A decade of Australian Rural Clinical School graduates: Where are they and why?

Introduction: The Australian Rural Clinical School (RCS) initiative has been addressing the rural medical workforce shortage at the medical education level for over a decade. A major expectation of this initiative is that it will improve rural medical workforce recruitment and subsequent retention through a rurally based undergraduate clinical training experience. The longitudinal nature of these workforce initiatives means that definitive evidence of its impact on the shortage of rural doctors is yet to be provided; however, to date cross-sectional studies are accumulating a measure of efficacy for these initiatives by monitoring early career factors such as internship location choice and speciality choice of RCS graduates. This article reports on a study in one RCS that is monitoring the impact of rural undergraduate clinical training on trends in workforce participation patterns of its graduates as long as 9 years in the workforce. Career location and speciality choice are reported as well as perspectives on early career intentions and the reality of making career and life decisions as a doctor in the medical workforce

Observational detection of eclipses of J5 Amalthea by the Galilean satellites

We carried out observations of the small jovian satellite Amalthea (J5) as it was being eclipsed by the Galilean satellites near the 2009 equinox of Jupiter in order to apply the technique of mutual event photometry to the astrometric determination of this satellite's position. The observations were carried out during the period 06/2009-09/2009 from the island of Maui, Hawaii and Siding Spring, Australia with the 2m Faulkes Telescopes North and South respectively. We observed in the near-infrared part of the spectrum using a PanStarrs-Z filter with Jupiter near the edge of the field in order to mitigate against the glare from the planet. Frames were acquired at rates >1/min during eclipse times predicted using recent JPL ephemerides for the satellites. Following subtraction of the sky background from these frames, differential aperture photometry was carried out on Amalthea and a nearby field star. We have obtained three lightcurves which show a clear drop in the flux from Amalthea, indicating that an eclipse took place as predicted. These were model-fitted to yield best estimates of the time of maximum flux drop and the impact parameter. These are consistent with Amalthea's ephemeris but indicate that Amalthea is slightly ahead of, and closer to Jupiter than, its predicted position by approximately half the ephemeris uncertainty in these directions. We argue that a ground-based campaign of higher-cadence photometry accurate at the 5% level or better during the next season of eclipses in 2014-15 should yield positions to within 0".5 and affect a corresponding improvement in Amalthea's ephemeris.Comment: Published in A&A in 2010; 6 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

Detection of arcs in Saturn's F ring during the 1995 Sun ring-plane crossing

Observations of the November 1995 Sun crossing of the Saturn's ring-plane made with the 3.6m CFH telescope, using the UHAO adaptive optics system, are presented here. We report the detection of four arcs located in the vicinity of the F ring. They can be seen one day later in HST images. The combination of both data sets gives accurate determinations of their orbits. Semi-major axes range from 140020 km to 140080 km, with a mean of 140060 +- 60 km. This is about 150 km smaller than previous estimates of the F ring radius from Voyager 1 and 2 data, but close to the orbit of another arc observed at the same epoch in HST images.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, To appear in A&A, for comments : [email protected]

Willa Cather\u27s refinement of art through progress and change: A study of The Song of the Lark and My Mortal Enemy

The reputation of Willa Cather is based, for the most part, on her novels of the frontier, particularly My Antonia (1918) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Her childhood years in Nebraska exposed her to the pioneer experience in America, and the way of life she knew in a small, prairie town late in the nineteenth century was to become a major influence in her writing. Taking the advice of Sarah Orne Jewett, Miss Cather found her “quiet centre of life,” and wrote about that which she knew best--the life she lived, the people who made that life interesting, and the fading days of the American West. As a result, Cather has frequently been considered both social historian an autobiographer. While there can be no denying that she was indeed both, it is perhaps more important to remember that Willa Cather was first an artist. Art was her way of life. She wanted more than anything else to capture “the shining , elusive element which is life itself--life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.” Thus, Cather’s novels were never purely historical or auto biographical. Rather, her works were, and are, a delicate web of fact and fiction, spun with the care of a scrupulous craftsman, reflecting the dignity of Cather’s own “kingdom of Art.

Novel patient-derived xenograft mouse model for pancreatic acinar cell carcinoma demonstrates single agent activity of oxaliplatin

Additional file 4: Figure S3. Integrated genomic viewer (IGV) of BRCA2 gene. IGV displays genomic data of the PA-018 PAAC PDTX model. Chromosome 13 (Chr 13) is shown and 5bp deletions are found after position 32907365 (c.1755_1759del5), this region resides on exon 10 of BRCA2. The bottom of the image shows the nucleotides and amino acids that correspond to the reference sequence of the BRCA2 gene and protein

Nut production in Bertholletia excelsa across a logged forest mosaic: implications for multiple forest use

Although many examples of multiple-use forest management may be found in tropical smallholder systems, few studies provide empirical support for the integration of selective timber harvesting with non-timber forest product (NTFP) extraction. Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa, Lecythidaceae) is one of the world’s most economically-important NTFP species extracted almost entirely from natural forests across the Amazon Basin. An obligate out-crosser, Brazil nut flowers are pollinated by large-bodied bees, a process resulting in a hard round fruit that takes up to 14 months to mature. As many smallholders turn to the financial security provided by timber, Brazil nut fruits are increasingly being harvested in logged forests. We tested the influence of tree and stand-level covariates (distance to nearest cut stump and local logging intensity) on total nut production at the individual tree level in five recently logged Brazil nut concessions covering about 4000 ha of forest in Madre de Dios, Peru. Our field team accompanied Brazil nut harvesters during the traditional harvest period (January-April 2012 and January-April 2013) in order to collect data on fruit production. Three hundred and ninety-nine (approximately 80%) of the 499 trees included in this study were at least 100 m from the nearest cut stump, suggesting that concessionaires avoid logging near adult Brazil nut trees. Yet even for those trees on the edge of logging gaps, distance to nearest cut stump and local logging intensity did not have a statistically significant influence on Brazil nut production at the applied logging intensities (typically 1–2 timber trees removed per ha). In one concession where at least 4 trees ha-1 were removed, however, the logging intensity covariate resulted in a marginally significant (0.09) P value, highlighting a potential risk for a drop in nut production at higher intensities. While we do not suggest that logging activities should be completely avoided in Brazil nut rich forests, when a buffer zone cannot be observed, low logging intensities should be implemented. The sustainability of this integrated management system will ultimately depend on a complex series of socioeconomic and ecological interactions. Yet we submit that our study provides an important initial step in understanding the compatibility of timber harvesting with a high value NTFP, potentially allowing for diversification of forest use strategies in Amazonian Perù

Partitioning the environmental drivers of immunocompetence

By determining susceptibility to disease, environment-driven variation in immune responses can affect the health, productivity and fitness of vertebrates. Yet how the different components of the total environment control this immune variation is remarkably poorly understood. Here, through combining field observation, experimentation and modelling, we are able to quantitatively partition the key environmental drivers of constitutive immune allocation in a model wild vertebrate (three-spined stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus). We demonstrate that, in natural populations, thermal conditions and diet alone are sufficient (and necessary) to explain a dominant (seasonal) axis of variation in immune allocation. This dominant axis contributes to both infection resistance and tolerance and, in turn, to the vital rates of infectious agents and the progression of the disease they cause. Our results illuminate the environmental regulation of vertebrate immunity (given the evolutionary conservation of the molecular pathways involved) and they identify mechanisms through which immunocompetence and host-parasite dynamics might be impacted by changing environments. In particular, we predict a dominant sensitivity of immunocompetence and host-pathogen dynamics to host diet shifts