Enabling our voices to be heard

Making our voices heard: Why student journals are crucial.

The studentBMJ has provided a forum for medical student debate for the past eight years. The issues that students need to discuss deserve dedicated journal space. Being able to comment on issues such as admissions policies and teaching styles may affect many future generations of doctors as well. As there are thousands of doctors in training world wide, the more ways available for students to e...

Social Creativity: Making All Voices Heard

The power of the unaided individual mind is highly overrated. Much human creativity is social, arising from activities that take place in a social context in which interaction with other people and the artifacts that embody collective knowledge are essential contributors. Social creativity is not a luxury but a necessity to address the problems faced by societies in the 21 century. Our research...

Shouting to Be Heard in Advertising

Advertising competes for scarce consumer attention, so more profitable advertisers send more messages to break through the others’ clutter. Multiple equilibria can arise: more messages in aggregate induce more "shouting to be heard", dissipating profit. Equilibria can involve a small range of loud shouters or large range of quiet whisperers. All advertisers prefer there to be less shouting. The...

“it’s Time to Hear Our Voices”

Voices to be heard -- The many positions of a physician in Anton Chekhov's short story, "A Case History.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) dealt in many of his short stories and plays with various phenomena as encountered in everyday medical practice in late 19th century Russia. In A Case History (1898) Chekhov illustrates the physician’s many positions in relation to his patient. According to Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy of language, a speaker occupies a certain position from which he or she addresses th...