Teaching Feedback to First-year Medical Students: Long-term Skill Retention and Accuracy of Student Self-assessment

Giving and receiving feedback are critical skills and should be taught early in the process of medical education, yet few studies discuss the effect of feedback curricula for first-year medical students. To study short-term and long-term skills and attitudes of first-year medical students after a multidisciplinary feedback curriculum. Prospective pre- vs. post-course evaluation using mixed-methods data analysis. First-year students at a public university medical school. We collected anonymous student feedback to faculty before, immediately after, and 8 months after the curriculum and classified comments by recommendation (reinforcing/corrective) and specificity (global/specific). Students also self-rated their comfort with and quality of feedback. We assessed changes in comments (skills) and self-rated abilities (attitudes) across the three time points. Across the three time points, students’ evaluation contained more corrective specific comments per evaluation [pre-curriculum mean (SD) 0.48 (0.99); post-curriculum 1.20 (1.7); year-end 0.95 (1.5); p = 0.006]. Students reported increased skill and comfort in giving and receiving feedback and at providing constructive feedback (p < 0.001). However, the number of specific comments on year-end evaluations declined [pre 3.35 (2.0); post 3.49 (2.3); year-end 2.8 (2.1)]; p = 0.008], as did students’ self-rated ability to give specific comments. Teaching feedback to early medical students resulted in improved skills of delivering corrective specific feedback and enhanced comfort with feedback. However, students’ overall ability to deliver specific feedback decreased over time

Small molecules, big targets: drug discovery faces the protein-protein interaction challenge.

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are of pivotal importance in the regulation of biological systems and are consequently implicated in the development of disease states. Recent work has begun to show that, with the right tools, certain classes of PPI can yield to the efforts of medicinal chemists to develop inhibitors, and the first PPI inhibitors have reached clinical development. In this Review, we describe the research leading to these breakthroughs and highlight the existence of groups of structurally related PPIs within the PPI target class. For each of these groups, we use examples of successful discovery efforts to illustrate the research strategies that have proved most useful.JS, DES and ARB thank the Wellcome Trust for funding.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Nature Publishing Group via http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrd.2016.2

From Romantic Gothic to Victorian Medievalism: 1817 and 1877

"The Cambridge History of the Gothic was conceived in 2015, when Linda Bree, then Editorial Director at Cambridge University Press, first suggested the idea to us

Algorithmic expedients for the prize collecting Steiner tree problem

Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the full text of this article is only available via subscription.This paper investigates the Prize Collecting Steiner Tree Problem (PCSTP) on a graph, which is a generalization of the well-known Steiner tree problem. Given a root node, edge costs, node prizes and penalties, as well as a preset quota, the PCSTP seeks to find a subtree that includes the root node and collects a total prize not smaller than the specified quota, while minimizing the sum of the total edge costs of the tree plus the penalties associated with the nodes that are not included in the subtree. For this challenging network design problem that arises in telecommunication settings, we present two valid 0-1 programming formulations and use them to develop preprocessing procedures for reducing the graph size. Also, we design an optimization-based heuristic that requires solving a PCSTP on a specific tree-subgraph. Although, this latter special case is shown to be NP-hard, it is effectively solvable in pseudo-polynomial time. The worst-case performance of the proposed heuristic is also investigated. In addition, we describe new valid inequalities for the PCSTP and embed all the aforementioned constructs in an exact row-generation approach. Our computational study reveals that the proposed approach can solve relatively large-scale PCSTP instances having up to 1000 nodes to optimality.NSF ; Fatimah Alnijris Research Chair for Advanced Manufacturing Technolog