Word: floridas
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...other day, a nurse at Florida State University in Tallahassee responded to an alarm in a hospital room where a patient named Stan D. Ardman lay gravely ill. Ardman's blood pressure had dropped precipitously, and when the nurse came in, Ardman wheezed and said, "I'm very nauseous and dizzy ... Having trouble breathing...
...Stan D. Ardman isn't a real person but a robot simulator ("standard man") used to train medical personnel. Thomas, who is just out of nursing school, was participating in a Florida State study designed to compare the performance of novice nurses like him against that of more experienced ones. The results were surprising. After Thomas left, I watched a nurse with more than 25 years' experience go through the same simulation. At first, when the monitor indicated a drop in blood pressure, Monica (also a pseudonym) coolheadedly began to identify possible treatments. Within seconds she noticed Ardman's dopamine...
...making the case that she would be a better President than Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton never forgets to summon the argument that she has more experience. But as the Florida State simulations show, experience doesn't always help. In fact, three decades of research into expert performance has shown that experience itself - the raw amount of time you spend pursuing any particular activity, from brain surgery to skiing - can actually hinder your ability to deliver reproducibly superior performance...
...most fields, it doesn't guarantee success. As Anders Ericsson writes in the introduction to the 901-page Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (2006), "The number of years of experience in a domain is a poor predictor of attained performance." Ericsson, 60, is a professor at Florida State who moved to the U.S. from his native Sweden in 1976 to study with Simon, co-author of the seminal chess paper. (Simon went on to win a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making.) Today Ericsson runs Florida State's Human Performance Laboratory, where Thomas...
...many that makes Tuesday's troubles all the more unsettling in a national context. Then again, if a number of things went wrong in Florida, just as many things actually went right: except for the initial substation breaker, the system responded - and was back up in a matter of hours - as it should have, perhaps preventing a more serious outage that could have lasted well into the dark night. "This certainly raised a red flag about Florida's vulnerability, if not the nation's," says Twomey. "But in the end the system worked as it was supposed to." In other...