596 research outputs found
Challenges in clinical genomics
A report on the Genomic Disorders 2012: Genomics of Rare Diseases meeting, Hinxton, UK, 21-23 March 2012
Biology of Genomes: making sense of sequence
A report on the Biology of Genomes meeting held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, USA, 5-9 May 2009
Between Philosophy and Art
Similarity and difference, patterns of variation, consistency and coherence: these are the reference points of the philosopher. Understanding experience, exploring ideas through particular instantiations, novel and innovative thinking: these are the reference points of the artist. However, at certain points in the proceedings of our Symposium titled, Next to Nothing: Art as Performance, this characterisation of philosopher and artist respectively might have been construed the other way around. The commentator/philosophers referenced their philosophical interests through the particular examples/instantiations created by the artist and in virtue of which they were then able to engage with novel and innovative thinking. From the artists’ presentations, on the other hand, emerged a series of contrasts within which philosophical and artistic ideas resonated. This interface of philosopher-artist bore witness to the fact that just as art approaches philosophy in providing its own analysis, philosophy approaches art in being a co-creator of art’s meaning. In what follows, we discuss the conception of philosophy-art that emerged from the Symposium, and the methodological minimalism which we employed in order to achieve it. We conclude by drawing out an implication of the Symposium’s achievement which is that a counterpoint to Institutional theories of art may well be the point from which future directions will take hold, if philosophy-art gains traction
Addressing the Enduring Primary Care Physician Shortage in The United States: The Direct and Indirect Effects of Gender on the Medical Specialty Decision-Making Process
Background: There has been an enduring primary care (PC) physician shortage in the United States (U.S.) for decades, which is projected to worsen. With women entering PC at significantly higher rates than men, the aim of this study was to explore various pathways through which gender may affect the medical specialty decision-making process. Methods: Using data from the National Survey of Attitudes and Choices in Medical Education and Training (ACMET) II on a sample of 492 medical residents, this study employed structural equation modeling (SEM) to explore how gender shaped residents’ preferences for future practice and their perceptions of PC, and how their experiences with faculty affected the medical specialty decision-making process. Results: As expected, women were significantly more likely than men to report choosing PC. This study also found that there were several indirect pathways through which gender affects specialty choice, including through negative perceptions about PC and the time spent with PC faculty in medical school. Conclusion: Given the multiple pathways through which gender affects the medical specialty decision-making process, this study highlights a need for gender-specific interventions when addressing the enduring PC physician shortage in the U.S. Specifically, the results of this study suggest that increasing the time that male medical students spend in PC through structural changes in medical education might mitigate negative perceptions about PC and encourage males to enter PC at higher rates. Future research should assess the effectiveness of such gender-specific interventions
The promise and reality of personal genomics
The second personal genome sequence of a Korean tells something about genetic ancestry but still little of medical relevance
Scaling Relations of Spiral Galaxies
We construct a large data set of global structural parameters for 1300 field
and cluster spiral galaxies and explore the joint distribution of luminosity L,
optical rotation velocity V, and disk size R at I- and 2MASS K-bands. The I-
and K-band velocity-luminosity (VL) relations have log-slopes of 0.29 and 0.27,
respectively with sigma_ln(VL)~0.13, and show a small dependence on color and
morphological type in the sense that redder, early-type disk galaxies rotate
faster than bluer, later-type disk galaxies for most luminosities. The VL
relation at I- and K-bands is independent of surface brightness, size and light
concentration. The log-slope of the I- and K-band RL relations is a strong
function of morphology and varies from 0.25 to 0.5. The average dispersion
sigma_ln(RL) decreases from 0.33 at I-band to 0.29 at K, likely due to the
2MASS selection bias against lower surface brightness galaxies. Measurement
uncertainties are sigma_ln(V)~0.09, sigma_ln(L)~0.14 and somewhat larger and
harder to estimate for ln(R). The color dependence of the VL relation is
consistent with expectations from stellar population synthesis models. The VL
and RL residuals are largely uncorrelated with each other; the RV-RL residuals
show only a weak positive correlation. These correlations suggest that scatter
in luminosity is not a significant source of the scatter in the VL and RL
relations. The observed scaling relations can be understood in the context of a
model of disk galaxies embedded in dark matter halos that invokes low mean spin
parameters and dark halo expansion, as we describe in our companion paper
(Dutton et al. 2007). We discuss in two appendices various pitfalls of standard
analytical derivations of galaxy scaling relations, including the Tully-Fisher
relation with different slopes. (Abridged).Comment: Accepted for publication at ApJ. The full document, with
high-resolution B&W and colour figures, is available at
http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~courteau/papers/VRL2007ApJ.pdf . Our data base
for 1303 spiral galaxies is also available at
http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~courteau/data/VRL2007.da
Do school crossing guards make crossing roads safer? A quasi-experimental study of pedestrian-motor vehicle collisions in Toronto, Canada
The species-area relationship and evolution
Models relating to the Species-Area curve are usually defined at the species
level, and concerned only with ecological timescales. We examine an
individual-based model of co-evolution on a spatial lattice based on the
Tangled Nature model, and show that reproduction, mutation and dispersion by
diffusion in an interacting system produces power-law Species-Area Relations as
observed in ecological measurements at medium scales. We find that
co-evolutionary habitats form, allowing high diversity levels in a spatially
homogenous system, and these are maintained for exponentially increasing time
when increasing system size.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figures. This is the final, accepted draf
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