Contribution of Medical Education to Rural Health

Rural health is an important priority in many jurisdictions as an example of social accountability. The choice to practice in a rural community can be influenced by personal factors, educational factors, and systemic factors. Medical education makes significant contribution to rural health by proactively and positively modifying the educational factors. The experience of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, Canada is used to illustrate how this can be accomplished. A multi-component approach that is tailored to address the personal and systemic determinants of rural practice must also be developed to maximize the positive impact of medical education on rural health

Socioeconomic determinants of multimorbidity: a population-based household survey of Hong Kong Chinese

<b>Introduction</b> Multimorbidity has been well researched in terms of consequences and healthcare implications. Nevertheless, its risk factors and determinants, especially in the Asian context, remain understudied. We tested the hypothesis of a negative relationship between socioeconomic status and multimorbidity, with contextually different patterns from those observed in the West.<p></p> <b>Methods</b> We conducted our study in the general Hong Kong (HK) population. Data on current health conditions, health behaviours, socio-demographic and socioeconomic characteristics was obtained from HK Government’s Thematic Household Survey. 25,780 individuals aged 15 or above were sampled. Binary logistic and negative binomial regression analyses were conducted to identify risk factors for presence of multimorbidity and number of chronic conditions, respectively. Sub-analysis of possible mediation effect through financial burden borne by private housing residents on multimorbidity was also conducted.<p></p> <b>Results</b> Unadjusted and adjusted models showed that being female, being 25 years or above, having an education level of primary schooling or below, having less than HK$15,000 monthly household income, being jobless or retired, and being past daily smoker were significant risk factors for the presence of multimorbidity and increased number of chronic diseases. Living in private housing was significantly associated with higher chance of multimorbidity and increased number of chronic diseases only after adjustments.<p></p> <b>Conclusions</b>Less advantaged people tend to have higher risks of multimorbidity and utilize healthcare from the public sector with poorer primary healthcare experience. Moreover, middle-class people who are not eligible for government subsidized public housing may be of higher risk of multimorbidity due to psychosocial stress from paying for the severely unaffordable private housing

Making the Most of Repetitive Mistakes: An Investigation into Heuristics for Selecting and Applying Feedback to Programming Coursework

In the acquisition of software-development skills, feedback that pinpoints errors and explains means of improvement is important in achieving a good student learning experience. However, it is not feasible to manually provide timely, consistent, and helpful feedback for large or complex coursework tasks, and/or to large cohorts of students. While tools exist to provide feedback to student submissions, their automation is typically limited to reporting either test pass or failure or generating feedback to very simple programming tasks. Anecdotal experience indicates that clusters of students tend to make similar mistakes and/or successes within their coursework. Do feedback comments applied to students' work support this claim and, if so, to what extent is this the case? How might this be exploited to improve the assessment process and the quality of feedback given to students? To help answer these questions, we have examined feedback given to coursework submissions to a UK level 5, university-level, data structures and algorithms course to determine heuristics used to trigger particular feedback comments that are common between submissions and cohorts. This paper reports our results and discusses how the identified heuristics may be used to promote timeliness and consistency of feedback without jeopardising the quality

Improved Measurements of the IXPE Crab Polarization

X-ray polarization from the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) provides an important new probe of the geometry of the pulsar emission zone and of particle acceleration in the surrounding pulsar wind nebula (PWN). However, with IXPE's modest ~20-30" spatial resolution, separation of the pulsar signal from the nebula is a challenge. Conventional analysis defines an "off" phase window as pure nebular emission and subtracts its polarization to isolate the phase-varying pulsar ("on-off fitting"). We present a more sensitive scheme that uses external measurements of the nebula structure and pulsar light curve to isolate their contributions to the phase- and spatially-varying polarization via least-squares regression ("simultaneous fitting"). Tests with simulation data show ~30% improvement in pulse phase polarization uncertainties, decreased background systematics, and substantially improved nebular polarization maps. Applying "simultaneous fitting" to early IXPE Crab data extracts additional phase bins with significant polarization. These bins show interesting departures from the well-known optical polarization sweeps, although additional exposure will be needed for precise model confrontation.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Perceived importance and levels of technical English communication skills among stakeholders in engineering fields

The purposes of this study were to examine stakeholders’ perceptions of the importance of technical English communication skills in engineering and academic teachers and industry professionals’ perceptions of current engineering students’ and graduates’ levels of technical communication skills. Survey questionnaires were designed to collect data from different research participants. The data were subsequently analysed using descriptive statistics. The study identified a discrepancy between students’ self-perceived performance on technical English communication skills and their perceived standards of these skills required by the programmes in which they were enrolled. Technical communication skills, including writing in engineering genres, essays and technical reports, reading and speaking, were viewed to be fairly important for their academic success. The findings also indicated that the students’ abilities in writing in engineering genres, and essays and technical report writing were perceived to be below the standards. In addition, the study highlighted that industry professionals viewed the technical communication skills of engineering graduates working in the engineering sectors as inadequate. Based on these results, it is vitally important to develop a tailor-made enhancement course to cater for the specific needs of engineering students, including technical communication skills for their study programmes and to prepare them for workplace needs of engineers in the near future

Contribution of Medical Education to Rural Health

Rural health is an important priority in many jurisdictions as an example of social accountability. The choice to practice in a rural community can be influenced by personal factors, educational factors, and systemic factors. Medical education makes significant contribution to rural health by proactively and positively modifying the educational factors. The experience of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, Canada is used to illustrate how this can be accomplished. A multi-component approach that is tailored to address the personal and systemic determinants of rural practice must also be developed to maximize the positive impact of medical education on rural health

The Anne Boleyn Illusion is a six-fingered salute to sensory remapping

The Anne Boleyn Illusion exploits the somatotopic representation of touch to create the illusion of an extra digit and demonstrates the instantaneous remapping of relative touch location into body-based coordinates through visuo-tactile integration. Performed successfully on thousands, it is also a simple demonstration of the flexibility of body representations for use at public events, in schools or in the home and can be implemented anywhere by anyone with a mirror and some degree of bimanual coordination

Surgical Treatment of Portal Hypertension: Review of Henry Ford Hospital Experience

Of 146 operations performed for the complications of portal hypertension in the Henry Ford Hospital between 1927 and August 31, 1969, 114 were portasystemic shunts. Operative mortality, sequelae and long term survival were closely related to the state of the patients\u27 liver function and the urgency of operation

Prevalencia de la infección por Helicobacter pylori en pacientes sintomáticos atendidos en consulta externa en el Hospital I Octavio Mongrut Muñoz-RAS-EsSalud periodo 2007-2010

El documento digital no refiere asesorObjetivo: Determinar la prevalencia de Helicobacter pylori en pacientes sintomáticos gástricos que acuden a la Consulta externa del Hospital I Octavio Mongrut Muñoz, a través de la prueba del Test de aliento. Planteamiento del Problema: La Organización Mundial de la Salud ha considerado al Helicobacter pylori como carcinógeno Tipo I. Esto no significa que esta bacteria produzca sustancias carcinogénicas o mutagénicas, sino que como consecuencia de una inflamación crónica y progresiva de la mucosa gástrica, lleva a la gastritis atrófica, entidad considerada como una condición precancerosa. Material y Métodos: Se diseñó un estudio Observacional, Descriptivo y Longitudinal. El estudio se llevó a cabo en el Hospital I Octavio Mongrut Muñoz (HIOMM) que pertenece a la Red Asistencial Sabogal (RAS) de (EsSALUD); en pacientes a los cuales se les solicitó la prueba del Test de Aliento en el período comprendido entre Enero a Diciembre de los años 2007 al 2010. Resultados: La prevalencia de la infección por Hp. fue de 63.7%, 61.89%, 59.68% y 69.26% entre los años 2007 al 2010 respectivamente. Conclusión: La prevalencia encontrada se encuentra por encima de países desarrollados y en concordancia con la prevalencia en Latinoamérica. No encontrándose diferencias estadísticas significativas en relación al grupo etáreo y sexo con los estudios a nivel de Latinoamérica.Trabajo académic

Statistics on Logic Simulation

The high costs associated with logic simulation of large VLSI based systems have led to the need for new computer architectures tailored to the simulation task. Such architecture have the potential for significant speedups over standard software based logic simulators. Several commercial simulation engines have been produced to satisfy need in this area. To properly explore the space of alternative simulation architectures, data is required on the simulation process itself. This paper presents a framework for such data gathering activity by first examining possible sources of speedup in the logic simulation task, examining the sort of data needed in the design of simulation engines, and then presenting such data. The data contained in the paper includes information on the subtask times found in standard discrete event simulation algorithms, event intensities, queue length distributions and simultaneous event distributions