Music Lessons: The Role of Music in Empathy Education for Physicians

In response to increasing physician burnout and deteriorating patient relationships, medical educators are increasingly adopting humanities approaches to better equip future physicians to cope with healthcare challenges. However, music has not been widely considered as a tool to reach this end. This work reviews the literature to explore how music can be used to nurture various skills related to empathy, which include listening to a patient narrative, engaging with the illness experience, and dealing with ambiguity. This study reviews the physiological evidence of connections between music and empathy and reviews evidence that suggests that listening to and performing music can train doctors to listen better, deal with the complexity of illness, and prioritize patient needs. The understanding brought by this exploration can be used to develop curricula that teach medical students about the importance of humanism in patient care. This could lead to better clinical outcomes, lower student distress levels, and increased patient satisfaction.Musi

Ambit of Multiphase CFD in Modelling Transport Processes Related to Oil Spill Scenario and Microfluidics

During the ‘Deepwater Horizon’ accident in the deep sea in 2010, about 4.9 million barrels of oil was released into the Gulf of Mexico, making the spill one of the worst ocean spills in recent times. To mitigate the ill effects of the event on the environment, subsea injection of dispersants was carried out. Dispersant addition lowers the interfacial tension at oil/water interface and presence of local turbulence enhances the droplet disintegration process. The oil droplets contain a plethora of hydrocarbons which are soluble in water. In deep spill scenarios, droplets spend large amounts of time in water column; hence, the dissolution process of soluble hydrocarbons becomes important. In this study, our focus is to exploit the capabilities of multiphase CFD in developing an integrated numerical model which accounts for various transport processes and hence would effectively guide us in predicting the fate of oil mass. In the initial stages, studies were conducted to understand these transport processes at a very fundamental level where the effect of surfactant, on the dynamics of crude oil, droplet rising in a stagnant column, was investigated. To capture the subsurface dissolution of hydrocarbons from oil droplet, a unique experiment was devised wherein a binary organic mixture, representing a pseudo oil droplet comprising of volatile and non-volatile hydrocarbons, was employed to study the effect of unsteady mass transport on the overall dynamics of the droplet. In the next phase of project, we developed a numerical model, by integrating traditional multiphase CFD models and turbulence models, with a population balance (PB) approach, for predicting the droplet size distribution resulting from the interaction of turbulent oil jets with the surrounding quiescent environment. Apart from the simulations specific to oil spill related situations, the multiphase CFD was also employed to study the fluid flow in micro-channels. The mass transfer mechanisms in micro-channels for immiscible fluids in squeezing and dripping regimes were studied by employing the numerical model, which couples the features of the traditional Volume of fluid method and the Continuous Species transport approach for evaluating the concentration fields inside dispersed and continuous phase

Effect of Surfactant on Dynamics of a Droplet Released in a Quiescent Medium

During the ‘Deepwater Horizon’ accident, dispersants were used as one of the remediation methods to mitigate the ill effects of oil that entered the water column. The dispersants lower the interfacial tension at the oil-water interface and cause the large oil droplets to disintegrate into finer droplets which remain dispersed in the water column for longer times. A dispersant typically is composed of a surfactant and solvent. Surfactants are chemical compounds which are chiefly responsible for the lowering of interfacial tension at oil water interface. In this study, we have investigated the effect of surfactant on the dynamics of a single crude oil droplet released into the quiescent water column. Experiments have been conducted in a tank with a capacity of about 100 liters, with an oil droplet being released through a nozzle. The droplets ranging from 0.3 to 0.85 cm were produced from three different nozzles. The shape adopted by the emanating droplets varied from spherical to oblate. On addition of the surfactant, sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) to water column there occurs reduction in interfacial tension at oil water interface which causes the droplet to flatten. SDS concentrations in water phase were varied in the range from 0 to 750 ppm. The change in the dynamics of the droplet due to the surfactant action has been reported in terms of the departure of the value of rise velocity and aspect ratio from that observed for a rising droplet in absence of surfactant. All experiments were conducted in ambient conditions. The second aspect of this study presents a numerical model based on finite volume method, which emulates the experimental observations. Volume of fluid method has been used for tracking the oil-water interface. The interfacial tension at the oil-water interface at various concentrations of surfactant is measured by Pendant drop Method using the Axisymmetric Shape Drop technique and has subsequently been used in the simulations. The model developed can be used to predict the behavior of droplets released into the water column during the oil spill

Alcohol use and alcohol-use disorders among older adults in India: a literature review.

OBJECTIVES: With changing attitudes to alcohol and an increasing life span in India, the prevalence of alcohol use and misuse in successive cohorts of older people is likely to increase. In this paper, we attempt to review the most recent evidence covering alcohol use and alcohol-use disorders in the Indian elderly. METHODS: PubMed, PsycINFO and Indmed databases were searched using relevant keywords. Papers meeting eligibility criteria were selected through a sequential process of screening title, abstract and full text. Data were extracted into Excel sheets. RESULTS: There was a dearth of pan-national studies. There were several methodological issues with many studies especially related to measurement. A substantial proportion of individuals above the age of 50 years are current consumers of alcohol and the prevalence is generally higher in urban compared to rural areas. Older women are generally likely to be alcohol abstainers. The general trend appears to be a reduction in current drinking among successive age cohorts over the age of 50. Alcohol consumption in the older adults is associated with educational status, health status, chronic morbidity, employment status, socioeconomic status, auditory/locomotor impairment and asthma. CONCLUSION: Alcohol use and misuse is a problem among the Indian older adults. With socio-demographic changes that will further increase longevity, this problem is likely to increase and policy-makers need to plan for it. Future research needs to improve validity and reliability in study methodology, as well as add to the current evidence base

E-Commerce Technologies and Information Systems Curricula

The World Wide Web (WWW), as the platform for E-Commerce, is the breeding ground for innovative applications. It is also providing the impetus for development of newer building blocks of information systems (IS) platforms. Today, novel applications such as push-type delivery of information, television style channels, multimedia mail attachments, desktop video-conferencing, and other examples of electronic commerce exist on the web. None of these was in wide use even as late as 1996. How are these technologies different from host-based and client/server technologies? What is the impact, if any, of these technologies on the skills set that IS majors need to have? This paper attempts an answer to the above questions by adopting an adult learning framework. Using the framework, we trace the impact of technology changes on skill requirements and the curricula. An appreciation of the fundamental differences that separate host-based, client/server and web-based platforms and E- Commerce applications can help in understanding this impact

Intelligent Control For Locating Fault in Transmission Lines

This paper presents a new approach for locating fault in transmission line using intelligent control relaying. Fault must be detected at its inception by issuing an output signal indicating this condition. Neural network approach for locating fault can be posed as a pattern-recognition to recognize pure sinusoidal signals as indicators of a normal system condition; abrupt changes of amplitude, phase, or the presence of transient components as indicators of fault. This method uses the fundamental frequency components of voltage and current basically current at pre-fault and post fault condition, measured at each phase from any one end of the selected power system. In this approach the data sets were trained using the available data from the system which comprises of different fault types data, and fault inception angles. This approach of locating fault using intelligent control can be used for supporting a new generation of very high speed protective relaying system

An Extreme Value Approach to Information Technology Security Investment

Information technology security investment is receiving increasing attention in recent years. Various methods have been proposed to determine the effective level of security investment. In this paper, we introduce an extreme value approach to address the issues of effective budgeting and investing in IT security. In our model, the security status of a system depends on two factors: system security level, which is measured by the level of security investment, and system attack level, which reflects the security risk with which the system is confronted. Security investment level is endogenous to the system, while attack level is exogenous. Extreme value analysis is used to characterize the stochastic behavior of high-level attacks based on the historical data and to make inferences on future attacks. Based on these inferences, we determine the effective security solutions and the level of security investment to modulate the likelihood of system failure. For illustration purposes, we use an extreme value approach to analyze a set of traffic data collected from a regional bank

QoS Constrained Optimal Sink and Relay Placement in Planned Wireless Sensor Networks

We are given a set of sensors at given locations, a set of potential locations for placing base stations (BSs, or sinks), and another set of potential locations for placing wireless relay nodes. There is a cost for placing a BS and a cost for placing a relay. The problem we consider is to select a set of BS locations, a set of relay locations, and an association of sensor nodes with the selected BS locations, so that number of hops in the path from each sensor to its BS is bounded by hmax, and among all such feasible networks, the cost of the selected network is the minimum. The hop count bound suffices to ensure a certain probability of the data being delivered to the BS within a given maximum delay under a light traffic model. We observe that the problem is NP-Hard, and is hard to even approximate within a constant factor. For this problem, we propose a polynomial time approximation algorithm (SmartSelect) based on a relay placement algorithm proposed in our earlier work, along with a modification of the greedy algorithm for weighted set cover. We have analyzed the worst case approximation guarantee for this algorithm. We have also proposed a polynomial time heuristic to improve upon the solution provided by SmartSelect. Our numerical results demonstrate that the algorithms provide good quality solutions using very little computation time in various randomly generated network scenarios

Modeling IS Activities for Business Process Reengineering : A Colored Petri Net Approach

The day to day functioning of any organization involves many business processes. Each business process is comprised of different activities. The identification of activities and their cost drivers is a critical factor for successful Business Process Reengineering. Since the resources used by the activities form an integral part of the model, the identification of the cost drivers is also simplified. This paper details the following : 1. It proposesthe use of colored Petri nets for process modeling. Brimson(1991) identifies the process modeling approach to activity analysis as useful since it graphically links the inputs and outputs among activities and identifies the information flow in the processes. However, use of process flow charts, which is most commonly used in activity analysis cannot capture some of the aspects of office processes, like supervision, general management, etc. In addition, representing the complex business logic associated with activities would be difficult in such flow models. The use of colored Petri nets overcomes this limitation, as business logic and various office processes can be easily represented. In addition, the complexity of the system is handled by resorting to hierarchical representation of the processes. 2. The paper applies the concept of activity based costing to the management of the IS processes in firms. The cost structure of these processes, to our knowledge, has not been studied from the activity based costing perspective. The article proposes the use of activity based costing for IS processes. Such analysis could help the organization in making operational as well as strategic decisions as related to its IS processe