Medical Humanities and Their Discontents: Definitions, Critiques, and Implications

Medical humanities and their discontents: definitions, critiques, and implications.

The humanities offer great potential for enhancing professional and humanistic development in medical education. Yet, although many students report benefit from exposure to the humanities in their medical education, they also offer consistent complaints and skepticism. The authors offer a pedagogical definition of the medical humanities, linking it to medicine as a practice profession. They the...

Infrastructures and Their Discontents: Implications for Ubicomp

Infrastructures (persistent socio-technical systems over which services are delivered) are normally taken for granted by their users, but are powerful forces of constraint and enablement with implications for the design, use, and adoption of ubiquitous computing. To approach the study of infrastructure from an ethnographic perspective, we conducted an exploratory field study of people for whom ...

Doctors and their discontents.

Entropy and Its Discontents: A Note on Definitions

The routine definitions of Shannon entropy for both discrete and continuous probability laws show inconsistencies that make them not reciprocally coherent. We propose a few possible modifications of these quantities so that 1) they no longer show incongruities, 2) they go one into the other in a suitable limit as the result of a renormalization. The properties of the new quantities would slight...

Gravidity and Parity Definitions (and their Implications in Risk Assessment)

For example, a woman who is described as 'gravida 2, para 2 (sometimes abbreviated to G2 P2) has had two pregnancies and two deliveries after 24 weeks, and a woman who is described as 'gravida 2, para 0' (G2 P0) has had two pregnancies, neither of which survived to a gestational age of 24 weeks. If they are both currently pregnant again, these women would have the obstetric résumé of G3 P2 and ...