Development of the Australian Core Competencies in Musculoskeletal Basic and Clinical Science Project - phase 1

©The Medical Journal of Australia 2008Musculoskeletal conditions are a major contributor to the burden of disease globally and their impact is predicted to increase. Consistent with findings in other countries, the current standard of musculoskeletal education in Australian medical schools is inadequate to meet today’s musculoskeletal care requirements. A national multidisciplinary approach unifying the key musculoskeletal clinical and basic science disciplines has been adopted to provide clear, evidence-based education guidelines that are specifically aimed at priority musculoskeletal conditions; a direct link is therefore established between community health care needs and education at a national level. This “top-down” approach provides the potential for a far more effective and efficient delivery of musculoskeletal education by allowing the identification of the key basic knowledge and skills required to achieve core competencies and by providing appropriate direction for students. The Australian Core Competencies in Musculoskeletal Basic and Clinical Science are being developed for medical schools to incorporate into their curricula, with the ultimate aim of improving the standard of health care for Australians with musculoskeletal conditions.Mellick J Chehade and Aleksander Bachorsk

Finite-element prediction of distortion during gas metal arc welding using the shrinkage volume approach

Distortion is a potential problem with all welded fabrications. To a large extent, industrial control of weld induced distortion is achieved by reliance on past experience, simple empirical formulae or rectification procedures. Rectification can be costly, whilst in large complex structures, empirical formulae are rarely applicable. Classical approaches to the modelling of welding distortion and residual stress, whilst accurate, have not been readily useable within industry. The time and cost associated with running such models appear to be the main reasons contributing to this situation. Nevertheless, the use of computer simulative techniques has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of welded fabrications by allowing for predictions to be made long before a single weld bead is put down on the workshop floor. Therefore, computer models that are aimed at predicting welding phenomena not only need to be accurate, but must also be affordable and capable of making predictions within industrial time frames if they are to be used by fabricators. This paper presents one such strategy. The Shrinkage Volume Method is a linear elastic finite-element modelling technique that has been developed to predict post-weld distortion. By assuming that the linear thermal contraction of a nominal shrinkage volume is the main driving force for distortion, the need to determine the transient temperature field and microstructural changes is eliminated. In so doing, the model solution times are reduced significantly and the use of linear elastic finite-element methods permits large, highly complex welded structures to be modelled within a reasonable time frame. Verification of the modelled results was carried out by an experimental program that investigated the distortion of plain carbon steel plates having differing vee-butt preparations. The initial models, which had assumed the edge preparation to be representative of the overall shrinkage volume, were in reasonable agreement with the experimentally determined distortion values. Further improvements to these results were made by using a thermal model to define better the effective weld shrinkage volume.A. Bachorski, M.J. Painter, A.J. Smailes, M.A. Waha

Faustus infaustissimus. Kontroverstheologisches aus der Hölle des Jesuitendramas

Am Ende der von Georg Bernardt SJ verfassten Dramen Theophilus Cilix (1621) und Tundalus redivivus (1622) tritt Faustus auf, dessen Verdammnis jeweils der Rettung des Protagonisten gegenübergestellt wird. Im Vergleich mit der Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587) lassen die Differenzen in Hinsicht auf Bußverständnis und Willensfreiheit eine kontroverstheologische Polemik erkennen

Demographic history and rare allele sharing among human populations

High-throughput sequencing technology enables population-level surveys of human genomic variation. Here, we examine the joint allele frequency distributions across continental human populations and present an approach for combining complementary aspects of whole-genome, low-coverage data and targeted high-coverage data. We apply this approach to data generated by the pilot phase of the Thousand Genomes Project, including whole-genome 2–4× coverage data for 179 samples from HapMap European, Asian, and African panels as well as high-coverage target sequencing of the exons of 800 genes from 697 individuals in seven populations. We use the site frequency spectra obtained from these data to infer demographic parameters for an Out-of-Africa model for populations of African, European, and Asian descent and to predict, by a jackknife-based approach, the amount of genetic diversity that will be discovered as sample sizes are increased. We predict that the number of discovered nonsynonymous coding variants will reach 100,000 in each population after ∼1,000 sequenced chromosomes per population, whereas ∼2,500 chromosomes will be needed for the same number of synonymous variants. Beyond this point, the number of segregating sites in the European and Asian panel populations is expected to overcome that of the African panel because of faster recent population growth. Overall, we find that the majority of human genomic variable sites are rare and exhibit little sharing among diverged populations. Our results emphasize that replication of disease association for specific rare genetic variants across diverged populations must overcome both reduced statistical power because of rarity and higher population divergence