Future career plans of Malawian medical students: a cross-sectional survey.

BACKGROUND: Malawi has one of the lowest physician densities in the world, at 1.1 doctors per 100,000 population. Undergraduate training of doctors at the national medical school has increased considerably in recent years with donor support. However, qualified doctors continue to leave the public sector in order to work or train abroad. We explored the postgraduate plans of current medical students, and the extent to which this is influenced by their background. METHODS: A self-administered questionnaire was developed after discussion with students and senior staff. This included questions on background characteristics, education before medical school, and future career plans. This was distributed to all medical and premedical students on campus over 1 week and collected by an independent researcher. One reminder visit was made to each class. Chi-squared tests were performed to investigate the relationship of student characteristics with future career plans. RESULTS: One hundred and forty-nine students completed the questionnaire out of a student body of 312, a response rate of 48%. When questioned on their plans for after graduation, 49.0% of students plan to stay in Malawi. However, 38.9% plan to leave Malawi immediately. Medical students who completed a 'premedical' foundation year at the medical school were significantly more likely to have immediate plans to stay in Malawi compared to those who completed A-levels, an advanced school-leaving qualification (P = 0.037). Current premedical students were slightly more likely to have immediate plans to work or train in Malawi compared to medical students (P = 0.049). However, a trend test across all the years was not significant. When asked about future plans, nearly half of students intend to work or train outside Malawi. CONCLUSIONS: The majority of respondents plan to leave Malawi in the future. The effectiveness of the substantial upscaling of medical education in Malawi may be diminished unless more medical students plan to work in Malawi after graduation

Where do they go when they die?

Food webs and matrices are vital to understanding feeding relationships and ecology. Adjacency matrices can be employed to present the direct relationships between predators and prey; these binary matrices utilize 0’s to denote no direct link and 1’s to denote a direct link. We analyzed a variety of published food webs ranging from pine forests in the United States to tussock grasslands in New Zealand. The food webs varied in number of distinguishable taxa present, functional diversity, climates and habitats. Consequently, we expect that our results are not specific to a given system. The published food webs lack flows from organisms to detritus despite the fact that organisms in these webs consume detritus. This discrepancy leads us to question how the inclusion of flows to detritus influences indirect connectance within large food webs. By including the flows to detritus, the number of indirect paths of length n as well as indirect relationships throughout the systems increased. Null model simulations were compared to detrital models in power series and eigen analysis. Pathway proliferation was found in all simulations with detrital models exhibiting greater potential indirect paths and detritus contributing greatly to energetic cycling by serving as energy storage to dead and decaying organic matter in ecosystems

Cooperation on Competition: The Multistate Tax Commission and State Corporate Tax Uniformity

This report explores how interstate uniformity of state corporate income taxes has varied over time, the role played by the MTC, and how likely it is that uniformity will be achieved. FRC Report 11

How to Get Started with SoTL: Reflections from a Novice SoTL Researcher

The purpose of this paper is to provide a reflection on successfully engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) after overcoming common barriers to engagement in SoTL. The author identifies barriers commonly experienced by scholars interested in engaging in SoTL. The author identified a variety of frameworks in the literature that were reported to be helpful in assisting novice SoTL scholars in overcoming barriers related to research question formation. An example is shared to demonstrate how the complementary frameworks can be used to develop answerable research questions

New method for determining relative oscillator strengths of atoms through combined absorption and emission measurements: Application to titanium (TiI)

The authors introduce a procedure that combines measurements of absorption and emission by atoms to obtain relative oscillator strengths that are independent of temperature determination in the sources and of assumptions regarding local thermodynamic equilibrium. The experimental observations are formed into sets of transitions and required to satisfy defined ratios. The screened data are adjusted with a least-squares program to obtain optimized relative oscillator strengths and constants relating the observations to these values. With appropriate choices of input observations, the constants are proportional to upper-level lifetimes and lower-level populations. The procedure is illustrated by the published data of Whaling et al. and Smith and Kühne for 16 transitions in TiI. The relative oscillator strengths resulting from this procedure have calculated uncertainties between 5 and 17% (∼ 95% confidence level). Evidence is presented to suggest that these uncertainties have been overestimated. Calculated oscillator strengths are normalized to the atomic-beam absorption measurements of Bell et al. and to the experimental lifetimes of Roberts et al. and Whaling et al. The absolute oscillator strengths are determined with an uncertainty of 7-18%. The results indicate that the published lifetime for the level y 3D20 of TiI should be increased by 24%

Occurrence of Vibrio parahaemolyticus in Estuarine Waters and Oysters of New Hampshire

Vibrio parahaemolyticus was isolated from water and oysters collected from seven different sampling stations in the Great Bay and Little Bay estuarine areas of New Hampshire. The morphological and biochemical characteristics of 50 isolates conformed in general to those described for this organism in the literature. All isolates produced hemolysis on blood-agar. To date, there have been no reports of V. parahaemolyticus food poisoning outbreaks due to the consumption of fish or shellfish harvested from this estuarine region

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Perceptions of Interprofessional Education

Engagement in interprofessional collaborative practice is critical for communication disorders professionals to provide quality clinical services. Given limited research on implementation of interprofessional education (IPE) within communication disorders pre-professional training programs and research highlighting potential barriers to implementation of IPE, this investigation assessed communication sciences and disorders (CSD) faculty attitudes toward IPE. One hundred fifty-eight CSD faculty from accredited CSD graduate programs completed the Interprofessional Attitudes Scale (Norris, Carpenter, Eaton, Guo, Lassche, Pett, & Blumenthal, 2016). Collectively, the faculty supported CSD students learning from and with students from different disciplines and endorsed IPE as beneficial. Faculty with master’s degrees were more likely to believe that IPE would increase student’s effectiveness as clinical care team members, whereas more faculty with research doctorates indicated that biases toward other professionals could get in the way of providing intervention. Compared to faculty in colleges other than health sciences, faculty in colleges of health sciences reported experiencing more bias toward and from professionals of other disciplines. Despite group differences, a majority of CSD faculty overwhelmingly favored IPE for students suggesting that the attitudes of CSD faculty toward IPE may not be a barrier to implementation of IPE within pre-professional training programs