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The human kindness curriculum: An innovative preclinical initiative to highlight kindness and empathy in medicine.
BackgroundPrior studies have shown a marked drop in empathy among students during their third (clinical) year of medical school. Curricula developed to address this problem have varied greatly in content and have not always been subjected to validated measures of impact.MethodsIn 2015, we initiated a Human Kindness (HK) curriculum for the initial 2 years of medical school. This mandatory 12-h curriculum (6 h/year) included an innovative series of lectures and patient interactions with regard to compassion and empathy in the clinical setting. Both quantitative (Jefferson Scale of Empathy [JSE]) and qualitative data were collected prospectively to evaluate the impact of the HK curriculum.ResultsIn the initial Pilot Year, neither 1st (Group 1) nor 2nd (Group 2) year medical students showed pre-post changes in JSE scores. Substantial changes were made to the curriculum based on faculty and student evaluations. In the following Implementation Year, both the new 1st (Group 3) and the now 2nd year (Group 4) students, who previously experienced the Pilot Year, showed significant improvements in post-course JSE scores; this improvement remained valid across subanalyses of gender, age, and student career focus (e.g., internal medicine, surgery, etc.). Despite the disappointingly flat initial Pilot Year JSE scores, the 3rd year students (Group 2) who experienced only the Pilot Year of the curriculum (i.e., 2nd year students at the time of the Pilot Year) had subsequent JSE scores that did not show the typical decline associated with the clinical years. Students generally evaluated the HK curriculum positively and rated it as being important to their medical education and development as a physician.DiscussionA required preclinical curriculum focused on HK resulted in significant improvements in medical student empathy; this improvement was maintained during the 1st clinical year of training
Jostling for Advantage or Not: Choosing Between Patent Portfolio Races and Ex Ante Licensing
Complex high technology industries are increasingly affected by patent thickets in which firms’ patents mutually block the use of important technologies. Firms facing patent thickets patent intensively to acquire bargaining chips and use licensing to ensure freedom to operate. Such licensing allows rivals to either avoid or resolve hold-up from blocking patents. R&D incentives depend on whether licensing takes place ex ante or ex post. We model the choice between ex ante licensing and entry into patent portfolio races leading to ex post licensing. It is shown that higher degrees of blocking lead firms to license ex post, while stronger product market competition leads firms to license ex ante. Empirical results support these theoretical predictions
EC00-2540 Field Records for Restricted Use Pesticide Applications and Integrated Crop Management by Private Applicators
Private applicators must record their restricted use pesticide (RUP) applications, as required by the Food, Agriculture, Conservation and Trade (FACT) Act of 1990. The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service administers this activity. In Nebraska, RUP application records must be maintained for three years from the date of application. The certified pesticide applicator should retain these RUP records, but must be able to make them accessible for copying by authorized representatives. This booklet is a suggested guide for preliminary or final RUP application records
A study of adverse reaction algorithms in a drug surveillance program
Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110093/1/cptclpt1985156.pd
Gaussian Quantum Information
The science of quantum information has arisen over the last two decades
centered on the manipulation of individual quanta of information, known as
quantum bits or qubits. Quantum computers, quantum cryptography and quantum
teleportation are among the most celebrated ideas that have emerged from this
new field. It was realized later on that using continuous-variable quantum
information carriers, instead of qubits, constitutes an extremely powerful
alternative approach to quantum information processing. This review focuses on
continuous-variable quantum information processes that rely on any combination
of Gaussian states, Gaussian operations, and Gaussian measurements.
Interestingly, such a restriction to the Gaussian realm comes with various
benefits, since on the theoretical side, simple analytical tools are available
and, on the experimental side, optical components effecting Gaussian processes
are readily available in the laboratory. Yet, Gaussian quantum information
processing opens the way to a wide variety of tasks and applications, including
quantum communication, quantum cryptography, quantum computation, quantum
teleportation, and quantum state and channel discrimination. This review
reports on the state of the art in this field, ranging from the basic
theoretical tools and landmark experimental realizations to the most recent
successful developments.Comment: 51 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Reviews of Modern Physic
Witnessing effective entanglement over a 2km fiber channel
We present a fiber-based continuous-variable quantum key distribution system.
In the scheme, a quantum signal of two non-orthogonal weak optical coherent
states is sent through a fiber-based quantum channel. The receiver
simultaneously measures conjugate quadratures of the light using two homodyne
detectors. From the measured Q-function of the transmitted signal, we estimate
the attenuation and the excess noise caused by the channel. The estimated
excess noise originating from the channel and the channel attenuation including
the quantum efficiency of the detection setup is investigated with respect to
the detection of effective entanglement. The local oscillator is considered in
the verification. We witness effective entanglement with a channel length of up
to 2km.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure
Experimental Vacuum Squeezing in Rubidium Vapor via Self-Rotation
We report the generation of optical squeezed vacuum states by means of
polarization self-rotation in rubidium vapor following a proposal by Matsko et
al. [Phys. Rev. A 66, 043815 (2002)]. The experimental setup, involving in
essence just a diode laser and a heated rubidium gas cell, is simple and easily
scalable. A squeezing of 0.85+-0.05 dB was achieved
Supersonic turbulence, filamentary accretion,and the rapid assembly of massive stars and disks
We present a detailed computational study of the assembly of protostellar
disks and massive stars in molecular clouds with supersonic turbulence. We
follow the evolution of large scale filamentary structures in a cluster-forming
clump down to protostellar length scales by means of very highly resolved, 3D
adaptive mesh refined (AMR) simulations, and show how accretion disks and
massive stars form in such environments. We find that an initially elongated
cloud core which has a slight spin from oblique shocks collapses first to a
filament and later develops a turbulent disk close to the center of the
filament. The continued large scale flow that shocks with the filament
maintains the high density and pressure within it. Material within the cooling
filament undergoes gravitational collapse and an outside-in assembly of a
massive protostar. Our simulations show that very high mass accretion rates of
up to 10^-2 Msol/yr and high, supersonic, infall velocities result from such
filamentary accretion. Accretion at these rates is higher by an order of
magnitude than those found in semi-analytic studies, and can quench the
radiation field of a growing massive young star.Our simulations include a
comprehensive set of the important chemical and radiative processes such as
cooling by molecular line emission, gas-dust interaction, and radiative
diffusion in the optical thick regime, as well as H2 formation and
dissociation. Therefore, we are able to probe, for the first time, the relevant
physical phenomena on all scales from those characterizing the clump down to
protostellar core.Comment: 35 pages, 17 figures, mnras style, accepted by MNRAS, a high
resolution version can be found at
http://www.ita.uni-heidelberg.de/~banerjee/TurbulentSF.pdf or
http://www.physics.mcmaster.ca/~banerjee/TurbulentSF.pd
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