Duty Hours: More Rest? More Sleep? Less Learning?

Learning More, with Less

P racticing chemists solve problems via “chemical intuition”, a quality that lets them skip intermediate details and get to the essential result, even if the outcome is counterintuitive to the uninitiated. There is no human shortcut to building this intuition; chemists hone their skills through years of experience of learning and memorizing patterns of molecular structure and reactivity. It is ...

Learning More by Doing Less

A principal must decide whether to implement each of two independent proposals (e.g., earmark requests, policy reforms, grant funding) of unknown quality. Each proposal is represented by an agent who advocates by producing evidence about quality. Although the principal prefers the most-informative evidence, agents strategically choose less-informative evidence to maximize the probability the pr...

Resident duty hour restrictions: is less really more?

Less is more… (more or less…).

In April 1981 Xerox introduced the Star 8010 workstation, the first commercial system with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the first to use the “desktop” metaphor to organize a user’s interactions with the computer. Despite the perception of huge progress, from the perspective of design and usage models, there has been precious little progress in the intervening years. In the tradition of ...

Less Is More, More the Merrier, or More From Less?

P hysicians deal with uncertainty all the time and chest pain in the emergency department (ED) is a typical example. Traditionally, coronary artery disease (CAD), pulmonary embolism (PE), and aortic dissection can present as chest pain, and the consequences of a missed diagnosis can be devastating, with the potential for rapid deterioration, and serious risk of morbidity and mortality. Moreover...