Unhappiness and dissatisfaction in doctors cannot be predicted by selectors from medical school application forms: A prospective, longitudinal study

BACKGROUND: Personal statements and referees' reports are widely used on medical school application forms, particularly in the UK, to assess the suitability of candidates for a career in medicine. However there are few studies which assess the validity of such information for predicting unhappiness or dissatisfaction with a career in medicine. Here we combine data from a long-term prospective study of medical student selection and training, with an experimental approach in which a large number of assessors used a paired comparison technique to predict outcome. METHODS: Data from a large-scale prospective study of students applying to UK medical schools in 1990 were used to identify 40 pairs of doctors, matched by sex, for whom personal statements and referees' reports were available, and who in a 2002/3 follow-up study, one pair member was very satisfied and the other very dissatisfied with medicine as a career. In 2005, 96 assessors, who were experienced medical school selectors, doctors, medical students or psychology students, used information from the doctors' original applications to judge which member of each pair of doctors was the happier, more satisfied doctor. RESULTS: None of the groups of assessors were significantly different from chance expectations in using applicants' personal statements and the referees' reports to predict actual future satisfaction or dissatisfaction, the distribution being similar to binomial expectations. However judgements of pairs of application forms from pairs of doctors showed a non-binomial distribution, indicating consensus among assessors as to which doctor would be the happy doctor (although the consensus was wrong in half the cases). Assessors taking longer to do the task concurred more. Consensus judgements seem mainly to be based on referees' predictions of academic achievement (even though academic achievement is not actually a valid predictor of happiness or satisfaction). CONCLUSION: Although widely used in medical student selection to assess motivation, interest and commitment to a medical career, the personal statement and the referee's report cannot validly be used by assessors, including experienced medical school selectors, to identify doctors who will subsequently be dissatisfied with a medical career

Overview of the TCV tokamak experimental programme

The tokamak a configuration variable (TCV) continues to leverage its unique shaping capabilities, flexible heating systems and modern control system to address critical issues in preparation for ITER and a fusion power plant. For the 2019-20 campaign its configurational flexibility has been enhanced with the installation of removable divertor gas baffles, its diagnostic capabilities with an extensive set of upgrades and its heating systems with new dual frequency gyrotrons. The gas baffles reduce coupling between the divertor and the main chamber and allow for detailed investigations on the role of fuelling in general and, together with upgraded boundary diagnostics, test divertor and edge models in particular. The increased heating capabilities broaden the operational regime to include T (e)/T (i) similar to 1 and have stimulated refocussing studies from L-mode to H-mode across a range of research topics. ITER baseline parameters were reached in type-I ELMy H-modes and alternative regimes with \u27small\u27 (or no) ELMs explored. Most prominently, negative triangularity was investigated in detail and confirmed as an attractive scenario with H-mode level core confinement but an L-mode edge. Emphasis was also placed on control, where an increased number of observers, actuators and control solutions became available and are now integrated into a generic control framework as will be needed in future devices. The quantity and quality of results of the 2019-20 TCV campaign are a testament to its successful integration within the European research effort alongside a vibrant domestic programme and international collaborations

Overview of the TCV tokamak experimental programme

The tokamak à configuration variable (TCV) continues to leverage its unique shaping capabilities, flexible heating systems and modern control system to address critical issues in preparation for ITER and a fusion power plant. For the 2019-20 campaign its configurational flexibility has been enhanced with the installation of removable divertor gas baffles, its diagnostic capabilities with an extensive set of upgrades and its heating systems with new dual frequency gyrotrons. The gas baffles reduce coupling between the divertor and the main chamber and allow for detailed investigations on the role of fuelling in general and, together with upgraded boundary diagnostics, test divertor and edge models in particular. The increased heating capabilities broaden the operational regime to include Te/Ti ∼1 and have stimulated refocussing studies from L-mode to H-mode across a range of research topics. ITER baseline parameters were reached in type-I ELMy H-modes and alternative regimes with 'small' (or no) ELMs explored. Most prominently, negative triangularity was investigated in detail and confirmed as an attractive scenario with H-mode level core confinement but an L-mode edge. Emphasis was also placed on control, where an increased number of observers, actuators and control solutions became available and are now integrated into a generic control framework as will be needed in future devices. The quantity and quality of results of the 2019-20 TCV campaign are a testament to its successful integration within the European research effort alongside a vibrant domestic programme and international collaborations

Studying the effect of non-adiabatic passing electron dynamics on microturbulence self-interaction in fusion plasmas using gyrokinetic simulations

Microturbulence driven by plasma instabilities is in most cases the dominant cause of heat and particle loss from the core of magnetic confinement fusion devices and therefore presents a major challenge in achieving burning plasma conditions. The role of passing electron dynamics in turbulent transport driven by ion-scale microinstabilities, in particular Ion Temperature Gradient (ITG) and Trapped Electron Mode (TEM) instabilities, has been given relatively little attention. In first approximation, these particles, which are highly mobile along the confining magnetic field, are assumed to respond adiabatically to the low frequency ion-scale modes. However, near mode rational surfaces (MRSs), the non-adiabatic response of passing electrons becomes important and can no longer be neglected. This non-adiabatic electron response actually has a destabilising effect and leads to generation of fine-structures located at the MRSs of each eigenmode. This thesis focuses on the effects of non-adiabatic response of passing electrons in tokamak core turbulence. One such effect of non-adiabatic passing electrons that is of particular interest to this work is the self-interaction mechanism. It is essentially a process by which a microinstability eigenmode that is extended along the direction parallel to the magnetic field interacts non-linearly with itself, in turn generating E x B zonal flows. Unlike the usual picture of zonal flow drive in which microinstability eigenmodes coherently amplify the flow via modulational instabilities, the self-interaction drive of zonal flows from these eigenmodes are uncorrelated with each other. In the case of ITG driven turbulence, using novel statistical diagnostic methods, it is shown that the associated shearing rate of the fluctuating zonal flows therefore reduces as more toroidal modes are resolved in the simulation. In simulations accounting for the full toroidal domain, such an increase in the density of toroidal modes corresponds in fact to an increase in the system size, leading to a finite system size effect that is distinct from the other better known system size effects such as profile shearing or finite radial extend of the unstable region. The study of non-adiabatic passing electron dynamics is pursued further to include more reactor relevant conditions such as collisions and background shear flow. It is found that, with increasing collisionality, electrons behave more adiabatic-like, especially the trapped electrons away from MRSs, thereby leading to a decrease in the growth rate of ITG eigenmodes. Furthermore, the shortened electron mean free path in presence of collisions leads to a radial broadening of the fine-structures at the MRS of corresponding eigenmodes. In nonlinear simulations, the turbulent flux levels decrease with increasing collisionality, as a result of the reduced drive from the less unstable ITG eigenmodes. The radial width of the fine structures at MRSs is found to reduce with increasing collisionality as a result of reduced nonlinear modification of the eigenmodes in turbulence simulations. A study of the effect of collisions on the self-interaction mechanism reveals that for physically relevant values of collisionality, the effect of self-interaction is still significant. A preliminary study of the effect of background E x B flow shear shows that the fine-structures associated with the non-adiabatic passing electron response persist even with finite background flow

Lum 118-02 Lab Gender and Eye Color Survey

<p>The information was recorded at york university, Lumber's Building room 118, on Tuesday September 15th, 2015 at roughly 2:00pm, 4 group members surveyed 21 ecology students, observing and recording the gender and eye color of all individuals</p

Danby Grasslands Insect diversity and abundance transect experiment

<p>The data in the excel sheet was from an experiment conducted on Tuesday September 29th 2015, in the Danby Grasslands at York University between the times of 2:45pm and 4:45pm. Group members that assisted in data collection: Naduni, Sharan, and Stanley. The temperature was 15 degrees celsius, light winds and moderate precipitation was constant through the collection. a transect was measured for 15 meters, and insects were swept in a scooping motion along the entire distance, perpendicular to the transect itself. After sweeping, number of insects, and total amount of species were recorded. The process was repeated 10 times in somewhat randomly selected areas. By means of that the conductor of the experiment closed their eyes and spun around 3 times took 10 steps and laid down the transect. The experiment was conducted by Bryson Chandrarajan.</p

Plant population sampling using quadrats in grasslands

<p>This data was collected at the Danby woods site on York university Camplus on September, 22nd, 2015, between the times of 2:30pm - 5:30pm.  The purpose of the collection was to sample areas of grasslands in the woods. The data was collected using 1 meter x 1 meter quadrats and recording data within the borders, the quadrats were randomly places by generating a random number to move from the last recorded quadrat. 25 replicates were taken and recorded from this proces. The temperature was 22 degrees Celsius, conditions were sunny with no cloud cover, and a light breeze. The entire process took rougly 40 minutes to complete. Group members : Naduni, Sharron, Stanley. </p

On the impact of temperature gradient flattening and system size on heat transport in microtearing turbulence

Microtearing instability is one of the major sources of turbulent transport in high-beta tokamaks. These modes lead to very localized transport at low-order rational magnetic field lines, and we show that flattening of the local electron temperature gradient at these rational surfaces plays an important role in setting the saturated flux level in microtearing turbulence. This process depends crucially on the density of rational surfaces, and thus the system-size, and gives rise to a worse-than-gyro-Bohm transport scaling for system-sizes typical of existing tokamaks and simulations