The Project of German Bomb Disposal: Temporal Imaginaries and Materiality after WWII

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard Colleg

Being the ‘med reg’: an exploration of junior doctors’ perceptions of the medical registrar role

The role of the medical registrar is a challenging one and is acknowledged as being a disincentive to a career in medicine for some junior doctors. We set out to build a broader understanding of the role through exploration of Foundation Doctors’ and Core Medical Trainees’ perceptions of the role. Data, gathered from focus groups, were analysed using a framework approach. Six key themes were identified, which were grouped under the headings ‘perceptions of the medical registrar role’ and ‘transition into the role’. Our work builds on existing literature to inform a deeper understanding of how junior doctors perceive the medical registrar role. In light of our findings we offer suggestions on possible training initiatives to tackle the issues identified. We also highlight positive perceptions of the role and emphasise the key ambassadorial role that current medical registrars have in relation to attracting tomorrows’ medical registrars to the specialty

Bayesian Models of Individual Differences

According to Bayesian models, perception and cognition depend on the optimal combination of noisy incoming evidence with prior knowledge of the world. Individual differences in perception should therefore be jointly determined by a person’s sensitivity to incoming evidence and their prior expectations. Pellicano and Burr (2012) proposed that individuals with autism have flatter priors, suggesting that prior variance is linked to the degree of autistic traits in the general population. We tested this idea by studying how perceived speed changes during pursuit eye-movement and at low contrast. We found that individual differences in these two motion phenomena were predicted by differences in thresholds and autistic traits when combined in a quantitative Bayesian model. Our findings therefore support the flatter-prior hypothesis and suggest that individual differences in prior expectations are more systematic than previously thought. In order to be revealed, however, individual differences in sensitivity must also be taken into account

Large-scale genotyping identifies 41 new loci associated with breast cancer risk

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women. Common variants at 27 loci have been identified as associated with susceptibility to breast cancer, and these account for ∼9% of the familial risk of the disease. We report here a meta-analysis of 9 genome-wide association studies, including 10,052 breast cancer cases and 12,575 controls of European ancestry, from which we selected 29,807 SNPs for further genotyping. These SNPs were genotyped in 45,290 cases and 41,880 controls of European ancestry from 41 studies in the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC). The SNPs were genotyped as part of a collaborative genotyping experiment involving four consortia (Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study, COGS) and used a custom Illumina iSelect genotyping array, iCOGS, comprising more than 200,000 SNPs. We identified SNPs at 41 new breast cancer susceptibility loci at genome-wide significance (P < 5 × 10(-8)). Further analyses suggest that more than 1,000 additional loci are involved in breast cancer susceptibility

Large-scale genotyping identifies 41 new loci associated with breast cancer risk

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women. Common variants at 27 loci have been identified as associated with susceptibility to breast cancer, and these account for ~9% of the familial risk of the disease. We report here a meta-analysis of 9 genome-wide association studies, including 10,052 breast cancer cases and 12,575 controls of European ancestry, from which we selected 29,807 SNPs for further genotyping. These SNPs were genotyped in 45,290 cases and 41,880 controls of European ancestry from 41 studies in the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC). The SNPs were genotyped as part of a collaborative genotyping experiment involving four consortia (Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study, COGS) and used a custom Illumina iSelect genotyping array, iCOGS, comprising more than 200,000 SNPs. We identified SNPs at 41 new breast cancer susceptibility loci at genome-wide significance (P < 5 × 10−8). Further analyses suggest that more than 1,000 additional loci are involved in breast cancer susceptibility