Tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants
All viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, change over time. Most changes have little to no impact on the virus’ properties. However, some changes may affect the virus’s properties, such as how easily it spreads, the associated disease severity, or the performance...
Source: who.int
UK should set tougher air pollution limits, says Kissi-Debrah coroner
The UK government should impose tougher limits on air pollution, in line with World Health Organization recommendations, to prevent more deaths like those of 9-year old Ella Kissi-Debrah, a coroner has urged.
Source: newscientist.com
Left-wing party wins Greenland election, opposes big mining project
Greenland's left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party pledged its opposition to a large rare earth mining project on Wednesday after winning a parliamentary election with more than a third of the votes.
Source: reuters.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
Medical educators’ beliefs about teaching, learning, and knowledge: development of a new framework
Interesting paper about beliefs among medical educators. This has been
developed with a qualitative study of undergraduate educators but the
framework makes for good reading for those of us involved in urging
colleagues and expert speakers to become more learner-centred. "The sharp divide between...
Source: biomedcentral.com
Build for a crisis: Ideas for the future of local news
Enjoyed this story of the ingenuity of local newspapers when struck with the crisis of extreme weather. What does it say for our other complex technology and business layers? When crisis strikes perhaps that's when you find the lowest common tech that works and exactly what purpose you are using it for....
Source: niemanlab.org
Can ultrasound novices develop image acquisition skills after reviewing online ultrasound modules? Elaine Situ-LaCasse.
Background Point-of-care ultrasound is becoming a ubiquitous diagnostic tool, and there has been increasing interest to teach novice practitioners. One of the challenges is the scarcity of qualified instructors, and with COVID-19, another challenge is the difficulty with social distancing between learners...
Source: biomedcentral.com
Friends of the Fal
Friends of the Fal are a group dedicated to providing a Community Conservation Project in Grampound for wildlife, recreation and educational purposes.
Source: friendsofthefal.org
PAIRED: A New Multi-agent Approach for Adversarial Environment Generation
This Google AI blog describes a method for machine learning using paired agents. The gap between the one that did the best and the one that did the worst is regret. That feeling of 'could have done' better is what pushes the 'unsupervised environment design' algorithm towards a better solution. "The...
Source: googleblog.com
COVID-19 has transformed education – here are the 5 innovations we should keep
"Five changes made to higher education during COVID-19 will be beneficial afterwards, according to an expert, including more creative assessment methods." Whilst this is written from the perspective of university education this authentic, rich, and active learning approach can and should be applied to...
Source: weforum.org
Eeek! or E484K mutation and the coronavirus pandemic
Rupert Beale · Eeek! · LRB 19 February 2021: "Uncontrolled spread – as we knew it would – led to an even greater wave of infections, hospitalisations and deaths than last spring. Children were sent to school for one day before the necessary ‘lockdown’ was reimposed. The impulse to keep schools...
Source: lrb.co.uk
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
Frontline workers left "risking lives to provide treatment and care"
"The Department for Health and Social Care's decision to prioritise hospitals at the beginning of the pandemic meant social care providers were left exposed by lack of PPE, says the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee in its first report on PPE procurement published today." "While government...
Source: parliament.uk
Effect of school closures on mortality from coronavirus disease 2019: old and new predictions
"It was predicted in March 2020 that in response to covid-19 a broad lockdown, as opposed to a focus on shielding the most vulnerable members of society, would reduce immediate demand for ICU beds at the cost of more deaths long term. The optimal strategy for saving lives in a covid-19 epidemic is different...
Source: bmj.com
Current themes and challenges facing HPE accreditation in the 21st century
A supplement in BMC Medical Education on Health Professional Education accreditation from the community of practice The International Health Professions Accreditation Outcomes Consortium (IFPAOC) - which was founded in 2012. This supplement focuses on graduate and residency programmes but it also addresses...
Source: biomedcentral.com
Proposal for a New Tool to Evaluate a Serious Game
Proposal for a New Tool to Evaluate a Serious Game: The current enthusiasm of generations of students for video games and the marked interest of training institutions for the use of playful strategies, which facilitate learning, has encouraged the development and use of formative games called Serious...
Source: online-journals.org
Oppose the educational technology algorithims and technosolutions?
Essay by Audrey Watters on schools and the technology industry ... basically f**k the algorithm. "Robot Teachers, Racist Algorithms, and Disaster Pedagogy: I have volunteered to be a guest speaker in classes this Fall. It's really the least I can do to help teachers and students through another tough...
Source: hackeducation.com
Ways to prevent crime other than police and prisons
Ways to prevent crime other than police and prisons: There are less harmful ways to stop a lot of crime from happening in the first place. Listen to Jennifer Doleac — Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, and Director of the Justice Tech Lab — is an expert on empirical research...
Source: 80000hours.org
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