Further complicating the issue is that burn wounds can progress in severity during the first 48 hours, and thus it is highly recommended to continuously monitor early-stage burns when deciding optimal treatment 10. Superficial-partial thickness burns can generally heal via natural re-epithelization with minimal scaring while deep-partial thickness burns will often require extensive surgical excision and grafting 9. This is problematic as treatment methods can vary dramatically depending on skin burn severity. While useful for evaluating superficial and full-thickness burns, clinical observation is widely considered suboptimal for distinguishing between different types of partial-thickness burns. Even when non-fatal, skin burns are a leading cause of future morbidity, prolonged hospitalization, disfigurement, and disability, which can all inadvertently lead to further negative socio-economic repercussions 6.ĭespite a field accuracy of about 50% to 76%, subjective visual and tactile assessments by a trained physician are the most commonly used method for assessing skin burn severity due to their simplicity and speed in clinical settings 7, 8. In the civilian sector, skin burns are problematic as an estimated 300,000 people world-wide die from fire-related burn injuries every year, with the majority of cases occurring in low and middle income countries 5. Due to the nature of explosive devices such as landmines, artillery munitions, mortar rounds, and improvised explosive devices, these multifaceted wounds can be highly complex and must be quickly diagnosed and treated in a potentially resource limited environment. Skin burns are a significant source of battlefield injury and have accounted for approximately 4% of all combat mortalities since World War II 1, 2, 3, 4. This low-cost, rapid, and non-invasive color analysis approach demonstrates the potential of dye-loaded liquid bandages as a method for skin burn assessment in settings such as emergency medicine triage and low resource environments. The finding was verified using fluorescence imaging, tissue cross-sectioning, and histopathology. Quantitative linear mixed effects models of color images from a four day porcine burn study demonstrate that colorimetric changes within the HSB colorspace can be used to estimate burn depth severity immediately after burning. Here we present a practical method for the early visualization of skin burn severity using a topically applied fluorescein-loaded liquid bandage and an unmodified commercial digital camera. Apart from being invasive, costly, and time-consuming, this method can suffer from heterogeneous sampling errors when interrogating large burn areas. When the appropriate resources are available, the current gold standard for assessing skin burns is through tissue punch biopsies followed by histological analysis. These multifaceted wounds can be highly complex and must be quickly diagnosed and treated to achieve optimal outcomes. They are especially problematic in low resource environments where non-fatal injuries can lead to high morbidity rates, prolonged hospitalization, and disability. Skin burns are a significant source of injury in both military and civilian sectors.
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Darwinians such as David Buss point out that females can only have one child every nine months, whereas men can in principle impregnate a virtually infinite number of women. Here is another way in which I’ve always thought evolutionary psychology subtly denigrates females’ capacity to reason. She notes that just as science has justified racism by portraying certain races as inferior, so it has justified sexism. A broad review of the literature reveals “only the tiniest gaps, if any, between the sexes, including areas such as mathematical ability and verbal fluency,” Saini writes. Saini notes in The Guardian that Damore and others back up their views of male/female differences by cherry-picking studies that supposedly prove male intellectual superiority. The firing of Damore, according to Brooks, was an example of “ideology obliterating reason.” (See my post “ Google Engineer Fired for Sexist Memo Isn’t a Hero.”) So has David Brooks of The New York Times, a booster of evolutionary psychology. Some of my male students have expressed sympathy for Damore and his claims about innate male/female differences. Google fired Damore, but his views are widely shared. Last summer Google engineer James Damore nonetheless claimed in a widely circulated memo that females are under-represented at Google and other tech firms because they are on average less ambitious and more prone to “neuroticism” than males and “have a stronger interest in people rather than things.” Damore said these alleged male/female differences are “exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective.” Hence modern gender differences are more likely to stem from discrimination and other cultural factors than from females’ alleged biological inferiority. Actually, Saini points out, anthropological research has revealed that hunter-gatherer societies were remarkably egalitarian. Natural selection made males more aggressive in their pursuit of status than females. These behavioral differences reflect biological differences, Miller argues. Men dominate mixed-sex committee discussions.” In his 2000 book The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller writes: “Men write more books. Saini notes that evolutionary psychology, a modern instantiation of Darwinian theory, still provides justification for female inequality. Galton, Saini notes, produced “beauty maps” that graded women in Britain “from the ugliest to the most attractive.” At a time when women were seeking the vote, Saini writes, Galton, Darwin and other scientists “hardened sexism into something that couldn’t even be challenged.” In his 1871 book The Descent of Man Charles Darwin wrote: “The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain-whether requiring deep thought, reason or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.” He added, “Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman.”įrancis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and the father of eugenics, was sexist too. In her important, timely new book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story, British science journalist Angela Saini documents how science has long denigrated females. Then, when women fail to thrive, the men say, See? Women just aren’t our equals. That is, male scientists use science to justify their sexist attitudes toward and maltreatment of women. These two forms of sexism are mutually reinforcing. Second, male scientists portray females as males’ intellectual inferiors. First, women in science (including engineering, math, medicine) face discrimination, harassment and other forms of maltreatment from men. Is science sexist? Of course it is, in two ways. Below are points I made or wanted to make during my conversation with Wright. And I feel obliged to say something about this issue because I teach at an engineering school where females account for less than 30 percent of the professors and students. But I just talked about sexism in science with my friend Robert Wright on. This is a time, part of me thinks, for men to listen to women rather than pontificating about sexism. |
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