Objective: To determine where to place patient status displays for family members in the operating room family waiting room at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Methods: We calculated the percentage of seats from which wall monitors placed in hypothetical positions would be usable. We validated the usability of the new monitors by observing nonemployees’ use of monitors in the waiting room 1 week before and 1 week after implementation. Results: Compared to the legacy monitor, the new monitors were observed to be used from more locations within the waiting room and more people were observed to use the new monitors soon after entering the waiting room. Conclusions: Seemingly trivial decisions like where in a waiting room to place monitors can be informed by careful data collection and the consequences can observably impact communication between hospital staff and family members waiting for loved ones in surgery.
In this paper, I present a straightforward secular (non-religious, non-theological) theory: the Hebrew in the Torah is an invented language, akin to Klingon or Elvish, that was designed to write the Torah. Under this theory, the letters, words, grammar, and key terms and phrases of the Biblical language were selected, co-determined, and creatively bootstrapped as a sort of language game. The invented language may have been designed, like Esperanto or Basic English, to include elements in common with known natural languages; nevertheless, the details and final form of the language were bespoke and under the control of a creative author. In the invented system, some anagrams were defined to mean related concepts; letters were assigned number values so words and phrases could “add up to” interesting numbers (“Gematria”); and the author planned a text that would include a density of word-games like pangrams (sentences that use all letters of the alphabet), lipograms (sections of the text that are missing one particular letter), and particular numbers of letters and words throughout. However, all signs of seemingly deliberate language games might instead merely be the result of cherry picking of interesting findings. In this paper, I present analysis and new approaches that might help distinguish whether the apparent language games in the Torah imply an intentional invented language or, instead, only result from over-analysis and were not intended by the author to be present in the text.
Errors made by injection-experienced and injection-inexperienced participants were compared to test whether injection experience relates to use errors among potential users of a new injection device. In our sample, healthcare professionals (Group 1) made the fewest errors overall while there was also a trend for injection-experienced laypeople (Group 2) to make more errors than injection-inexperienced laypeople (Group 3). Furthermore, the types of errors made by each of the two layperson groups appear distinct from each other, with the pattern of errors made by injection-experienced laypeople more closely resembling the pattern among medical professionals. We speculate that medically experienced laypeople might inherit the “worst of both worlds” in that, as laypeople, they make errors due to inexperience with medical procedures and that also, like healthcare professionals, they make errors due to negative transfer from past experience with medical procedures. We suggest that experienced laypeople require special consideration as a potentially vulnerable user group.
