Compassion and Integrity in Health Professions Education

Issues related to professionalism have come to the fore in health professions education. Strategies designed to evaluate and increase components of professionalism are now of interest to educators. Skills in improving levels of professionalism can be accurately assessed and taught. Professionalism encompasses attributes of compassion and integrity. Tools to measure indices of compassion have been developed. There are three critical stages in which attributes of compassion and integrity can be assessed: prior to admission, during education, and graduation standards. One effective means of transferring skills related to professionalism is modeling. Health professions educators need to be more aware of the issues related to the assessment of elements of professionalism

Conflict of Laws (2017)

States’ and nations’ laws collide when foreign factors appear in a lawsuit. Nonresident litigants, incidents outside the forum, and judgments from other jurisdictions can create problems with personal jurisdiction, choice of law, and the recognition of foreign judgments. This article reviews Texas conflict cases from Texas state and federal courts during the Survey period from December 1, 2015, through November 30, 2016. The article excludes cases involving federal–state conflicts; intrastate issues, such as subject matter jurisdiction and venue; and conflicts in time, such as the applicability of prior or subsequent law within a state. State and federal cases are discussed together because conflict of laws is mostly a state-law topic, except for a few constitutional limits, resulting in the same rules applying to most issues in state and federal courts. Although no data are readily available to confirm this, Texas is no doubt a primary state in the production of conflict-of-laws precedents. This results not only from its size and population, but also from its placement bordering four states and a civil-law nation, and its significant international trade volume. Texas state and federal courts provide a fascinating study of conflicts issues every year, but the volume of case law now greatly exceeds this Survey’s ability to report on them, a function both of journal space and authors’ time. In addition, the current Survey covers one year and will accordingly limit its review to a few highlight cases and an examination of a couple of trends

Revisiting methodological issues in transcript analysis: Negotiated coding and reliability

Transcript analysis is an important methodology to study asynchronous online educational discourse. The purpose of this study is to revisit reliability and validity issues associated with transcript analysis. The goal is to provide researchers with guidance in coding transcripts. For validity reasons, it is suggested that the first step is to select a sound theoretical model and coding scheme. Particular focus is placed on exploring the advantages of the option of a negotiated approach to coding the transcript. It is concluded that researchers need to consider the advantages of negotiation when coders and researchers are not familiar with the coding scheme

Macromolecular X-ray structure determination using weak, single-wavelength anomalous data.

We describe a likelihood-based method for determining the substructure of anomalously scattering atoms in macromolecular crystals that allows successful structure determination by single-wavelength anomalous diffraction (SAD) X-ray analysis with weak anomalous signal. With the use of partial models and electron density maps in searches for anomalously scattering atoms, testing of alternative values of parameters and parallelized automated model-building, this method has the potential to extend the applicability of the SAD method in challenging cases

High-throughput SNP discovery through deep resequencing of a reduced representation library to anchor and orient scaffolds in the soybean whole genome sequence

Background: The Soybean Consensus Map 4.0 facilitated the anchoring of 95.6% of the soybean whole genome sequence developed by the Joint Genome Institute, Department of Energy, but its marker density was only sufficient to properly orient 66% of the sequence scaffolds. The discovery and genetic mapping of more single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers were needed to anchor and orient the remaining genome sequence. To that end, next generation sequencing and high-throughput genotyping were combined to obtain a much higher resolution genetic map that could be used to anchor and orient most of the remaining sequence and to help validate the integrity of the existing scaffold builds. Results: A total of 7,108 to 25,047 predicted SNPs were discovered using a reduced representation library that was subsequently sequenced by the Illumina sequence-by-synthesis method on the clonal single molecule array platform. Using multiple SNP prediction methods, the validation rate of these SNPs ranged from 79% to 92.5%. A high resolution genetic map using 444 recombinant inbred lines was created with 1,790 SNP markers. Of the 1,790 mapped SNP markers, 1,240 markers had been selectively chosen to target existing un-anchored or un-oriented sequence scaffolds, thereby increasing the amount of anchored sequence to 97%. Conclusion: We have demonstrated how next generation sequencing was combined with high-throughput SNP detection assays to quickly discover large numbers of SNPs. Those SNPs were then used to create a high resolution genetic map that assisted in the assembly of scaffolds from the 8× whole genome shotgun sequences into pseudomolecules corresponding to chromosomes of the organism