Sequential incoherence in a multi-party synchronous computer mediated communication for an introductory Health Informatics course.

Online courses will play a key role in the high-volume Informatics education required to train the personnel that will be necessary to fulfill the health IT needs of the country. Online courses can cause feelings of isolation in students. A common way to address these feelings is to hold synchronous online "chats" for students.

Personal Background Preparation Survey for early identification of nursing students at risk for attrition.

During 2004 and 2005 orientations, all 187 and 188 new matriculates, respectively, in two southwestern U.S. nursing schools completed Personal Background and Preparation Surveys (PBPS) in the first predictive validity study of a diagnostic and prescriptive instrument for averting adverse academic status events (AASE) among nursing or health science professional students.

Developing a taxonomy and an ontology of nurses' patient clinical summaries.

Nurses prepare a summary of patient information that they consult and update throughout the shift. This document is believed to be integral to cognition, working memory, and decision-making. While serving as a key support to nursing practice, this summary also represents risks to patient safety.

Using the personal background preparation survey to identify health science professions students at risk for adverse academic events.

In the first predictive validity study of a diagnostic and prescriptive instrument for averting adverse academic status events (AASE) among multiple populations of diverse health science professions students, entering matriculates' personal background and preparation survey (PBPS) scores consistently significantly predicted 1st- or 2nd-year AASE. During 1st-year orientations, 441 entering matriculates in four southwestern schools from dental, medical, and nursing disciplines completed the 2004 PBPS. The following year during 1st-year orientations, 526 entering matriculates in five schools from dental, medical, nursing, and biomedical science disciplines completed the 2005 PBPS.

Taxonomy development and knowledge representation of nurses' personal cognitive artifacts.

Nurses prepare knowledge representations, or summaries of patient clinical data, each shift. These knowledge representations serve multiple purposes, including support of working memory, workload organization and prioritization, critical thinking, and reflection. This summary is integral to internal knowledge representations, working memory, and decision-making.

Application of cognitive engineering principles to the redesign of a dichotomous identification key for parasitology.

Dichotomous identification keys are used throughout biology for identification of plants, insects, and parasites. However, correct use of identification keys can be difficult as they are not usually intended for novice users who may not be familiar with the terminology used or with the morphology of the organism being identified. Therefore, we applied cognitive engineering principles to redesign a parasitology identification key for the Internet.

A day in the life of PubMed: analysis of a typical day's query log.

Objective: To characterize PubMed usage over a typical day and compare it to previous studies of user behavior on Web search engines.

Design: We performed a lexical and semantic analysis of 2,689,166 queries issued on PubMed over 24 consecutive hours on a typical day.

Measurements: We measured the number of queries, number of distinct users, queries per user, terms per query, common terms, Boolean operator use, common phrases, result set size, MeSH categories, used semantic measurements to group queries into sessions, and studied the addition and removal of terms from consecutive queries to gauge search strategies.

Using incomplete citation data for MEDLINE results ranking.

Information overload is a significant problem for modern medicine. Searching MEDLINE for common topics often retrieves more relevant documents than users can review. Therefore, we must identify documents that are not only relevant, but also important.

Human-centered design of a distributed knowledge management system.

Many healthcare technology projects fail due to the lack of consideration of human issues, such as workflow, organizational change, and usability, during the design and implementation stages of a project's development process. Even when human issues are considered, the consideration is typically on designing better user interfaces. We argue that human-centered computing goes beyond a better user interface: it should include considerations of users, functions and tasks that are fundamental to human-centered computing.

Accentuated Virchow-Robin spaces in the centrum semiovale in children with autistic disorder.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess the incidence of abnormal Virchow-Robin (VR) spaces in children and adolescents with an autistic disorder (AD). An increased incidence of enlarged VR spaces in children has been reported in several developmental disorders.

Methods: Sixteen children and adolescents (13 male, 3 female; mean age = 143.

Designing a knowledge management system for distributed activities: a human centered approach.

In this study we use the principles of distributed cognition and the methodology of human-centered distributed information design to analyze a complex distributed human-computer system, identify its problems, and generate design requirements and implementation specifications of a replacement prototype for effective organizational memory and knowledge management. We argue that a distributed human-computer information system has unique properties, structures and processes that are best described in the language of distributed cognition. Distributed cognition provides researchers a richer theoretical understanding of human-computer interactions and enables re-searchers to capture the phenomenon that emerges in social interactions as well as the interactions between people and structures in their environment.