Mentoring in medical practice

Previous articles in this series have defined words and concepts that guide our thinking in the areas of teaching and learning, set in the greater world of education; but what happens in the quiet and often lonely world of individual practice? As we reflect upon our pasts, many of us recognise that we have at some point in time engaged with a significant figure who has had a long term and positive influence on our personal development; someone who has the unusual and valuable qualities that mean that whatever else is happening to them personally, they maintain a genuine interest in at least one other person's development. All too frequently, this becomes an isolated event; a lost activity from which there is limited gain. This article explores how, as busy practitioners, we may think of using the principles implied in this experience and build upon them to facilitate a powerful and cost effective method that encourages personal development

Effective teaching through active learning

There can be very few practitioners whose daily working life is not involved someway in teaching or learning. Used in its broadest sense, we engage teaching everyday in our advice to patients, and conversely we learn from each of our patients. As we move inexorably towards compulsory reaccredidation for all practitioners, purposeful and effective continuing professional development takes over from the previously passive continuing medical education model. As Universities and Medical Schools recognise where most healthcare occurs and see the benefits of community-based education, increasing numbers of undergraduate and postgraduate students pass daily through our surgery doors. No doubt, the majority of busy practitioners see these activities as an increased workload rather than an opportunity, a stress factor rather than a possibility to develop in their personal lives. In this article, we wish to suggest how some of our daily practice activities can be seen as opportunities to teach and learn; how by using the principles of being an effective teacher, we can create learning situations for all. "Learning and teaching should not stand on opposite banks and just watch the river flow by; instead, they should embark together on a journey down the water. Through an active, reciprocal exchange, teaching can strengthen learning how to learn". Loris Malaguzz

Transverse field-induced nucleation pad switching modes during domain wall injection

We have used magnetic transmission soft X-ray microscopy (M-TXM) to image in-field magnetization configurations of patterned Ni80F20 domain wall "nucleation pads" with attached planar nanowires. Comparison with micromagnetic simulations suggests that the evolution of magnetic domains in rectangular injection pads depends on the relative orientation of closure domains in the remanent state. The magnetization reversal pathway is altered by the inclusion of transverse magnetic fields. These different modes explain previous results of domain wall injection into nanowires

Direct imaging of domain-wall interactions in Ni80Fe20 planar nanowires

We have investigated magnetostatic interactions between domain walls in Ni80Fe20 planar nanowires using magnetic soft x-ray microscopy and micromagnetic simulations. In addition to significant monopole-like attraction and repulsion effects we observe that there is coupling of the magnetization configurations of the walls. This is explained in terms of an interaction energy that depends not only on the distance between the walls, but also upon their internal magnetization structure

Elastic Scattering of Pions From the Three-nucleon System

We examine the scattering of charged pions from the trinucleon system at a pion energy of 180 MeV. The motivation for this study is the structure seen in the experimental angular distribution of back-angle scattering for pi+ 3He and pi- 3H but for neither pi- 3He nor pi+ 3H. We consider the addition of a double spin flip term to an optical model treatment and find that, though the contribution of this term is non-negligible at large angles for pi+ 3He and pi- 3H, it does not reproduce the structure seen in the experiment.Comment: 15 pages + 5 figure

How strongly do word reading times and lexical decision times correlate? Combining data from eye movement corpora and megastudies

We assess the amount of shared variance between three measures of visual word recognition latencies: eye movement latencies, lexical decision times and naming times. After partialling out the effects of word frequency and word length, two well-documented predictors of word recognition latencies, we see that 7-44% of the variance is uniquely shared between lexical decision times and naming times, depending on the frequency range of the words used. A similar analysis of eye movement latencies shows that the percentage of variance they uniquely share either with lexical decision times or with naming times is much lower. It is 5 – 17% for gaze durations and lexical decision times in studies with target words presented in neutral sentences, but drops to .2% for corpus studies in which eye movements to all words are analysed. Correlations between gaze durations and naming latencies are lower still. These findings suggest that processing times in isolated word processing and continuous text reading are affected by specific task demands and presentation format, and that lexical decision times and naming times are not very informative in predicting eye movement latencies in text reading once the effect of word frequency and word length are taken into account. The difference between controlled experiments and natural reading suggests that reading strategies and stimulus materials may determine the degree to which the immediacy-of-processing assumption and the eye-mind assumption apply. Fixation times are more likely to exclusively reflect the lexical processing of the currently fixated word in controlled studies with unpredictable target words rather than in natural reading of sentences or texts

Problem-based learning approaches in meteorology

Problem-Based Learning, despite recent controversies about its effectiveness, is used extensively as a teaching method throughout higher education. In meteorology, there has been little attempt to incorporate Problem-Based Learning techniques into the curriculum. Motivated by a desire to enhance the reflective engagement of students within a current field course module, this project describes the implementation of two test Problem-Based Learning activities and testing and improvement using several different and complementary means of evaluation. By the end of a 2-year program of design, implementation, testing, and reflection and re-evaluation, two robust, engaging activities have been developed that provide an enhanced and diverse learning environment in the field course. The results suggest that Problem-Based Learning techniques would be a useful addition to the meteorology curriculum and suggestions for courses and activities that may benefit from this approach are included in the conclusions

Temporal fluctuations of waves in weakly nonlinear disordered media

We consider the multiple scattering of a scalar wave in a disordered medium with a weak nonlinearity of Kerr type. The perturbation theory, developed to calculate the temporal autocorrelation function of scattered wave, fails at short correlation times. A self-consistent calculation shows that for nonlinearities exceeding a certain threshold value, the multiple-scattering speckle pattern becomes unstable and exhibits spontaneous fluctuations even in the absence of scatterer motion. The instability is due to a distributed feedback in the system "coherent wave + nonlinear disordered medium". The feedback is provided by the multiple scattering. The development of instability is independent of the sign of nonlinearity.Comment: RevTeX, 15 pages (including 5 figures), accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Cosmic Ray Signatures of Multi-W Processes

We explore the discovery potential of cosmic ray physics experiments for Standard Model processes involving the nonperturbative production of O(30) weak gauge bosons. We demonstrate an experimental insensitivity to proton-induced processes and emphasize the importance of neutrino-induced processes. The Fly's Eye currently constrains the largest region of parameter space characterizing multi-W phenomena if a cosmic neutrino flux exists at levels suggested by recent models of active galactic nuclei. MACRO (DUMAND) can constrain or observe additional regions by searching for 1-100 (1-10) characteristic near-vertical (near-horizontal) spatially compact energetic muon bundles per year.Comment: 44 pages (LaTeX) + 19 PostScript figures in accompanying file (uuencoded), CERN-TH.6822/93,UCLA 93/TEP/2