Due to its vast potential and commercialization opportunities, particularly in gaming, broadcasting, and video streaming, the Metaverse is currently one of the fastest-growing technologies. Modern Metaverse applications utilize AI frameworks, including computer vision and diffusion models, to enhance their realism. A significant challenge for Metaverse applications…
Improving patient safety using principles of aerospace engineering
Approximately 13 billion laboratory tests are administered every year in the United States, but not every result is timely or accurate. Laboratory missteps prevent patients from receiving appropriate, necessary, and sometimes lifesaving care. These medical errors are the third-leading cause of death in the nation.
To help reverse this trend, a research team from the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) Engineering Systems Lab and Synensys, a safety management contractor, examined the ecosystem of diagnostic laboratory data. Their findings, including six systemic factors contributing to patient hazards in laboratory diagnostics tests, offer a rare holistic view of this complex network — not just doctors and lab technicians, but also device manufacturers, health information technology (HIT) providers, and even government entities such as the White House. By viewing the diagnostic laboratory data ecosystem as an integrated system, an approach based on systems theory, the MIT researchers have identified specific changes that can lead to safer behaviors for health care workers and healthier outcomes for patients.
A report of the study, which was conducted by AeroAstro Professor Nancy Leveson, who serves as head of the System Safety and Cybersecurity group, along with Research Engineer John Thomas and graduate students Polly Harrington and Rodrigo Rose, was submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this past fall. Improving the infrastructure of laboratory data has been a priority for the FDA, who contracted the study through Synensis.
Hundreds of hazards, six causes
In a yearlong study that included more than 50 interviews, the Leveson team found the diagnostic laboratory data ecosystem to be vast yet fractured. No one understood how the whole system functioned or the totality of substandard treatment patients received. Well-intentioned workers were being influenced by the system to carry out unsafe actions, MIT engineers wrote.
Test results sent to the wrong patients, incompatible technologies that strain information sharing between the doctor and lab technician, and specimens transported to the lab without guarantees of temperature control were just some of the hundreds of hazards the MIT engineers identified. The sheer volume of potential risks, known as unsafe control actions (UCAs), should not dissuade health care stakeholders from seeking change, Harrington says.
“While there are hundreds of UCAs, there are only six systemic factors that are causing these hazards,” she adds. “Using a system-based methodology, the medical community can address many of these issues with one swoop.”
Four of the systemic factors — decentralization, flawed communication and coordination, insufficient focus on safety-related regulations, and ambiguous or outdated standards — reflect the need for greater oversight and accountability. The two remaining systemic factors — misperceived notions of risk and lack of systems theory integration — call for a fundamental shift in perspective and operations. For instance, the medical community, including doctors themselves, tends to blame physicians when errors occur. Understanding the real risk levels associated with laboratory data and HIT might prompt more action for change, the report’s authors wrote.
“There’s this expectation that doctors will catch every error,” Harrington says. “It’s unreasonable and unfair to expect that, especially when they have no reason to assume the data they’re getting is flawed.”
Think like an engineer
Systems theory may be a new concept to the medical community, but the aviation industry has used it for decades.
“After World War II, there were so many commercial aviation crashes that the public was scared to fly,” says Leveson, a leading expert in system and software safety. In the early 2000s, she developed the System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), a technique based on systems theory that offers insights into how complex systems can become safer. Researchers used STPA in its report to the FDA. “Industry and government worked together to put controls and error reporting in place. Today, there are nearly zero crashes in the U.S. What’s happening in health care right now is like having a Boeing 787 crash every day.”
Other engineering principles that work well in aviation, such as control systems, could be applied to health care as well, Thomas says. For instance, closed-loop controls solicit feedback so a system can change and adapt. Having laboratories confirm that physicians received their patients’ test results or investigating all reports of diagnostic errors are examples of closed-loop controls that are not mandated in the current ecosystem, Thomas says.
“Operating without controls is like asking a robot to navigate a city street blindfolded,” Thomas says. “There’s no opportunity for course correction. Closed-loop controls help inform future decision-making, and, at this point in time, it’s missing in the U.S. health-care system.”
The Leveson team will continue working with Synensys on behalf of the FDA. Their next study will investigate diagnostic screenings outside the laboratory, such as at a physician’s office (point of care) or at home (over the counter). Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, nonclinical lab testing has surged in the country. About 600 million Covid-19 tests were sent to U.S. households between January and September 2022, according to Synensys. Yet, few systems are in place to aggregate these data or report findings to public health agencies.
“There’s a lot of well-meaning people trying to solve this and other lab data challenges,” Rose says. “If we can convince people to think of health care as an engineered system, we can go a long way in solving some of these entrenched problems.”
The Synensys research contract is art of the Systemic Harmonization and Interoperability Enhancement for Laboratory Data (SHIELD) campaign, an agency initiative that seeks assistance and input in using systems theory to address this challenge.
Inclusive research for social change
Pair a decades-old program dedicated to creating research opportunities for underrepresented minorities and populations with a growing initiative committed to tackling the very issues at the heart of such disparities, and you’ll get a transformative partnership that only MIT can deliver.
Since 1986, the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP) has led an institutional effort to prepare underrepresented students (minorities, women in STEM, or students with low socioeconomic status) for doctoral education by pairing them with MIT labs and research groups. For the past three years, the Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism (ICSR), a cross-disciplinary research collaboration led by MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), has joined them in their mission, helping bring the issue full circle by providing MSRP students with the opportunity to use big data and computational tools to create impactful changes toward racial equity.
“ICSR has further enabled our direct engagement with undergrads, both within and outside of MIT,” says Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences, associate director of IDSS, and co-organizer for the initiative. “We’ve found that this line of research has attracted students interested in examining these topics with the most rigorous methods.”
The initiative fits well under the IDSS banner, as IDSS research seeks solutions to complex societal issues through a multidisciplinary approach that includes statistics, computation, modeling, social science methodologies, human behavior, and an understanding of complex systems. With the support of faculty and researchers from all five schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, the objective of ICSR is to work on an array of different societal aspects of systemic racism through a set of verticals including policing, housing, health care, and social media.
Where passion meets impact
Grinnell senior Mia Hines has always dreamed of using her love for computer science to support social justice. She has experience working with unhoused people and labor unions, and advocating for Indigenous peoples’ rights. When applying to college, she focused her essay on using technology to help Syrian refugees.
“As a Black woman, it’s very important to me that we focus on these areas, especially on how we can use technology to help marginalized communities,” Hines says. “And also, how do we stop technology or improve technology that is already hurting marginalized communities?”
Through MSRP, Hines was paired with research advisor Ufuoma Ovienmhada, a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. A member of Professor Danielle Wood’s Space Enabled research group at MIT’s Media Lab, Ovienmhada received funding from an ICSR Seed Grant and NASA’s Applied Sciences Program to support her ongoing research measuring environmental injustice and socioeconomic disparities in prison landscapes.
“I had been doing satellite remote sensing for environmental challenges and sustainability, starting out looking at coastal ecosystems, when I learned about an issue called ‘prison ecology,’” Ovienmhada explains. “This refers to the intersection of mass incarceration and environmental justice.”
Ovienmhada’s research uses satellite remote sensing and environmental data to characterize exposures to different environmental hazards such as air pollution, extreme heat, and flooding. “This allows others to use these datasets for real-time advocacy, in addition to creating public awareness,” she says.
Focused especially on extreme heat, Hines used satellite remote sensing to monitor the fluctuation of temperature to assess the risk being imposed on prisoners, including death, especially in states like Texas, where 75 percent of prisons either don’t have full air conditioning or have none at all.
“Before this project I had done little to no work with geospatial data, and as a budding data scientist, getting to work with and understanding different types of data and resources is really helpful,” Hines says. “I was also funded and afforded the flexibility to take advantage of IDSS’s Data Science and Machine Learning online course. It was really great to be able to do that and learn even more.”
Filling the gap
Much like Hines, Harvey Mudd senior Megan Li was specifically interested in the IDSS-supported MSRP projects. She was drawn to the interdisciplinary approach, and she seeks in her own work to apply computational methods to societal issues and to make computer science more inclusive, considerate, and ethical.
Working with Aurora Zhang, a grad student in IDSS’s Social and Engineering Systems PhD program, Li used county-level data on income and housing prices to quantify and visualize how affordability based on income alone varies across the United States. She then expanded the analysis to include assets and debt to determine the most common barriers to home ownership.
“I spent my day-to-day looking at census data and writing Python scripts that could work with it,” reports Li. “I also reached out to the Census Bureau directly to learn a little bit more about how they did their data collection, and discussed questions related to some of their previous studies and working papers that I had reviewed.”
Outside of actual day-to-day research, Li says she learned a lot in conversations with fellow researchers, particularly changing her “skeptical view” of whether or not mortgage lending algorithms would help or hurt home buyers in the approval process. “I think I have a little bit more faith now, which is a good thing.”
“Harvey Mudd is undergraduate-only, and while professors do run labs here, my specific research areas are not well represented,” Li says. “This opportunity was enormous in that I got the experience I need to see if this research area is actually something that I want to do long term, and I got more mirrors into what I would be doing in grad school from talking to students and getting to know faculty.”
Closing the loop
While participating in MSRP offered crucial research experience to Hines, the ICSR projects enabled her to engage in topics she’s passionate about and work that could drive tangible societal change.
“The experience felt much more concrete because we were working on these very sophisticated projects, in a supportive environment where people were very excited to work with us,” she says.
A significant benefit for Li was the chance to steer her research in alignment with her own interests. “I was actually given the opportunity to propose my own research idea, versus supporting a graduate student’s work in progress,” she explains.
For Ovienmhada, the pairing of the two initiatives solidifies the efforts of MSRP and closes a crucial loop in diversity, equity, and inclusion advocacy.
“I’ve participated in a lot of different DEI-related efforts and advocacy and one thing that always comes up is the fact that it’s not just about bringing people in, it’s also about creating an environment and opportunities that align with people’s values,” Ovienmhada says. “Programs like MSRP and ICSR create opportunities for people who want to do work that’s aligned with certain values by providing the needed mentoring and financial support.”
10 Excellent WordPress Themes for 2024 – Web Design Ledger
There is certainly no shortage of excellent WordPress themes you can select from to help you create an engaging and high performing website. Finding the best one for the job would most certainly be a challenge as there are literally thousands of great WordPress themes available plus you’ll have to define just what the makeup of the “best” would be like. Simply finding one you can rely on to help you create a website that will attract and engage new visitors to your site can be a problem in itself.
Since the one you pick will go a long way toward determining the look and feel of your site and would play an essential role in creating a source of information potential customers can feel they can rely on, one of our 10 top picks for the best WordPress themes should suit you quite nicely in that each brings a wealth of powerful website-building features to the table.
One of the most consistent features of BeTheme is that it keeps getting better with each new release, with each new feature or set of features adding to its already well-established popularity. BeTheme has in effect become a total website management system thanks to a multiplicity of powerful core features that can be used for quickly building high performance websites of any type.
- BeTheme’s 700+pre-built websites, a longtime user favorite, feature total customizability, responsiveness, and built-in UX functionality plus they enable users to get their projects off to a rapid start.
- BeBuilder heads up an imposing collection of builders that include a Header Builder, a Footer Builder, a WooCommerce Builder, a Loop Builder, a Popup Builder, and a Sidebar Menu Builder. Thanks to BeBuilder, BeTheme can lay claim to being the fastest, most flexible, and most intuitive WordPress theme ever built.
- BeBuilder’s Blocks mode features 80+ building blocks to work with together with selections of premade payouts and global theme options.
- BeBuilder’s Developer mode improves workflow and takes users to the next level.
- Other new BeTheme features include a Dynamic Data feature, a Conditional Logic tool that can determine if a content element or section can be rendered, a Single Post option, a Single Portfolio option, a Layer Navigator, and a Nested Wraps capability for managing more advanced layouts.
Click on the banner to check out each of BeTheme’s core website-building features. You’ll be impressed and glad you did.
Take Cornerstone, the most advanced builder in WordPress, pair it with Pro Theme, and what you get is the most powerful combo in WordPress. Cornerstone, with its app-like design and development capability is website building in the browser at its best and makes building websites fun, as it should be.
The Cornerstone Builder brings to the table the ability to build custom layouts and templates, stunning headers, content blocks, optimized workflows, glorious grids, and much more.
Cornerstone’s imposing family of builders include a Header Builder, a Footer Builder, a Layout Builder, and a Blog Builder.
- Cornerstone’s Design Cloud asset is only a click away and features hundreds of ready-made templates, an ecosystem of premium plugins, and a collection of valuable courses that include Cornerstone Charts, Web Design Magic, Super Loopers, Gridorama, Modern Sliders, and others.
- Headline technical features include Blank & Starter Stack, Theme Parameters, Components, and Elements, Conditional Logic, Native Web Effects, Native Sliders, Native Mega Menus, Font Awesome 6, Presets, Responsive Modals, Element API, and much more.
- Cornerstone recently launched an External API feature that enables users to connect any 3rd party API to WordPress.
Click on the banner, visit the Pro + Cornerstone website and be prepared to be impressed with what you see. Reviews by satisfied users are included.
Whether you have a new website building project in mind or have decided it would be a good idea to spice up an existing one, having Total at your fingertips will help you do either to perfection. The Total WordPress theme is an ideal choice for developers, small business owners, and web designers of all skill levels.
Having the ability to create a website that does justice to your business is good. Having tools on hand that enable you to build it your way is even better. The Total WordPress theme guarantees both with its:
- 50+ ready to use demos, 100+ site builder elements, 90+section templates, and hundreds of live customer settings plus the Slider Revolution plugin and an extended version of the WPBakery drag and drop page builder with its ready to use patterns, sample demos, and pre-styled cards.
- seamless integration with WooCommerce for your shop-building projects.
- boxed and full-width layout options, dynamic layouts, one-page sites, and advanced page settings.
- RTL and translation ready code, retina images, a unique WPBakery Slim Mode to speed up your site, and five-star support.
Total is developer friendly with a full complement of action hooks, filters, custom snippets and more. Click on the banner to learn more about what Total could do for you.
Suggestion. Visit Uncode’s website and view its inspirational user-built website gallery that shows what its users have accomplished, as well as what Uncode could do for you.
This best-selling (110,000+ sales) creative and WooCommerce theme features include:
- a remarkable selection of 95 demos or concepts, each of which is built around a specific purpose for creating agency, business, event, or portfolio websites and blog projects.
- an impressive library of useful page layouts.
- Uncode’s WooCommerce Builder for designing shop pages and pixel-perfect product listings.
- the Uncode Wireframes plugin with its 550+ section templates you can work with to create landing your pages or build a complete website.
The Outgrid Elementor Theme with its impressive range of 2,000+ blocks, 250+widgets, pages, and stunning interactions gives you everything you need to create an exceptional website that will stand out from the competition.
- Outgrid’s Theme Options tool gives you total control over every aspect of your website’s static elements.
- Outgrid’s UiCore Framework, Elementor’s free page builder, and Element Pack Pro plugins provide the theme’s core functionalities and amazing horsepower.
- Outgrid’s Performance Manager helps you manage your website features, all in one panel, with no extra plugins.
- Go global with Outgrid’s multilingual, translation, and RTL capabilities,
Outgrid also offers a White Label version. Simply add your logo, brand name, brand color, and disable theme features.
750,000+ first-time WordPress users and professional web designers (more than 24,000 of whom have submitted 5-star reviews) have discovered how Avada, the ultimate website builder and the #1 best-selling WordPress website building theme ever, makes it so fast and easy to create an amazing website.
- Avada lets you customize anything and everything while its live visual drag and drop builder and huge selection of templates lets you build your website quickly.
- The demo importer is a time saver. One click, and you’re ready to start customizing.
- You can build everything from one-page business websites to thriving online marketplaces without ever having to write a single line of code.
Avada is responsive, optimized for speed, e-commerce enabled, and you’ll receive top-notch customer support.
Woodmart, the owner of a 4.95/5.0 average rating, offers an all-in-one solution for creating an attention-grabbing online store.
Visit the Woodmart WooCommerce theme website and go down its selection of 80+demos with their shop, business, corporate, fashion, electronics, and furniture themes. Chances are you’ll catch yourself trying to order something before remembering it’s only a demo.
Woodmart is simply demonstrating what an engaging website should look like.
- The 80+ attractively laid out pre-made websites are inspirational and realistic.
- Woodmart’s Shop and Product Page Elementor builders and design elements help you build an online store the way you want to.
- The full AJAX filter and search features and Elementor custom checkout reduce order completion time and increase conversion rates.
The 100% eCommerce ready Blocksy WordPress theme is chock full of intuitive website building tools and aids that include –
- Powerful advanced header and footer builders.
- Gutenberg capabilities and the latest web technologies together with advanced WooCommerce integration with features calculated to maximize your conversion rates.
- Blocksy’s Content Blocks module for inserting content anywhere you choose.
- The mega menu extension for creating gorgeous dropdowns and layouts.
- Support for custom post types and dynamic data.
- local Google fonts that endure GDPR compliance.
Blocksy is compatible with Elementor, Brizy, and Beaver Builder page builders. Blocksy also features a White Label module that allows users to emphasize their company brands for maximal trust and user engagement.
Building an online store should be done with careful attention to detail but it does not have to become a tedious grind. You’ll need to have your own content (products, descriptions, etc.) at the ready, but the rest will be the easy part if you let the XStore WooCommerce theme do the work for you.
Design tools include 130+ ready to customize and launch shops, Single Product, Product Archive, Checkout Layout, and Cart Layout builders, and 15 Sales Booster features that include:
- Fake live viewing as a sales boosting aide.
- product variation swatches selection dropdown.
- popup that shows site activity in real-time.
- frequently bought together ads as customer aids
- 360 Product Viewer
- Express Checkout, and
- sticky add to cart bar that allows customers to add products without leaving pages.
If a creative, multi-purpose Elementor WordPress theme is your cup of tea, Litho is right for you.
Litho is built with Elementor and can be used for any type of business niche like corporate, design agency, restaurant, travel, yoga, architect, fitness, interior, cafe, application and more, plus portfolio, blog, and eCommerce. Just add the WooCommerce plugin and you’re ready to go.
- The popular Slider Revolution plugin is included along with 37+ ready home pages, 200+ creative elements, and 300+ page-building templates.
- Litho is WooCommerce ready, multilingual WPML compatible, and features top loading speeds and healthy SEO results.
- Litho provides its users with detailed online documentation and top-notch customer support.
Litho is ideal for novice and advanced users alike.
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Site appearance is key with respect to how people will perceive your brand. It is therefore imperative that your online presence features a professional, visually appealing, and responsive design that helps you gain credibility, engage site visitors, and increase your conversion rates.
A WordPress theme can make this happen by giving you a fast, reliable, and efficient approach to website design by providing you with solutions that allow you to jumpstart your design efforts in minutes as opposed to the time it can take to create a layout from scratch.
Selecting the right WordPress theme is key if you want to present your content in an engaging, easy-to-digest, and functional manner. Now that you’ve checked out these 10 excellent WordPress themes, this might be the time to select one that suits you best and get on with building your site.
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