The Health Professions Educational Assistance Act of 1976: A New Prescription?

The 1976 Health Professions Educational Assistance Act is a new congressional effort to promote the rational development, distribution, and utilization of the health professions through financial incentives. The Act represents a compromise solution to the issues affecting the quality, quantity and distribution of health manpower. It targets the four major problems of the current system: (1) the shortage of health professionals; (2) the geographic maldistribution of health manpower; (3) the specialty maldistribution of physicians and dentists; and (4) the influx of foreign medical graduates into the United States. This comment examines the effectiveness of past legislative responses to these issues and considers the provisions of the new law that attempt to resolve them. The comment discusses various aspects of the 1976 Act such as: (1) its amendments to the direct federal loan program for students in health profession schools; (2) the substantial increases in the authorization of funding to programs such as the National Health Service Corps (NHSC); (3) requirements placed on health profession schools for capitation support; and (4) enlargement of the existing Area Health Education Centers (AHEC) program. The comment suggests that immense public pressure for extensive federal control of the nation\u27s health manpower education programs will arise unless the geographic and specialty maldistribution of health professionals improves upon the 1976 Act\u27s expiration in 1980

Assistant Suite

This project was conducted to demonstrate a voice-to-mechanical application from one source to multiple platforms with the use of hardware-to-software technology. The main platforms that are used for implementation is an Amazon Echo Dot, which serves as the voice interceptor to transcribe speech through integrated software hosted within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud network, and a Raspberry Pi microcontroller, which serves as the device which controlled mechanical movements based on what is transcribed from the Echo. The user can speak a command into the Echo to control the movement of one of two RC cars without any physical engagement. The Echo utilizes Wi-Fi to connect to the AWS cloud network to transcribe the speech, which then goes through a series of channels to communicate with a microcontroller that is connected to its own RC car to cause that selected RC car to move in a specified direction. For example, the user can speak a command that says “Alexa, move car A forward for two seconds,” and this will translate to the selected car to motion forward for a total of two seconds. The project also displays the usefulness of being able to speak to multiple microcontrollers connected to separate devices under a single application; this caters to the convenience of not having to close and open separate applications every time a different connection is needed.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/capstone/1193/thumbnail.jp

A Comprehensive Archival Chandra Search for X-ray Emission from Ultracompact Dwarf Galaxies

We present the first comprehensive archival study of the X-ray properties of ultracompact dwarf (UCD) galaxies, with the goal of identifying weakly-accreting central black holes in UCDs. Our study spans 578 UCDs distributed across thirteen different host systems, including clusters, groups, fossil groups, and isolated galaxies. Of the 336 spectroscopically-confirmed UCDs with usable archival Chandra imaging observations, 21 are X-ray-detected. Imposing a completeness limit of $L_X>2\times10^{38}$ erg s$^{-1}$, the global X-ray detection fraction for the UCD population is $\sim3\%$. Of the 21 X-ray-detected UCDs, seven show evidence of long-term X-ray time variability on the order of months to years. X-ray-detected UCDs tend to be more compact than non-X-ray-detected UCDs, and we find tentative evidence that the X-ray detection fraction increases with surface luminosity density and global stellar velocity dispersion. The X-ray emission of UCDs is fully consistent with arising from a population of low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs). In fact, there are fewer X-ray sources than expected using a naive extrapolation from globular clusters. Invoking the fundamental plane of black hole activity for SUCD1 near the Sombrero galaxy, for which archival Jansky Very Large Array imaging at 5 GHz is publicly available, we set an upper limit on the mass of a hypothetical central black hole in that UCD to be $\lesssim10^5M_{\odot}$. While the majority of our sources are likely LMXBs, we cannot rule out central black holes in some UCDs based on X-rays alone, and so we address the utility of follow-up radio observations to find weakly-accreting central black holes.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, re-submitted to ApJ after minor revision

The composition, mechanisms of action and infusion parameters of cardioplegic solutions as determinants of recovery in rabbit isolated hearts (Langendorff)

Imperial Users onl

Irish media: slow to get up to the pace of the game

This piece reflects on my professional and personal involvement in sport, as editor of a national newspaper and coach of a girls' youth team at my local GAA club. In so doing, it highlights some of the prejudices I saw first-hand while coaching teams which, in turn, opened my eyes to my own failures in my role as sports editor. The first camogie supplement in a Sunday newspaper sports section broke this glass ceiling. Arguably, the responsibility on native media outlets to include more coverage of women's sports is increasing as mainly UK broadcasters enter the Irish media scape