The host is interviewing Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, a British medical journal recently made (in)famous for feeding the vaccine/autism hoax.

The editor says The Lancet must be more careful in the future.

Translation: more of The Lancet‘s future articles will support the status quo. This will reduce hoaxes, but it crowds out legitimate alternative theories.

Are academic journals even relevant? Whatever relevancy they have is mainly because the research community is clinging to an outdated model. And let’s don’t forget these wickedly expensive journals have their own fiscal incentive to perpetuate themselves.

Research is living and constantly evolving. Why then rely on a content delivery method that can only create frozen, dead documents? Where corrections require new, frozen documents? This is silly.

Some say if we don’t have journals, we effectively lose the peer review process because respected academics aren’t the gatekeepers. Hardly. Wikipedia’s not perfect, but it shows that a completely open model, that even allows anonymous editing, can produce highly reliable information. Services like the Educause-sponsored academia.edu show it shouldn’t be hard to limit involvement just to the research community–not to the “select few” researchers but the entire community. This increases veracity by at least an order of magnitude.

Richard Horton said that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the originator of the fraudulent research, was respected politically and academically for years, and his words were taken as “gospel truth.”

Doesn’t this sound familiar? Doesn’t this sound like James Hansen, Al Gore, IPCC, etc.? All of whom deliver polemic research so political, agenda-driven, and error-full that people are stating to question the scientific basis of global warming?

“School’s out forever”? Not by a long shot!

If something happened and I needed to quit now, I could walk with a Master of Science in Engineering Management. As tempting as that sounds, I need to push on.

All that sits between me completing my Doctorate of Engineering in Engineering Management is the praxis. A praxis is a giant research project that’s equivalently difficult as four graduate courses. But before I do that, I still have to assemble my supervisory committee and passing a qualifying exam.

I will meet with my research adviser soon to discuss next steps.

On Friday, I passed my Preliminary Counseling Exam. This was a 30 minute chat with three EMIS department professors where they verified knowledge of basic concepts. I flubbed some precise definitions (e.g., couldn’t remember the exact words behind the abbreviation MARR), but I showed competence in the heuristics of the concepts. For most of the session, we chatted about my proposed praxis topic, which is on speed limits. This topic dovetails well with engineering management, especially with its economic implications.

My research advisor agrees that I have finished all advanced coursework, so I am formally cleared to begin the preliminary praxis steps of assembling my supervisory committee and passing a qualifying exam.

This degree requires 66 credit hours of coursework and a 12 hour praxis. To date, I have earned 52 hours. Fortunately, my Master of Science in Computer Science, which I earned in May 2003, satisfied all the elective credits for the doctorate, so I am really only doing twelve courses beyond that degree.

I have finished the following courses. (EMIS means Engineering Management and Information Sciencece (my department), CSE means Computer Science and Engineering, ENCE means Environmental and Civil Engineering, and CISB is for the Cox School of Businesses‘s Caruth Institute for Entrepreneurship.)

• EMIS 7370 – Engineering Statistics
• EMIS 8360 – Operations Research
• EMIS 7362 – Production and Operations Management
• EMIS 8378 – Optimization Models for Decision Support
• ENCE 7391 – Urban Transportation Systems
• EMIS 8361 – Economic Decision Analysis
• EMIS 8363 – Engineering Finance
• CSE 8344 – Computer Networks
• CSE 7382 – Computer Graphics
• CSE 7348 – Internetworking Protocols
• CSE 8313 – Object-Oriented Analysis & Design
• CSE 8340 – Software Practicum
• CSE 8391 – Mobile Computing & Databases
• CSE 7350 – Algorithm Engineering
• CSE 8330 – Database Management Systems
• CSE 7381 – Computer Architecture
• CSE 7394 – XML & Java
• CSE 7192 – IP & Information Technology

This spring, I will take Experimental Statistics (STAT 5372) and Network Flows ( (EMIS 8374). I expect this spring to be the most difficult semester of my graduate career. I hope I get through it without too much bruising!

After this spring, I have three courses left:

• CISB 6210 – Essential Law For The Entrepreneur (this is an MBA course)
• EMIS 8362 – Engineering Accounting
• EMIS 8364 – Management for Engineers

…and that pesky praxis.

This course is a special topics survey course that will cover the math of transportation planning, such as roadway capacity, and the practicalities of managing traffic control, such as timing of traffic signals and appropriate speed limits.

I have already gotten my praxis topic approved. Guess what it is?? Speed limits! My advisor has some experience with traffic engineering, and he showed interest in the subject.

I am so lucky. How many people get to pursue a passion for academic purposes? Now I will have a real excuse to finally thoroughly research this topic.

I see two ways to properly study for this exam:

1. Pore through massive amounts of material and work lots of practice problems.
2. Skim everything and concentrate on just know where everything is in the notes and textbook.

Given that I am an “efficient engineer” (per David Russo) I have chosen door number 2.

I don’t know how well I’ll do. I just want to get it over with.

Time for Marie Callender’s Country Fried Chicken meal. (Ugh.)

I should complete this MSEM degree in fall 2005. That assumes I take a course this summer, two courses this fall, and one course each in spring and fall 2005.

There is also a Doctor of Engineering in Engineering Management degree. In my case that degree could only require five courses more courses beyond my MSEM plus a praxis. A praxis is a dissertation that’s useful in a practical sense. This is opposed to traditional PhD dissertations that are just “contributing to the body of knowledge.”

This DEEM degree is very tempting. I could probably finish it in fall 2006, and I could make everyone call me Dr. Cambre. (My wife would have to get used to that.)

If I was to complete the MSEM and accept the degree, I would not be able to count those courses towards a DEEM. The DEEM requires that at least 18 hours of “course work“ (6 standard 3 hour courses) are not used for a previous post-baccalaureate degree. So what I want is to be simultaneously enrolled in MSEM and DEEM credits. I would satisfy all MSEM requirements as early as possible and then start on DEEM stuff. If at any point during my DEEM track I decide that I just cannot continue, I could dump the DEEM and stick with the MSEM.

I will meet with the Engineering Management, Information, and Systems department chairman to discuss this.