A recent study by Mayo Clinic and the American Medical Association delivered a scathing “F” rating on the usability of electronic health record systems (EHR), blaming them for an epidemic of burnout that has taken a toll on nearly half of physicians across the country. Frustration with EHR system usability is not new. Exactly a year ago, in a piece entitled “Why doctors hate their computers,” physician and author Atul Gawande essentially made the same case, indicting EHR systems for poor design.
Paradoxically, an entire industry designed around meeting people’s healthcare needs is now the victim of poorly designed systems that get in the way of meeting those objectives. For their part, healthcare consumers are demanding more from the broken experience of a typical healthcare encounter. In response to the changing marketplace dynamics, healthcare is beginning to embrace a new discipline in developing software-driven healthcare experiences – namely, human-centered design.
Turns out that we’re often pretty terrible at reporting on our own habits — how much we’re exercising, when we’re sleeping and feel rested. But what we are good at is engaging with a wide variety of technology 24/7.
“Walking around with our smartphones and wearable devices, the devices actually generate massive digital traces of our behavior in the real world,” said Tim Althoff, an assistant professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.
Althoff and his team are tapping into this data in some unexpected ways in order to tease out a better understanding of human health, including insights into sleep and performance, exercise and health inequality, and mental health and counseling.
Medium, Multiple Views: Visualization Research Explained, Michael Correll
from
People have been communicating with data for centuries before the computer. But if all we have is a computer science background, and we lack grounding in psychology, statistics, or communication, then we’re going to start running into trouble once our elegantly designed charts and graphs start meeting the squishy and biased brains of the people we’re showing them to. The crumbling of that computational edifice, the decline of visualization as fundamentally a computer science problem, is what I started seeing in the work at VIS this year. To be clear, I think this is a good thing! It’s a sign that the field is maturing and expanding outwards and no longer just about throwing pixels on screens. I’ve selected a handful of talks that I saw as contributing to the “de-CSifying” of visualization, and how they might get us thinking about the fact that hey, we’re communicating information to people, not just maximizing data ink.
New research led by the University of Bristol has found that over half of people would be willing to donate their personal data for research to benefit the wider general public.
When the transformation is complete, in summer 2022, the Departments of Astronomy, Mathematics, and Statistics and Data Science, as well as parts of the Department of Physics, will move into new space in the tower designed specifically for their use.
“In this new form, Kline Tower will represent a re-envisioning of how we work on Science Hill, as well as an invitation for the broader campus to engage with faculty in the development of new computational, mathematical, and statistical methods and tools,” the deans wrote.
Kaiser Health News, Fortune, Fred Schulte and Erika Fry
from
In 2015, members of Congress derailed a long-planned EHR safety center, first by challenging the government’s authority to create it and later by declining to fund it. A year later, Congress stripped the Food and Drug Administration of its power to regulate the industry or even to track malfunctions and injuries.
“A lot of people involved with patient safety and medical informatics were horrified,” said Ross Koppel, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist and prominent EHR safety expert. Koppel said the industry won legal status as a “regulatory free zone” when it came to safety, an outcome he called a “scandal beyond belief.”
The Electronic Health Record Association, a trade group that represents more than 30 vendors, declined to comment on the safety issue.
The University of Delaware on Thursday announced plans for the newest addition to the growing STAR Campus – a $38 million financial services technology building.
The six-story, 100,000-square-foot building is a partnership between UD, Delaware Technology Park and Discover Bank. DTP will own the building, which it will fund with a below-market-rate loan from Discover. UD will lease space in the building once its completed in 2021.
UD officials said the new building will foster collaborations between students and companies in the growing field of financial services technology, often referred to as FinTech.
They set out to address big questions: Is music a cultural universal? If that’s a given, which musical qualities overlap across disparate societies? If it isn’t, why does it seem so ubiquitous? But they needed a data set of unprecedented breadth and depth. Over a five-year period, the team hunted down hundreds of recordings in libraries and private collections of scientists half a world away.
“We are so used to being able to find any piece of music that we like on the internet,” said Mehr, who is now a principal investigator at Harvard’s Music Lab. “But there are thousands and thousands of recordings buried in archives. At one point, we were looking for traditional Celtic music and we found a call number in the [Harvard] library system and librarian told us we needed to wait on the other side of the library because there was more room over there. Twenty minutes later this poor librarian comes out with a cart of about 20 cases of reel-to-reel recordings of Celtic music.”
The idea of reverse engineering biology seems like a paradox. How could we ever reverse engineer anything for which we didn’t “invent” the original technology? Radios, bridges, computers—all these are human-made, built from logical, clean cut, organized systems. Biology, on the other hand, is wild and messy, complex in ways we can’t even conceive of. How could we reverse engineer biology—a millennia of evolution—when we don’t fully understand the complexities or processes of that system in the first place?
In fact, it’s for just those reasons that we must learn to reverse engineer biology. Otherwise, engineering new applications in biology will be limited to only those areas where we have a clean, logical, organized understanding of the biological system. To intervene in complex biological contexts we don’t fully understand but desperately need to affect—like disease, or aging, or cancer—reverse engineering may be our best tool. The future of bio will look much more like programming than pipetting. If we can unlock the power of reverse engineering in the field of biology, we may be able to break through all the supposed limits of engineering biology as we know it today.
Two years ago, a student responding to Nature’s biennial PhD survey called on universities to provide a quiet room for “crying time” when the pressures caused by graduate study become overwhelming. At that time, 29% of 5,700 respondents listed their mental health as an area of concern — and just under half of those had sought help for anxiety or depression caused by their PhD study.
Things seem to be getting worse.
Respondents to our latest survey of 6,300 graduate students from around the world, published this week, revealed that 71% are generally satisfied with their experience of research, but that some 36% had sought help for anxiety or depression related to their PhD.
If we were living in the future imagined in Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi cult classic Blade Runner you might be able to answer some of those questions. The film takes place exactly here and now — Los Angeles, Nov. 2019 — so we wondered: how does the film’s dark future look against the light of actual today?
We spent months speaking with some of the minds that helped bring you the film, and posed this question to them. We recently published their oral history and perspective.
But we also ran this question through the KPCC/LAist newsroom. Here’s what our in-house team had to say about how the real Los Angeles turned out.
Ride-hail apps like Uber, Via, and Lyft have made transportation more egalitarian in some ways, reducing the chances a taxi will bypass a person of color for the white customer just down the street, or connecting underserved neighborhoods to the surrounding community. But until self-driving vehicles take over, human bias is still a problem.
After studies found that people of color face longer wait times to be matched with a driver—sometimes 35 percent longer than white riders—by last year, most ride-hail platforms had responded by limiting the information drivers receive about potential riders, the study says. For many of the services on these platforms, drivers can no longer see the name, profile picture, or drop-off location of customers before accepting a ride. The hope was that discrimination would decrease.
Older scientists aren’t notably worse at accepting revolutionary ideas compared to younger colleagues, research has found. But a paper published in August in the American Economic Review suggests there may be subtler ways in which the top dogs have a discouraging effect on new entrants. According to the paper, which draws on decades of data on more than 12,000 elite biology researchers, when a superstar scientist dies their field sees a small burst of activity in the form of fresh publications. What’s more, the authors of the new papers, which are more likely than usual to be highly cited, are typically newcomers who have never published in this subfield before.
The results imply that the deaths of important scientists may open up opportunities for fresh ideas, reaffirming Planck’s statement. But they also suggest that science is reassuringly robust; instead of fields getting into a rut, or even falling apart when a star dies, they continue to evolve.
oshua Bauml, a University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) oncologist, received welcome news last year: He had won a coveted spot in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Loan Repayment Program (LRP). Since 1988, the program has aimed to keep promising young biomedical scientists in academic research by helping repay school loans that can run up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Without it, supporters say, many of these researchers might have chosen lucrative slots at pharmaceutical companies or in private practice.
Bauml, who finished medical school in 2008, says he will get $75,000 in tax-free loan repayments during his first two LRP years and hopes a renewal will further pay down his debt. He also became a program “ambassador”—a model of success who counsels applicants.
Bauml has another distinction, too. A Science investigation has shown that he, like more than one-third of the 182 clinical scientist ambassadors whose years of participation could be determined, broke the program’s rules against certain forms of industry funding. (NIH’s own analysis finds a smaller number of violations.)
Copenhagen, Denmark June 22-26, 2020. “The summer school is dedicated to the uses of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in and for games. After introductory lectures that explain the background and key techniques in AI and games, the school will introduce participants the uses of AI for playing games, for generating content for games, and for modeling players.” [save the date]
We have Tamara Munzner from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and Robert Kosara from Tableau Research on the show to go through some of our personal highlights from the IEEE Visualization Conference 2019.” [audio, 1:02:01]
“The 1.0.2 release brings support for our new Visual Coding – Neuropixels dataset. This is a large-scale survey of mouse subcortical and visual cortical regions using high-density Neuropixels probes.”
“KSQL as it has existed thus far has been about continuously transforming streams of data. It allows you to take existing Apache Kafka® topics and filter, process, and react to them to create new derived topics. These topics can represent pure events or updates to some keyed table that is being materialized off the stream. For example, I could join together many sources of data I have about my customers to create a continually updated “unified customer profile.” KSQL continually processes the stream of incoming events and updates those materializations.”
“Until now, KSQL has only had support for this kind of continuous, streaming query against its tables of data.”