Analysis of the Workforce and Workplace for Rheumatology, and the Research Activities of Rheumatologists Early in Their Careers

[Excerpt] The scope and scale of clinical research is unknown for any medical or surgical specialty beyond snapshots of the broad aims and expenditures of research programs sponsored by federal agencies or the pharmaceutical industry. As a consequence, the workforce and workplace for clinical investigation is enigmatic and unexamined even after explicit warnings that an essential arm for advancing clinical practice has been disabled. The present study was designed to assess the workforce and workplace for rheumatology, and the extent and type of research prevailing among rheumatologists early in their careers. Our findings provide fresh insights about the workforce and the workplace for rheumatology, and justify interventions to address gaps in both the scope and scale of clinical research in arthritis and rheumatism

The Scope and Scale of Clinical Research Accomplished by Rheumatologists Early in Their Careers

[Excerpt] The scope and scale of clinical research is unknown for any medical or surgical specialty beyond snap shots of the broad aims and expenditures of research programs sponsored by federal agencies or the pharmaceutical industry. As a consequence, the workforce and workplace for clinical investigation is enigmatic and unexamined even after explicit warnings that an essential arm for advancing clinical practice is disabled. The present study was designed to examine the nature and extent of investigative activity prevailing among rheumatologists early in their careers. This assessment provides a lens on: i) the fraction of early career rheumatologists who engage in investigative rheumatology, ii) the scope and scale of research in musculoskeletal diseases, iii) funding available for investigative work, iv) the impact of research-intensive institutions, and NIH-K-series awards on research, and v) the demographic backgrounds of early career rheumatologists. The results provide important new insights about the early career workforce for discovery and innovation in rheumatology. The findings integrate demographic, normative, and predictive data to provide the first estimate of the scope and scale of clinical investigation within rheumatology. The results also justify interventions for promoting investigative work, and ultimately advancing the clinical practice of rheumatology

Protecting Minorities in Binary Elections

Democratic systems are built, with good reason, on majoritarian principles, but their legitimacy requires the protection of strongly held minority preferences. The challenge is to do so while treating every voter equally and preserving aggregate welfare. One possible solution is storable votes: granting each voter a budget of votes to cast as desired over multiple decisions. During the 2006 student elections at Columbia University, we tested a simple version of this idea: voters were asked to rank the importance of the different contests and to choose where to cast a single extra "bonus vote," had one been available. We used these responses to construct distributions of intensities and electoral outcomes, both without and with the bonus vote. Bootstrapping techniques provided estimates of the probable impact of the bonus vote. The bonus vote performs well: when minority preferences are particularly intense, the minority wins at least one of the contests with 15.30 percent probability; and, when the minority wins, aggregate welfare increases with 85.95 percent probability. When majority and minority preferences are equally intense, the effect of the bonus vote is smaller and more variable but on balance still positive

Policy Decisions and Research in Economics and Industrial Relations: An Exchange of Views: Comment

[Excerpt] John Dunlop has presented what are certainly some of the most provocative remarks to appear in a scholarly journal in the labor field in many years. We find much to agree with in his remarks; however, we also find many areas where we feel he condemns research because of his overly optimistic expectations about its ability to contribute to the policy process, and other areas where he appears to be unaware that research in labor economics has already contributed fairly directly to policy decisions

Efforts to mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic: potential entry points for neglected tropical diseases

BACKGROUND: The damage inflicted by the coronavirus diseases 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic upon humanity is and will continue to be considerable. Unprecedented progress made in global health over the past 20 years has reverted and economic growth has already evaporated, giving rise to a global recession, the likes of which we may not have experienced since the Second World War. Our aim is to draw the attention of the neglected tropical disease (NTD) community towards some of the major emerging economic opportunities which are quickly appearing on the horizon as a result of COVID-19. MAIN TEXT: This scoping review relied on a literature search comprised of a sample of articles, statements, and press releases on initiatives aimed at mitigating the impact of COVID-19, while supporting economic recovery. Of note, the donor scenario and economic development agendas are highly dynamic and expected to change rapidly as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, as are donor and lender priorities. CONCLUSIONS: The NTD community, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), will need to work quickly, diligently, and in close collaboration with decision-makers and key stakeholders, across sectors at national and international level to secure its position. Doing so might enhance the odds of grasping potential opportunities to access some of the massive resources that are now available in the form of contributions from corporate foundations, trust funds, loans, debt relieve schemes, and other financial mechanisms, as part of the ongoing and future economic development agendas and public health priorities driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper should serve as a starting point for the NTD community to seek much needed financial support in order to sustain and revitalize control and elimination efforts pertaining to NTDs in LMICs

Protecting Minorities in Large Binary Elections: A Test of Storable Votes Using Field Data

The legitimacy of democratic systems requires the protection of minority preferences while ideally treating every voter equally. During the 2006 student elections at Columbia University, we asked voters to rank the importance of different contests and to choose where to cast a single extra "bonus vote," had one been available — a simple version of Storable Votes. We then constructed distributions of intensities and electoral outcomes and estimated the probable impact of the bonus vote through bootstrapping techniques. The bonus vote performs well: when minority preferences are particularly intense, the minority wins at least one contest with 15-30 percent probability; when the minority wins, aggregate welfare increases with 85-95 percent probability. The paper makes two contributions: it tests the performance of storable votes in a setting where preferences were not controlled, and it suggests the use of bootstrapping techniques when appropriate replications of the data cannot be obtained

Local Viscosity Control Printing for High-Throughput Additive Manufacturing of Polymers

Fused deposition modeling's (FDM) throughput is limited by process physics as well as practical considerations favoring single-head polymer extrusion. To expedite the thermoplastic additive manufacturing process, we propose a parallelized material deposition process called local viscosity control (LVC) additive manufacturing. LVC prints an entire layer in one step by selectively modulating the viscosity of polymer feedstock in contact with a heated wire mesh. Layers of molten polymer are contact printed, with the relative motion between the wire mechanism and a build plate allowing wetting and surface tension to transfer selectively heated, lower viscosity regions of polymer to a fixed substrate. Experiments demonstrate the viability of this process using a single cell depositing layered polycarbonate pixels. Theoretical analysis shows this process may offer similar capabilities in resolution to conventional FDM with a significantly higher production rate for commonly available input power

A fast and less expensive test to determine permeability-related parameters on well’s drilled cuttings.

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The Chemical and Electronic Structure of the Neutral Flavin Radical as Revealed by Electron Spin Resonance Spectroscopy of Chemically and Isotopically Substituted Derivatives

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65670/1/j.1432-1033.1970.tb00277.x.pd

The Aharonov-Bohm effect: the role of tunneling and associated forces

Through tunneling, or barrier penetration, small wavefunction tails can enter a finitely shielded cylinder with a magnetic field inside. When the shielding increases to infinity the Lorentz force goes to zero together with these tails. However, it is shown, by considering the radial derivative of the wavefunction on the cylinder surface, that a flux dependent force remains. This force explains in a natural way the Aharonov-Bohm effect in the idealized case of infinite shielding.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures; minor changes, references added, typo corrected in eq. (16). Accepted for publication in Journal of Physics