The importance of scientific competencies in German medical curricula - the student perspective

Background: Scientific competencies are of great importance for physicians; not only for conducting reliable research, but also for patient care. However, there is growing concern that a lack of scientific competencies among physicians may lead to a deterioration in the quality on biomedical research. This study aims at assessing medical students’ perspectives on the implementation of scientific competency training in German medical curricula. Methods: An online survey was conducted in order to collect German medical students’ opinions on the importance of acquiring scientific competencies during their medical studies and to provide us with an assessment of their current levels of basic scientific competencies by having them conduct a self-evaluation. Moreover, we wanted to understand their perceptions of current curricular content and to receive suggestions for improving scientific competency training. Participants were reached via the mailing lists of the German Medical Students’ Association, as well as of local medical student committees, and the German Medical Students’ Associations social media channel on Facebook. Results: In total, 2380 medical students from across all 37 German medical faculties participated in the survey. The majority of students agreed that the ability to critically evaluate the relevant literature is an important competency for physicians, and that every student should conduct a research project during their medical studies. However, the students evaluated their scientific competencies as unsatisfactory, especially with regard to statistics and scientific writing. They were strongly in favor of receiving extended research training. Conclusion: Our study provides insight into German medical students’ self-perception in relation to both patient care and biomedical research, and makes recommendations for potential improvements in scientific training. The study demonstrates that scientific competencies are of great importance to medical students in Germany. Students are not lacking motivation for scientific practice and have numerous ideas for enhancing scientific teaching opportunities. Scientific training should follow a holistic approach based on three pillars: (i) a scientific core curriculum, (ii) intracurricular research projects, and (iii) special research programs for students strongly interested in medical research

Wave Function Shredding by Sparse Quantum Barriers

We discuss a model in which a quantum particle passes through $\delta$ potentials arranged in an increasingly sparse way. For infinitely many barriers we derive conditions, expressed in terms ergodic properties of wave function phases, which ensure that the point and absolutely continuous parts are absent leaving a purely singularly continuous spectrum. For a finite number of barriers, the transmission coefficient shows extreme sensitivity to the particle momentum with fluctuation in many different scales. We discuss a potential application of this behavior for erasing the information carried by the wave function.Comment: 4 pages ReVTeX with 3 epsf figure

On the equality of Hausdorff and box counting dimensions

By viewing the covers of a fractal as a statistical mechanical system, the exact capacity of a multifractal is computed. The procedure can be extended to any multifractal described by a scaling function to show why the capacity and Hausdorff dimension are expected to be equal.Comment: CYCLER Paper 93mar001 Latex file with 3 PostScript figures (needs psfig.sty

Negative differential conductivity in an interacting quantum gas

Negative differential conductivity (NDC) is a widely exploited effect in modern electronic components. Here, a proof-of-principle is given for the observation of NDC in a quantum transport device for neutral atoms employing a multi-mode tunneling junction. The transport of the many-body quantum system is governed by the interplay between the tunnel coupling, the interaction energy and the thermodynamics of intrinsic collisions, which turn the coherent coupling into a hopping process. The resulting current voltage characteristics exhibit NDC, for which we identify a new microscopic physical mechanism. Our study opens new ways for the future implementation and control of complex neutral atom quantum circuits

The Lazarus Effect: Healing Compromised Devices in the Internet of Small Things

We live in a time when billions of IoT devices are being deployed and increasingly relied upon. This makes ensuring their availability and recoverability in case of a compromise a paramount goal. The large and rapidly growing number of deployed IoT devices make manual recovery impractical, especially if the devices are dispersed over a large area. Thus, there is a need for a reliable and scalable remote recovery mechanism that works even after attackers have taken full control over devices, possibly misusing them or trying to render them useless. To tackle this problem, we present Lazarus, a system that enables the remote recovery of compromised IoT devices. With Lazarus, an IoT administrator can remotely control the code running on IoT devices unconditionally and within a guaranteed time bound. This makes recovery possible even in case of severe corruption of the devices' software stack. We impose only minimal hardware requirements, making Lazarus applicable even for low-end constrained off-the-shelf IoT devices. We isolate Lazarus's minimal recovery trusted computing base from untrusted software both in time and by using a trusted execution environment. The temporal isolation prevents secrets from being leaked through side-channels to untrusted software. Inside the trusted execution environment, we place minimal functionality that constrains untrusted software at runtime. We implement Lazarus on an ARM Cortex-M33-based microcontroller in a full setup with an IoT hub, device provisioning and secure update functionality. Our prototype can recover compromised embedded OSs and bare-metal applications and prevents attackers from bricking devices, for example, through flash wear out. We show this at the example of FreeRTOS, which requires no modifications but only a single additional task. Our evaluation shows negligible runtime performance impact and moderate memory requirements.Comment: In Proceedings of the 15th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIA CCS 20

Evaluation of Transformer Architectures for Electrical Load Time-Series Forecasting

Accurate forecasts of the electrical load are needed to stabilize the electrical grid and maximize the use of renewable energies. Many good forecasting methods exist, including neural networks, and we compare them to the recently developed Transformers, which are the state-of-the-art machine learning technique for many sequence-related tasks. We apply different types of Transformers, namely the Time-Series Transformer, the Convolutional Self-Attention Transformer and the Informer, to electrical load data from Baden-Württemberg. Our results show that the Transformes give up to 11% better forecasts than multi-layer perceptrons for long prediction horizons. Furthermore, we analyze the Transformers’ attention scores to get insights into the model

The nature of the Galactic Center source IRS 13 revealed by high spatial resolution in the infrared

High spatial resolution observations in the 1 to 3.5 micron region of the Galactic Center source known historically as IRS 13 are presented. They include ground-based adaptive optics images in the H, Kp (2.12/0.4 micron) and L bands, NICMOS data in filters between 1.1 and 2.2 micron, and integral field spectroscopic data from BEAR, an Imaging FTS, in the HeI 2.06 micron and the Br$\gamma$ line regions. Analysis of all these data provides a completely new picture of the main component, IRS 13E, which appears as a cluster of seven individual stars within a projected diameter of ~0.5'' (0.02 pc). The brightest sources, 13E1, 13E2, 13E3 (a binary), and 13E4, are all massive stars, 13E1 a blue object, with no detected emission line while 13E2 and 13E4 are high-mass emission line stars. 13E2 is at the WR stage and 13E4 a massive O-type star. 13E3A and B are extremely red objects, proposed as other examples of dusty WR stars. All these sources have a common westward proper motion. 13E5, is a red source similar to 13E3A/B. This concentration of comoving massive hot stars, IRS 13E, is proposed as the remaining core of a massive star cluster, which could harbor an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) of ~1300 M_sol. This detection plays in favor of a scenario in which the helium stars and the other hot stars in the central pc originate from the stripping of a massive cluster formed several tens of pc from the center. The detection of a discrete X-ray emission (Baganoff et al. 2003) at the IRS~13 position is examined in this context.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures (3 in color), LaTeX2e, accepted in A&

Simultaneous 3D measurement of the translation and rotation of finite size particles and the flow field in a fully developed turbulent water flow

We report a novel experimental technique that measures simultaneously in three dimensions the trajectories, the translation, and the rotation of finite size inertial particles together with the turbulent flow. The flow field is analyzed by tracking the temporal evolution of small fluorescent tracer particles. The inertial particles consist of a super-absorbent polymer that renders them index and density matched with water and thus invisible. The particles are marked by inserting at various locations tracer particles into the polymer. Translation and rotation, as well as the flow field around the particle are recovered dynamically from the analysis of the marker and tracer particle trajectories. We apply this technique to study the dynamics of inertial particles much larger in size (Rp/{\eta} \approx 100) than the Kolmogorov length scale {\eta} in a von K\'arm\'an swirling water flow (R{\lambda} \approx 400). We show, using the mixed (particle/fluid) Eulerian second order velocity structure function, that the interaction zone between the particle and the flow develops in a spherical shell of width 2Rp around the particle of radius Rp. This we interpret as an indication of a wake induced by the particle. This measurement technique has many additional advantages that will make it useful to address other problems such as particle collisions, dynamics of non-spherical solid objects, or even of wet granular matter.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, submitted to "Measurement Science and Technology" special issue on "Advances in 3D velocimetry