Developing a Pharmacy Professional Elective Course: Underserved Populations

Objectives. To ascertain the current curriculum exposure, knowledge, and interest in medically underserved populations of 3rd and 4th year professional pharmacy students enrolled at Butler University. Methods. An eleven item survey was designed, involving multiple choice, Likert scale, and open response questions. The survey was administered through the web-based survey software company, Survey Monkey, utilizing the Butler College of Pharmacy and health Sciences email listserv to all P3 and p4 students. Results. P3 and P4 students showed a high degree of interest in taking a professional elective focusing on medically underserved populations. Many of these students also felt the current information presented in the curriculum on these populations was not adequate. Conclusions. Current interest in a professional pharmacy elective focusing on medically underserved populations is present, but further training is needed to prepare students for employment within these settings. The data collected during this study collected through surveys, reinforces the importance of focusing on the needs of medically underserved populations from the P1 through P4 year of pharmacy education

Male Field Cricket Songs Are Altered After Aggressive Interactions

To address the hypothesis that male acoustic sexual advertisement signals, in addition to chemical signals, might be indicators of aggressiveness, we examined the relationship between levels of aggression/dominance status and acoustic sexual advertisement signals in the field cricket Gryllus integer. Males were paired in aggression trials and recorded the night before and night after the trial. This allowed us to test whether aggression is inherently linked to song phenotypes, or whether aggressive interactions cause males to alter their songs. We found that dominant (winning) males signaled with higher energy, amplitude, and power the night after winning an aggressive encounter, but we could not detect any differences before the encounter. Time spent calling and the number of calling bouts were apparently unrelated to aggression, whereas winning males increased their bout lengths after winning, and losing males decreased their bout lengths after losing

Environmental condition-dependent effects on a heritable, preferred male trait

Models for the evolution of female mating preferences suggest that preferred male traits may be condition dependent. In the field cricket, Gryllus integer, a preferred male trait (calling-bout duration) shows high additive genetic variance. I found that this preferred trait is also condition dependent. Under food deprivation, males lose body mass and correspondingly shorten the durations of their calling bouts. This result implies that females might be able to gain cues from calling-bout durations about a male's body condition. (c) 2005 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Clap and fling mechanism with interacting porous wings in tiny insect flight

The aerodynamics of flapping flight for the smallest insects such as thrips is often characterized by a 'clap and fling' of the wings at the end of the upstroke and the beginning of the downstroke. These insects fly at Reynolds numbers (Re) of the order of 10 or less where viscous effects are significant. Although this wing motion is known to augment the lift generated during flight, the drag required to fling the wings apart at this scale is an order of magnitude larger than the corresponding force acting on a single wing. As the opposing forces acting normal to each wing nearly cancel during the fling, these large forces do not have a clear aerodynamic benefit. If flight efficiency is defined as the ratio of lift to drag, the clap and fling motion dramatically reduces efficiency relative to the case of wings that do not aerodynamically interact. In this paper, the effect of a bristled wing characteristic of many of these insects was investigated using computational fluid dynamics. We performed 2D numerical simulations using a porous version of the immersed boundary method. Given the computational complexity involved in modeling flow through exact descriptions of bristled wings, the wing was modeled as a homogeneous porous layer as a first approximation. High-speed video recordings of free-flying thrips in take-off flight were captured in the laboratory, and an analysis of the wing kinematics was performed. This information was used for the estimation of input parameters for the simulations. Compared with a solid wing (without bristles), the results of the study show that the porous nature of the wings contributes largely to drag reduction across the Re range explored. The aerodynamic efficiency, calculated as the ratio of lift to drag coefficients, was larger for some porosities when compared with solid wings