A significant health concern is addiction, a brain disease that can affect anyone. 

The most severe form of substance use disorder (SUD), addiction manifests as a compulsion for a substance or behavior. If addiction is left untreated, it can affect your life in multiple ways: financially, socially, physically, and mentally. 

There are various approaches to fight addiction. You can use traditional psychotherapy, technological methods, or a combination of both.

The Internet of Things (IoT)—a network of Internet-connected devices—is a technological innovation that can help fight addiction and facilitate online recovery. 

As of July 2020, more than 4.5 billion people globally were active Internet users. 

How Can the Internet of Things Help Fight Addiction?

There are various ways the Internet of Things helps to provide online recovery. The Internet of Things offers:

Anonymity

A 2014 study of public attitudes by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that society is more hostile towards people with substance use disorders (SUD) than those with mental illnesses. This animosity—even among family members or people close to us, makes people uncomfortable seeking help for their SUD. 

Celebrities and other well-known people may feel they can’t be seen seeking help without risking legal trouble or loss of professional standing. That’s one reason why 12-step organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous are anonymous; they can help people recover from addiction without feeling judged.

The Internet of Things helps to maintain the anonymity of those fighting their addiction. You can create an anonymous profile on an online recovery program or anonymously get information on how to get help for addiction. Many 12-step groups have long offered online meetings. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, these online meetings have increased. 

Some addiction professionals also offer online consultations.

Technology-Based Interventions

Traditional methods are still instrumental in addiction recovery. The Internet of Things uses technology-based interventions to supplement and support traditional addiction treatments, not replace them, assist online recovery, and prevent relapse.

Technology-based interventions include:

• Technology-assisted behavioral therapies like individual counseling.
• Education on substance and behavioral addiction.
• Recovery support programs.
• Prevention resources.
• Information resources.
• Wellness monitoring.

The Internet of Things provides access to these interventions through various methods which include:

• Zoom and other types of video conferencing.
• Telephone counseling.
• Web-based text communication, such as chat, emails, and online forums.
• Self-directed therapeutic tools.
• Self-assessment tools.

While such technology-based interventions have little impact on addressing behavioral addictions, it is still significant.

Centralized Prescriptions

Prescription drugs are a concern because of the high abuse, addiction, overdose, and fatalities. Opioids are one of the significant prescription drugs raising a lot of concern. 

Currently, the United States is in the middle of an opioid epidemic. In 2012, there were more than 250 million opioid prescriptions. By 2018, however, the number had decreased to fewer than 170 million prescriptions. Still, 128 people lost their lives every day due to opioid overdose.

The Internet of Things provides prescription monitoring programs that help healthcare officials monitor and control prescriptions. The monitoring programs can also store your prescription history to indicate if you are responsible enough to take the prescriptions home.

Awareness

The Internet is an extensive information resource that young people prefer to brick-and-mortar libraries. The Internet of Things increases awareness of and access to information about addiction recovery, such as:  

• Types of addiction. 
• Causes. 
• Symptoms. 
• Effects. 
• How to get help.  

The Internet of Things is all about communication. You can use various platforms to ask questions, learn about campaigns, present your views, debate, and seek addiction support. Since it’s online, you can have few interruptions when addressing your thoughts and can take your time to give responses.

Monitoring Apps and Use of Wearables

The Internet of Things has also made it possible to fight addiction through artificial intelligence applications and wearables. There are smartphone apps available that create addiction awareness and monitor the chances of relapse.

Wearables have sensors that track your habits. For example, a smartwatch can detect hand movements used in smoking, create awareness of the effects of smoking, and give out reward points when you abstain.

You can also use a wearable breathalyzer to monitor your alcohol consumption and the alcohol content in your body. 

Other wearables offer physical stimuli like a tiny zap to prevent you from engaging in addictive habits.

Final Thoughts

Addiction is a disease characterized by a compulsion to engage in a particular behavior or use a substance. There are various treatment and prevention measures for addiction. Treatment is more effective if you keep up on trends and combine various methods.

The use of the Internet of Things is one of the trends. It will help you fight addiction in various ways, including anonymous online recovery, use of wearables, prescription control, technology-based interventions, and addiction awareness.

About the Author

Patrick Bailey is a professional writer mainly in the fields of mental health, addiction, and living in recovery. He attempts to stay on top of the latest news in the addiction and the mental health world and enjoy writing about these topics to break the stigma associated with them. 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Pat_Bailey80

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-bailey-writer

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All crises bring with them a chance to better understand this thing we call the economy. Here is a timeline of economic crashes throughout history.

Economists talk about recession as being two successive periods of negative economic growth. That doesn’t necessarily mean much. What matters is that recessions harm people’s wellbeing – think homes lost, less “stuff” purchased, and unemployment. The long-term social effects can be harmful if people are less confident or are without jobs for a long time. While we do pull through recessions, they tend to hit some people harder than others which can have long-run implications. Unfortunately, crashes are an innate part of the economic system.

There is no such thing as long-term economic stability. You might have heard the popular saying that there is an economic disaster every ten years or so. COVID-19 is just the latest in a long line of economic crashes. 

Recessions are both a disaster and a learning opportunity. Policymakers need to learn from recessions so we can understand how to mitigate the damage. We probably get better at addressing economic disasters, but the big ones like COVID-19 or the 2008 Great Recession bring with them unique features that we can learn from each time.

There are several reasons why recessions can happen:

• Demand-driven – a widespread drop in spending causes a downturn. We are seeing this during COVID-19 with containment measures, health risks and uncertainty causing people stay at home and reduce spending.
• Supply shocks – a sudden decrease in the supply of a good or service. This type of downturn could occur when there is say a destructive natural disaster or a resource runs dry (e.g. an oil well)
• Bubble bursting – a large drop in asset values (e.g. shares in a company or property) causing people to lose confidence in the economy. 
• Financial panics – run on banks due to a loss in confidence in the financial system with depositors removing large amounts of cash.

Depending on the cause of the recession different mechanisms may be used to address the problem. Governments often step up to the plate with large spending packages designed to stimulate the economy and keep money in people’s pockets. Central banks may lower interest rates to encourage people to reduce saving and spend more money. Tax cuts could be popular as a way to encourage spending. Reforms are often proposed with voters advocating change.

Perhaps one day economists will have the ability to properly predict and avoid recessions, but that’s unlikely to happen any time soon. In the meantime, stay safe during COVID-19, and let’s try to make it to the other side in one piece.

About the author: Byte Size Story is run by a New Zealand economist and connects everyday economic interactions with the big picture. The blog talks about popular issues using economic ideas to tell a story, exploring topics such as government intervention, policy and markets.

Where to know more:

• List of Economic Crises
• List of Recessions in the United States

The Full list of Guest posts is available here:

• https://francescolelli.info/category/guest-post/

The post Bubbles and Crashes: When the Invisible Hand Dishes Out an Invisible Punch in the Nose appeared first on Francesco Lelli.

You feel two things: important because you are a PhD student and scared of the PhD journey ahead. In fact, the more important you feel because you are pursuing a PhD degree and nobody else in your circle of life is doing the same, the more scared you become. Vice versa, the more scared you are of the journey, the more you feel the need to pump up your self-confidence.

You are annoying, do you know that? You are only learning how to do your data analysis, and are completely lost in the jungle of all these methodologies, theoretical approaches, previous studies, and their endless intertwined little traps where you keep falling into. However, because you are not accepting of the fact that you do not know and are only learning, you cover this up and mask it into being overly self-certain. You question your supervisor when there is no need to, take advice personally and get upset of it. The frustration that should be directed at yourself, you place at your supervisors.

Dear younger me: your supervisors are only humans. Keep in mind that they are actually doing very well. You tend to see only what they are not doing, such as writing any of your thesis for you or interacting with you as if you are a true colleague. You suffer because you are slowly beginning to understand that you are not yet at their academic level of understanding. They know it -and they show it. Please be aware of the fact that they are not only reading your scribbles and commenting them both in person and in email, but they are also dealing with your attitude -ignorance combined with all possible attempts at hiding your slowly growing understanding that you are ignorant. Meaning, you, my dear, are a Besserwisser.

The sooner you learn to be humble, the better. Admit that you are only learning and do not yet know anything. Stay in that place of openness and curiosity and put your ego aside. That is the only way to ever truly learn. There will be many ways you will be humbled along the road, and you should take them as blessings, not as setbacks or punishments. When your article is not accepted in the journal you had wanted to publish it, when someone really challenges you at your conference presentation, and when your supervisors tell you to re-write it all (again!), take these as normal parts of the path and also as possibilities to get rid of your attempts to be perfect in a way that, in doing research, is far from perfect. Embrace all chances to admit you have taken the wrong approach, misunderstood something, tried a method that will just not work, or spent a lot of time reading something that is not useful (or that you have not even understood in the first place).

Dear younger me, when you stop acting like you already know everything, you start learning. The PhD journey becomes real -messy, fun, frustrating, adventurous. When you not only know that you don’t know but are also willing to show it instead of trying to defend your ground, your supervisors will respect you more, not less, and your work can proceed in unknown ways. The more you get rid of the need to know, the more space you open up for learning, taking unfamiliar perspectives, and doing things in a way that comes from the need to understand instead of the need to  know better.

So dear younger self, embrace a not-knowing -attitude and let it show. You will have the chance to be a know-it-all, if you still want to, later on, after you have graduated and other people (perhaps your own prospective PhD students) are willingly giving you the position of someone who indeed knows better.

About Heidi Toivonen: I am a Finnish clinical psychologist with a wide experience from a variety of different health and social care and medicine settings. Lately, I have been working with developing services that support employment, such as vocational and career coaching. My PhD research concerned the construction of agency and its lack, nonagency, in psychotherapeutic conversations. In the future, I aim to continue doing research and teach. My research interests include e.g. national stereotypes, stereotypes related to researchers in different fields of science, agency of patients with serious illness, and user’s sense of agency in human-computer -interaction.

More information about Heidi Toivonen:

• Link to PhD dissertation: https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/65808
• Connect with Heidi in LinkedIn

If You Want to Be Brainy Start With Humility
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This letter ( If You Want to Be Brainy Start With Humility ) is part of the collection “letter to the younger self” and has been written for helping the “new generation of students” learning from who was there before. You can see all the letters at the following link:

https://francescolelli.info/category/letter-to-the-younger-self/

The post If You Want to Be Brainy Start With Humility appeared first on Francesco Lelli.

I have supervised many successful Msc theses projects, and had some failures. Now, I am Msc Thesis coordinator at Tilburg University, for the Information Management program. 

In this article, I would like to elaborate on the role of the supervisor.

Suppose you are a supervisor yourself. You may be helping secondary school pupils with their exams, or you may be training a football team to become better at defense. There are many settings, also in your work, which involve supervision. From these settings you can learn and see patterns emerge. My claim is that your master’s thesis project will improve, if you let yourself be supervised and if you do some self-supervising. And for both it is crucial that you understand the role of the supervisor. Here is the main point. It is based on my own observations, but it was confirmed by education experts, when I discussed it.

A supervisor has two roles: coach and referee. These roles are partly conflicting.

The coach helps the student reach an objective. The coach will motivate and encourage the student, and try to boost his or her confidence. This may sound like an American sports movie: “Yes! You can do it”. Like in an American sports movie, the student (hero) should overcome some set-backs and hardships. This involves effort. To put in the effort requires determination. Coaches motivate students and to be believable, they need to get involved. They are next to the student, but strictly, they need to stay off the pitch. 

The referee must assess whether the objective is actually met. By the end of the research project, the outcome will be judged on a number of criteria. And such assessment matters: it determines the grade. The referee can push some of these assessments forward in time. At intermediate points you need to know: is the conceptual framework adequate and suitable for the topic? Is the questionnaire well formulated?  Is the literature review properly accounted for? To make a fair assessment, the referee needs some distance from the student.

Figure 1 illustrates the two roles. There is a difference between ‘now’ and ‘objective’, as shown by an assessment by the referee. The coach will help to bridge that gap.

                —-coach— >    referee

           —-|——————–|——

             now                objective

Figure 1. Roles of the supervisor. Coach: motivate student to reach objective.  Referee: assess the work done.

   Referee: assess whether objective as reached.

The roles partly conflict. Being a coach requires involvement, but being a referee requires distance. Usually, in the beginning of the project I am more involved; towards the end I try to keep some distance. This may be surprising to students: “Last month you said you liked the idea, and now you criticize it!” “Well yes, last month I tried to encourage you and now I have to assess the outcomes”. Sometimes it is even necessary to force a ‘crisis’: “This version is not good enough!”  “There is a conceptual error in the model”. If tough messages arrive in time, the student can address the crisis and the problem can still be repaired.   

The link between the two roles is the objective. Where do objectives come from? Ideally, they come from the student. The supervisor should help in setting objectives, and once set, in maintaining them. In the beginning of a project, students are uncertain. That is normal, as by definition, the outcomes of any research project are uncertain. So we need stability from a project planning. Don’t change course, unless there is a real change in circumstances.

How can you apply these supervision patterns in your own work?

• First, let yourself be supervised. That means no sheepish obedience, but being clear about objectives and the current state of the project. The supervisor needs material to work with. It helps to provide frequent status reports (e.g. once every two weeks). This will allow the supervisor to monitor progress and keep him or her involved. Usually, deviations from the plan signal that objectives need to be changed. Take responsibility for such changes.
• Second, do some self-supervising. Monitor your own efforts, so you do not waste them. Once you have set the objectives, and you have broken them down into weekly tasks, you can monitor progress! Your can test how much work (e.g. how much pages, or how much interviews) you can do in a week. Based on such observations, you may have to adjust the plan.  Is it still doable? Daily issues can be solved by yourself. Problems that involve the set-up of the research need to be discussed with the supervisor.

And please be kind to your supervisor. Although they have experience in previous projects, they have never done this project with you before!  They need to learn and adjust too. Give them some space to do so, but be clear about what you expect.  

Good luck with your thesis!

About the Author

Dr. J. Hulstijn (Joris).

I am researcher with a background in information systems and artificial intelligence. My research concerns model-based auditing, continuous control monitoring and their applications, for instance in regulatory compliance. A research profile and list of publications can be found here: https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/webwijs/show/j.hulstijn.htm

I teach courses in the Information Management Msc programme at Tilburg University: ERP systems, Project management and Cyber Security. I often supervise master’s students in doing research, and I have recently become msc Thesis coordinator. If you know about a nice internship or project, please let me know!

This article (The roles of the supervisor: coach and referee) is part of the miniseries on how to do a good thesis, you can see the full list of post at the following links:

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