39 research outputs found

    Digital competence in laboratory medicine

    Get PDF
    Objectives: Even though most physicians and professionals in laboratory medicine have received basic training in statistics, experience shows that a general understanding of data analysis is not yet available on a broad scale. Therefore, data literacy, data-driven decision making, and computational thinking should be implemented in future educational training. To evaluate the state of digital competence among young scientists (YS) in laboratory medicine, we launched a worldwide online survey. Methods: A global online survey was conducted from 25/05/2022 to 26/06/2022 and was disseminated to YS who are listed in three large networks: YS of the DGKL, the EFLM Task Group-YS, and IFCC Task Force-YS and its corresponding members, covering a base of 53 countries. Results: A total of 119 young scientists from 40 countries participated in this survey. 80% did not learn digital skills in their academic education but 96% felt they needed to. Digital literacy was associated with terms such as programming, artificial intelligence and machine learning, statistics, communication, Big Data and data analytics. Conclusions: The results of our survey show that more knowledge and training in the area of digital skills is not just necessary, but also wanted by young scientists. A varied learning environment consisting of tutorial articles, videos, exercises, technical articles, collection of helpful links, online meetings and in person bootcamps is crucial to meet the challenges of an international project with different languages, health systems and time zones

    Oregon Reading Instructional Materials and Practices Statewide Survey Executive Summary

    Get PDF
    This study reports the results of a survey of a representative sample of 1,206 K-6 classroom and 7-12 English Language Arts teachers in Oregon to learn 1) what reading instructional materials are currently being used, 2) what reading instructional materials teachers would prefer, 3) what reading instructional materials teachers wanted to have included on the state approved materials list, and 4) what instructional practices teachers use. Results indicated that in grades K-6 basal/core reading programs were the predominant material in use, but that these teachers preferred to use trade books. The majority of grades 7-12 English Language Arts teachers reported mainly using trade books for reading instruction. Teachers wanted to use their professional judgment to make decisions about materials. When asked about revisions to the Oregon Statute 337 and the Oregon Administrative Rule 581 Division 11, only 4.5% of Oregon K-12 teachers wanted their choice limited to basal/core reading programs. All others wanted flexibility in selecting instructional materials. Overall teacher preferences for the approved instructional materials were not associated with teacher type, grade level, school context, or school Title I status

    Bridging Alone: Religious Conservatism, Marital Homogamy, and Voluntary Association Membership

    Full text link
    This study characterizes social insularity of religiously conservative American married couples by examining patterns of voluntary associationmembership. Constructing a dataset of 3938 marital dyads from the second wave of the National Survey of Families and Households, the author investigates whether conservative religious homogamy encourages membership in religious voluntary groups and discourages membership in secular voluntary groups. Results indicate that couples’ shared affiliation with conservative denominations, paired with beliefs in biblical authority and inerrancy, increases the likelihood of religious group membership for husbands and wives and reduces the likelihood of secular group membership for wives, but not for husbands. The social insularity of conservative religious groups appears to be reinforced by homogamy—particularly by wives who share faith with husbands

    Measuring Five Dimensions of Religiosity Across Adolescence

    Get PDF
    This paper theorizes and tests a latent variable model of adolescent religiosity in which five dimensions of religiosity are interrelated: religious beliefs, religious exclusivity, external religiosity, private practice, and religious salience. Research often theorizes overlapping and independent influences of single items or dimensions of religiosity on outcomes such as adolescent sexual behavior, but rarely operationalizes the dimensions in a measurement model accounting for their associations with each other and across time. We use longitudinal structural equation modeling (SEM) with latent variables to analyze data from two waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion. We test our hypothesized measurement model as compared to four alternate measurement models and find that our proposed model maintains superior fit. We then discuss the associations between the five dimensions of religiosity we measure and how these change over time. Our findings suggest how future research might better operationalize multiple dimensions of religiosity in studies of the influence of religion in adolescence

    Finding a Needle in the Virus Metagenome Haystack - Micro-Metagenome Analysis Captures a Snapshot of the Diversity of a Bacteriophage Armoire

    Get PDF
    Viruses are ubiquitous in the oceans and critical components of marine microbial communities, regulating nutrient transfer to higher trophic levels or to the dissolved organic pool through lysis of host cells. Hydrothermal vent systems are oases of biological activity in the deep oceans, for which knowledge of biodiversity and its impact on global ocean biogeochemical cycling is still in its infancy. In order to gain biological insight into viral communities present in hydrothermal vent systems, we developed a method based on deep-sequencing of pulsed field gel electrophoretic bands representing key viral fractions present in seawater within and surrounding a hydrothermal plume derived from Loki's Castle vent field at the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge. The reduction in virus community complexity afforded by this novel approach enabled the near-complete reconstruction of a lambda-like phage genome from the virus fraction of the plume. Phylogenetic examination of distinct gene regions in this lambdoid phage genome unveiled diversity at loci encoding superinfection exclusion- and integrase-like proteins. This suggests the importance of fine-tuning lyosgenic conversion as a viral survival strategy, and provides insights into the nature of host-virus and virus-virus interactions, within hydrothermal plumes. By reducing the complexity of the viral community through targeted sequencing of prominent dsDNA viral fractions, this method has selectively mimicked virus dominance approaching that hitherto achieved only through culturing, thus enabling bioinformatic analysis to locate a lambdoid viral “needle" within the greater viral community “haystack". Such targeted analyses have great potential for accelerating the extraction of biological knowledge from diverse and poorly understood environmental viral communities

    Drivers of interannual variability in virioplankton abundance at the coastal Western Antarctic Peninsula and the potential effects of climate change

    Get PDF
    An eight year time-series in the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) with an approximately weekly sampling frequency was used to elucidate changes in virioplankton abundance and their drivers in this climatically-sensitive region. Virioplankton abundances at the coastal WAP show a pronounced seasonal cycle with interannual variability in the timing and magnitude of the summer maxima. Bacterioplankton abundance is the most influential driving factor of the virioplankton, and exhibit closely coupled dynamics. Sea ice cover and duration predetermine levels of phytoplankton stock and thus, influence virioplankton by dictating the substrates available to the bacterioplankton. However, variations in the composition of the phytoplankton community and particularly the prominence of Diatoms inferred from silicate drawdown, drive inter-annual differences in the magnitude of the virioplankton bloom; likely again mediated through changes in the bacterioplankton. Our findings suggest that future warming within the WAP will cause changes in sea ice that will influence viruses and their microbial hosts through changes in the timing, magnitude and composition of the phytoplankton bloom. Thus the flow of matter and energy through the viral shunt may be decreased with consequences for the Antarctic food web and element cycling
    corecore