Objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs), psychiatry and the clinical assessment of skills and competencies (CASC) : same evidence, different judgement

Background: The Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), originally developed in the 1970’s, has been hailed as the "gold standard" of clinical assessments for medical students and is used within medical schools throughout the world. The Clinical assessment of Skills and Competencies (CASC) is an OSCE used as a clinical examination gateway, granting access to becoming a senior Psychiatrist in the UK. Discussion: Van der Vleuten’s utility model is used to examine the CASC from the viewpoint of a senior psychiatrist. Reliability may be equivalent to more traditional examinations. Whilst the CASC is likely to have content validity, other forms of validity are untested and authenticity is poor. Educational impact has the potential to change facets of psychiatric professionalism and influence future patient care. There are doubts about acceptability from candidates and more senior psychiatrists. Summary: Whilst OSCEs may be the best choice for medical student examinations, their use in post graduate psychiatric examination in the UK is subject to challenge on the grounds of validity, authenticity and educational impact

An Analysis of Diffraction in Deep-Inelastic Scattering

We propose a simple parametrization for the deep-inelastic diffractive cross section. It contains the contribution of $q\bar{q}$ production to both the longitudinal and the transverse diffractive structure functions, and of the production of $q\bar{q}g$ final states from transverse photons. We start from the hard region and perform a suitable extrapolation into the soft region. We test our model on the 1994 ZEUS and H1 data, and confront it with the H1 conjecture of a singular gluon distribution.Comment: 24 pages, LaTeX, figures included using epsfi

Dynamical Formation of Horizons in Recoiling D Branes

A toy calculation of string/D-particle interactions within a world-sheet approach indicates that quantum recoil effects - reflecting the gravitational back-reaction on space-time foam due to the propagation of energetic particles - induces the appearance of a microscopic event horizon, or `bubble', inside which stable matter can exist. The scattering event causes this horizon to expand, but we expect quantum effects to cause it to contract again, in a `bounce' solution. Within such `bubbles', massless matter propagates with an effective velocity that is less than the velocity of light in vacuo, which may lead to observable violations of Lorentz symmetry that may be tested experimentally. The conformal invariance conditions in the interior geometry of the bubbles select preferentially three for the number of the spatial dimensions, corresponding to a consistent formulation of the interaction of D3 branes with recoiling D particles, which are allowed to fluctuate independently only on the D3-brane hypersurface.Comment: 25 pages LaTeX, 4 eps figures include

Do Three Dimensions tell us Anything about a Theory of Everything?

It has been conjectured that four-dimensional N=8 supergravity may provide a suitable framework for a `Theory of Everything', if its composite SU(8) gauge fields become dynamical. We point out that supersymmetric three-dimensional coset field theories motivated by lattice models provide toy laboratories for aspects of this conjecture. They feature dynamical composite supermultiplets made of constituent holons and spinons. We show how these models may be extended to include N=1 and N=2 supersymmetry, enabling dynamical conjectures to be verified more rigorously. We point out some special features of these three-dimensional models, and mention open questions about their relevance to the dynamics of N=8 supergravity.Comment: 20 pages Latex, 2 eps figure

CP-Violating MSSM Higgs Bosons in the Light of LEP 2

In the MSSM, the CP parities of the neutral Higgs bosons may be mixed by radiative effects induced by explicit CP violation in the third generation of squarks. To allow for this possibility, we argue that the charged Higgs-boson mass and tan(beta) should be used to parametrize the MSSM Higgs sector. We introduce a new benchmark scenario of maximal CP violation appropriate for direct searches of CP-violating MSSM Higgs bosons. We show that the bounds established by LEP 2 on the MSSM Higgs sector may be substantially relaxed at low and intermediate values of tan(beta) in the presence of CP violation, and comment on possible Higgs boson signatures at LEP 2 within this framework.Comment: 16 pages, LaTeX, 4 encapsulated figure