Academic GIFts

Healthcare is expensive, health literacy requires good education and specialised information, and health-promoting behaviour takes considerable time and commitment. Therefore, reaching people from low socio-economic status and keeping them engaged for non-communicable disease prevention and support poses a major challenge. So how can a health intervention be as exciting, enjoyable and engaging as our favourite TV show?

Resarch shows that good argumentation skills need practice and continuous feedback from a personal tutor. Well, no one has time and financial means for that. Unless a system could do the tutoring. Argumentation Learning (AL) is such a system. AL uses a feedback algorithm that analyses the argumentation quality of student´s texts and provides individual and adaptive feedback throughout the writing process.

Imagine difficult economic times. The past financial crisis. The recent coronavirus pandemic. How can central banks and governments stabilize their country´s economy in such trying circumstances? And how does this work in a monetary union?

Number of bedrooms, floor and garden space, kitchen standard or distance to the next train station. Whichever structural housing attributes or locational factors make living in a house less or more pleasant affect its price. But how does each individual characteristic affect this price?

n a purely digital world, processes can be easily traced by IT systems. In our real world, there is no central IT system to do this. But the internet of things, IoT, provides an abundance of smart objects that collect data about activities and surroundings. Since this data is not complete, the challenge is to select relevant data and to correlate it with the activities in the processes.

Writers have always written about death. Helping us make sense of the inevitable. Recently, there has been an explosion of autobiographical texts by writers facing their own death. What can we – medicine and society as a whole – learn from them?

Populists promise to bring power back to "the people". They value "wisdom of the crowds" more than scientific expertise. But what about those populist leaders who are scientific experts themselves?

In contracts between bank and customer such as loans, bonds or mortgages, an interest rate is required. A reference interest rate is determined independently and represents the cost of lending money in a particular market.

Most companies today motivate their workforce by means of bonuses. The underlying assumption? Only extrinsic motivation works. But is the prospect of earning more money really the only or even the best driver of performance? Studies show that this actually isn’t the case.

The lack of understanding of exponential growth has been one of the biggest challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic. Amidst all the confusion, there is one thing the Corona crisis has made abundantly clear: wrapping our minds around the notion of exponential growth is hard. Many people have been surprised by the fact that hospitals could need only a couple of ventilators one day…and thousands of them soon thereafter. So, why is it that we seem to have trouble with the notion of exponential growth?

You might not know it, but you are using cryptography many times, every day. Surprised? Just think of all the digital data you are sending around, from online banking to tax data or business emails. All this data is cryptographically encrypted. All your WhatsApp messages are encrypted. Because no one but your buddy can read them.

Contactless payment is far from replacing cash in general. This is shown in a study by Dr. Tobias Trütsch, Head of the Economics Division at the Executive School of the University of St.Gallen.

Autonomous agents can already interact within their environment in a so-called multi-agent system. But only if you set up such interactions. By using the web, HyperAgents can navigate and interact with other entities in an autonomous, flexible, and scalably way.

Leaders need to be close to their own personal meaning to provide a compelling vision and purpose to their followers.

Crowdsourcing works best in collaborativ settings - with collaborative crowds. In other settings, such as crowdsourcing competitions, individuals become less creative over time.

Globalisation facilitates the flows of capital, goods, and ideas and it provides firms with access to new markets. Yet, the benefits from globalisation are not distributed equally. How do these imbalances feed back into the allocation of talent across competing teams?

We face a lot of challenges in our healthcare systems. With demographic ageing, an ever-growing number of people is affected by chronic diseases. Patients depend on services that are provided by multiple organisations. Are there better ways to deliver healthcare?

All entrepreneurial teams face one decision that is particularly difficult: How to allocate power? Who gets to be the CEO? Who sits on the board? And who’s allowed to make important decisions? Power imbalances can affect a company`s ability to grow.

To err is technical: Even autonomous cars can cause accidents. Who has to answer for the damage caused by the the vehicle "Trooper" in a careless moment?

Why are we so frightened or thrilled about automation and the future of work? What histories and philosophical concepts affect how we think and talk about automation?