Thursday, July 13, 2006

Working on my IFA contributions

I am currently working on my contributions to the IFA proceedings. The deadline is on Friday, but sending it by Monday morning if enough. Unfortunately, I haven't started with the articles nor the presentations yet! And rumors go that others haven't done much more either. This is a typical occurrence for conferences. In many cases, deadlines are postponed by a week or two, and I would be surprised if the same happens here.

So what am I going to talk about? The first talk is rather low-key and non-controversial. I am going to give a workshop with "How should we use the Internet to help researchers and do meta-analysis?". I am hoping that people are discussing ways to utilise the Internet for research on stuttering. As a warm-up, I will give a quick presentation on different ways on how this could be done, and on what the obstacles are in my opinion. And then hopefully the participants will "take over" and a lively discussion will start. Here is a list of Internet utilities that I find useful:

- Pub Medline: Internet archive of all published articles on stuttering
- Messenger and VoIP: Chatting and talking to other researchers for free (I have done this extensively with Per Alm, Roland Pauli, and Oren Civier)
- Email: goes much faster than writing letters. Yaruss & Onslow debate (but this one is old by now! :-)
- Pdf / Word Files: you can easily send your research article to someone. (I often ask researcher to send me their article).
- Mailing List:
- List Archive: like Judy Kuster
- Blog: THE STUTTERING BRAIN of course, always the latest on stuttering (big readership after Pagaclone story broke=
- Replis in Blogs: Ingham.
- Online conferences:
- Wikipedia entry
- Open articles & Replies:

Some issues:

- researchers have no time.
- too many sources.
- secrecy dominates.
- old generation.
- no real scientific debate: more teaching of others
- too much information.
- difficult to judge quality of information
- etc

So I will make 4-5 slides for this workshop, and write 1-2 pages. That's it. The other article will be hard-core science. I want to make people aware that you cannot just apply the standard random control trials framework for stuttering. I have done a few statistical simulations, and show that for example the Lidcombe results are not as clear as they think.

More tomorrow.

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