Thinking Allowed

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Why Did It Take So Long to Accept the Facts About Covid?

"The importance of airborne transmission in the pandemic was clear long before the World Health Organization finally began to acknowledge it." "If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small...
Source: nytimes.com

No Evidence That Associations Between Adolescents' Digital Technology Engagement and Mental Health Problems Have Increased

Digital technology is ubiquitous in modern adolescence, and researchers are concerned that it has negative impacts on mental health that, furthermore, increase over time. To investigate whether technology is becoming more harmful, we examined changes in associations between technology engagement and...
Source: sagepub.com

Use of 360° virtual reality video in medical obstetrical education: a quasi-experimental design Vera Arents. Pieter C.

Background Video-based teaching has been part of medical education for some time but 360° videos using a virtual reality (VR) device are a new medium that offer extended possibilities. We investigated whether adding a 360° VR video to the internship curriculum leads to an improvement of long-term recall...
Source: biomedcentral.com

Effectiveness of a serious game addressing guideline adherence: cohort study with 1.5-year follow-up Tobias Raupach. Insa

Background Patients presenting with acute shortness of breath and chest pain should be managed according to guideline recommendations. Serious games can be used to train clinical reasoning. However, only few studies have used outcomes beyond student satisfaction, and most of the published evidence is...
Source: biomedcentral.com

Building customer relationships with conversational AI

We’ve all been there. “Please listen to our entire menu as our options have changed. Say or press one for product information…” Sometimes, these automated customer service experiences are effective and efficient—other times, not so much. Many organizations are already using chatbots and virtual...
Source: technologyreview.com

Outcomes Standardisation Project (OSP) for Continuing Medical Education (CE/CME) Professionals:

Despite an increased focus and urgency for CE/CME professionals to effectively and systematically assess the impact of their educational interventions, the community has struggled to do so. This struggle is in large part due to the lack of a standardised outcomes language and a set of unified approaches.
Source: nih.gov

Adaptive testing reduces collusion in online tests

“Rensselaer-developed method proven effective in reducing collusion among students” “When a distanced online test is performed, students receive the same questions, but at varying times depending on their skill level. For instance, students of highest mastery levels receive each question after...
Source: rpi.edu

Using GPT-2 to generate Tweets

blog post image Last summer I blogged about using a Deep Neural Network to generate tweets but only used 3200 of my tweets. Since then I've used Twitter's archive mechanism to retrieve ALL my tweets (just over 30,000) to train a network. Not any old network - the GPT-2 model from OpenAI. This 'finetuning' of an existing...

Tiny Town, Big Decision: What Are We Willing to Pay to Fight the Rising Sea?

On the Outer Banks, homeowners in Avon are confronting a tax increase of almost 50 percent to protect their homes, the only road into town, and perhaps the community’s very existence.
Source: nytimes.com

Andy Weber on rendering bioweapons obsolete & ending the new nuclear arms race

"COVID-19 has provided a vivid reminder of the power of biological threats. But the threat doesn’t come from natural sources alone. Weaponized contagious diseases — which were abandoned by the United States, but developed in large numbers by the Soviet Union, right up until its collapse — have...
Source: 80000hours.org

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

Quantum computing and pharmaceutical research

"Theoretically, quantum computers can prove more powerful than any supercomputer. And recent moves from computer giants such as Google and pharmaceutical titans such as Roche now suggest drug discovery might prove to be quantum computing’s first killer app." In January this year Boehringer-Ingelheim...
Source: ieee.org

Killings by Police Declined after Black Lives Matter Protests

"A study also found body-camera use and community policing increased in places with the most active movements."
Source: scientificamerican.com

'How many dead bodies?' asked Myanmar protester killed on bloodiest day

Shocking news from Myanmar reported by Reuters. "The day before he was killed, internet network engineer Nyi Nyi Aung Htet Naing had posted on Facebook about the increasingly violent military crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Myanmar." "“#How_Many_Dead_Bodies_UN_Need_To_Take_Action,” he wrote,...
Source: reuters.com

Private equity investment in nursing home increase mortality.

Does Private Equity Investment in Healthcare Benefit Patients? Evidence from Nursing Homes Atul Gupta. Sabrina T. Howell. Constantine Yannelis. Abhinav Gupta.
Source: nber.org

Mars rover landing

NASA releases “exhilarating” image of Mars rover just above the planet
Source: arstechnica.com

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

Increasing Students Critical Thinking Skills and Learning Motivation Using Inquiry Mind Map

These researchers from Indonesia explore the use of inquiry-based models in encouraging critical thinking in medical students. "Critical thinking skills are very important to have for students given the rapid distribution of information. To promote the critical thinking skills of the student, it could...
Source: online-journals.org

Declining Life Expectancy in the United States

This Viewpoint reviews the social and economic drivers of declines in longevity in the US, especially among lower socioeconomic status groups, and proposes policy options for the Biden-Harris administration to mitigate the trend, including an increase in the federally mandated minimum wage. Atheendar...
Source: jamanetwork.com

Clinical Trials Overlook Diseases of Low-Income Countries

Conditions like respiratory infections, tuberculosis, and enteric infections that disproportionately affect low-income countries are consistently understudied in clinical trials, according to a recent study. Bridget M. Kuehn. JAMA.
Source: jamanetwork.com