There's a line from a science fiction novel that, to me, captures the drama of applied research. In William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, an unknown person or persons are publishing video fragments online one at a time—pieces of a larger story, discovered at random on hidden sites on the internet. Taken together, these fragments are known as "the footage." In the book, whole online forums are devoted to discovering who is publishing the videos and why. One of the ongoing debates concerns "progressives" versus "completists"...
In gem cutting, a "facet" is one of the cut faces that causes the gem to shine and sparkle. But facets don't just reflect light. In the words of the International Gem Society, facets "control the entry and exit of light" from the gem. In other words, cutting a new facet—seeing or finding a new angle on the stone—allows the viewer to literally see further into its depths. It's an enchanting idea, and one that, surprisingly enough, applies to this issue of AEDR. In 2013, in the second issue ever of AEDR, we published a literature review...
When I was younger, I spent a lot of time at science fairs—so much time, in fact, that two of the three new cars my parents bought during my childhood were purchased while I was busy presenting three-sided foamcore posters to skeptical rounds of judges. My favorite project was the one I did in fourth grade. I wanted to find out whether heated gels were stronger or weaker than cold ones. In other words, would heating or cooling my bubble-blowing syrup help me make bigger bubbles? It was a great project. It was messy and required me to...
The time to beat is 17 years. We think we can blow it out of the water. In 2011, a group of researchers from Cambridge University compiled studies on research "lags"—the time it takes to convert research findings into useful patient care applications—and found that the average was 17 years. That's 17 years to go from a discovery in the lab to care for a patient, 17 years from studying a phenomenon to saving a life, 17 years from having an insight about care to implementing it. The broader term for the movement from research findings to practice is "translational science," which can include...
Emergency dispatchers are no strangers to misunderstandings about what they do. Even the U.S. government classifies emergency dispatchers as "clerks," rather than as the protective service professionals they are. In research on emergency dispatch, we see plenty of misunderstanding as well. Mostly, it comes in the form of narrowed focus. When people talk about emergency dispatch research, they generally mean they're studying one of two things times or cardiac arrests. The vast majority of emergency dispatch research over the past twenty years has focused on one of these two topics. Yet as...
One of the most rewarding parts of being involved with the world's first-ever peer-reviewed journal of emergency dispatch is that we get to work with a lot of new researchers. Working with those who are just entering the field helps us remember how important—and how exciting—research is. When we do research, we get to be on the very forefront of knowledge. We're no longer only learning at second hand, but actually creating new knowledge ourselves, and that's something we love to share. Science has always been an effort of generations, with every new researcher building on and expanding what...
