Feral child: the legacy of the wild boy of Aveyron in the domains of language acquisition and deaf education

Language Acquisition has been hotly debated since Chomsky\u27s theory of innate ability in the 1950s. Feral children. i.e.. wild children who grow up in extreme isolation, provide a unique opportunity to study the process of language acquisition. What we can learn can have a major impact on what and how we teach our young students, especially deaf - students whose language development may be delayed. Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, a famous feral child, is the focus of this study. He was discovered in the French wilderness in 1800, after three to eight years alone in the forest. After five years of instruction at the Paris Institute for the Deaf, his education was abandoned. Victor never learned to speak and only ever became half-civilized . Nevertheless, he left a tremendous legacy on the fields of education and language acquisition. His case helped develop many language acquisition theories, and numerous the techniques used in the attempt to educate him are still used in the field of education today

Current and Optimal Training in High-Value Care in the Internal Medicine Clerkship: A National Curricular Needs Assessment

Purpose: The clinical skills needed to practice high-value care (HVC) are core to all medical disciplines. Medical students form practice habits early, and HVC instruction is essential to this formation. The purpose of this study was to describe the state of HVC instruction and assessment in internal medicine clerkships and identify needs for additional curricula. Method: In 2014, the Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine conducted its annual survey of 121 U.S. and Canadian medical schools. The authors evaluated a subset of questions from that survey asking clerkship directors about the perceived importance of HVC instruction, type and amount of formal instruction and assessment, achievement of student competence, prioritization of topics, and barriers to curriculum implementation. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize responses, and chi-square tests were used to examine associations between response categories. Results: The overall response rate was 77.7% (94/121). The majority (85; 91.4%) agreed that medical schools have a responsibility to teach about HVC across all phases of the curriculum. Of respondents, 31 (32.9%) reported their curricula as having some formal instruction on HVC, and 66 (70.2%) felt the amount was inadequate. Highest-priority topics for inclusion included overuse of diagnostic tests and treatments, defining value and its application to clinical reasoning, and balancing benefit and harm. Only 11 (17.8%) assessed students’ competence in HVC. Conclusions: Internal medicine clerkship directors reported that HVC is insufficiently taught and assessed in medical school, despite relevance to practice. Developing generalizable curricular materials, faculty development, and dedicated curricular time may enhance HVC education

Differential Effects of Comorbidity on Antihypertensive and Glucose-Regulating Treatment in Diabetes Mellitus – A Cohort Study

BACKGROUND: Comorbidity is often mentioned as interfering with "optimal" treatment decisions in diabetes care. It is suggested that diabetes- related comorbidity will increase adequate treatment, whereas diabetes- unrelated comorbidity may decrease this process of care. We hypothesized that these effects differ according to expected priority of the conditions. METHODS: We evaluated the relationship between comorbidity and treatment intensification in a study of 11,248 type 2 diabetes patients using the GIANTT (Groningen Initiative to Analyse type 2 diabetes Treatment) database. We formed a cohort of patients with a systolic blood pressure >/= 140 mmHg (6,820 hypertensive diabetics), and a cohort of patients with an HbA1c >/= 7% (3,589 hyperglycemic diabetics) in 2007. We differentiated comorbidity by diabetes-related or unrelated conditions and by priority. High priority conditions include conditions that are life- interfering, incident or requiring new medication treatment. We performed Cox regression analyses to assess association with treatment intensification, defined as dose increase, start, or addition of drugs. RESULTS: In both the hypertensive and hyperglycemic cohort, only patients with incident diabetes-related comorbidity had a higher chance of treatment intensification (HR 4.48, 2.33-8.62 (p<0.001) for hypertensives; HR 2.37, 1.09-5.17 (p = 0.030) for hyperglycemics). Intensification of hypertension treatment was less likely when a new glucose-regulating drug was prescribed (HR 0.24, 0.06-0.97 (p = 0.046)). None of the prevalent or unrelated comorbidity was significantly associated with treatment intensification. CONCLUSIONS: Diabetes-related comorbidity induced better risk factor treatment only for incident cases, implying that appropriate care is provided more often when complications occur. Diabetes- unrelated comorbidity did not affect hypertension or hyperglycemia management, even when it was incident or life-interfering. Thus, the observed "undertreatment" in diabetes care cannot be explained by constraints caused by such comorbidity

Experimental study of seed germination in the seagrass Cymodocea nodosa

Seeds of Cymodocea nodosa (Ucria) Aschers. are abundant throughout the year in several beds around the coasts of the western Mediterranean, but it is rare to find seedlings in situ. Experiments carried out in aquaria have shown that the higher the temperature and the lower the salinity, the faster the germination and the higher the germination rate. At high temperatures and low salinities C. nodosa can show more than 90% germination in 10 days, at all times of the year. Seedlings, however, show good growth only at temperatures between 17 and 25°C and when salinity is also moderately reduced. Thus, in C. nodosa, germination followed by seedling development requires either a reduction of salinity to between 20 and 27‰ for a prolonged period (several weeks-several months) or a more marked reduction to between 10 and 20‰ for a days. These restrictions appear to limit the germination of C. nodosa in the western Mediterranean, in time to the period April–October, and in space to those seagrass beds near sources of freshwater