Are you a researcher as well as a medical illustrator?

When we list the areas of practice for medical illustrators we always include research, but how involved in research are we? The aim of this activity is to encourage your professional development not just as a medical illustrator but your involvement with research whether that is undertaking your own research, undertaking evidence based practice (1) , working as part of a research team, advising researchers on the value of medical illustration or supporting a student undertaking a research project for their degree or post-graduate qualification

Efficiency at optimal work from finite reservoirs: a probabilistic perspective

We revisit the classic thermodynamic problem of maximum work extraction from two arbitrary sized hot and cold reservoirs, modelled as perfect gases. Assuming ignorance about the extent to which the process has advanced, which implies an ignorance about the final temperatures, we quantify the prior information about the process and assign a prior distribution to the unknown temperature(s). This requires that we also take into account the temperature values which are regarded to be unphysical in the standard theory, as they lead to a contradiction with the physical laws. Instead in our formulation, such values appear to be consistent with the given prior information and hence are included in the inference. We derive estimates of the efficiency at optimal work from the expected values of the final temperatures, and show that these values match with the exact expressions in the limit when any one of the reservoirs is very large compared to the other. For other relative sizes of the reservoirs, we suggest a weighting procedure over the estimates from two valid inference procedures, that generalizes the procedure suggested earlier in [J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. {\bf 46}, 365002 (2013)]. Thus a mean estimate for efficiency is obtained which agrees with the optimal performance to a high accuracy.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure

Environmental and genetic influences on neurocognitive development: the importance of multiple methodologies and time-dependent intervention

Genetic mutations and environmental factors dynamically influence gene expression and developmental trajectories at the neural, cognitive, and behavioral levels. The examples in this article cover different periods of neurocognitive development—early childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—and focus on studies in which researchers have used a variety of methodologies to illustrate the early effects of socioeconomic status and stress on brain function, as well as how allelic differences explain why some individuals respond to intervention and others do not. These studies highlight how similar behaviors can be driven by different underlying neural processes and show how a neurocomputational model of early development can account for neurodevelopmental syndromes, such as autism spectrum disorders, with novel implications for intervention. Finally, these studies illustrate the importance of the timing of environmental and genetic factors on development, consistent with our view that phenotypes are emergent, not predetermined

Photography of operative techniques and pathology during arthroscopy using a second arthroscope.

The use of two arthroscopes is recommended to reduce the time needed for photography eliminating the need to remove video control from the main arthroscope, to record pathology and operative techniques for teaching without an additional light source

Child support judgments: comparing public policy to the public's policy

Any child support regime necessarily makes policy choices about how parental income should be shared between the two parental households. Those choices involve balancing the claims of the child, the claims of the custodial parent for help with the expense of providing for the child, and the claims of the support obligor for autonomy in deciding how to spend his own earnings. That balancing task is complicated by the fact that the child and the custodial parent necessarily share a living standard, so that any child support transfer, large or small, will unavoidably benefit the custodial parent as well as the child. This article reports the findings of an empirical study designed to reveal how the British public believe this balance should be struck. It then compares the public’s preferred policies to the policy choices implicit in the current UK child support schedule. It concludes that there are important gaps between the two, and recommends that consideration be given to amending the current UK law to better align it with the public’s values on these matters

Techniques for improved convergence in neighboring optimum guidance

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/77140/1/AIAA-1969-888-643.pd

Optimal Control of Quantum Dynamics : A New Theoretical Approach

A New theoretical formalism for the optimal quantum control has been presented. The approach stems from the consideration of describing the time-dependent quantum system in terms of the real physical observables, viz., the probability density rho(x,t) and the quantum current j(x,t) which is well documented in the Bohm's hydrodynamical formulation of quantum mechanics. The approach has been applied for manipulating the vibrational motion of HBr in its ground electronic state under an external electric field.Comment: 4 figure

AGMIAL: implementing an annotation strategy for prokaryote genomes as a distributed system

We have implemented a genome annotation system for prokaryotes called AGMIAL. Our approach embodies a number of key principles. First, expert manual annotators are seen as a critical component of the overall system; user interfaces were cyclically refined to satisfy their needs. Second, the overall process should be orchestrated in terms of a global annotation strategy; this facilitates coordination between a team of annotators and automatic data analysis. Third, the annotation strategy should allow progressive and incremental annotation from a time when only a few draft contigs are available, to when a final finished assembly is produced. The overall architecture employed is modular and extensible, being based on the W3 standard Web services framework. Specialized modules interact with two independent core modules that are used to annotate, respectively, genomic and protein sequences. AGMIAL is currently being used by several INRA laboratories to analyze genomes of bacteria relevant to the food-processing industry, and is distributed under an open source license