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Over 27,000 students share how colleges and universities could improve digital learning

"A Jisc survey of 27,069 higher and further education students reveals that most are pleased with their digital learning, but areas such as wellbeing, mental health and staff digital skills need more attention." Get the basics right (like college WiFi)Make learning sessions more interactive Record lessons...
Source: jisc.ac.uk

Covid vaccines cut risk of serious illness by 80% in over-80s

"The UK will soon be in a "very different world", government scientists promise after the success of the jabs."
Source: bbc.com

The Namib Desert bears a scar from a meteorite impact.

"In the vastness of one of the world’s oldest deserts lies a relatively recent geologic feature: the Roter Kamm crater (“red comb” or “red crest/ridge” in German). An astronaut onboard the International Space Station photographed the crater while orbiting over the Namib Desert. It is approximately...
Source: nasa.gov

Rocket Report Cornwall

Cornwall says “LOL, no” to space tourism. "If we're being blunt about it ... One council member, John Fitter, was more explicit, saying, 'If we were to entertain this, it would be quite ridiculous and send out the wrong message to those people in Cornwall who could possibly be suffering on below...
Source: arstechnica.com

Why Are COVID-19 Case Numbers Dropping?

"We don’t know. That part is easy. Also easy is that case numbers really are falling — it’s not just reduced testing — and it’s happening pretty much everywhere. Urban areas and rural. Red states and blue. Places with broad vaccine rollouts and those with hardly any. North and South America,...
Source: jwatch.org

Fires Raged in the Amazon Again in 2020

"After intense fires in the Amazon captured global attention in 2019, fires again raged throughout the region in 2020. According to an analysis of satellite data from NASA’s Amazon dashboard, the 2020 fire season was actually more severe by some key measures." “Our system identified about 23,000...
Source: nasa.gov

NHS sets up mental health hubs for staff traumatised by Covid

Forty hubs in England will field calls from frontline staff and contact those at higher risk directly
Source: theguardian.com

Reconstructing the Menu of a Pub in Ancient Pompeii

When in Rome ... or Pompeii. "Eat like a first-century Roman, using recent archaeological discoveries as your guide." "In consideration of some of this evidence, if we were to hypothesize that what we’ve read in the Latin literary record about “boiled meat,” “broth and chunks of meat,” and...
Source: atlasobscura.com

Using the right tools for the job

Since this blog has been up I've fiddled with some text analysis stuff by analysing the text and making recommendations for similar blog entries. Did it all in PHP and MySQL just to understand how the algorithms work. Eventually it started to take about 5 hours to: tokenise and stemming the textcalculate...

Preventing critical failure

Can routinely collected data be repurposed to predict avoidable patient harm? A quantitative descriptive study Objectives To determine whether sharing of routinely collected health service performance data could have predicted a critical safety failure at an Australian maternity service. Design Observational...
Source: bmj.com

Goondiwindi Argus says that Government sets talks with Facebook

"Frydenberg and Zuckerberg to talk on Friday in an attempt to resolve news stand-off." Apart from the fact that Facebook has blocked them - sharing news stories from Australian newspaper websites would be so much easier if they configured their pages for sharing.
Source: goondiwindiargus.com.au

Abundant Rain Turns Namibia Green

The landscape has been transformed by the wettest rainy season since 2011. "January 2021 saw rainfall totals double to triple the norm in the northeastern, central, and southern parts of Namibia. According to a weather monitor in Windhoek, 228 millimeters (9 inches) of rain fell in January; the long-term...
Source: nasa.gov

Largest COVID-19 contact tracing study to date finds children key to spread, evidence of superspreaders.

Largest COVID-19 contact tracing study to date finds children key to spread, evidence of superspreaders: Researchers from the Princeton Environmental Institute find the continued spread of novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is driven by only a small percentage of those who become infected.
Source: princeton.edu

How we learnt to stop worrying and love web scraping: For Nicholas DeVito, Georgia Richards and Peter Inglesby, custom webscrapers

How we learnt to stop worrying and love web scraping: For Nicholas DeVito, Georgia Richards and Peter Inglesby, custom webscrapers have driven their research — and their collaborations. For Nicholas DeVito, Georgia Richards and Peter Inglesby, custom webscrapers have driven their research — and...
Source: nature.com

Dying in a Leadership Vacuum Why has the United States handled this pandemic so badly?

Dying in a Leadership Vacuum Why has the United States handled this pandemic so badly? The NEJM Editors asks what has gone so wrong in the US and lays the blame with the political leadership. "This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were...
Source: nejm.org

Psoriasis severity: commonly used clinical thresholds may not adequately convey patient impact - PubMed: Patients with PASI

Psoriasis severity: commonly used clinical thresholds may not adequately convey patient impact - PubMed: Patients with PASI or BSA scores less than 10 can have major quality of life impairment. In general, the objective measures of BSA and PASI alone, when excluding DLQI, may not fully capture the impact...
Source: nih.gov

The truth about the Second Wave

The truth about the Second Wave - uncancelled: We need to move away from binary certainties – the battle of the Professors of Hope vs the Doom mongers is not a helpful one. The truth is somewhere in between. It’s nuanced. Dr Matt Morgan, ICU Consultant in Cardiff, argues that we need to say "I don't...
Source: uncancelled.co.uk

5,000 people have pledged to give at least 10% of their lifetime incomes to effective charities

5,000 people have pledged to give at least 10% of their lifetime incomes to effective charities: Today we reached a major milestone. More than 5,000 people have pledged to give at least ten percent of their lifetime earnings to effective charities.
Source: givingwhatwecan.org

Sports During COVID-19 - When What Doesn't Matter Actually Matters a Lot

Sports During COVID-19 - When What Doesn't Matter Actually Matters a Lot - HIV and ID Observations: "A few weeks ago, I got a text from a long-time ID colleague here in Boston: Hey Paul want ur opinion … this is for an interview with MLB radio, and no one knows less about baseball than I do, but...
Source: jwatch.org

Adaptive tutorials versus web-based resources in radiology: a mixed methods analysis in junior doctors of efficacy and engagement:

Adaptive tutorials versus web-based resources in radiology: a mixed methods analysis in junior doctors of efficacy and engagement: Radiology education is limited in undergraduate Medicine programs. Junior doctors might not have the necessary background to effectively order and interpret diagnostic imaging...
Source: biomedcentral.com