Clinical audit project in undergraduate medical education curriculum: An assessment validation study

Objectives: To evaluate the merit of the Clinical Audit Project (CAP) in an assessment program for undergraduate medical education using a systematic assessment validation framework. Methods: A cross-sectional assessment validation study at one medical school in Western Australia, with retrospective qualitative analysis of the design, development, implementation and outcomes of the CAP, and quantitative analysis of assessment data from four cohorts of medical students (2011-2014). Results: The CAP is fit for purpose with clear external and internal alignment to expected medical graduate outcomes. Substantive validity in students’ and examiners’ response processes is ensured through relevant methodological and cognitive processes. Multiple validity features are built-in to the design, planning and implementation process of the CAP. There is evidence of high internal consistency reliability of CAP scores (Cronbach’s alpha \u3e 0.8) and inter-examiner consistency reliability (intra-class correlation\u3e0.7). Aggregation of CAP scores is psychometrically sound, with high internal consistency indicating one common underlying construct. Significant but moderate correlations between CAP scores and scores from other assessment modalities indicate validity of extrapolation and alignment between the CAP and the overall target outcomes of medical graduates. Standard setting, score equating and fair decision rules justify consequential validity of CAP scores interpretation and use. Conclusions: This study provides evidence demonstrating that the CAP is a meaningful and valid component in the assessment program. This systematic framework of validation can be adopted for all levels of assessment in medical education, from individual assessment modality, to the validation of an assessment program as a whole

Watch Out for the Under Toad

This article studies the significance of insights from non- legal disciplines (such as political science, economics, and sociology) for comparative legal research and the methodology connected with such ‘interdisciplinary contextualisation’. Based on a theoretical analysis concerning the nature and methodology of comparative law, the article demonstrates that contextualisation of the analysis of legal rules and case law is required for a meaningful comparison between legal systems. The challenges relating to this contextualisation are illustrated on the basis of a study of the judicial use of comparative legal analysis as a source of inspiration in the judgment of difficult cases. The insights obtained from the theoretical analysis and the example are combined in a final analysis concerning the role and method of interdisciplinary contextualisation in comparative legal analysis conducted by legal scholars and legal practitioner

Introduction: The Possibilities of Comparative Law Methods for Research on the Rule of Law in a Global Context

Since its rise at the beginning of the twentieth century, comparative legal research has gained an influential place in legal research concerning national legal systems. Comparative legal methodology is used to acquire insight into foreign legal systems, to find solutions for problems of a specific legal system, or to promote the unifi cation of law between national legal systems. Its methods consist of a comparison of different legal systems or legal traditions (external comparison), or of fields of law within national legal systems (internal comparison). With the proliferation of regulatory regimes at the international level (e.g. in the context of the United Nations or the WTO), comparative legal research has expanded its focus to include international law. Consensus, however, has not been reached on the most suitable way of applying comparative law methods to the global context. Can the concepts and methods developed to conduct comparative legal research of national legal systems be transposed to study the international legal system? In this issue of Erasmus Law Review, a number of scholars with different legal backgrounds reflect on these questions

Multilevel blocking approach to the fermion sign problem in path-integral Monte Carlo simulations

A general algorithm toward the solution of the fermion sign problem in finite-temperature quantum Monte Carlo simulations has been formulated for discretized fermion path integrals with nearest-neighbor interactions in the Trotter direction. This multilevel approach systematically implements a simple blocking strategy in a recursive manner to synthesize the sign cancellations among different fermionic paths throughout the whole configuration space. The practical usefulness of the method is demonstrated for interacting electrons in a quantum dot.Comment: 4 pages RevTeX, incl. two figure

The Judicial Domain in View: figures, trends and perspectives

Where will the Dutch judicial system be in 2015? One of us answered a similar type of question elsewhere with a sketch of two frightening scenarios.* In the first scenario the judicial system will have insufficiently adapted itself to its surroundings. The judicial system will become more intensively involved in a decreasing amount of cases that gradually carry less weight. The judicial system, as a social phenomenon, will be marginalized even though the traditional standards of constitutional legitimacy and professionalism of the administration of justice are kept up. Interesting or big cases will be handled outside the judiciary by special courts or through arbitration, mediation or other forms of “alternative dispute resolution” (ADR). The large amount of bulk cases will be transferred to other legal areas or authorities where the involvement of the judge will decrease (for example the Mulderizing of criminal cases, or settlement by the Public Prosecutor). With the decrease in jurisdiction the authority of the judicial system will decline and eventually prise itself out of the market. In the second frightening scenario the judicial system will have adapted itself too much to its surroundings. Van Gunsteren once sketched a picture of the court as a dynamic centre for settling conflicts, a place where the experts fall over each other with seminars, workshops, courses, and new methods. Instead of settling conflicts they get copied within the judicial organization itself.† The judicial system, with its well-meaning efforts at being responsive, will have distanced itself from its core duties: settling disputes through binding judgments. While the judicial system has lost touch with its surroundings in the first scenario, it has lost its own self in the second scenario

Distinguishing impurity concentrations in GaAs and AlGaAs, using very shallow undoped heterostructures

We demonstrate a method of making a very shallow, gateable, undoped 2-dimensional electron gas. We have developed a method of making very low resistivity contacts to these structures and systematically studied the evolution of the mobility as a function of the depth of the 2DEG (from 300nm to 30nm). We demonstrate a way of extracting quantitative information about the background impurity concentration in GaAs and AlGaAs, the interface roughness and the charge in the surface states from the data. This information is very useful from the perspective of molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) growth. It is difficult to fabricate such shallow high-mobility 2DEGs using modulation doping due to the need to have a large enough spacer layer to reduce scattering and switching noise from remote ionsied dopants.Comment: 4 pages, 5 eps figure

The European Union’s Rule of Law Agenda: Identifying Its Core and Contextualizing Its Application

Monitoring the rule of law performance of EU member states presupposes that the EU has a clear idea of what is meant by the rule of law. Theoretically, however, the conceptualization of this notion has proven difficult, leading to a wide range of differing approaches. Moreover, the application of a common rule of law concept in a multilevel legal context creates its own difficulties. As the starting point for this contribution, we identify a core meaning of the rule of law based on the work of Philip Selznick and Martin Krygier. They see the reduction of the arbitrary use of power as the central value and point to the importance of a contextual approach to realizing that value: reducing arbitrariness may require very different concrete measures from one society to another. We examine what common idea of the rule of law is projected by the European Union in its rule of law agenda, looking specifically at two important instruments, the Justice Scoreboard and the Better Regulation programme. Using the contextual approach to rule of law, we then examine whether the core meaning of this concept is recognizable here, and whether efforts are already made to allow for the inclusion of contextual elements. Our analysis clarifies that the two instruments support the core notion of the rule of law by enhancing the quality of political debates in the EU. However, underlying economic assumptions and approaches as well as political forces form a constant threat to the realization of elements of participation and

Modeling usual and unusual anisotropic spheres

In this paper, we study anisotropic spheres built from known static spherical solutions. In particular, we are interested in the physical consequences of a "small" departure from a physically sensible configuration. The obtained solutions smoothly depend on free parameters. By setting these parameters to zero, the starting seed solution is regained. We apply our procedure in detail by taking as seed solutions the Florides metrics, and the Tolman IV solution. We show that the chosen Tolman IV, and also Heint IIa Durg IV,V perfect fluid solutions, can be used to generate a class of parametric solutions where the anisotropic factor has features recalling boson stars. This is an indication that boson stars could emerge by "perturbing" appropriately a perfect fluid solution (at least for the seed metrics considered). Finally, starting with Tolman IV, Heint IIa and Durg IV,V solutions, we build anisotropic gravastar-like sources with the appropriate boundary conditions.Comment: Final version published in IJMP

Low-temperature dynamical simulation of spin-boson systems

The dynamics of spin-boson systems at very low temperatures has been studied using a real-time path-integral simulation technique which combines a stochastic Monte Carlo sampling over the quantum fluctuations with an exact treatment of the quasiclassical degrees of freedoms. To a large degree, this special technique circumvents the dynamical sign problem and allows the dynamics to be studied directly up to long real times in a numerically exact manner. This method has been applied to two important problems: (1) crossover from nonadiabatic to adiabatic behavior in electron transfer reactions, (2) the zero-temperature dynamics in the antiferromagnetic Kondo region 1/2<K<1 where K is Kondo's parameter.Comment: Phys. Rev. B (in press), 28 pages, 6 figure