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Collaborative Instruction for Information Retrieval and Appraisal Skills in Evidence-Based Practice Models for Dental Hygiene Students.

Objectives: 1. Collaborate with VCU Dental Hygiene Program faculty to develop and evaluate a model of evidence-based practice (EBP) for students in didactic and clinical settings. 2. Describe how a course was modified to emphasize evidence-based practice. 3. Analyze course evaluations and student scholarly output. Methods/Materials: Dental educators strive to develop graduates who practice evidence-based practice and whose clinical decisions are based on current scientific research. A medical librarian was invited to assist in integrating EBP into the dentistry curriculum in 2012. To gain a better understanding of EBP in dental settings, the librarian and dental hygiene faculty attended the Forsyth ADA Evidence-Based Dentistry training in Boston, Massachusetts that same year. The collaborators revised a course to take students through the mechanics of EBP, including demonstrating transfer into the clinic setting and developing a model of real-time information retrieval useful after graduation in the “real world.” Results: In didactic activities, students received instruction on information retrieval as well as critical appraisal skills to answer clinical questions, reinforcing the EBP model. This culminated in students creating improved literature reviews for capstone projects, posters and table clinic presentations, stronger clinical information retrieval skills, and increased publications in refereed professional journals. Interaction between students, the librarian and faculty resulted in positive outcomes in EBP concepts used for generation of decision making in clinic as well as peer presentations in local, regional and national settings. Conclusions: The collaborative effort was valuable as it strengthened the relationship between dental hygiene faculty, students and the librarian. Additionally, students’ experience was enhanced as they practiced retrieval strategies and critical appraisal of research literature. This enabled them to develop as “consumers” of current professional research literature, model evidence-based practice and publish their writing in professional journals

Impact of strong magnetic fields on collision mechanism for transport of charged particles

One of the main applications in plasma physics concerns the energy production through thermo-nuclear fusion. The controlled fusion is achieved by magnetic confinement i.e., the plasma is confined into a toroidal domain (tokamak) under the action of huge magnetic fields. Several models exist for describing the evolution of strongly magnetized plasmas, most of them by neglecting the collisions between particles. The subject matter of this paper is to investigate the effect of large magnetic fields with respect to a collision mechanism. We consider here linear collision Boltzmann operators and derive, by averaging with respect to the fast cyclotronic motion due to strong magnetic forces, their effective collision kernels

Propagation of L1L^{1} and L∞L^{\infty} Maxwellian weighted bounds for derivatives of solutions to the homogeneous elastic Boltzmann Equation

We consider the $n$-dimensional space homogeneous Boltzmann equation for elastic collisions for variable hard potentials with Grad (angular) cutoff. We prove sharp moment inequalities, the propagation of $L^1$-Maxwellian weighted estimates, and consequently, the propagation $L^\infty$-Maxwellian weighted estimates to all derivatives of the initial value problem associated to the afore mentioned problem. More specifically, we extend to all derivatives of the initial value problem associated to this class of Boltzmann equations corresponding sharp moment (Povzner) inequalities and time propagation of $L^1$-Maxwellian weighted estimates as originally developed A.V. Bobylev in the case of hard spheres in 3 dimensions; an improved sharp moments inequalities to a larger class of angular cross sections and $L^1$-exponential bounds in the case of stationary states to Boltzmann equations for inelastic interaction problems with `heating' sources, by A.V. Bobylev, I.M. Gamba and V.Panferov, where high energy tail decay rates depend on the inelasticity coefficient and the the type of `heating' source; and more recently, extended to variable hard potentials with angular cutoff by I.M. Gamba, V. Panferov and C. Villani in the elastic case collision case and so $L^1$-Maxwellian weighted estimated were shown to propagate if initial states have such property. In addition, we also extend to all derivatives the propagation of $L^\infty$-Maxwellian weighted estimates to solutions of the initial value problem to the Boltzmann equations for elastic collisions for variable hard potentials with Grad (angular) cutoff.Comment: 24 page