Epidemiology of Connectional Silence in specialist serious illness conversations.

Context: Human connection can reduce suffering and facilitate meaningful decision-making amid the often terrifying experience of hospitalization for advanced cancer. Some conversational pauses indicate human connection, but we know little about their prevalence, distribution or association with outcomes.

Purpose: To describe the epidemiology of Connectional Silence during serious illness conversations in advanced cancer.

Conversational stories & self organizing maps: Innovations for the scalable study of uncertainty in healthcare communication.

Background: Understanding uncertainty in participatory decision-making requires scientific attention to interaction between what actually happens when patients, families and clinicians engage one another in conversation and the multi-level contexts in which these occur. Achieving this understanding will require conceptually grounded and scalable methods for use in large samples of people representing diversity in cultures, speaking and decision-making norms, and clinical situations.

Discussion: Here, we focus on serious illness and describe Conversational Stories as a scalable and conceptually grounded framework for characterizing uncertainty expression in these clinical contexts.

Epidemiology of Fear, Sadness, and Anger Expression in Palliative Care Conversations.

Context: Advancing the science of serious illness communication requires methods for measuring characteristics of conversations in large studies. Understanding which characteristics predict clinically important outcomes can help prioritize attention to scalable measure development.

Objectives: To understand whether audibly recognizable expressions of distressing emotion during palliative care serious illness conversations are associated with ratings of patient experience or six-month enrollment in hospice.

Analytic solution for a quartic electron mirror.

A converging electron mirror can be used to compensate for spherical and chromatic aberrations in an electron microscope. This paper presents an analytical solution to a diode (two-electrode) electrostatic mirror including the next term beyond the known hyperbolic shape. The latter is a solution of the Laplace equation to second order in the variables perpendicular to and along the mirror's radius (z(2)-r(2)/2) to which we add a quartic term (kλz(4)).