Hot Topic

Sources due online: Friday, September 7

In-class Presentations: September 17-26

This assignment involves presenting on a healthcare innovation that has been reported on in the popular media during the last 5 months (preferably within the last 14 days). As a reminder, many newspapers (such as the NY Times) have a Science section that is published once a week, which might be a good place to start (the NY Times publishes theirs on Mondays). This project will be an in-class presentation starting on Monday September 17. We will pick presentations at random for three days, so everyone should be ready to present on Sept. 17.

• Find a popular media report published in a general readership periodical (e.g. newspapers, magazines, news websites, or newsletters) of something exciting in healthcare innovations (within the last 5 months, preferably within the last 14 days). This article must directly reference a peer-reviewed primary source article, which is often linked in the article. It should not be a press release by a university or lab about their own research.
• Find the corresponding primary literature that the popular report is based on and upload a link to your article and the primary literature by September 7. The primary literature article must be from a peer-reviewed scientific journal. You may need to access this through Baruch’s library website if there is a paywall.
  • To do this, create a new post with the category “Hot Topic.”
  • Your post title should be the name of the healthcare innovation.
  • Create a link to your popular report along with a correct citation (using Chicago style) for that report.
  • If your primary literature article is open access, paste the link to that as well along with the correct citation. If it is not open access, you should download the article as a PDF and then upload it to your post.
  • Ensure that your category is marked “Hot Topic” and also preview your post to make sure your links look the way you want them to. Remember you can use the “link” button (looks like a chain link) to create links.
  • Publish
• Determine how reputable the general readership/popular source is. Use the skills we have covered in class to determine this. Tell us about the author, the website/publication.
• Prepare an in-class presentation of approximately 10 minutes in which you:
  • Describe the healthcare innovation(s) discussed in your popular media report.
  • Introduce the source for your popular report and justify its and the author’s legitimacy
  • Justify the need for this particular healthcare innovation.
  • Compare your popular media report and the primary literature and try to assess the truthfulness of the popular media report. This is the most important part of the presentation. Consider the following:
    • Does the popular report seem to cover everything in the primary literature? Or did they only read the abstract/introduction/conclusion?
    • Does the popular report accurately reproduce data?
    • Is the data manipulated in any way for the popular report?
    • Does the popular report misread or misinterpret conclusions in order to make a more definitive statement than the primary literature?
    • Anything else relevant

Try not to present this as a series of bullet points that you are checking off (as it is presented here), but rather as a complete presentation in which you assess how the general readership publication presents scientific information.

Your presentation can be in any form you choose — you can make a PowerPoint, Google Slides, a web post on our site that you scroll through, or just talk from notes, whatever you like. Feel free to reproduce any charts, data, or ideas from your articles either in a PowerPoint or website post so that we can see what you are talking about.