Building bridges between doctors and patients: the design and pilot evaluation of a training session in argumentation for chronic pain experts

Shared decision-making requires doctors to be competent in exchanging views with patients to identify the appropriate course of action. In this paper we focus on the potential of a course in argumentation as a promising way to empower doctors in presenting their viewpoints and addressing those of patients. Argumentation is the communication process in which the speaker, through the use of reasons, aims to convince the interlocutor of the acceptability of a viewpoint. The value of argumentation skills for doctors has been addressed in the literature. Yet, there is no research on what a course on argumentation might look like. In this paper, we present the content and format of a training session in argumentation for doctors and discuss some insights gained from a pilot study that examined doctors' perceived strengths and limitations vis-à-vis this training

Reinforcing attitudes in a gatewatching news era: individual-level antecedents to sharing fact-checks on social media

Despite the prevalence of fact-checking, little is known about who posts fact-checks online. Based upon a content analysis of Facebook and Twitter digital trace data and a linked online survey (N = 783), this study reveals that sharing fact-checks in political conversations on social media is linked to age, ideology, and political behaviors. Moreover, an individual’s need for orientation (NFO) is an even stronger predictor of sharing a fact-check than ideological intensity or relevance, alone, and also influences the type of fact-check format (with or without a rating scale) that is shared. Finally, participants generally shared fact-checks to reinforce their existing attitudes. Consequently, concerns over the effects of fact-checking should move beyond a limited-effects approach (e.g., changing attitudes) to also include reinforcing accurate beliefs.Accepted manuscrip

Teaching Policy Instrument Choice in Environmental Law: The Five P’s

Abstract. We introduce a method to combine the color channels of an image to a scalar valued image. Linear combinations of the RGB chan-nels are constructed using the Fisher-Trace-Information (FTI), defined as the trace of the Fisher information matrix of the Weibull distribu-tion, as a cost function. The FTI characterizes the local geometry of the Weibull manifold independent of the parametrization of the distribution. We show that minimizing the FTI leads to contrast enhanced images, suitable for segmentation processes. The Riemann structure of the man-ifold of Weibull distributions is used to design optimization methods for finding optimal weight RGB vectors. Using a threshold procedure we find good solutions even for images with limited content variation. Ex-periments show how the method adapts to images with widely varying visual content. Using these image dependent de-colorizations one can ob-tain substantially improved segmentation results compared to a mapping with pre-defined coefficients