Alan Schwartz's Home Page

I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I'm also a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics. My curriculum vitae is here.

Interests

Judgment and Decision-Making

• Making Medical Decisions: A Physician's Guide. A book providing physicians with a practical translation of current theory and practice in medical decision making for use with their patients. Available in June 2008 from Cambridge University Press.
• Life goals in health decisions. How do non-medical goals that may be achieved in the future impact the way people evaluate their health-related quality of life and make medical decisions?
• Assessment of Evidence-Based Medicine Skills. How well do physicians learn to evaluate the validity of evidence from the clinical research literature, interpret results, and apply them to their patients? How can it be better taught, better learned, better practiced? What role should clinical librarians play? What are the implications for clinical behavior and patient outcomes?
• Clinical values. What is the ideal physician, and how does the ideal differ for different patients? Are patients whose physicians share their ideals more satisfied with their physician and do they have better health outcomes? (With Arnold Eiser and Arthur Elstein).
• Perceptions of and Attitudes toward Risk in Treatments. What aspects of treatment options or clinical trials cause people to consider them more or less risky? How much risk are people willing to accept?

I'm the course director for MHPE 441: Medical Decision Making (in a semester version and a 1-week short course version), MHPE 494: Introductory Quantitative Data Analysis, and MHPE 504: Leadership and Organizational Behavior in Health Professions Education, and have also taught in MHPE 431: Research Design and Grant Writing.

Computer-mediated communication and information

I have also written four books published by O'Reilly and Associates, Inc. The first is called Managing Mailing Lists, and came out in March 1998. It offers advice for people using mailing list management software, and specifically targets administrators of LISTSERV Lite, Majordomo, Listproc, and SmartList.

The second, co-authored with Simson Garfinkel, is called Stopping Spam and came out in October 1998. It's a toolkit for all levels of users, administrators, and ISPs who are fed up with Internet spam, and offers a social and historical perspective on spamming, an explanation of why spam is a serious problem, technical suggestions for avoiding, filtering, and responding to spam for users and administrators, and legal and political approaches to making spam unprofitable or illegal.

The third, by Simson Garfinkel, Gene Spafford, and me, is Practical Unix and Internet Security, 3rd edition and came out in February 2003. It focuses on how to securely configure and operate Unix systems, especially those connected to the Internet or providing network services. We discuss security not only from a conceptual standpoint, but from a truly practical standpoint - things you should do, now, to protect your systems.

The fourth is SpamAssassin, and came out in June 2004. It documents the installation, configuration, and use of the SpamAssassin spam-checking system (versions 2.63 and 3.0) for Unix system administrators using the Postfix, Sendmail, Exim, or qmail mail servers.

I'm also an LPIC-2 certified linux system administrator. and co-author of the World Bank Information Technology Security Handbook for developing nations, published by infoDev. And I've written a few technical articles, for Web Techniques magazine and ONLamp.com.

Freemasonry

Homebrewing

Knitting