Archive for November 2024

As a great loss loomed, I feared straying too far from the hard truth. But I learned to distinguish denial from hope.

Seriously ill patients and family members face intense emotional suffering, and researchers, say clinicians must engage in ‘compassionate communication’ as part of the treatment process. They have identified so-called ‘never words’ that should not be said under any circumstances; offer methods for clinicians to identify their own never words; and provide more helpful language to use instead.

When we see the outputs of AI, we can see these as the result of a very sophisticated process of extracting raw materials, labor, and our collective intelligence and repackaging these and selling it for a profit. Above: Nets outside of a Foxconn Technology Group employee dormitory in China in 2010 to help prevent suicide attempts.

The children spent an average of 6.5 hours per week (0.92 hours per day) using tablets when they were 3.5 years old, 6.7 hours per week (0.95 hours per day) when they were 4.5 years old, and 7.0 hours per week (1 hour per day) when they were 5.5 years old. The researchers found that each 69-minute increase in tablet use when the children were 3.5 years old was associated with a 22% increase in expressions of anger and frustration when they were 4.5 years old. In turn, each standard deviation increase in anger and frustration at 4.5 years was associated with an increase of roughly 17 minutes in tablet use at 5.5 years.

Commentators often blame the rise of the far right in East Germany on the social and economic consequences of “failed” reunification. But right-wing extremism is by no means exclusive to the neue Bundesländer in the East. In the postwar West, former Nazis were rehabilitated and integrated into the federal bureaucracy. The far right shaped the core institutions of the Federal Republic, which affected their ability—or willingness—to investigate or prosecute its crimes. Above: Scenes from the 1992 riots in Rostock-Lichtenhagen.

The Rev. Blair Moorhead (left) with colleagues in ministry at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in McLean, Virginia.

How trustworthy is a positive HIV test result? How probable is an actual infection when the test is positive? Even professionals often get such questions wrong, which can lead to misdiagnoses and unnecessary surgeries in practice. In a new study with medicine and law students, a team of mathematics education scholars from the Universities of Regensburg, Kassel, and Freiburg, Heidelberg University of Education, and LMU Munich has compared four different training courses designed to help students gain a better understanding of probabilities.