Healthcare and STEM Education – Siamese Twins in Reform and Innovation

The US has lost ground in recent years to other leading industrial nations in attracting new generations to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers. This has resulted in decreased enrollment rates in STEM college and university programs. Much of this trend is related to issues of global outsourcing of many of the related jobs in established industries, thus eliminating corresponding career incentives for high-school graduates. Industry and academia are in agreement that this educational trend is threatening the US economic and intellectual future and is one of the biggest challenges for current generations. Other reasons are related to an antiquated school system that has not changed significantly since the industrial revolution, and is, therefore, still favoring universal education over academic excellence on the PK-12 level.

National reform of our public school systems will take a long time, so one shorter-term solution is to specifically on women and minorities that are traditionally underrepresented in these careers. We need to find new approaches to attract minority groups to STEM programs, plain and simple.

One way we might do that is to embed STEM curriculum into currently desirable career fields. For instance, in a previous career at the University of Rhode Island, I wrapped traditional computer science education into the context of game design in order to attract more students. Another related initiative combined colleagues’ traditional STEM education with industrially relevant experiences and international exchange in order to emphasize the diversity and breadth of related career paths.

I will admit, however, that while this kind of approach can demonstrate isolated successes, it cannot change fundamental issues in career choice that are closely tied to gender differences: Although girls increasingly outperform boys in K-16 education, consequential female dominance does not seem to translate well into higher education or even STEM careers.

An extensive body of scientific research suggests that the apparent difference of career choice is in part related to gender differences in risk preferences, social preferences and competitive preferences. These differences have largely evolutionary roots, leading apparently – together with workplace discrimination and social acceptance pressure – to women’s ‘attraction’ to jobs with lower mean, lower-variance salaries. This relationship between evolved gender differences and occupational segregation might be hard to influence, so a bigger benefit may come from channeling these differences into new opportunities:

“The tendency of men to predominate in fields imposing high quantitative demands, high physical risk, and low social demands, and the tendency of women to be drawn to less quantitatively demanding fields, safer jobs, and jobs with a higher social content are, at least in part, artifacts of an evolutionary history that has left the human species with a sexually dimorphic mind. These differences are proximately mediated by sex hormones.”

What about healthcare reform?

It is widely accepted that healthcare reform will heavily rely on information and telecommunication technologies. Whether you are talking about electronic medical records or personal health records, telemedicine, telemonitoring or teleconsultation, online social communities of interest, remote caregiving, or Aging in Place, the trend from provider-centric healthcare to home- and individual-centered health and wellness is on the horizon.

This new found demand is creating an unprecedented need for scientific, technological, and engineering innovations. The corresponding career paths have the potential to combine both the job recognition and safety with the social content and rewards according to studies sought after by many women.

Could a potential to channel gender differences into new opportunities lie somewhere within healthcare reform? Early signs point to yes. Women are at the forefront of many of the emerging multidisciplinary research fields underlying the aforementioned healthcare IT R&D opportunities. These research fields combine aspects of Computer Science and Computer Engineering with Psychology, Social Sciences, Anthropology, Medicine and Communication and include Human-Computer Interaction, Affective Computing, Privacy Engineering, Health Communications (incl. Games for Health), Assistive Robots, and Online Social Networking, to mention a few. These women are the role models for new generations of women in STEM careers.

However, the emergence of such role models and the mere existence of the described opportunities for reform in health, wellness, and STEM education are not enough to catalyze the rapid change that is required. STEM education reformers are struggling to understand how to attract women and minorities to traditional STEM higher-education programs. There is also a struggle in determining how to develop frameworks for providing stronger workplace support for these underrepresented groups in STEM careers.

Where are the STEM curricula and initiatives specifically addressing the opportunities promised by home-centered healthcare and personalized health and wellness?

Where are the interdisciplinary centers communicating these opportunities to today’s high-school graduates?

And where are the public-private partnerships that can provide political decision makers with the implementation frameworks to link healthcare reform to STEM education reform?

The answers to these questions will not come from tweaking standardized testing or from providing in schools an additional hour of health and wellness per week … So where will they come from?

How to Lose Friends with Social Media

Recently a colleague complained to me that I’m not following him back on Twitter. Another one posted a comment to a Facebook application, offended that my wall was not accessible to her. And another one got annoyed when comments to my online status stayed unanswered for long periods of time, although there seemed to be plenty of activity on my profile.

Which made me think about the different uses people apply to their online social networks and tools – and their personal expectations.

In general, people don’t seem to realize, that most social technologies, including Twitter and Facebook, are asynchronous communication tools. That means, that they are meant to post information now that people pick up at a later point in time at their own discretion. Consequently, the builders of those tools have built in mechanisms and algorithms which – in an attempt to manage the communication load – often arbitrarily display the newest status updates, photos, news on the various ‘friends’ you follow; the newest ones first but in no particular order and without any particular ranking. Therefore, your profile may look active today when your updates are actually from a while ago. What makes matters worse is the fact, that your profile also displays replies, posts, comments by your friends – dependent on your preference settings. So, there may be recent activity on your profile although you haven’t logged in for weeks.

What we need to remember is that people use these tools in different ways, which is dependent on how they are able to access them throughout the day. For example, due to company security restrictions, I can only access most social media sites from my iPod touch during the day and from my home desktop at night. Consequently, I try to manage my Twitter stream by:

• only following people that talk about things of interest to me (which at this point does not include when they go to the shower or watch the sun rise) :)
• only posting information and links on Twitter that I find particularly intriguing from a professional and intellectual perspective

Some good additional suggestions on social media etiquette were posted by Chris Brogan.

Consequently, I don’t prohibit anybody from following me but choose who to follow based on the above criteria. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, other people use Twitter in different ways which includes building an online reputation as connectors or distributors of any kind of information, measured by a ratio of followers to followees (called tweeciprocity on Twitter) or alike.

Sorry, guys, for virtually screwing up your cyber-reputation. I hope that the intellectual and informative value that my posts provide to you compensate for that. :)

But back to asynchronous communication tools, old-fashioned Email being one of them... They allow you to access and respond in a different-place/different-time manner and thus the expectation for somebody waiting for a response should adjust accordingly. Even though you may instantaneously see my post doesn’t create the need or ability for me to immediately respond; nor does it require me to respond at all. :)

In contrast, synchronous communication gives you instant feedback but requires you to also immediately respond. This direct feedback loop, however, helps to quickly overcome ambiguity, reach agreement, minimize time, and is, therefore, a much better way to arrive at mutual consent and to make decisions.

So, why not pick up the phone if you actually want to accomplish something?

Or, if the person you want to talk to is actually sitting in the cubicle across the aisle: Why not get up, walk over, and talk to him or her?

You might actually make a real friend …

Attention Deficit Disorder: Personal Demise or the Next Step of Human Evolution?

According to modern evolutionary theories, evolution is based on two fundamental changes in life forms, both of which adhere to the process of natural selection: arbitrary mutation and adaptation to the environment.

Recent years have seen a remarkable increase in children diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) often in conjunction with hyperactivity (ADHD). ADHD is now thought to occur in 3-5% of school-age children and is more common in boys. It is not yet known what causes ADD, but there does seem to be a genetic influence.

As a condition, ADD is considered to be a deviation from 'normal' capabilities (which constitutes a challenge for educators and a burden for many parents). But what if, in classifying ADD exclusively as a state of reduced mental capacity, chemical imbalance or 'different wiring' (as often alluded to), we’ve gotten it all wrong? What if ADD was actually an adaptation to dealing with an increasingly complex environment? An environment where children grow up exposed to increased levels of external stimuli and information, at an ever-increasing pace. And an environment that presents them with an increased number of multimodal communication channels to be processed in parallel.

Some scientists even correlate rises in ADD among children to a nature-deficit disorder, i.e. the lack of exposure of today’s children to the need for involuntary attention processes as required in natural environments.

At the same time, popular new-age beliefs are on the rise about the power of subconscious decision-making over thorough scientific proof (see e.g. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink!) paving the way for societal acceptance of short-term focus and spontaneous, uninformed snap judgments.

Not surprisingly, this theory of “Thinking without thinking” has been sharply criticized by supporters of evidence-based decision making such as Michael LeGault in Th!nk, advocating the continuous need for critical thinking and problem-solving strategies as well as emphasizing a concerning decline of related capabilities among the young generations.

So, are we dealing with a classic dichotomy of contrasting trends and opinions, both of which would be supporting the hypothesis of natural selection through adaptation, with one, however, providing hope and justification for phenomena like ADD, the other dooming us to look at a future of self-inflicted mental decline?

Many aspects of the modern information society bear the risk of information overload for the human recipient and the need for them to quickly filter huge amounts of references rather than store significant amounts of information for longer periods of time.

Effectively navigating through the jungle of online media has become essential to gain and maintain social connectivity and acceptance. Crouching through a multitude of opinions in the form of blogs and discussion forums, while engaging in duels of rapidly fired bursts of micro blogs to create situational awareness in an increasingly complex world has replaced externally led knowledge acquisition and indoctrination. It is now truer than ever: "It's who you know, not what you know!"

So, are modern IT-based communication tools and techniques our response to reduced human capacity in focusing, critical thinking and long-term memorization or are those societal trends and challenges the result of the new and celebrated technologies?

Is, consequently, the best medicine in this case possibly no medicine at all, but a matter of better diagnosis resulting in differentiation between true ADD/ADHD and different learning styles and cognitive specialization of today's children?

Might it, therefore, require a revised educational system that embraces mental diversity in order not to be in the way of human evolution and adaptation to ITC innovation?

Or should we – God forbid – be a little more critical towards the adoption of modern technologies and should we study and consider their impact more thoroughly before exposing future generations?