Climate change, non-identity and moral ontology

No abstrac

Making Science Make Sense: Applied Improvisation in Health and Life Sciences

poster abstractAbstract Both in and out of the classroom, physicians and scientists must speak in a way that generates excitement about their disciplines (Berrett, 2014). They also must communicate vividly to funders and policy makers about their work and why it matters. In every context, these experts must tell engaging stories, respond spontaneously to the needs of the moment, and explain their work in terms nonscientists can understand. In response, some universities have turned to the techniques of improvisational theater to help scientists to speak more spontaneously, responsively, and engagingly. Over the past year, we have conducted a series of workshops (N=54) for a variety of audiences including, doctoral and post-doc students in the sciences, for educators, for physicians and research scientists, and for doctoral nursing students. The workshops help participants make stronger connections to their multiple audiences. They include content on improvisation skills such as presence and listening, acceptance, recognizing offers, and storytelling to help scientists translate their research in ways that engage their audiences. This approach moves faculty toward understanding communication as a process of collaborative meaningmaking, thus helping them to address the “curse of knowledge” by which experts forget the time when they were novices in their field (Bass, 2015). This poster will report on four key areas of the intervention and evaluation: 1) the need for communication training in the health professions and sciences, 2) the development of the programs, 3) the program efficacy and outcomes. Higher education presents unique challenges for the practice of applied improvisation. While enthusiasm for the work has grown in industry, some audiences within the academy seem resistant to the methods, especially within the sciences. This poster will also address the ways expertise, prestige, and rank affect the practice of applied improvisation in higher education, and we will propose strategies for mitigating resistance

Twelve tips for using applied improvisation in medical education

Future physicians will practice medicine in a more complex environment than ever, where skills of interpersonal communication, collaboration and adaptability to change are critical. Applied improvisation (or AI) is an instructional strategy which adapts the concepts of improvisational theater to teach these types of complex skills in other contexts. Unique to AI is its very active teaching approach, adapting theater games to help learners meet curricular objectives. In medical education, AI is particularly helpful when attempting to build students’ comfort with and skills in complex, interpersonal behaviors such as effective listening, person-centeredness, teamwork and communication. This article draws on current evidence and the authors’ experiences to present best practices for incorporating AI into teaching medicine. These practical tips help faculty new to AI get started by establishing goals, choosing appropriate games, understanding effective debriefing, considering evaluation strategies and managing resistance within the context of medical education

Religion, discrimination and trust across three cultures

We propose that religion impacts trust and trustworthiness in ways that depend on how individuals are socially identified and connected. Religiosity and religious affiliation may serve as markers for statistical discrimination. Further, affiliation to the same religion may enhance group identity, or affiliation irrespective of creed may lend social identity, and in turn induce taste-based discrimination. Religiosity may also relate to general prejudice. We test these hypotheses across three culturally diverse countries. Participants' willingness to discriminate, beliefs of how trustworthy or trusting others are, as well as actual trust and trustworthiness are measured incentive compatibly. We find that interpersonal similarity in religiosity and affiliation promote trust through beliefs of reciprocity. Religious participants also believe that those belonging to some faith are trustworthier, but invest more trust only in those of the same religion—religiosity amplifies this effect. Across non-religious categories, whereas more religious participants are more willing to discriminate, less religious participants are as likely to display group biases

Application Heartbeats for Software Performance and Health

Adaptive, or self-aware, computing has been proposed as one method to help application programmers confront the growing complexity of multicore software development. However, existing approaches to adaptive systems are largely ad hoc and often do not manage to incorporate the true performance goals of the applications they are designed to support. This paper presents an enabling technology for adaptive computing systems: Application Heartbeats. The Application Heartbeats framework provides a simple, standard programming interface that applications can use to indicate their performance and system software (and hardware) can use to query an applicationâ s performance. Several experiments demonstrate the simplicity and efficacy of the Application Heartbeat approach. First the PARSEC benchmark suite is instrumented with Application Heartbeats to show the broad applicability of the interface. Then, an adaptive H.264 encoder is developed to show how applications might use Application Heartbeats internally. Next, an external resource scheduler is developed which assigns cores to an application based on its performance as specified with Application Heartbeats. Finally, the adaptive H.264 encoder is used to illustrate how Application Heartbeats can aid fault tolerance

Climate change, non-identity and moral ontology

No abstrac

Systemic sclerosis is associated with specific alterations in gastrointestinal microbiota in two independent cohorts.

ObjectiveTo compare faecal microbial composition in patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc) from 2 independent cohorts with controls and to determine whether certain genera are associated with SSc-gastrointestinal tract (GIT) symptoms.DesignAdult patients with SSc from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Oslo University Hospital (OUH) and healthy controls participated in this study (1:1:1). All participants provided stool specimens for 16S rRNA sequencing. Linear discriminant analysis effect size demonstrated genera with differential expression in SSc. Differential expression analysis for sequence count data identified specific genera associated with GIT symptoms as assessed by the GIT 2.0 questionnaire.ResultsThe UCLA-SSc and OUH-SSc cohorts were similar in age (52.1 and 60.5 years, respectively), disease duration (median (IQR): 6.6 (2.5-16.4) and 7.0 (1.0-19.2) years, respectively), gender distribution (88% and 71%, respectively), and GIT symptoms (mean (SD) total GIT 2.0 scores of 0.7 (0.6) and 0.6 (0.5), respectively). Principal coordinate analysis illustrated significant microbial community differences between SSc and controls (UCLA: p=0.001; OUH: p=0.002). Patients with SSc had significantly lower levels of commensal genera deemed to protect against inflammation, such as Bacteroides (UCLA and OUH), Faecalibacterium (UCLA), Clostridium (OUH); and significantly higher levels of pathobiont genera, such as Fusobacterium (UCLA), compared with controls. Increased abundance of Clostridium was associated with less severe GIT symptoms in both cohorts.ConclusionsThe present analysis detected specific aberrations in the lower GIT microbiota of patients with SSc from 2 geographically and ethnically distinct cohorts. These findings suggest that GIT dysbiosis may be a pathological feature of the SSc disease state

Democracy, justice, & the long term : designing institutions for the future

Wrongful short-termism results in undue discounting of the future in political decisions. As a result, the future is wronged because too little is spent on disaster preparedness, climate mitigation and other long-term risks. In response, various proposals have been made to re-form democracy and install institutions for the future (F-Institutions). This thesis makes two arguments. First, it argues that installing F-Institutions can be justified on the basis of justice, democracy, and sovereignty, and secondly, it argues for specific criteria, methods, practices, strategies, and proposals for F-Institutions design. The thesis considers three normative grounds for installing F-Institutions. First, a common approach argues that future people are entitled to representation in decisions that affect them. Due to theoretical and practical difficulties, the thesis rejects this argument but suggests that future people are owed consideration and justification. Second, the thesis argues that there is a duty to ensure that the future enjoys democracy and, third, a duty to ensure intertemporal distributive justice. Installing F-Institutions is justified to reduce wrongful short-termism and thereby ensure compliance with these duties. Drivers such as uncertainty, various biases, and the election cycle all contribute to wrongful short-termism. F-Institutions need to address these drivers to reduce wrongful short-termism. Four criteria are suggested for designing F-Institutions: Effectiveness, feasibility, institutional sustainability, and moral legitimacy. Further, a novel citizens’ assembly approach is suggested for identifying the best F-Institutions. As a single F-Institution is unlikely to overcome wrongful short-termism, a strategy is suggested to install multiple F-Institutions and transform democracy step by step. Lastly, a starter set of seven F-Institutions is proposed that is more effective and legitimate than many proposed alternatives. This set would make it more likely that policies are understood as intertemporal investments instead of intratemporal redistributions, thus raising the chance that wrongful short-termism will be overcome