Diagnosis

My father used to tell the same stories over and over again.  He was a doctor, who had gone to med school in the ‘good old days’ of the late 60’s when you could still smoke in the lecture halls…and in the hospital…and in the cadaver lab.  Several times, when he wanted to warn us about getting too focused on details in assessment, diagnosis, spreadsheets and reports he’d tell this apocryphal story.

One day there was a young, fresh-faced medical student who had finally finished the lectures and labs and was spending his first semester in the teaching hospital.  He’s gob smacked at how amazing the older doctors are, jealous but cowed of the students a year or two more advanced, and grudgingly respectful of the nurses and other techs who see him as green.  After about a week of learning the ropes, he’s given several specific patients to look after, and he does his proscribed work diligently.  Gathering the data from the techs and nurses, making his comments, maintaining the records, and even occasionally prescribing a treatment.  Of course, his most common shift is overnight.  While he’s been able to learn at the knee of the older doctors, they are frequently called away from their rounds with students by one emergency or another. 

One particularly busy night, he is given the assignment to keep watch on one particular important patient (in some retellings of the story it’s a relative of the older doctor, or some pillar of the community suddenly hospitalized).  The older doctor and the nurses have worked tirelessly to sustain this important person, and of course, are called off to another emergency to another floor of the hospital.  The patient was badly off, but is slowly recovering, using all of the latest medical machines.  The young medical student is given the important, but dull, task of checking in every hour to monitor vitals, the equipment, make sure that all of the diagnostics are properly written and circulated to the nurses station and input into the correct files.  The medical student checks in even more frequently than once and hour – almost every fifteen minutes.  He collects all of the vitals, not rounding off, but carrying everything out to the third decimal point, even when averaging (I suppose with a slide rule).  He even adds in additional data from the limbic system, or the bile count, or whatever clever chapters from his textbook the previous semester.

The night wears on into the early hours of the morning.  Aside from a few other small crises, he’s been able to keep a very good watch on the important patient.  And thinks to himself, “my word, they should use my chart as an illustration in a textbook”, such elegant data, such visualization in the graphs, meaningful data and intelligent medicine.

As the sun comes up, the older doctor and the nurses return from their other emergency.  The young student meets them at the nursing station and proudly presents the chart and files.  Of course, taking one look at the data, the older doctor’s face falls, and he and the nurse immediately recognize that the young medical student has been faithfully recording the long, slow, now-immanent death of the important patient.  They rush to the room, and find the patient in a dire straights (the specifics of this would change based on the audience) Of course, though another application of practical knowledge, sustained effort and medical science the older doctor, nurses and techs inevitably save the important patient while the young medical student stands by nearly helplessly, but often redeem himself with one or two vital pieces of information that he did not think to record in the charts and files.

In the various retelling of the story the mistake would be one, or some combination of three simple problems: 

1) The medical student is reading from the wrong machines, or from the wrong readout of the machines. Or…

2) The medical student focuses too much on the data, and misses the patterns (when told to us as young children, he simply has the chart upside down) or…

3) The medical student forgets to either speak to the patient or to use his intuition to from knowledge from information.  Dia-gnosis.

It’s from this third version of the story where the medical student redeems himself and proves his worth by connecting his book learning to real life scenarios.  In my copious spare time, I’d like to look up the Aarne-Thompson trope for this story.

The Time Ice Cream Castles 4 min 12 sec LA 139 5:23:84 Limelight Inc Re...

This November has five Wednesdays.

Right.... I forgot...  This November has five Wednesdays..

Where there's a wig, there's a way.

SmartPhone Video Producer [Complete Training]

 I'd been looking for a series or a course for teaching smartphone videography for about a year now.  There is a course over at Udemy that looks promising, and a short article at good old Videography that but for a series of videos that could be remixed and reordered for one of my classes, this looks really good.  The only problem is that the hardware and software keeps changing so quickly, some of the videos will be outdated the moment they're posted.  Well, that's life in digital media.



And I'd like to know if there are any 'course designers' in Higher Ed, or do they all work in K-12?  Because there are some very clever modules, that could work just as well for undergrad courses.

Formalism, Realism & Museums

For the last few times I've facilitated and taught an online class in Art History, I've been thinking a lot about how the display of art in Museums works on us as audiences -- particularly Egyptian art.  I'd spent some time in Cairo about 15 years ago, and noticed that while the museum there is very impressive, so much of the best known works aren't there, but instead have been scattered across museums in Europe.  And they have been for several centuries.  The Egyptian collections in Rome go back way before 19th century colonisation.

Not to say that many of the collections of Mesopotamian and Egyptian art held in Europe weren't straight up demonstrations of imperial power.  (the Egyptians and Persians did the same thing at their heights)

During weeks 3 and 4 of the most recent course I was teaching, I was visiting Berlin with my family and we'd taken an afternoon to visit the "Museum Island" and a very similar collection of Egyptian art to that in Rome.  Once again, that interplay of realism and formalism became very apparent.  I was gobsmacked by this depiction of a man's head:

Which contrasted so much with the more formal elements common to Egyptian Art:

I was struck by how even at it's more formalised, the Neues Museum in Berlin had chosen to show off the more realism-driven side of Egyptian art -- probably because it lined up with something they culturally valued when the museum was originally built in about 1850, and is still a deep part of thier culture as a modern, multi-cultural city.  Without a doubt, the most famous example, that's almost become a icon for Berlin is the bust of Nefertiti.  (photographs weren't allowed, so here's a link)

http://www.egyptian-museum-berlin.com/c53.php

The artwork resonates so well with the city, that they created a 'Vegas-style' laser-show with 

acrobatic dancers based on it.  (really, not kidding)

And as silly and cliche as it is, it shows how museums (and art history) can have a profound effect on the broader culture.  This is where we go to learn about form, theme and content, but it's also where we go to learn about our connections to earlier cultures -- and that we take these artworks and continue to make new artforms based on the forms, themes and content that resonate with us.  The museum in Rome is focused on the abstract formalism of beauty (early dynasty art), the museum in London on the writing (Rosetta stone), in Berlin on realism of Beauty (Nefertiti bust), in New York on the architecture (Temple of Dendur).  While each of these museums has a representative collection of artifacts, their place in time and culture highlighted something that resonated with the people there.  That's why travel is such a great way to educate yourself.

A city of architecture and a city of words:

           

Aside from out global multi-media Internet, we still see the vast majority of the art we experience in galleries, salons and art museums.  This is an incredibly important part of the context of each of the artworks we view.  Museums have been with us for at least 2,500 years, but their position in society has changed; it continues to change in our fast-evolving and hybridising media-driven world.  I believe that they will become increasingly important as we become more of a virtual society.  The ability to visit a place in real-time, and real-space will become more and more important.  In many ways, museums help us return to the real.

Catchin' the Sun

There was a vinyl LP that my father would play on the weekends, it was called Catchin' the Sun – an instrumental jazz-funk-pop-fusion album that seemed to have whole worlds in its catchy sax refrains and synth solos.

I must have been about eleven or so.  The songs rolled one into another, weaving complete complexity.  This was nearly an unfairness that those of us who grew up in the late 20th century have to deal with... ...this hermetic perfection of near-perfect pop music.  Emotional experiences triggered by slick production that could make your own attempts feel so clumsy in comparison. Younger and older generations ran in, where Gen-Xer's feared to tread.

Still, we're all trying to be that compiler, that artist, that writer who is – Catchin' the Sun.

The self-publishing we've got at our fingertips retrieves the essence of those 18th century pamphleteers who caught ideas, re-molded them to fit changing times, used a messy technology, a gossip-network, and changed the world.

All energy comes from that Sun of ours.  Energy from tens of millions of years ago burst from that star, fell on some plants on the surface of our world, those plants soon died, and spent eons below ground turning from funk to slime to gunk to thicker gunk, to gas.  That gas pulled from the ground, burned, and electrified, passes through a near-incomprehensible grid of power, and into the battery of a slim, glowing tablet — on which I write, and you read — and if our ideas line up with each other's, and if our electrons line up from sun to funk to gas to light again.  Maybe we can change the world.

Then maybe, just maybe, you and I are – Catchin' the Sun.