Assessing student perceptions of the Pharm.D. degree at a private tertiary medical university in India

Background: Pharmacy education in India has expanded to include the Doctorate of Pharmacy degree (Pharm.D.). With clinical practice in early development, job opportunities in India are limited. Graduates often consider pharmacy opportunities abroad. Aims: This study compares Indian students’ career aspirations related to the Pharm.D. degree before and after beginning their programmes. Methods: A 5-point Likert scale paper survey with open ended questions was distributed to all Pharm.D. students (Year 1- 6) at a medical university in India. Results: With a response rate of 83% (144/173), over half of the students’ primary goal was to pursue careers abroad post-graduation (54.2% before, 51.4% after). Data from the last three graduating classes indicated that 28.3% travelled abroad for future studies while 62.3% secured positions in India. Conclusions: Opportunities abroad remain challenging for Indian trained Pharm.D.s’; graduates may consider the expanding clinical opportunities in India

Next Generation Teaching and Learning ??? Technologies and Trends

The landscape of teaching and learning has been radically shifted in the last 15 years by the advent of web technologies, which enabled the emergence of Learning Management Systems (LMS). These systems changed the educational paradigm by extending the classroom borders, capturing and persisting course content and giving instructors more flexibility and access to students and other resources. However, they also constrained and limited the evolution of teaching and learning by imposing a traditional, instructional framework. With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, participation and collaboration have become predominant experiences on the Web. The teaching and learning community, as a whole, has been late to capitalize on these technologies in the classroom. Part of this trend is due to constraints in the technology (LMS), and part is due to the fact that participatory media tools require an additional shift in educational paradigms, from instructional, on-the-pulpit type of teaching, to a student-centered, adaptive environment where students can contribute to the course material and learn from one another. This panel will discuss the next generation of teaching and learning, involving more lightweight, modular systems to empower instructors to be flexible, explore new student-centered paradigms, and plug and play tools as needed. We will also discuss how the iSchools are and should be increasingly involved in studying these new forms, formulating best practices and supporting the needs of teachers as they move toward more collaborative learning environments

Looking at Accountability 40 Years after Darling

An examination of the ramifications of the Darling decision

EMBEDDED DEFECTS AND SYMMETRY BREAKING IN FLIPPED SU(5)SU(5)

We explicitly show the analogy between the symmetry breaking scheme for the GUT flipped $SU(5)$ with that of the Weinberg-Salam theory of electroweak interactions. This allows us to construct the embedded defect spectrum of the theory flipped $SU(5)$. We find that the spectrum consists of twelve gauge-equivalent unstable Lepto-quark strings, which are analogous to W-strings in electroweak theory, and another string that is gauge inequivalent to the Lepto-quark strings, which we call the `V-string'. The V-string is analogous to the Z-string of electroweak theory, correspondingly admitting a stable semilocal limit. Using data on the running coupling constants we indicate that in the non-supersymmetric case V-strings can be stable for part of the physically-viable parameter space. Cosmological consequences are briefly discussed.Comment: 21 pages, LATE

Simon-Task Reveals Balanced Visuomotor Control in Experienced Video-Game Players

Both short and long-term video-game play may result in superior performance on visual and attentional tasks. To further these findings, we compared the performance of experienced male video-game players (VGPs) and non-VGPs on a Simon-task. Experienced-VGPs began playing before the age of 10, had a minimum of 8 years of experience and a minimum play time of over 20 h per week over the past 6 months. Our results reveal a significantly reduced Simon-effect in experienced-VGPs relative to non-VGPs. However, this was true only for the right-responses, which typically show a greater Simon-effect than left-responses. In addition, experienced-VGPs demonstrated significantly quicker reaction times and more balanced left-versus-right-hand performance than non-VGPs. Our results suggest that experienced-VGPs can resolve response-selection conflicts more rapidly for right-responses than non-VGPs, and this may in part be underpinned by improved bimanual motor control

Transition to Retirement

This Policy Bulletin describes the implementation and evaluation of the Transition to Retirement (TTR) Program that was examined in a three-year collaborative program of applied research involving university researchers and disability service providers. The Bulletin ends with recommendations for policy and practice based on our research findings and on the practical experience of delivering the program. The TTR Program offered older people with disability the opportunity to begin to build a retirement lifestyle by joining a general community group for one day a week instead of working on that day. Thus, the program fulfils an important goal of disability policy: the social inclusion of people with disability in Australian community life. The program involved: talking to people with disability about retirement, investigating their interests, finding an appropriate community group for individuals to join, seeking and then training mentors from that group, and ensuring the people with disability were actively involved so they could contribute to the group.This research was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects funding scheme (Project number: LP0989241) and with the assistance of two industry partners: (1) Australian Foundation for Disability (AFFORD), and (2) St John of God AccordCentre for Disability Research and Polic

Embedded Vortices

We present a discussion of embedded vortices in general Yang-Mills theories. The origin of a family structure of solutions is shown to be group theoretic in nature and a procedure for its determination is developed. Vortex stability can be quantified into three types: Abelian topological stability, non-Abelian topological stability, and dynamical stability; we relate these to the family structure of vortices, in particular discussing how Abelian topological and dynamical stability are related. The formalism generally encompasses embedded domain walls and embedded monopoles also.Comment: final corrections. latex fil