The Best of Our Knowledge Show 1167, 2013 January 29

This is the best of our knowledge, a presentation of national productions.
When you switch on your computer in the morning, what's the first page you see?
For millions, that homepage is Google, and the first thing they notice is the Google Doodle.
Now students are being asked to design their own Google Doodle for a nice scholarship.
What Doodle for Google is about is giving students in K through 12 an opportunity to draw their own Google logo.
Today on the best of our knowledge, we'll get the details of the contest.
We'll also hear how budget cutbacks have changed the lives of some teachers in Chicago.
Attend a training session for emergency room personnel and spend an academic minute learning about a rare condition that affects a child's coordination.
I'm Bob Barrett, and this is the best of our knowledge.
In just a few years, the word Google has gone from being an obscure word that was only seen on one of those word of the day calendars from time to time,
to being one of the most used names on one of the most visited websites in the world.
There's another term that grew from this, the Google Doodle, and that's something that will mean a big scholarship to one talented and lucky student.
Here to talk about the Doodle for Google Scholarship contest is Ryan Germick, the lead of the Google Doodle team.
Ryan, we'll get to this contest in a minute, but at first for the three or four people in the world who don't know, tell us about the Google Doodle.
Sure, so the Google Doodle is one of the special logos that we do on our home page from time and time around and the home pages around the world.
I think it was just something that the founders did when they went to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada.
They put out of office matches of sorts superimposing the Burning Man logo on the Google logo.
It's a tradition we've been keeping ever since honoring different traditions or celebrations for people's birthdays or holidays, etc.
And by this point we've done almost 1,500 of them and we really try to take advantage of what the Internet has to offer and make them as exciting as fun as possible.
And some of them get pretty elaborate, I may I remember for a Star Trek anniversary you had an animation that was even interactive.
Yeah, over the last few years we've done more with the capabilities of not just the illustration or a photograph or a graphic design, but really thinking about all the things the Internet can do.
Any kind of interactivity be it a game or an animation or even sometimes we've done videos.
So now you're trying to get students involved in this and I guess this has been an ongoing contest for a few years.
Tell us what the contest entails.
Sure, so we're always looking for ways to kind of celebrate innovation, technology and fun.
And this is definitely one of the fun celebrations to be sure.
And what doodle for Google is about is giving students in K through 12 an opportunity to draw their own Google logo and to scholarship competitions.
So there are prizes to be had as well.
Now the scholarship it's pretty heavy, that's a $30,000 scholarship plus the school gets a technology grant.
That's right, there's a $50,000 technology grant for the school and of course the grand prize winner gets their work on Google for the day.
There's a theme to this year's contest, what is that?
The theme is my best day ever, so we hope that that really opens up the creative possibilities for the participants and anything that they can think of that would be exciting for them to happen that day.
We'd love to see that on Google Doodle.
It's interesting that it's K through 12.
I mean you would expect that the older kids would have a better shot at this, but I guess we have some pretty imaginative kindergarten students do.
Well you know last year's winner was a kid named Dylan, he was seven from Wisconsin.
It's not about necessarily technical prowess with a pencil or pen, it's really about communicating something that's striking and fun.
We all have that innate artist inside of us whether we're one or one or one and there's no age by a third.
It's just about what kind of resonates with the people at Google and also the audience at votes on it.
Now what type of art are we looking for? Is it something that's actually drawn? Is it something that's computer produced even some animation? What's being accepted?
Really anything goes. This year you can, for the first time besides entering by mail, you can also enter online.
And really anything you can put onto a Google logo you're able to do.
If you want to use crayons or you want to use spray paints or you want to use oil paints or pencils or computer, whatever, you go for it and we'll take a look.
This is going through the middle of March, who's going to be judging it once you get everything in?
So there's a few different rounds of judging. The contest runs until March 22nd.
First we get tens of thousands of entries historically, more than 100,000 last year.
And it first goes through many gracious volunteers at Google and then we have a series of guest judges as well.
So folks like Katie Curric and Quetzlove from the band The Roots and some other really exciting folks are going to be chipping in.
And then after the national finalists are selected, they'll be 50, one from each state.
We'll then have a public vote online on the website, which is where you can find all these resources is Google.com, FlashDoodle for Google.
And people will be able to pick their favorites from there.
And when do you think the when will the actual scholarship and winner be announced?
The winner gets announced in May and we fly all the national finalists to New York for an award ceremony and that's when we unveiled a grand prize.
We have the grand prize of the ready all the prizes.
Yeah, there's five national finalists and those will be honored as well.
Okay, that's great. And again, this is Google.com, FlashDoodle, the number four, then Google.
That's right.
Ryan Germick is the lead of the Google Doodle team.
Again, to learn more about the scholarship contest, go to google.com, FlashDoodle, the number four, Google.
In late 2009, early 2010, the state of Illinois first delayed, then failed to disperse the funding had it allocated to the University of Illinois.
In response, the university implemented several cost-cutting measures, including a hiring freeze, salary reductions through furlough days and cuts to jobs and programs.
James Nell and Stephanie Whitaker worked as academic professionals in the political science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago when they were told they would lose their jobs.
Academic professionals are lucky because their contracts require they be given a six to 12-month grace period before their last day of work.
But because they have year-to-year appointments, they're particularly vulnerable to being fired in tough financial times.
Independent producer Michelle Boyd crafted this piece as James and Stephanie described what it was like to lose their jobs and how they fared afterwards.
When I came in 1993, my kids were one and two.
I was a working full-time mom and I always do that.
But at some point, I realized that my family needed me more than we had to have that second paycheck.
So I sort of cut my ties with the University for about six months before I said, oh, this thing at home stuff is hard.
And I actually came back in the temple and landed this role in political science seven years ago.
At first, I worked in financial aid and then as sort of a junior academic advisor.
That was great until the recession of 2002. The University had a budget problem and many of us in the College of Medicine received tea contracts.
I was one of them. I was out of work for about a week before I was hired by the political science department to be their graduate advisor.
I didn't want to just work with kids who aren't struggling for something.
Who aren't, you know, the first in their families to go to college and I can get that here.
Oh, I felt that I was very lucky and had found my niche.
It was a position that I kind of imagined that I might retire in.
I had been following news reports so closely and every time I turn on the news, another company was letting 2000 employees go.
So I could foresee that this was becoming an increasing probability that I would go through this difficult thing for a second time.
And then we started to hear rumblings about administrative cuts.
It's kind of like being an insect and seeing the car windshield coming at you in slow motion.
And then it was not just program cuts. It became human resource cuts, you know, people.
My department head on Friday called the four staff members together said we're going to have a meeting on Monday at 10.
And he didn't smile. You pretty much know what that's about.
Not a fun weekend. That's for that now about three, four days.
Now it's Monday, the week of Thanksgiving. And we're all called in a meeting.
And we're told all of the administrative staff in four areas of social science will lose their jobs.
The positions were going to be eliminated. And a pod would be created with five blow-age positions and perhaps a supervisor.
While I was thinking, wow, really? After all these years, I got to find something else.
How do I remake myself? You know, you go through, you know, let me start reading my essence magazines and figure out what new outfits I need.
I need to get to the health club and lose about 15 pounds so I can get this new look about me.
The harder moments came, you know, earlier and later.
These are the times when you stop. When things slow down and you have a chance to consider, you know, well, what is my future?
I might get a live under a bridge. How ugly is this kitty cat? Then, you know, those are the most difficult moments for sure.
But what I began to think over the next 30 days or so was, how did this happen to the departments and the department not have a say in it?
And I think it was right after that. I sent a note to my faculty that said, I hear you guys discuss things all day long on Academy about, you know, telephone changes at the university.
You know, you know, parking changes at the university, but all of the administrative staff is let go. And I don't hear anything. Right after that, I think the faculty began to rally.
I talked to my state senator. I talked to my state representative. I'm losing my job because of the Illinois State budget deficit.
I think it was the main message. Are you going to support a revenue increase?
After the faculty rallied and they rallied and they rallied hard and they marched on Springfield and they marched on the state of Illinois building downtown.
You know, what ultimately happened was only two of us were let go.
And there was no pod and the salaries were retained. And it was just in the four-person department, we were going down to two.
And even that was very uneasy in the department.
I applied for over maybe 30, 35 different positions, uh, third to a half or eight UIC. I hadn't given up on the place yet.
I've had my T-contract rescinded and I am glad that I still have my job.
I found another position in the 11th hour in November. The physics department hired me.
We never told the boys about my T-contract. I didn't want to share it and have it be their fear.
Oh my god, our moms are going to lose her job. Are we going to lose our house? That kind of thing.
My colleagues at Wayne State, they're still in the same jobs that they were or better. They have never heard of a T-contract.
They only get fired for cause and none of them have ever been fired for cause. And they have a lot of confidence as a professional.
And I feel like I kind of wounded but on the mend. And it'll take some time to regain the sense of confidence and security that most people have.
Those people who have said to me, oh you should just be lucky you have a job. Yes I am. Yes I am. I'm grateful for that.
But I have not lost the impact of what happens when someone says your life is going to change. And a year you're going to be gone.
This piece was produced by Michelle Boyd as part of the series Meet the Budget Cuts, a multimedia project that explores the human impact of state budget cuts.
Learn more at MeetTheBudgetCuts.weblyweb.com
Still to come at emergency room becomes a classroom that's next on the best of our knowledge.
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This is the best of our knowledge. I'm Bob Barrett. Many medical schools use life like dolls and dummies to simulate real patients in emergency conditions.
Some of these sim patients can be remarkable. I attended one of these simulations at Seattle Children's Hospital a couple of years ago and here's what it sounded like.
What's going on? He was fine. He was having a bottle and then he went in to beat it.
Okay, what access do we have? We have a right PIV over here. We have a probe that's long. Do we have any sats? No.
If you walked into this simulated emergency room situation and didn't know it was a simulation your first instinct would probably be to panic.
Your next would be to admire the calm professionalism of the emergency care personnel during the simulated emergency the condition of a three month old baby quickly deteriorated until it's heart stopped training sessions such as these are an important part of keeping emergency personnel prepared as we used to say on the radio in case this had been an actual emergency during the simulation all members of the Seattle Children's emergency blue team methodically went through a checklist of tests and observations as the young patients conditions.
The concept of using simulation in medicine came out of the airline industry flight trainers. Dr. Daniel Rubens is an anesthesiologist at Seattle Children's Hospital and is the medical director of the simulation program.
In terms of having a checklist for medical things that's pretty new because you know if you go back five, ten years ago it used to be you know the good doctor would stand there going I wonder what's going on here.
And we still find that today is that you know baby goes into the crisis you can have four doctors standing there they're all highly trained and they're trying to figure out what's going on but that's not what the baby needs the baby needs ABC airway breathing circulation so we have to pull them back to this basic protocol checklist.
Another important part of the training session was making sure every person in the room knew their role in the operation for the hospital is a code team 24 hours a day.
So that code team runs pretty much as they did with the car and with the bits and they come from certain areas of the hospital mostly from intensive care.
So you'd have an anesthesiologist would take the airway role you'd have a two intensive care nurses that would take the medication role or the CPR role the person doing chest compressions is a single role.
And so all those people come from come as that team and respond around the hospital so that you've got that team response and they will work together and you know and then they follow that sort of checklist.
The blue team leader is the calm authoritative voice you hear the most during the simulation. Dr. Jennifer Reed is an attending physician at Seattle Children's and played that role as the team leader in the simulation I watched.
She told me that as an ER attending physician, it's a role she plays very often in real life during the simulation.
Everyone on the resuscitation team work together like a well oil machine. I asked her if that was like real life.
We were trying to show you our best example. So this is the ideal of how we would like things to go and that's exactly why we do simulated resuscitations.
Our goal is to have every resuscitation run smoothly and sort of pretty much the way we model and that's why it just takes practice.
Fortunately in pediatrics resuscitations are a rare event but if you don't practice it and practice going through all the steps the one that actually happens,
you're not going to be prepared to do everything in a timely organized fashion.
We've often talked about communication between doctors and patients here it seemed like you're practicing communication between doctor and doctor.
Here we're practicing communication between everybody involved in the team. So it's between the doctor, every doctor on the team, the nurses on the team, the respiratory therapist on the team and the family as well.
We believe that it's important for everybody to be involved and up to date as far as where things are at and a patient's care.
When you come into a simulation like this, do you know what's going to happen?
No, so usually no. So the goal during a simulation honestly is to have a whole group of people there who don't know what's going to happen and then to have to respond to it as they wouldn't realize.
So the patient's condition is evolving and we're able with the simulation to then have the simulator respond to what the team is doing so as it wouldn't realize.
After the simulation there was an evaluation, the entire team was assembled and the performance is reviewed.
Dr. Rubin stress that they're not looking for perfection.
The goal of this is to accept human error.
That especially in this highly strong situation, human error will occur and it does occur and this has been very difficult in medicine to accept that.
So you know we're human, we make mistakes. So that's why we need to practice it.
So the goal of this is not to do it perfectly. The goal of this is to make mistakes and this is the place to make them but not in a real situation.
In the center of all this activity was the patient during this little simulation an extremely life like mannequin of a three month old child called the Sim Baby which Dr. Rubin's had a hand in designing.
Inside its cute exterior is sophisticated circuitry controlled by a laptop computer that creates a realistic pulse in the child's arm causes the chest to rise and fall as it breathes, exhaling carbon dioxide.
It cries, it pulls its arm away when you shoot an IV in it, gasps and even makes heart lung and bowel sounds.
I noticed after the simulation was over and we were just talking to the participants that the Sim Baby was lying there on the OR table still breathing.
The only thing the Sim Baby didn't have that the real three month old would is a name.
Okay, take a quick pulse. Can I get somebody with airway skills even in a C-geologist?
The company that manufactures Sim Baby is the same one that introduced Rysasa Annie back in 1960.
It's hoping it does for childhood emergency medicine what Annie did for EMTs around the world.
There's a rare condition that strikes children that really has no training simulation. That's the topic of today's academic minute.
Welcome to the academic minute. I'm Lynn Pascarella, president of Mount Holyoke College.
If you've spent much time around small children, you are probably accustomed to the occasional spill, fall or other mess inducing mishaps.
But as Priscilla Kasola, assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Texas at Arlington reveals,
a small percentage of children face a more serious obstacle when developing their motor skills.
At least 6% of the American school age population, 3 million children, suffer some condition called developmental coronation disorder or DCD.
The disorder is characterized by marketing payments in balance, fine motor and visual motor skills.
Those difficulties have been associated with poor mental health, emotional and behavioral issues, and I'm very interested in why this lack of motor coordination occurs.
The difficulties are pretty because by impairments in the frontal parietal system or the frontal and metal part of the brain.
This results in poor integration between planning, executing and using feedback during motor actions.
Brain messages are not accurately transmitted to the body and vice versa.
In my lab, we have been exploring how children with DCD estimate and visualize actions when they are using an implement, such as using a pencil to write.
We found that children with DCD seem to be less accurate than typically developing children when estimating their reach ability using an implement.
In the length of that implement is also important.
For example, typically developing children are just as good when estimating their reach, what are they using their hand, a 20 or a 40 centimeter stick.
But children with DCD were less accurate when estimating reach using the 20 centimeter stick than just with their hands and even less accurate when they use the 40 centimeter stick.
This ongoing investigation has already given us an exciting window into how children with DCD process information.
Knowing the conditions under which movement plenty is impaired can help us develop a fact of intervention strategies.
That was Priscilla Kassala of the University of Texas at Arlington.
You can find this, other segments, and more information about the professors on our website, academicminute.org.
Production support for the Academic Minute comes from Newman's Own Foundation in partnership with Mount Holyoke College.
That's all the time we have for this week's program. If you'd like to listen again, join us online at our flagship stations website.
Go to WAMC.org and click on the programs link. And if you have any questions or comments about the program, send them in.
Our email address is knowledge at WAMC.org. I'm Bob Barrett. Be sure to join us next time for another edition of The Best of Our Knowledge.
Bob Barrett is producer of The Best of Our Knowledge. Dr. Alan Shartock is executive producer.
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