RIME 60 Years: Celebration and Future Horizons

This year marks the 60th anniversary (1961-2021) of Research in Medical Education (RIME). Over the past 6 decades, RIME has selected medical education research to be presented each year at the Association of American Medical Colleges Annual Meeting: Learn Serve Lead and published in a supplement of Academic Medicine. In this article, the authors surveyed RIME chairs from the past 20 years to identify ways that RIME has advanced medical education research and to generate ideas for future directions. RIME chairs described advancements in the rigor and impact of RIME research and the timeliness of the topics, often serving as a driver for cutting-edge research. They highlighted RIME\u27s role in promoting qualitative research, introducing new epistemologies, and encouraging networking as a means of career advancement. Going forward, RIME chairs suggested (1) strengthening collaborations with formal advanced MEd and PhD degree programs, (2) creating formal mentorship channels for junior and minority faculty, and (3) promoting research related to knowledge translation

Positive Academic Leadership: Stop Putting Out Fires; Start Making a Difference

A highly interactive workshop on strategies that can help chairs move towards positive outcomes in even the most negative of situations, making their leadership more effective, effortless, and enjoyable. Participants will come away from this workshop with clear, practical ideas about how they can help their departments become more positive, visionary, and forward-looking

Design guidelines and evaluation of an ergonomic chair feature capable of providing support to forward-leaning postures

This research investigated the need, design, and evaluation of a product capable of providing support to forward-leaning postures. Due to the high occurrence of low-back pain in industry potentially due to workers performing their tasks while assuming forward-leaning postures, along with the biological plausibility of these postures causing low-back pain, the need was established for a product that provides forward-leaning support. An envelope was quantified, ranging from the 5th percentile female to the 95th percentile male, to establish the range of potential forward-leaning postures. The design of a Support-Arm for use with current ergonomic chairs was discussed and design feature specifications were then provided. A Latin Square statistical design was employed to evaluate a Support-Arm model alongside 8 other commonly used chairs over 3 different postures. Subjects, overall, had lower peak pressures for the buttock-thigh region, increased productivity, higher comfort levels, and higher buttock-thigh contact areas when seated in the Support-Arm model chair as compared to the other chairs. Subjects, overall, also ranked this chair first over the other chairs for preferred use after having sitting experience in all 9 chairs. In an additional part of the evaluation, subjects chose their own set-up of the Support-Arm model chair. Eleven of the 18 subjects chose to use the Support-Arm when their workstation was located 36 above the floor. Subjects confirmed the need to design a Support-Arm capable of providing forward leaning support to the entire envelope of forward-leaning postures. Statistical evaluation revealed several significant differences between the chairs. The results gave no indication that the use of a Support-Arm for forward-leaning support may cause detrimental effects to users or overall chair ergonomics. Future research could track workers use of a Support-Arm in industry and compare their occurrence of low-back pain to a control group

The INSEN Experience, by INSEN Chairs

As a feature of this issue, we asked INSEN chairs to share their thoughts about what the organization has meant to them as they led this network of colleagues in the mission of improving nuclear security education and training at institutions and organizations around the world. Below are their stories. The chairs describe their paths to INSEN leadership, the organization’s work, challenges, and successes, and how the experience of leading INSEN affected their professional and personal lives. IJNS thanks each of the authors contributing to this collaborative article. Every chair has done a tremendous job in their tenure as INSEN’s leader—and we, the membership and all who have benefitted from their dedication and expertise, are deeply grateful. We look forward to INSEN’s next decade under the leadership of colleagues and friends like these

What Can We Do to Improve Peer Review in NLP?

Peer review is our best tool for judging the quality of conference submissions, but it is becoming increasingly spurious. We argue that a part of the problem is that the reviewers and area chairs face a poorly defined task forcing apples-to-oranges comparisons. There are several potential ways forward, but the key difficulty is creating the incentives and mechanisms for their consistent implementation in the NLP community.Comment: To appear at Findings of EMNL

Effects of peer comparisons on low-promotability tasks: Evidence from a university field experiment

Governance—the way rules are set and implemented—in many institutions is sustained through the service of groups of individuals, performing low-promotability tasks. For instance, the success of not-for-profit professional societies, civic organizations, and public universities depends on the willingness of members and employees to serve in governance. Typically service is requested by annual calls to serve. We implement and analyze a field experiment at a large public university using a randomized experimental design, to investigate whether responses to calls to serve are affected by revealing a department's service rankings among its peer departments. We find that revealing a service ranking in the lowest quartile leads to significantly higher response rates than disclosing a median and higher-than-median ranking. Second, beyond informing department heads of their departments’ service rank, directly informing individual faculty members does not have an additional effect on response rates. Third, we show that the treatment effects in the lowest serving quartile are driven by female faculty responses, even though female faculty members were no more likely than their male peers to respond to serve before the experiment. If taking on such tasks is detrimental to promotion, while important for the overall institution, this has implications for the faculty careers of women and men. We discuss potential mechanisms behind the results; formally testing these mechanisms is an area for future research

Occlusion Aware Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow

It has been recently shown that a convolutional neural network can learn optical flow estimation with unsupervised learning. However, the performance of the unsupervised methods still has a relatively large gap compared to its supervised counterpart. Occlusion and large motion are some of the major factors that limit the current unsupervised learning of optical flow methods. In this work we introduce a new method which models occlusion explicitly and a new warping way that facilitates the learning of large motion. Our method shows promising results on Flying Chairs, MPI-Sintel and KITTI benchmark datasets. Especially on KITTI dataset where abundant unlabeled samples exist, our unsupervised method outperforms its counterpart trained with supervised learning.Comment: CVPR 2018 Camera-read

Dealing With Deans and Academic Medical Center Leadership: Advice From Leaders.

The 2017 Association of Pathology Chairs Annual Meeting included a session for department chairs and other department leaders on how to deal with deans and academic medical center leadership. The session was focused on discussing ways to foster positive relationships with university, medical school, and health system leaders, and productively address issues and opportunities with them. Presentations and a panel discussion were provided by 4 former pathology chairs who subsequently have served as medical deans and in other leadership positions including university provost, medical center CEO, and health system board chair. There was a strong consensus among the participants on how best to deal with superiors about problems, conflicts, and requests for additional resources and authority. The importance of teamwork and accountability in developing a constructive and collaborative relationship with leaders and peers was discussed in detail. Effectiveness in communication, negotiation, and departmental advocacy were highlighted as important skills. As limited resources and increased regulations have become growing problems for universities and health systems, internal stress and competition have increased. In this rapidly changing environment, advice on how chairs can interact most productively with institutional leaders is becoming increasingly important

Brief 13: The Critical Connection: Department Chairs\u27 and Associate Deans\u27 Strategies for Involving Faculty in Outcomes Assessment

Assessment, with a capital “A”, has become in the academy a politically loaded buzzword that closes many more doors than it opens. Assessment, with a small “a”, however, is a necessary part of any attempt to find the best path forward in environments that change. At meetings this spring, Members of NERCHE’s Departments Chairs Think Tank and Associate Academic Deans Think Tank discussed this controversial issue, focusing on ways to foster climates in which faculty and administrators are collaborative partners in assessment with the intention of strengthening teaching and learning

Error resilience analysis of wireless image transmission using JPEG, JPEG 2000 and JPWL

The wireless extension of the JPEG 2000 standard formally known as JPWL is the newest international standard for still image compression. Different from all previous standards, this new standard was created specifically for wireless imaging applications. This paper examines the error resilience performance of the JPEG, JPEG 2000 and JPWL standards in combating multi-path and fading impairments in Rayleigh fading channels. Comprehensive objective and subjective results are presented in relation to the error resilience performance of these three standards under various conditions. The major findings in this paper reveal that a CRC approach is not a viable option for protecting wireless image data when not used in conjunction with an efficient retransmission strategy. In addition, the Reed-Solomon error correction codes in JPWL provide strong protection for wireless image transmission. However, any stronger protection beyond RS(64,32) yields diminishing returns