Analytics: Potential in Higher Education

Analytics is altering the world of business and leadership as companies take advantage of its descriptive and predictive capabilities. Industries incorporating analytics into their daily operations are outperforming their competitors, generating greater profits and reducing expenditures. Following industry’s lead, higher education is beginning to make sure of big data to induce academic success by means of increased enrollment, retention, and graduation rates. Incorporating analytics into the decision-making process and overarching operations of an organization may yield considerable outcomes in corporate and academic environments. Integrating analytics into corporate culture requires collaborative partnerships focused on mutual interest and leadership expertise. This article discusses how analytics has influenced business and its potential impact on the future success of higher education

Twelve tips for teaching medical students with dyslexia

Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty. As a result of SS' own experiences as a medical student with dyslexia, we have been researching and teaching on this topic for the past two years. Here, we present twelve tips for teaching medical students with dyslexia. These are gathered from our personal experiences and research, discussions with other educators, and wider literature on the topic. This article aims to shed some light on dyslexia, and also to make practical suggestions. Teaching students with dyslexia should not be a daunting experience. Small changes to existing methods, at minor effort, can make a difference - for example, adding pastel colors to slide backgrounds or avoiding Serif fonts. These tips can help educators gain more insight into dyslexia and incorporate small, beneficial adaptations into their teaching

Coreceptor affinity for MHC defines peptide specificity requirements for TCR interaction with coagonist peptide–MHC

Recent work has demonstrated that nonstimulatory endogenous peptides can enhance T cell recognition of antigen, but MHCI- and MHCII-restricted systems have generated very different results. MHCII-restricted TCRs need to interact with the nonstimulatory peptide–MHC (pMHC), showing peptide specificity for activation enhancers or coagonists. In contrast, the MHCI-restricted cells studied to date show no such peptide specificity for coagonists, suggesting that CD8 binding to noncognate MHCI is more important. Here we show how this dichotomy can be resolved by varying CD8 and TCR binding to agonist and coagonists coupled with computer simulations, and we identify two distinct mechanisms by which CD8 influences the peptide specificity of coagonism. Mechanism 1 identifies the requirement of CD8 binding to noncognate ligand and suggests a direct relationship between the magnitude of coagonism and CD8 affinity for coagonist pMHCI. Mechanism 2 describes how the affinity of CD8 for agonist pMHCI changes the requirement for specific coagonist peptides. MHCs that bind CD8 strongly were tolerant of all or most peptides as coagonists, but weaker CD8-binding MHCs required stronger TCR binding to coagonist, limiting the potential coagonist peptides. These findings in MHCI systems also explain peptide-specific coagonism in MHCII-restricted cells, as CD4–MHCII interaction is generally weaker than CD8–MHCI.National Institutes of Health (U.S.). Pioneer Awar

Predicting the effect of climate change on wildfire behavior and initial attack success

This study focused on how climate change-induced effects on weather will translate into changes in wildland fire severity and outcomes in California, particularly on the effectiveness of initial attack at limiting the number of fires that escape initial attack. The results indicate that subtle shifts in fire behavior of the sort that might be induced by the climate changes anticipated for the next century are of sufficient magnitude to generate an appreciable increase in the number of fires that escape initial attack. Such escapes are of considerable importance in wildland fire protection planning, given the high cost to society of a catastrophic escape like those experienced in recent decades in the Berkeley-Oakland, Santa Barbara, San Diego, or Los Angeles areas. However, at least for the three study areas considered, it would appear that relatively modest augmentations to existing firefighting resources might be sufficient to compensate for change-induced changes in wildland fire outcomes

Steps toward Massage Therapy Guidelines: A First Report to the Profession

Over the last two decades, the massage profession has grown rapidly. As it does with business startups that begin informally and successfully grow into mature enterprises, growth brings new organizational challenges along with greater visibility and opportunity. The maturation of massage as a healthcare profession creates an increasing need for a process to formalize the synthesis of massage therapy knowledge from clinical experience and research. As a profession, we need more expedient means to collect what we know and to make such baseline knowledge widely available to practitioners, consumers, and other healthcare stakeholders. In short, we need to create a process for creating guidelines. This paper lays out the motivations and framework for creating guidelines for massage therapy that are informed both by research and clinical experience. It represents a report to the massage therapy profession and to other stakeholders of the work of the Best Practices Committee (BPC) of the Massage Therapy Foundation over the previous two years. Because there is little or no existing referenceable literature basis for such discussion in the context of massage, the paper also bears the additional goal of providing a healthcare literature basis for future academic massage discussions. The concept of guidelines is discussed based on a definition from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and research on the nature of expertise. Guidelines are targeted for submission to the National Guideline Clearinghouse. Challenges in creating guidelines for massage therapy are discussed. Different stakeholders are considered, with their needs and potential benefits from guidelines presented as scenarios. Current literature from the wider scope of healthcare is extensively reviewed. Topics include guideline creation, credentialing of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners, definition of competence, and the increasing role of technology (i.e. informatics) in managing training and task-necessary competencies. At first glance separate, these topics are interlinked by a healthcare quality initiative from the IOM, by a resultant process of healthcare self-reflection, and by extensive defense and technology industry efforts to create new capabilities and data standards for learning and competency communication and management. Finally, a process for creation of massage therapy guidelines is proposed. A central feature of the proposal is the use of a “World Café” symposium to elicit knowledge and solutions from a diverse collection of experts. The symposium would be aimed at vetting and refining the proposed guideline process by applying it to creation of guidelines for massage interventions for stress management, low-back pain, and lymphedema. The role of transparency and a wide and open peer-review is stressed as essential to the usability and credibility of guidelines

Evaluation of the current knowledge limitations in breast cancer research: a gap analysis

BACKGROUND A gap analysis was conducted to determine which areas of breast cancer research, if targeted by researchers and funding bodies, could produce the greatest impact on patients. METHODS Fifty-six Breast Cancer Campaign grant holders and prominent UK breast cancer researchers participated in a gap analysis of current breast cancer research. Before, during and following the meeting, groups in seven key research areas participated in cycles of presentation, literature review and discussion. Summary papers were prepared by each group and collated into this position paper highlighting the research gaps, with recommendations for action. RESULTS Gaps were identified in all seven themes. General barriers to progress were lack of financial and practical resources, and poor collaboration between disciplines. Critical gaps in each theme included: (1) genetics (knowledge of genetic changes, their effects and interactions); (2) initiation of breast cancer (how developmental signalling pathways cause ductal elongation and branching at the cellular level and influence stem cell dynamics, and how their disruption initiates tumour formation); (3) progression of breast cancer (deciphering the intracellular and extracellular regulators of early progression, tumour growth, angiogenesis and metastasis); (4) therapies and targets (understanding who develops advanced disease); (5) disease markers (incorporating intelligent trial design into all studies to ensure new treatments are tested in patient groups stratified using biomarkers); (6) prevention (strategies to prevent oestrogen-receptor negative tumours and the long-term effects of chemoprevention for oestrogen-receptor positive tumours); (7) psychosocial aspects of cancer (the use of appropriate psychosocial interventions, and the personal impact of all stages of the disease among patients from a range of ethnic and demographic backgrounds). CONCLUSION Through recommendations to address these gaps with future research, the long-term benefits to patients will include: better estimation of risk in families with breast cancer and strategies to reduce risk; better prediction of drug response and patient prognosis; improved tailoring of treatments to patient subgroups and development of new therapeutic approaches; earlier initiation of treatment; more effective use of resources for screening populations; and an enhanced experience for people with or at risk of breast cancer and their families. The challenge to funding bodies and researchers in all disciplines is to focus on these gaps and to drive advances in knowledge into improvements in patient care

What do older people learn from young people? : Intergenerational learning in ‘day centre’ community settings in Malta

This study analyses what motivates older people to attend ‘day centres’ in Malta and what they believe that they derive from young people who carry out their placements at these day ‘centres’ These young people, who are aged 16–17, attend a vocational college in Malta and are studying health and social care. The study is based on a qualitative approach and employs the usage of focus groups. The main findings are that the elderly see the students as helping them on an emotional level by giving them encouragement, and on a practical level, by offering them insights that help them in modern-day life

The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: Wiener reconstruction of the cosmic web

We reconstruct the underlying density field of the Two-degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) for the redshift range 0.035 < z < 0.200 using the Wiener filtering method. The Wiener filter suppresses shot noise and accounts for selection and incompleteness effects. The method relies on prior knowledge of the 2dF power spectrum of fluctuations and the combination of matter density and bias parameters, however the results are only slightly affected by changes to these parameters. We present maps of the density field. We use a variable smoothing technique with two different effective resolutions: 5 and 10 h−1 Mpc at the median redshift of the survey. We identify all major superclusters and voids in the survey. In particular, we find two large superclusters and two large local voids. The full set of colour maps can be viewed on the World Wide Web a