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BackgroundSocial Media, such as Yelp, provides rich information of consumer experience. Previous studies suggest that Yelp can serve as a new source to study patient experience. However, the lack of a corpus of patient reviews causes a major bottleneck for applying computational techniques. ObjectiveThe objective of this study is to create a corpus of patient experience (COPE) and report descriptive statistics to characterize COPE. MethodsYelp reviews about health care-related businesses were extracted from the Yelp Academic Dataset. Natural language processing (NLP) tools were used to split reviews into sentences, extract noun phrases and adjectives from each sentence, and generate parse trees and dependency trees for each sentence. Sentiment analysis techniques and Hadoop were used to calculate a sentiment score of each sentence and for parallel processing, respectively. ResultsCOPE contains 79,173 sentences from 6914 patient reviews of 985 health care facilities near 30 universities in the United States. We found that patients wrote longer reviews when they rated the facility poorly (1 or 2 stars). We demonstrated that the computed sentiment scores correlated well with consumer-generated ratings. A consumer vocabulary to describe their health care experience was constructed by a statistical analysis of word counts and co-occurrences in COPE. ConclusionsA corpus called COPE was built as an initial step to utilize social media to understand patient experiences at health care facilities. The corpus is available to download and COPE can be used in future studies to extract knowledge of patients’ experiences from their perspectives. Such information can subsequently inform and provide opportunity to improve the quality of health care.

BackgroundA search engine to find physicians’ information is a basic but crucial function of a health care provider’s website. Inefficient search engines, which return no results or incorrect results, can lead to patient frustration and potential customer loss. A search engine that can handle misspellings and spelling variations of names is needed, as the United States (US) has culturally, racially, and ethnically diverse names. ObjectiveThe Marshfield Clinic website provides a search engine for users to search for physicians’ names. The current search engine provides an auto-completion function, but it requires an exact match. We observed that 26% of all searches yielded no results. The goal was to design a fuzzy-match algorithm to aid users in finding physicians easier and faster. MethodsInstead of an exact match search, we used a fuzzy algorithm to find similar matches for searched terms. In the algorithm, we solved three types of search engine failures: “Typographic”, “Phonetic spelling variation”, and “Nickname”. To solve these mismatches, we used a customized Levenshtein distance calculation that incorporated Soundex coding and a lookup table of nicknames derived from US census data. ResultsUsing the “Challenge Data Set of Marshfield Physician Names,” we evaluated the accuracy of fuzzy-match engine–top ten (90%) and compared it with exact match (0%), Soundex (24%), Levenshtein distance (59%), and fuzzy-match engine–top one (71%). ConclusionsWe designed, created a reference implementation, and evaluated a fuzzy-match search engine for physician directories. The open-source code is available at the codeplex website and a reference implementation is available for demonstration at the datamarsh website.

Researchers and practitioners in marketing, economics, and public policy often use preference elicitation tasks to forecast real-world behaviors. These tasks typically ask a series of similarly structured questions. The authors posit that every time a respondent answers an additional elicitation question, two things happen: (1) they provide information about some parameter(s) of interest, such as their time preference or the partworth for a product attribute, and (2) the respondent increasingly “adapts” to the task—that is, using task-specific decision processes specialized for this task that may or may not apply to other tasks. Importantly, adaptation comes at the cost of potential mismatch between the task-specific decision process and real-world processes that generate the target behaviors, such that asking more questions can reduce external validity. The authors used mouse and eye tracking to trace decision processes in time preference measurement and conjoint choice tasks. Respondents increasingly relied on task-specific decision processes as more questions were asked, leading to reduced external validity for both related tasks and real-world behaviors. Importantly, the external validity of measured preferences peaked after as few as seven questions in both types of tasks. When measuring preferences, less can be more.

U.S. education generally portrays science from the Western perspective. As a result, students from different cultures, also referred to as nonmajority students, often struggle to relate material learned in class to their own cultures and lived experiences. Cultural relevance is gaining momentum in broader education reform movements to relate content in the classroom to students' cultures and worldviews. Even with this momentum, examples of implementing culturally relevant instruction remain sparse in science education, and in chemistry education in particular. This article outlines a collaboration between I?isagvik College, a tribal college in Utqiagvik, Alaska, and the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to learn more about how culture and context influence the design and implementation of culturally relevant curricular materials for introductory chemistry. Throughout the ongoing process, students work with community members, Elders, and scientists to develop an environmental chemistry research project focused on integrating local, cultural, and scientific resources to explore Arctic snow processes. Participating students engaged in a three-part unit, including information gathering from cultural and scientific resources to develop research questions, collecting and analyzing samples from the local area using analytical methods, and interpreting the data and communicating results to the greater community. Here we outline the design considerations used to construct and implement a culturally relevant chemistry unit. We describe activities where students cultivated relationships with the community and identified resources to inform their research design and classroom interactions. We also detail how culturally relevant education relates to the unit and identify areas where we are still growing as we engage in the design process. Finally, this project demonstrates how a student-driven environmental chemistry project can connect introductory science students to their community while engaging in authentic research practices.

Risk and delay co-occur. Intertemporal choices are rarelycertain; risky choices are rarely atemporal. Behavioralevidence suggests that risk and time are entangled: timediscounting is different for risky outcomes than for risklessoutcomes. A prominent model of risky intertemporal choice(Baucells & Heukamp, 2012) combines risk and delay intopsychological distance. It predicts that risk and time will beentangled for outcome risk (risk with one zero outcome and atleast one positive outcome) but not for amount risk (risk withthree or more positive outcomes) unless assuming non-cumulative probability weights. We show that BH does notquantitatively fit risky intertemporal choices better than amodel assuming risk and time are independent. Manyparticipants were best fit by a random response model. Thefunctional form for risky intertemporal choices is difficult todetect. While risk and time are entangled, they do not seem tobe evaluated as psychological distance.

Microbes face many physical, chemical, and biological insults from their environments. In response, cells adapt, but whether they do so cooperatively is poorly understood. Here, we use a model social bacterium, Myxococcus xanthus, to ask whether adapted traits are transferable to naïve kin. To do so we isolated cells adapted to detergent stresses and tested for trait transfer. In some cases, strain-mixing experiments increased sibling fitness by transferring adaptation traits. This cooperative behavior depended on a kin recognition system called outer membrane exchange (OME) because mutants defective in OME could not transfer adaptation traits. Strikingly, in mixed stressed populations, the transferred trait also benefited the adapted (actor) cells. This apparently occurred by alleviating a detergent-induced stress response in kin that otherwise killed actor cells. Additionally, this adaptation trait when transferred also conferred resistance against a lipoprotein toxin delivered to targeted kin. Based on these and other findings, we propose a model for stress adaptation and how OME in myxobacteria promotes cellular cooperation in response to environmental stresses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In previous studies of homework in core academic subjects, positive student attitudes toward homework were linked to higher achievement, whereas time spent on homework showed an inconsistent relationship with achievement. This study examined the generalizability of these findings to foreign language learning by analyzing 2,342 adult students' attitudes toward assigned homework, time spent on assigned homework, and achievement outcomes in a variety of foreign language courses. Student ratings of the relevance of homework, the usefulness of feedback provided on homework, and the fairness of homework grading were positively correlated with teacher-assigned grades and standardized proficiency test scores in listening, reading, and speaking. Reported time spent on homework, however, was negatively correlated with these measures. In hierarchical regression analyses, all homework-related variables emerged as significant predictors of outcomes after controlling for potential covariates such as language learning aptitude, demographic variables, and affective factors. Thus, these results provide evidence that language course outcomes are positively associated with attitudes toward homework but negatively associated with time spent on homework. Possible interpretations of these findings are discussed. We suggest that the negative association follows in part from the opportunity cost of time spent on assigned homework, which decreases time spent on individualized study that may be more beneficial for improving language course outcomes.