Didn’t think I’d be using this twice in March.
WED MAR 21
Progress Reminders: The severe late-winter weather has been playing havoc with our schedule, so it’s easy to lose track of work you should be accomplishing.
I’m glad we had our donuts on Monday.
Revision Reminders
White Paper. By now, your White Paper has served as the repository for sources you found to support your Definition, Causal, and Rebuttal Arguments. As such, it should contain roughly 15 sources, many of them academic. If you haven’t already, beef up your White Paper now and change its name to White Paper 3—username. DON’T CREATE A NEW POST. Just Update and change the name. Update your thesis statement to reflect your current thinking. Add or update your “What I’m Still Looking For” and “Current State of my Research” sections too.
For the official assignment, click here: P07: White Paper 3rd Draft.
Did you know some items in the Assignments Menu have sub-menus revealed by hovering over the assignment?
Visual Rhetoric. In the first storm closing, we missed an official assignment for your Visual Rhetoric arguments as well. I think I’ve done a good job explaining the amount of detail and analysis needed for a Portfolio-ready VR post in my Lecture post “How Much Detail is Enough?,” and in a companion post about analysis called “From which we can conclude WHAT?,” but if you disagree, please let me know. We can review those requirements today in class (unless it’s cancelled for snow.) I won’t enforce a specific deadline for your Rewrites, but this item goes in your Portfolio, so ask for feedback unless you’re sure your first draft is ready to go.
For the official assignment, click here: P08: Visual Rewrite
Class Activities planned for WED MAR 21
- Revision—Mechanics
- Planned as an in-class exercise, I’ll add some “take home” questions you can answer in the Reply area.
- Not Because
- Planned as an in-class exercise, I’ll add some “take home” questions you can answer in the Reply area.
- Lecture: Advertising Failure
- Exercise E07: Counterintuitive Predictions
- Planned as an in-class exercise, I’ll add some “take home” questions you can answer in the Reply area.
For next week
- Portfolio Assignment P09: Definition Argument Rewrite
- DUE WED MAR 28
Rowan Counterintuitive 
reply for march 21, 2018 (snow day)
advertising failure:
Dr. Adcock landed a job as a radiology chief in Colorado. He heard problems being talked about by the staff, so he decided to investigate himself.
Adcock looked at charts that were risky to be looked at. He saw that a doctors were missing cancer on patients. So he held his doctors accountable for their work.
Dr. Adcock hired half of a new team and they performed better.
Not that many hospitals offer the mammography program.
Adcock wanted his doctors to focus more on spotting tumors.
Sadly many doctors lack the proper knowledge or training of mammography.
Denver also used statistics to track their doctors performance.
Other doctors admire Adcocks work.
Kaiser the person who hired Adcock was very impressed.
Since the surgeons were performing better, there were less deaths during surgeries.
There was a lot of criticism. But Adcock took that to be opportunity.
People rechecked numbers and saw that a lot of the women who Adcock said did not have breast cancer, did have breast cancer.
Many of the women needed follow up X-rays and biopsies, but only 10 out of around 250 women had breast cancer.
many clinics have volunteers that help doctors improve their skills.
The do’s and dont’s of mammograms.
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You always impress me when you get to your assignments early, SummerGirl. This are good Notes that summarize well the essential details of the “Advertising Failure” story.
I’m adding tiny Take-Home assignments to the Grammar Exercises that were supposed to be part of today’s class. If you saw them early, you might need to take another look at them.
May I help with some grammar/punctuation issues?
Possessives and Apostrophes:
Other doctors admire Adcocks work.
—Corrected: Other doctors admire Adcock’s work.
Denver also used statistics to track their doctors performance.
—Corrected: Denver also used statistics to track their doctors’ performance.
(The rule for possessive PLURALS such as this one is to first make the plural—doctors—then add the ‘s. If the result is stupid, you can drop the extra s)
Less and Fewer:
Since the surgeons were performing better, there were less deaths during surgeries.
—Corrected: Since the surgeons were performing better, there were fewer deaths during surgeries.
(The rule here is that if you can count them—in this case deaths—use fewer. If you can’t count them—for example, mortality—use less. Better performance by the surgeons resulted in fewer deaths, but less mortality.)
Now go build a snowman/snowoman. 🙂
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Today’s lecture, Advertising Failure:
-Dr. Kim A Adcock’s solution to the problem in the radiology department at Kaiser Permanete seems like it’d be from a TV show
-old solutions turned about to be ineffective and even deadly
-my prediction: tumors slowly form, so more mammograms means more visits without tumors until one appears, making it seem like having frequent gynecologist visits help prevent them.
-Dr. Adcock fires or removes staff that are shown to be dangerously bad at their jobs and replaces them with better doctors, effectively increasing their success rate by a third
-Dr. James Walsh is upset that he was fired, as he believes his rate of success and failure was on par with anyone elses
-since the makeover, the Denver team has had a 10 percent higher score, or about 15 more cases spotted, each year
-The Do’s and Don’t’s of Mammograms
I couldn’t believe the document was from 2002 because I didn’t realize that information from back then was still online.
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It’s true that online information ages faster than tumors, but some of it is still around from even before you were born 🙂 . Enjoy your snow day. Thank you for playing the home version of our game.
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Class cancelled due to snow. Advertising Failure Lecture notes:
Dr. Adcock, the man who became the radiology chief at Kaiser Permanente Colorado, set out to improve the effectiveness of his staff by eliminating people that missed more than “their fair share” of tumors. He went through the records of every doctor in his employ and was able to find the ones that he deemed to be underperforming. Many objected to this limit on doctors’ autonomy; keeping score put an extra pressure on them, after all. However, Dr. Adcock’s efforts resulted in his doctors missing 1/3 less cancers. He has also achieved perhaps the best statistical system to ensure that every doctor is held accountable for his/her work. However, whether the data reflects the truth is difficult to say- he fired underperforming employees and hired better ones, so the statistics are bound to improve. Also, he realized that some of the supposed improvement may simply have been because patients with a higher risk factor were increasingly turned down. In addition, many of the patients that he had deemed to be without cancer in reality had it. He concluded that 259 patients needed follow-ups, and ten additional women had been found to have breast cancer. The news got word of this miscalculation and covered the situation as a scandal. However, Kaiser was sued by only one woman, who later dropped it. Dr. Adcock’s scrutiny and firing practices led to the firing of Dr. James A. Walsh, who believed that it was unfair, as he had missed only 3 cancers. He later moved and was performing without any problems in multiple states. Aside from that, many look on to Dr. Adcock’s achievement with awe and seek to replicate it in their own facilities. Also, advocates for improvement in screening for breast cancer are pushing for legal change. Doctors’ competency has been called into question. Eventually, however, Dr. Adcock worried about his own effectiveness and decided to stop reading mammograms so as not to overwork his team, which was smaller than ever.
This was definitely an interesting read. I wouldn’t consider myself to be medically informed, but it was intriguing to read about such a mathematical and calculated approach to mammograms.
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Impressive work as usual, DK. I love that you stay critical; not wooed by the article’s laudatory approach, you stay dubious that the data prove what they’re purported to prove. Did you make bold predictions before reading?
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Yes, I predicted that Dr. Adcock’s strict scrutiny and firing practices would lead to members of his team resigning, however I don’t remember it mentioning that any actually did.
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Unfortunately, class was cancelled due to snow. Thankfully, our professor gave us resources to what would have been our discussion, so we can still catch up. Dr. Adcock is a radiologist in Colorado who decided to act when he heard problems being discussed.He noticed from several scans that doctors had been missing cancer on patients. Like any good doctor would, he fired his team and hired new ones who would be fit for the job. He wanted them to focus on finding tumors and diagnosing them on the scans. But because mammography is not common, some were unprepared for this task, but learned as time went on and became successful surgeons. Kaiser was thrilled with Adcock’s performance. Adcock potentially saved hundreds of lives due to his intensive research and dedication to help others.
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If we had class on this day we would’ve learned about Dr. Adcock, a radiologist who noticed missing cancer scans for patients. firing his team and hiring new ones who would do better eventually.
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