Enhancing Consultants' IT Skills: A Reverse Mentoring Project

13-16 July 2002 Many medical students arrive with excellent IT skills and experience of mentoring their peers in secondary school. Senior clinicians, by contrast, did not grow up with the technology and often feel left behind by the IT revolution. This generation gap is often seen as a threat to the authority of clinical tutors. We have set up a reverse mentoring scheme to help consultants develop their IT skills. With a grant from the post graduate dean, we have recruited thirty medical students to act as personal trainers to thirty consultants and specialist registrars. Each participant is issued with a set of learning vouchers which enables them to purchase four hours of training and a password to access the learning resources from the project website. This paper will describe the methods used, and report on the results of this unique reverse mentoring scheme

Determinants of project success

The interactions of numerous project characteristics, with particular reference to project performance, were studied. Determinants of success are identified along with the accompanying implications for client organization, parent organization, project organization, and future research. Variables are selected which are found to have the greatest impact on project outcome, and the methodology and analytic techniques to be employed in identification of those variables are discussed

Barium release system

A chemical system is described for releasing a good yield of free barium neutral atoms and barium ions in the upper atmosphere and interplanetary space for the study of the geophysical properties of the medium. The barium is released in the vapor phase so that it can be ionized by solar radiation and also be excited to emit resonance radiation in the visible range. The ionized luminous cloud of barium becomes a visible indication of magnetic and electrical characteristics in space and allows determination of these properties over relatively large areas at a given time

Rocket having barium release system to create ion clouds in the upper atmosphere

A chemical system for releasing a good yield of free barium atoms and barium ions to create ion clouds in the upper atmosphere and interplanetary space for the study of the geophysical properties of the medium is presented

Moving Family Dispute Resolution from the Court System to the Community

Over the past three decades, there has been a significant shift in the way the legal system approaches and resolves family disputes. Mediation, collaboration, and other non-adversarial processes have replaced a traditional, law-oriented adversarial regime. Until recently, however, reformers have focused largely on the court system as the setting for innovations in family dispute resolution. But our research suggests that courts may not be the best places for families to resolve disputes, particularly disputes involving children. Moreover, attempting to turn family courts into multi-door dispute resolution centers may detract from their essential role as adjudicators of last resort and forums for the creation and enforcement of important social norms. In this Essay, and in our recent book, Divorced From Reality: Rethinking Family Dispute Resolution, we suggest that family law reformers should rethink their continuing reliance on courts and consider moving some of the problem-solving processes and services that characterize today’s family justice system out of the courts and into the community

Field Measurements of Penetrator Seismic Coupling in Sediments and Volcanic Rocks

Field experiments were conducted to determine how well a seismometer installed using a penetrator would be coupled to the ground. A dry-lake bed and a lava bed were chosen as test sites to represent geological environments of two widely different material properties. At each site, two half-scale penetrators were fired into the ground, a three-component geophone assembly was mounted to the aft end of each penetrator, and dummy penetrators were at various distances to generate seismic signals. These signals were detected by the penetrator-mounted geophone assembly and by a reference geophone assembly buried or anchored to surface rock and 1-m from the penetrator. The recorded signals were digitized, and cross-spectral analyses were performed to compare the observed signals in terms of power spectral density ratio, coherence, and phase difference. The analyses indicate that seismometers deployed by penetrators will be as well coupled to the ground as are seismometers installed by conventional methods for the frequency range of interest in earthquake seismology

CAN ELITE TENNIS PLAYERS JUDGE THEIR SERVICE SPEED?

The purpose of this study was to examine if elite tennis players could accurately determine whether successive serves were faster or slower than the preceding serve. Eleven national standard junior tennis players completed 10 acceptable maximum effort serves, aiming to land the ball with-in a 1m square area adjacent to the service box T. A Wilcoxen signed rank non-parametric test was employed (α = 0.05). Results indicated players were no more likely to correctly differentiate serves (4.9 ± 1.5) than that which would be expected by chance (5 out of 10) [p = 0.92]. The average speed of serve was 46.9 ± 4.5 m.s-1 and the variation in each player’s service was 1.1 ± 0.5 m.s-1 (approximately 2.3%). The implications of these findings is that it is not possible for elite junior tennis players to use service speed (knowledge of results) as a means of guiding and fine-tuning their technique when they rely on gaining this information from purely internal physiological systems (e.g. vision)