YONK BLOG'S

Lorelai, I'm not surprised to hear that state/local uteiersvniis are not helpful during the policymaking process. At least where I am, researchers ask the question, What is intellectually interesting to me? and rarely What is a question that will inform social policy? . Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that we don't know what questions are policy relevant today or at least how the big questions can be broken down into pieces small enough to focus one research project around. I agree wholeheartedly that this is a job for connectors, but I'm not sure exactly how I see it working. Academia is such a different beast, with it's own weird conventions. Professors are already so overworked that they definitely won't be able to do this on their own. Maybe if one day a budget for such a person on each grant from NIH was standard, professors could have a dedicated person on each of their grants whose sole job was to connect the research to people who could use it however, this would not solve the problem of asking relevant questions, because the grant would already have outlined what the study was researching. Anyway, I'm very interested to brainstorm more ideas about how to do this. Patrick, I'm sorry I haven't emailed you yet soon!

• Sorry. Ignore that last request. I shloud have known you'd have done it already. I forgot to look at how you organise your blog. I've found exactly what I was hoping for and more under tutorial and reviews. Thank you very much.