney’s research interests include unsaturated soil mechanics, geosynthetics, and thermally active geotechnical systems. He has received several research awards, including the NSF Faculty Early Development (CAREER) Award i...

century, we practice in an era of accelerating communication and expanding expectations. Partners, consultants and staff depend on our notes to effectively extend care, while patients may – and increasingly do – peer into the documents we create about them. Because of this common interest and potential scrutiny, our medical records need to furnish clear collegial communication and assure patien...

The pervasive use of social media provides massive data about individuals’ online social activities and their social relations. The building block of most existing recommendation systems is the similarity between users with social relations, i.e., friends. While friendship ensures some homophily, the similarity of a user with her friends can vary as the number of friends increases. Research fro...

James P. Spillane is an associate professor of education and social policy and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, 2115 North Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208–2615, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. His research explores the policy-implementation process at the state, school district, school, and classroom levels, focusing on inter-governmental...

The Toronto experience suggests that there may be several general lessons for academic health sciences complexes to learn from the Olivieri/Apotex affair (OAA) regarding the ethics, independence, and integrity of clinical research sponsored by for profit enterprises. From a local perspective, the OAA occurred when there already was a focus on the complex and changing relationships among the Uni...

A world-renowned physician-researcher, David Bates, MD, MSc, is Chief of the Division of General Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA, and a Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, where he is codirector of the Program in Clinical Effectiveness. He is the Medical Director of Clinical and Quality Analysis, Information Systems at Partners...

research is focused on understanding how people collaborate across professional, organizational, and geographical boundaries on outsourced systems development projects. Her research interests deal with situated learning and the construction of intra-organizational boundaries and with IS use as well as with the relationships between representations and practices in the context of IS use. Her wor...