I know the title won’t surprise anyone but now here is a publication that tried to find a scientific explanation for this phenomenon.

Aims: To evaluate the effects of a 24 h (h) physicians on-call duty (OCD) (‘night shift’) on 24 h electrocardiogram (ECG), heart rate variability, blood pressure (BP), and various biochemical serum and urine ‘stress markers’ compared with a ‘regular’ day at work.

Methods and results: The study was designed as a prospective randomized cross-over trial with each physician completing a 24 h (h) OCD and a 24 h control period including a regular 8 h non-OCD. Thirty healthy physicians with a median age of 33.5 years (range 29.0–45.0) were analysed. Twenty-four hours ECG and BP monitoring were performed and participants were instructed to fill out an event diary and perform a 24 h urine collection. Furthermore, blood was drawn before and after OCD and control day.

Conclusion: Our results highlight the association of OCD with an increased risk profile for cardiovascular disease. In addition to the acute effects observed, frequent night-calls over a longer period possibly elicit sustained alterations in cardiovascular homeostasis.

Reference:

Arrhythmias and increased neuro-endocrine stress response during physicians’ night shifts: a randomized cross-over trial

Rauchenzauner et al, European Heart Journal 2009 30(21):2606-2613;

Mauroof Ibrahim, an Animation degree student in LimKokWing University of Creative Technology, Malaysia did an interview with me for a research project “Virtual Reality: Establishing Medical Hallmarks”. I asked him to publish the comprehensive results in a well-structured form on Scribd. Enjoy:

Google is now trying to collect information about flu shots across the USA. Here is an example featuring where you can find seasonal (red) and H1N1 (blue) flu shots near New York.

An excerpt from Google Blog:

You can check out the flu shot finder at www.google.com/flushot. The same tool will also be available shortly on www.flu.gov and the American Lung Association websites. It’s important to note that this project is just beginning and we have not yet received information about flu shot clinics for many locations. In addition, many locations that are shown are currently out of stock. We launched this service now in order to help disseminate information about locations where vaccines are available, and also to make more vaccine providers aware of the project so that they can contribute.

It’s a shame it’s only avaliable in the US at the moment.

We all know about the Personalised Medicine Coalition:

The Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC) is an independent, non-profit group that works to advance the understanding and adoption of personalized medicine for the ultimate benefit of patients. Our diverse members work together to educate opinion leaders and the public about the issues that will shape how personalized medicine develops — and how quickly all of us can benefit from it.

Now I was glad to see the European Personalised Medicine Diagnostics Association just launched as reported by GenomeWeb.

Made up of biotechnology firms, academic and institutional researchers, small and large businesses, and patient advocacy groups, the European Personalised Medicine Diagnostics Association (EPEMED) announced its board of directors this week. Included on that board are executives from Ipsogen, Genzyme Genetics, Oncomethylome Sciences, the Personalized Medicine Coalition, BioMerieux, Theranostics, and Novartis Molecular Diagnostics.

EPEMED says its central goals are to move personalized medicine forward throughout Europe through targeted education, idea-sharing, and business models, and to promote harmonization in Europe’s approach to personalized medicine.

My friends at Medgadget have recently attended the interesting TEDMED 2009 event. I hope I can make the next one. Here are the entries they wrote focusing on the newest innovations in medicine.

• TEDMED 2009 – Day 1
• TEDMED 2009 – Day 2
• TEDMED 2009 – Day 3
• TEDMED 2009 – Day 4 (The Final Day)

And also some videos they published:

Knome Personal DNA Sequencing Services

XVIVO’s David Bolinsky on Benefits of Scientific Animation

Interview with Philip Low About Roche and NeuroVigil Partnership

Patch Adams on Medical Technology

Ben Blum-Smith inspires a new anti-jargon edu-slogan:

… what happens is that when kids reach a point in their mathematical education where they are asked to prove things, they find

1. that they have no idea how to accomplish what is being asked of them, and
2. that they don’t really get why they’re being asked to do it in the first place.

The way out of this is to give them a crisis. We need to give them problems where the obvious pattern is not the real pattern. What you see is not the whole story! Then, there is a reason to prove something.

Create crisis.

I have become convinced, overwhelmingly, that my value to my students as an educator is bound up less in what I know (though knowing things doesn't hurt) than in my ability to engineer a safe, controlled crisis in their learning process (which, I think, requires knowing a whole lot about something very little).

Blum-Smith's post connects a lot of my recent disconnected writing — in particular, my intention to be less helpful and my interest in a learning process that positions new knowledge as the solution to the limitations of old knowledge. As far as teacher mug slogans go, "create crisis" should start some good conversation in the faculty lounge.

Aside: I'm reviewing some of O'Reilly's Head First material (for some small profit, in full disclosure) and their authors do a fantastic job creating crises. There are two chapters in the Head First Programming, in which the reader learns searching, strings, and branching. Watch how they do this:

• First, you learn how to pull down the text of a webpage for your "employer," the CEO of Starbuzz.
• But then your employer gets sick of looking at raw HTML and you have to search strings to find the price information he's looking for.
• But then he needs an emergency option so he can place an order if the price drops below a certain point.
• But then he needs a notification system, so your program will Tweet him that information immediately.

And so on. It's extremely satisfying.

2.

Nina Simon, a Santa Cruz neighbor, designs participatory museum experiences which she has dubbed "Museum 2.0." She compiled an excellent list of questions that support and suppress participation:

Here are some of the wrong questions:

1. What is the girl in the painting doing? (too teacherly)
2. What does freedom mean to you? (too abstract)
3. How would you define nanotechnology? (too impersonal)
4. What's the best song you've ever heard? (avoid superlatives – they make some people anxious)
5. What do you think? (too general)

Let's set aside the fact that she uses "teacherly" as a pejorative. The applicability of this post to anyone who spends the majority of her work day asking students questions should be obvious.

Furthermore, I haven't set aside the puzzle I posted in You Have No Life. I'm ripping pages out of the playbooks of people who spend their working lives "engaging the imagination so that people don't feel threatened by it": Nina Simon (museums), Jane McGonigal (games), and David Milch (television, quoted). The projects highlighted at the Kickstarter blog (miscellaneous) are essential reading also.

3.

Robert Cringely hops on the higher-education-is-screwed meme in Burn Baby Burn [via]:

Education, which — along with health care — seems to exist in an alternate economic universe, ought to be subject to the same economic realities as anything else. We should have a marketplace for insight. Take a variety of experts (both professors and lay specialists) and make them available over the Internet by video conference. Each expert charges by the minute with those charges adjusting over time until a real market value is reached. The whole setup would run like iTunes and sessions would be recorded for later review.

I'm not in the prognostication business. I draft off more serious thinkers on the open question of the effect of the Internet on higher education. I don't know if I've missed a dumptruck-sized hole in Cringely's reasoning but I found the piece extremely provocative and I'll be revisiting it later in this space.

4.

I want to buy a coffee table book packed with anecdotes just like this one from Ian Garrovillas, illustrating the healthy, cool interaction between a student and teacher.

I tried to graft a structure onto this post but nothing stuck. Topical bullet points from the failed drafts:

1. a description of what happens to the blue students next, of their regrettable slides further leftward and their occasional, triumphant slides rightward.
2. tortured musings about correlation and causation. (ie. "if I take some credit for their progress, must I then accept some blame for dot dot dot et cetera.")
3. a description of effective motivators for my blue students, none of which include teacher approval, parent approval, disciplinary consequences, or perfect attendance badges at the end-of-year assembly.
4. the economies of scale I can't seem to access as a part-time teacher, two of which, however tacky the terms may seem in this context, are "word of mouth" and (even tackier) "branding."
5. really, how irresponsible and inaccurate it is to compare one class to the next and yet, wow, that was some group last year, the first and last group for whom I'll ever take a summer school bullet.

The only draft that mattered was this:

The blue students indulge none of my laziness. They tolerate none of my bad habits. There are all kinds of students at this school — gray students, we'll call them — who will let me slide on all kinds of carelessness so long as I keep them moving toward graduation, college, and career.

But graduation, college, and career are all abstractions wrapped in scare quotes to my blue students. So they pummel my flabby pedagogy daily to the point that I'm burger. Lean burger. You can't believe the gratitude I have for such a challenging year.

Take-home lesson: never underestimate your ability to fool yourself into believing your students understand something when really what they are doing is watching you. To force them to engage the material it is often necessary to restrict their access to you or systematically confound the signals they get from you.

I think this is a central issue for modern math teachers. We need to explicitly develop ways of question-posing and interacting with our classes and individual students that hide or disguise our intentions for how they are supposed to respond. This needs to be part of the core training of math teachers, much more than it already is.

A late link to some really great writing. Forward, retweet, reblog, subscribe, etc.