The Best Of Our Knowledge
The Best Of Our Knowledge
#1572: Staying Positive In A Pandemic |The Best Of Our Knowledge
Loading
/

There’s a course at Towson university in Maryland that teaches a class in positive psychology. This week on the Best of Our Knowledge, we’ll learn how this class stays positive during a pandemic.

We’ll also learn how a school system  survived a cyberattack, hear how machine learning is helping COVID testing, and spend an Academic Minute with COVID-19 and your singing voice.

Dr. Christa Schmidt is an associate professor and has taught positive psychology to undergraduates at Towson University in Maryland for nearly a decade. Never before has her course been more vital and relevant. Halfway through the spring 2020 semester, COVID-19 forced everyone into quarantine. Students had plenty of reasons to despair. Through the course, they learned how to focus on gratitude and show resilience. As Dr. Schmidt explains to producer Elia Powers, positive psychology helped her students and can help us all during the coronavirus pandemic.

Back in September, we talked to a clinical chemist about the difference between machine learning and artificial intelligence and how they are both becoming important in the clinical lab. We’re going to expand on that a bit right now. An article has been posted in the journal Clinical Chemistry call Deus Ex Machina? Predicting SARS-CoV-2 Infection from Lab Tests Using Machine Learning. That was written by Dr. Christopher McCudden, a Clinical Biochemist at the Ottawa Hospital, and an Associate Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Ottawa.

Nobody is going to sing a happy tune about the coronavirus. In fact, if you catch the COVID, you might not be singing about anything at all. That’s the topic of today’s Academic Minute.