Holly Witteman

I’m keenly interested in the design features of online health applications and the way people respond to different aspects of presentation and interaction. One of the things that triggered a set of questions for me was one of the websites I analyzed in my dissertation research, which offered detailed estimates of risks related to prostate [...]

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I’m at a conference in LA at the moment; it feels so lovely and strange to be able to walk around outside in short sleeves. I took a really excellent short course on Sunday afternoon about the psychology of decision-making, led by Alan Schwartz. At one point, he was talking about the gist paradox. There [...]

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A number of years ago, I joined a Master’s swim team. I was doing triathlons at the time, and the swim was my weakest leg. The team I joined divided the pool into four lanes: A (fastest swimmers), B (next fastest), C (next fastest) and D (slowest.) Workouts were organized accordingly; faster swimmers were assigned [...]

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I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the close relationship between power and responsibility. It keeps coming up in my research. It has shown itself in three different projects/papers I am working on, and I’m attending a workshop soon on the idea of the flip side of empowerment: a shifting burden of work. It’s [...]

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How have I never heard of this? (Apparently I do not spend enough time on the right places on the Web.) Better late than never, I say. I’ve already had a writing-heavy month, and I had some loose goals for next month, so I’m firming them up. By Dec 20 (conveniently: one month from now, [...]

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Papers changed my life. I have used it to organize the 1200+ (and counting) pdfs that I have collected and cited in the course of my time in grad school. I love: the autofill on the metadata (I wish it worked better on some of my areas of interest — I rarely get more than [...]

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I’ve realized recently that even as my research interests take me further and further away from my engineering background, I remain incredibly grateful for my training. Engineering is essentially all about problem solving, and the approach is just so sensible: 1. Establish what you want to know. Write it down. 2. Figure out what you [...]

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I ran into Hans Oh at a meeting last night. A few years ago he blogged somewhere between agreement and disagreement with a presentation I gave at eHealth 2005 in which I argued that trying to make one-size-fits-all eHealth applications is, at best, wasted effort, and at worst, harmful. That topic came up again last [...]

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I attended a conference about prostate cancer this weekend. It was great — conferences are time-consuming, but it’s useful to hear what’s new in the field and to connect (or reconnect) with researchers from other areas and locations. I got a really lovely compliment from someone whose work I admire, and that, as well some [...]

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The beauty of having a very intense period of focus on my Ph.D. is that it really renews my excitement for my topic. I found some interesting new stuff today and am already tossing around ideas of how either incorporate it into my existing research plan, or extend my research in this area afterwards.

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