You can lead a horse to water… are clinical students getting the message about the library and information skills support that is available?

Cambridge University Library is the recipient of a grant from the Arcadia Trust to investigate issues and challenges in delivering academic library services in the digital era. One project under this auspice has been IRIS: Induction, Research and Information Skills, which attempted to map the information skills and needs of students at Cambridge University. The results of this study will be used to provide information in planning future services and facilities for students. Students were invited to complete an online survey asking about which online information resources they use most frequently, from whom they hear about new resources, and where they go for help with information-seeking. Librarians across the tripartite Cambridge system, in 60 college, department, and University libraries, were also surveyed with regard to what training, induction, and support they offered and to whom. This article will focus on the responses of 115 medical students who participated in the survey, accounting for 6.5% of the total survey responses. While acknowledging that student respondents were self-selecting, the results raise questions about how well the librarians’ message is getting across and how librarians can better serve students in the digital age

Librarians use of Web 2.0 in UK Medical Schools: Outcomes of a national survey

Using the results of an Email survey, this paper reviews the use of Web 2.0 technologies by librarians working in UK Medical Schools. Web 2.0 has been hailed as an innovation for facilitation of two way communication on the net, and it is, therefore, timely to measure how effectively librarians are capturing this opportunity for increased student engagement. The social nature of Web 2.0 can be particularly appropriate for undergraduate medical students who fit their studies around the unsocial hours and geographical isolation of clinical placements. This paper will investigate library use of blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Consideration will also be given as to whether they facilitate a more collabroative library service or if they leave undergraduate medical students swamped with yet more information to manage

Modelling of hydrological response to climate change in glacierized Central Asian catchments

The arid lowlands of Central Asia are highly dependent on the water supplied by the Tien Shan mountains. Snow and ice storage make large contributions to current runoff, particularly in summer. Two runoff models with different temporal resolutions, HBV-ETH and OEZ, were applied in three glaciated catchments of the Tien Shan mountains. Scenario runs were produced for a climate change caused by the doubling of atmospheric CO2 as predicted by the GISS global circulation model and assuming a 50% reduction of glaciation extent, as well as a complete loss of glaciation. Agreement of the results was best for runs based on 50% glaciation loss, where both models predict an increase in spring and summer runoff compared to current levels. Scenarios for complete loss of glaciation predict an increase in spring runoff levels, followed by lower runoff levels for July and August. Model predictions differ concerning the degree of reduction of late summer runoff. These scenarios are sensitive to model simulation of basin precipitation, as well as to reduction of glaciation extent

Body-Based Activism and Embodied Protest Art, Community Engagement Project With Karen and Karenni Young Adults

This paper explores body-based activism and embodied protest art as a means to connect to others and participate in social activism. It serves to identify embodied and body-based practices that allow individuals to settle in their bodies to be present and in connection with others in order to feel empowered and motivated to sustain social activist movements. The author further identifies how community arts-based projects help give voice to marginalized, refugee communities that can often feel isolated or voiceless in their displacement. The author engaged in a community engagement project with a group of Karen and Karenni young adults to create an embodied protest art piece in response to the one-year anniversary of the military coup in Myanmar on February 1, 2021. Before the project, participants shared feeling immense concern and specified feelings of hopelessness and wanting to do something, but not knowing what, in response to the coup. This project offered an opportunity to engage in the resistance movement through protest art and led to participants feeling more connected and inspired to continue protesting and supporting the cause

Access to health care, medical progress and the emergence of the longevity gap: A general equilibrium analysis

We study skill- and income-related differences in the access to health care as drivers of longevity inequality from a theoretical life-cycle as well as from a macroeconomic perspective. To do so, we develop an overlapping generations model populated by heterogeneous agents subject to endogenous mortality. We model two groups of individuals for whom differences in skills translate into differences in income and in the ability to use medical technology effectively in curbing mortality. We derive the skill- and age-specific individual demand for health care based on the value of life, the level of medical technology and the market prices. Calibrating the model to the development of the US economy and the longevity gap between the skilled and unskilled, we study the impact of rising effectiveness of medical care in improving individual health and examine how disparities in health care utilisation and mortality emerge as a consequence. In so doing, we explore the role of skill-biased earnings growth, skill-bias in the ability to access state-of-the art health care and to use it effectively, and skill-related differences in health insurance coverage. We pay attention to the macroeconomic feedback, especially to medical price inflation. Our findings indicate that skill-bias related to the effectiveness of health care explains a large part of the increase in the longevity with earnings-related differences in the utilisation of health care taking second place. Both channels tend to be reinforced by medical progress

Measuring the Solar Radius from Space during the 2003 and 2006 Mercury Transits

The Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory observed the transits of Mercury on 2003 May 7 and 2006 November 8. Contact times between Mercury and the solar limb have been used since the 17th century to derive the Sun's size but this is the first time that high-quality imagery from space, above the Earth's atmosphere, has been available. Unlike other measurements this technique is largely independent of optical distortion. The true solar radius is still a matter of debate in the literature as measured differences of several tenths of an arcsecond (i.e., about 500 km) are apparent. This is due mainly to systematic errors from different instruments and observers since the claimed uncertainties for a single instrument are typically an order of magnitude smaller. From the MDI transit data we find the solar radius to be 960".12 +/- 0".09 (696,342 +/- 65 km). This value is consistent between the transits and consistent between different MDI focus settings after accounting for systematic effects.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal (2012 March 5

Sch 29482, laboratory evaluation of a new penem antibiotic

The antibacterial activity of a new penem antibiotic, Sch 29482 (SCH), was examined in comparison with appropriate cephalosporins and penicillins. The drug inhibited penicillinase-positive and negative staphylococci equally well, being 2-5 times more active than cephalothin or cefamandole and 10-20 times more active than methicillin. Staphylococci resistant to methicillin were susceptible to SCH in agar dilution tests. Staphylococci tolerant to methicillin were also tolerant to SCH. Streptococci and pneumococci were highly susceptible to the drug. The agent was of only moderate activity against enterococci, especially Streptococcus faecium strains. MICs of ampicillin and penicillin G against enterococci were 4-8 times lower than those of SCH. SCH was bactericidal. Neither the choice of the method used for susceptibility testing, nor the size of the inoculum nor various test media influenced the in-vitro activity of this drug against a representative collection of Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteri

Morphological stability of electromigration-driven vacancy islands

The electromigration-induced shape evolution of two-dimensional vacancy islands on a crystal surface is studied using a continuum approach. We consider the regime where mass transport is restricted to terrace diffusion in the interior of the island. In the limit of fast attachment/detachment kinetics a circle translating at constant velocity is a stationary solution of the problem. In contrast to earlier work [O. Pierre-Louis and T.L. Einstein, Phys. Rev. B 62, 13697 (2000)] we show that the circular solution remains linearly stable for arbitrarily large driving forces. The numerical solution of the full nonlinear problem nevertheless reveals a fingering instability at the trailing end of the island, which develops from finite amplitude perturbations and eventually leads to pinch-off. Relaxing the condition of instantaneous attachment/detachment kinetics, we obtain non-circular elongated stationary shapes in an analytic approximation which compares favorably to the full numerical solution.Comment: 12 page

Optimizing photon indistinguishability in the emission from incoherently-excited semiconductor quantum dots

Most optical quantum devices require deterministic single-photon emitters. Schemes so far demonstrated in the solid state imply an energy relaxation which tends to spoil the coherent nature of the time evolution, and with it the photon indistinguishability. We focus our theoretical investigation on semiconductor quantum dots embedded in microcavities. Simple and general relations are identified between the photon indistinguishability and the collection efficiency. The identification of the key parameters and of their interplay provides clear indications for the device optimization

Electroweak 2 -> 2 amplitudes for electron-positron annihilation at TeV energies

The non-radiative scattering amplitudes for electron-positron annihilation into quark and lepton pairs in the TeV energy range are calculated in the double-logarithmic approximation. The expressions for the amplitudes are obtained using infrared evolution equations with different cut-offs for virtual photons and for W and Z bosons, and compared with previous results obtained with an universal cut-off.Comment: Revtex4, 17 pages, 7 figures. Some minor changes made, more refs adde