In academia, usually we love to add some new pages to the human knowledge; we are looking for increasing the current knowledge most of the time. Therefore, usually we forget that we already have a lot of existing knowledge and data and we rarely take advantage of using these data. Our goal is to make more data and do more statistics on our findings but what will happen to the data, usually nothing. We save data in the computers’ files or big hardware drawers and we start another project to generate more data.
We save our data with stupid passwords and we don’t let others to have access to our findings. We simply ignore the fact that the most of these findings are produced by public funding. In the academic world, you can see a race between data producers, but rarely people sit and think about the outputs and try to apply the findings in existing problem settings.
I love this observation by Professor Rex Fendall:
“Civilization will be judged not so much on its acquisition of new knowledge but rather on the application of existing knowledge to the betterment of living”
Filed under: Blogroll, Health Policy | Tagged: knowledge, Rex Fendall
