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Dennis OConnor

Mendi.io - Brain Training Tracker + Gamification - 0 views

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    See your brain activity visualized in Mendi's training game. You control the game using only your brain, making brain training tangible and visible. "Make the ball rise and earn points. These are both signs you're increasing your brain activity and strengthening your neural pathways. The goal? Better brain performance and mental wellbeing."
Dennis OConnor

Brain Exercises, Brain Training, Brain Health - BrainHQ from Posit Science - 0 views

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    Nueroplasticity -- Online training games. Interested in using this system for N=1 experiments.
Dennis OConnor

Tinnitus research | A randomized single-blind controlled trial of a prototype digital p... - 0 views

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    "Objective: This randomized single-blind controlled trial tested the hypothesis that a prototype digital therapeutic developed to provide goal-based counseling with personalized passive and active game-based sound therapy would provide superior tinnitus outcomes, and similar usability, to a popular passive sound therapy app over a 12 week trial period. Methods: The digital therapeutic consisted of an app for iPhone or Android smartphone, Bluetooth bone conduction headphones, neck pillow speaker, and a cloud-based clinician dashboard to enable messaging and app personalization. The control app was a popular self-help passive sound therapy app called White Noise Lite (WN). The primary outcome measure was clinically meaningful change in Tinnitus Functional Index (TFI) between baseline and 12 weeks of therapy. Secondary tinnitus measures were the TFI total score and subscales across sessions, rating scales and the Client Oriented Scale of Improvement in Tinnitus (COSIT). Usability of the US and WN interventions were assessed using the System Usability Scale (SUS) and the mHealth App Usability Questionnaire (MAUQ). Ninety-eight participants who were smartphone app users and had chronic moderate-severe tinnitus (>6 months, TFI score > 40) were enrolled and were randomly allocated to one of the intervention groups. Thirty-one participants in the USL group and 30 in the WN group completed 12 weeks of trial. Results: Mean changes in TFI for the USL group at 6 (16.36, SD 17.96) and 12 weeks (17.83 points, SD 19.87) were clinically meaningful (>13 points reduction), the mean change in WN scores were not clinically meaningful (6 weeks 10.77, SD 18.53; 12 weeks 10.12 points, SD 21.36). A statistically higher proportion of USL participants achieved meaningful TFI change at 6 weeks (55%) and 12 weeks (65%) than the WN group at 6 weeks (33%) and 12 weeks (43%). Mean TFI, rating and COSIT scores favored the US group but were not statistically different from WN. Usability measures
Dennis OConnor

A Texas team comes up with a COVID vaccine that could be a global game changer | Nevada... - 0 views

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    "A vaccine authorized in December for use in India may help solve one of the most vexing problems in global public health: How to supply lower-income countries with a COVID-19 vaccine that is safe, effective and affordable. The vaccine is called CORBEVAX. It uses old but proven vaccine technology and can be manufactured far more easily than most, if not all, of the COVID-19 vaccines in use today."
Dennis OConnor

Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here's How. - POLITICO - 0 views

  • Instead of asking, “Is there a reason to do this online?” we’ll be asking, “Is there any good reason to do this in person?”
  • saluting our doctors and nurses, genuflecting and saying, “Thank you for your service,”
  • give them guaranteed health benefits and corporate discounts
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  • it will force us to reconsider who we are and what we value, and, in the long run, it could help us rediscover the better version of ourselves.
  • has the potential to break America out of the 50-plus year pattern of escalating political and cultural polarization
  • the “common enemy” scenario, in which people begin to look past their differences when faced with a shared external threat
  • second reason is the “political shock wave” scenario
  • enduring relational patterns often become more susceptible to change after some type of major shock destabilizes them
  • now is the time to begin to promote more constructive patterns in our cultural and political discourse. The time for change is clearly ripening.
  • The COVID-19 crisis
  • has already forced people back to accepting that expertise matters.
  • move them back toward the idea that government is a matter for serious people.
  • the end of our romance with market society and hyper-individualism.
  • We could turn toward authoritarianism
  • reorient our politics and make substantial new investments in public goods—for health, especially—and public services.
  • to allowing partial homeschooling or online learning for K-12 kids has been swept away by necessity.
  • the social order it helps support—will collapse if the government doesn’t guarantee income for the millions of workers who will lose their jobs in a major recession or depression
  • de-militarization of American patriotism and love of community will be one of the benefits to come out of this whole awful mess.
  • But how do an Easter people observe their holiest day if they cannot rejoice together on Easter morning?
  • How do Jews celebrate their deliverance from bondage when Passover Seders must take place on Zoom
  • Can Muslim families celebrate Ramadan if they cannot visit local mosques for Tarawih prayers
  • All faiths have dealt with the challenge of keeping faith alive under the adverse conditions of war or diaspora or persecution—but never all faiths at the same time.
  • Contemplative practices may gain popularity
  • One group of Americans has lived through a transformational epidemic in recent memory: gay men. Of course, HIV/AIDS
  • Plagues drive change.
  • awakened us to the need for the protection of marriage
  • People are finding new ways to connect and support each other in adversity
  • demand major changes in the health-care system
  • COVID-19 will sweep away many of the artificial barriers to moving more of our lives online
  • uptake on genuinely useful online tools has been slowed by powerful legacy players,
  • collaboration with overcautious bureaucrats
  • Medicare allowing billing for telemedicine was a long-overdue change
  • s was revisiting HIPAA to permit more medical providers to use the same tools the rest of us use every day to communicate, such as Skype, Facetime and email.
  • The resistance
  • we will be better able to see how our fates are linked.
  • near-impossible to put that genie back in the bottle in the fall
  • college
  • forcing massive changes in a sector that has been ripe for innovation for a long time.
  • Once companies sort out their remote work dance steps, it will be harder—and more expensive—to deny employees those options.
  • Yo-Yo Ma
  • Perhaps we can use our time with our devices to rethink the kinds of community we can create through them
  • This is a different life on the screen from disappearing into a video game or polishing one’s avatar.
  • breaking open a medium with human generosity and empathy
  • Not only alone together, but together alone.
  • The rise of telemedicine
  • Out of necessity, remote office visits could skyrocket in popularity as traditional-care settings are overwhelmed by the pandemic
  • they’ve been forced to make impossible choices among their families, their health and financial ruin.
  • This crisis should unleash widespread political support for Universal Family Care
  • single public federal fund that we all contribute to, that we all benefit from, that helps us take care of our families while we work, from child care and elder care to support for people with disabilities and paid family leave.
  • potlight on unmet needs of the growing older population
  • The reality of fragile supply chains for active pharmaceutical ingredients coupled with public outrage over patent abuses that limit the availability of new treatments has led to an emerging, bipartisan consensus that the public sector must take far more active and direct responsibility for the development and manufacture of medicines.
  • resilient government approach will replace our failed, 40-year experiment with market-based incentives
  • Science reigns again.
  • Truth and its most popular emissary, science, have been declining in credibility for more than a generation
  • Quickly, however, Americans are being reacquainted with scientific concepts like germ theory and exponential growth
  • Unlike with tobacco use or climate change, science doubters will be able to see the impacts of the coronavirus immediately
  • for the next 35 years, I think we can expect that public respect for expertise in public health and epidemics to be at least partially restored
  • Congress can finally go virtual.
  • We need Congress to continue working through this crisis, but given advice to limit gatherings to 10 people or fewer, meeting on the floor of the House of Representatives is not an especially wise option right now
  • nstead, this is a great time for congresspeople to return to their districts and start the process of virtual legislating—permanently
  • Lawmakers will be closer to the voters they represent
  • sensitive to local perspectives and issues
  • A virtual Congress is harder to lobby
  • Party conformity also might loosen with representatives remembering local loyalties over party ties.
  • Big government makes a comeback.
  • Not only will America need a massive dose of big government
  • we will need big, and wise, government more than ever in its aftermath.
  • The widely accepted idea that government is inherently bad won’t persist after coronavirus.
  • functioning government is crucial for a healthy society
  • most people are desperately hoping
  • a rebirth of the patriotic honor of working for the government.
  • the coronavirus crisis might sow the seeds of a new civic federalism, in which states and localities become centers of justice, solidarity and far-sighted democratic problem-solving.
  • we will see that some communities handled the crisis much better than others.
  • success came in states where government, civic and private-sector leaders joined their strengths together in a spirit of self-sacrifice for the common good.
  • The coronavirus is this century’s most urgent challenge to humanity.
  • a new sense of solidarity, citizens of states
  • The rules we’ve lived by won’t all apply
  • pandemic has revealed a simple truth:
  • many policies that our elected officials have long told us were impossible and impractical were eminently possible and practical all along.
  • student loans and medical debt
  • evictions were avoidable; the homeless could’ve been housed
  • Trump has already put a freeze on interest for federal student loans
  • Governor Andrew Cuomo has paused all medical and student debt owed to New York State
  • Democrats and Republicans are discussing suspending collection on—or outright canceling—student loans as part of a larger economic stimulus package
  • It’s clear that in a crisis, the rules don’t apply
  • an unprecedented opportunity to not just hit the pause button and temporarily ease the pain, but to permanently change the rules so that untold millions of people aren’t so vulnerable to begin with.
  • Revived trust in institutions.
  • oronavirus pandemic, one hopes, will jolt Americans into a realization that the institutions and values Donald Trump has spent his presidency assailing are essential to the functioning of a democracy—and to its ability to grapple effectively with a national crisis.
  • government institutions
  • need to be staffed with experts (not political loyalists),
  • decisions need to be made through a reasoned policy process and predicated on evidence-based science and historical and geopolitical knowledge
  • we need to return to multilateral diplomacy,
  • to the understanding that co-operation with allies—and adversaries, too—is especially necessary when it comes to dealing with global problems like climate change and viral pandemics.
  • t public trust is crucial to governance
  • 1918 flu pandemic
  • the main lesson from that catastrophe is that “those in authority must retain the public’s trust” and “the way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one.”
  • Expect a political uprising.
  • Occupy Wall Street 2.0, but this time much more massive and angrier.
  • Electronic voting goes mainstream.
  • how to allow for safe voting in the midst of a pandemic, the adoption of more advanced technology
  • To be clear, proven technologies now exist that offer mobile, at-home voting while still generating paper ballots.
  • This system is not an idea; it is a reality that has been used in more than 1,000 elections for nearly a decade by our overseas military and disabled voters.
  • hould be the new normal.
  • Election Day will become Election Month.
  • The change will come through expanded early voting and no-excuse mail-in balloting, effectively turning Election Day into Election Month
  • Once citizens experience the convenience of early voting and/or voting by mail, they won’t want to give it up.
  • . Some states, such as Washington, Oregon and Utah, already let everyone vote at home.
  • Voters already receive registration cards and elections guides by mail. Why not ballots?
  • First, every eligible voter should be mailed a ballot and a self-sealing return envelope with prepaid postage.
  • Elections administrators should receive extra resources to recruit younger poll workers, to ensure their and in-person voters’ health and safety, and to expand capacity to quickly and accurately process what will likely be an unprecedented volume of mail-in votes.
  • In the best-case scenario, the trauma of the pandemic will force society to accept restraints on mass consumer culture as a reasonable price to pay to defend ourselves against future contagions and climate disasters alike.
  • In the years ahead, however, expect to see more support from Democrats, Republicans, academics and diplomats for the notion that government has a much bigger role to play in creating adequate redundancy in supply chains—resilient even to trade shocks from allies. This will be a substantial reorientation from even the very recent past.
  • pressure on corporations to weigh the efficiency and costs/benefits of a globalized supply chain system against the robustness of a domestic-based supply chain.
  • other gap that has grown is between the top fifth and all the rest—and that gap will be exacerbated by this crisis.
  • In this crisis, most will earn steady incomes while having necessities delivered to their front doors.
  • other 80 percent of Americans lack that financial cushion.
  • will struggle
  • A hunger for diversion.
  • After the disastrous 1918-19 Spanish flu and the end of World War I, many Americans sought carefree entertainment, which the introduction of cars and the radio facilitated.
  • The economy quickly rebounded and flourished for about 10 years, until irrational investment tilted the United States and the world into the Great Depression.
  • human beings will respond with the same sense of relief and a search for community, relief from stress and pleasure.
  • Less communal dining—but maybe more cooking
  • many people will learn or relearn how to cook over the next weeks.
  • ikely there will be many fewer sit-down restaurants in Europe and the United States. We will be less communal at least for a while.
  • A revival of parks.
  • Urban parks—in which most major cities have made significant investments over the past decade—are big enough to accommodate both crowds and social distancing.
  • Society might come out of the pandemic valuing these big spaces even more,
  • A change in our understanding of ‘change.’
  • Americans have said goodbye to a society of frivolity and ceaseless activity in a flash
  • Our collective notions of the possible have changed already
  • The tyranny of habit no more.
  • Maybe, as in Camus’ time, it will take the dual specters of autocracy and disease to get us to listen to our common sense, our imaginations, our eccentricities—and not our programming.
  • and environmentally and physiologically devastating behaviors (including our favorites: driving cars, eating meat, burning electricity)
  • echarged commitment to a closer-to-the-bone worldview that recognizes we have a short time on earth
Dennis OConnor

What We Know So Far About SARS-CoV-2 - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • March 20, 2020
  • One of the few mercies during this crisis is that, by their nature, individual coronaviruses are easily destroyed.
  • These viruses don’t endure in the world. They need bodies.
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  • To be clear, SARS-CoV-2 is not the flu. It causes a disease with different symptoms, spreads and kills more readily,
  • his family, the coronaviruses, includes just six other members that infect humans
  • OC43, HKU1, NL63, and 229E—have been gently annoying humans for more than a century, causing a third of common colds
  • MERS and SARS (or “SARS-classic,” as some virologists have started calling it)—both cause far more severe disease.
  • hy was this seventh coronavirus the one to go pandemic?
  • The structure of the virus provides some clues about its success. In shape, it’s essentially a spiky ball. Those spikes recognize and stick to a protein called ACE2
  • This is the first step to an infection
  • he exact contours of SARS-CoV-2’s spikes allow it to stick far more strongly to ACE2 than SARS-classic did
  • But in SARS-CoV-2, the bridge that connects the two halves can be easily cut by an enzyme called furin, which is made by human cells and—crucially—is found across many tissues. “This is probably important for some of the really unusual things we see in this virus,” says Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research Translational Institute.
  • SARS-CoV-2 seems to infect both upper and lower airways,
  • his double whammy could also conceivably explain why the virus can spread between people before symptoms show up
  • All of this is plausible but totally hypothetical; the virus was only discovered in January, and most of its biology is still a mystery.
  • The closest wild relative of SARS-CoV-2 is found in bats, which suggests it originated in a bat, then jumped to humans either directly or through another species.
  • Another coronavirus found in wild pangolins also resembles SARS-CoV-2
  • Indeed, why some coronaviruses are deadly and some are not is unclear. “There’s really no understanding at all of why SARS or SARS-CoV-2 are so bad but OC43 just gives you a runny nose,” Frieman says.
  • Once in the body, it likely attacks the ACE2-bearing cells that line our airways.
  • The immune system fights back and attacks the virus; this is what causes inflammation and fever
  • in extreme cases, the immune system goes berserk
  • These damaging overreactions are called cytokine storms.
  • they’re probably behind the most severe cases of COVID-19.
  • During a cytokine storm, the immune system isn’t just going berserk but is also generally off its game, attacking at will without hitting the right targets.
  • But why do some people with COVID-19 get incredibly sick, while others escape with mild or nonexistent symptoms
  • Age is a factor.
  • other factors—a person’s genes, the vagaries of their immune system, the amount of virus they’re exposed to, the other microbes in their bodies
  • “it’s a mystery why some people have mild disease, even within the same age group,”
  • Coronaviruses, much like influenza, tend to be winter viruses.
  • In the heat and humidity of summer, both trends reverse, and respiratory viruses struggle to get a foothold.
  • irus is tearing through a world of immunologically naive people, and that vulnerability is likely to swamp any seasonal variations.
  • And one recent modeling study concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 can proliferate at any time of year.
  • Unless people can slow the spread of the virus by sticking to physical-distancing recommendations, the summer alone won’t save us.
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    Dr. Michael Kurisu D.O.: We've known about SARS-CoV-2 for only three months, but scientists can make some educated guesses about where it came from and why it's behaving in such an extreme way.
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