18,597 research outputs found
Widening access in selection using situational judgement tests: evidence from the UKCAT
CONTEXT Widening access promotes student diversity and the appropriate representation of all demographic groups. This study aims to examine diversity-related benefits of the use of situational judgement tests (SJTs) in the UK Clinical Aptitude Test (UKCAT) in terms of three demographic variables: (i) socioeconomic status (SES); (ii) ethnicity, and (iii) gender.
METHODS Outcomes in medical and dental school applicant cohorts for the years 2012 (n = 15 581) and 2013 (n = 15 454) were studied. Applicants' scores on cognitive tests and an SJT were linked to SES (parents' occupational status), ethnicity (White versus Black and other minority ethnic candidates), and gender.
RESULTS Firstly, the effect size for SES was lower for the SJT (d = 0.13-0.20 in favour of the higher SES group) than it was for the cognitive tests (d = 0.38-0.35). Secondly, effect sizes for ethnicity of the SJT and cognitive tests were similar (d = similar to 0.50 in favour of White candidates). Thirdly, males outperformed females on cognitive tests, whereas the reverse was true for SJTs. When equal weight was given to the SJT and the cognitive tests in the admission decision and when the selection ratio was stringent, simulated scenarios showed that using an SJT in addition to cognitive tests might enable admissions boards to select more students from lower SES backgrounds and more female students.
CONCLUSIONS The SJT has the potential to appropriately complement cognitive tests in the selection of doctors and dentists. It may also put candidates of lower SES backgrounds at less of a disadvantage and may potentially diversify the student intake. However, use of the SJT applied in this study did not diminish the role of ethnicity. Future research should examine these findings with other SJTs and other tests internationally and scrutinise the causes underlying the role of ethnicity
A review of residual stress analysis using thermoelastic techniques
Thermoelastic Stress Analysis (TSA) is a full-field technique for experimental stress analysis
that is based on infra-red thermography. The technique has proved to be extremely effective for
studying elastic stress fields and is now well established. It is based on the measurement of the
temperature change that occurs as a result of a stress change. As residual stress is essentially a
mean stress it is accepted that the linear form of the TSA relationship cannot be used to
evaluate residual stresses. However, there are situations where this linear relationship is not
valid or departures in material properties due to manufacturing procedures have enabled
evaluations of residual stresses. The purpose of this paper is to review the current status of
using a TSA based approach for the evaluation of residual stresses and to provide some
examples of where promising results have been obtained
WILLINGNESS-TO-PAY FOR VALUE ADDED BRED HEIFER CHARACTERISTICS
Livestock Production/Industries,
The Dog on the Ship: The "Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy" as an Outlying Part of the Argo Star System
Overdensities in the distribution of low latitude, 2MASS giant stars are
revealed by systematically peeling away from sky maps the bulk of the giant
stars conforming to ``isotropic'' density laws generally accounting for known
Milky Way components. This procedure, combined with a higher resolution
treatment of the sky density of both giants and dust allows us to probe to
lower Galactic latitudes than previous 2MASS giant star studies. While the
results show the swath of excess giants previously associated with the
Monoceros ring system in the second and third Galactic quadrants at distances
of 6-20 kpc, we also find a several times larger overdensity of giants in the
same distance range concentrated in the direction of the ancient constellation
Argo. Isodensity contours of the large structure suggest that it is highly
elongated and inclined by about 3 deg to the disk, although details of the
structure -- including the actual location of highest density, overall extent,
true shape -- and its origin, remain unknown because only a fraction of it lies
outside highly dust-obscured, low latitude regions. Nevertheless, our results
suggest that the 2MASS M giant overdensity previously claimed to represent the
core of a dwarf galaxy in Canis Major (l ~ 240 deg) is an artifact of a dust
extinction window opening to the overall density rise to the more significant
Argo structure centered at larger longitude (l ~ 290 +- 10 deg, b ~ -4 +- 2
deg).Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Quantitative Morphology of Galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field
We measure quantitative structural parameters of galaxies in the Hubble Deep
Field (HDF) on the drizzled F814W images. Our structural parameters are based
on a two-component surface brightness made up of a S\'ersic profile and an
exponential profile. We compare our results to the visual classification of van
den Bergh et al. (1996) and the classification of Abraham et al. (1996a).
Our morphological analysis of the galaxies in the HDF indicates that the
spheroidal galaxies, defined here as galaxies with a dominant bulge profile,
make up for only a small fraction, namely 8% of the galaxy population down to
m = 26.0. We show that the larger fraction of early-type systems
in the van den Bergh sample is primarily due to the difference in
classification of 40% of small round galaxies with half-light radii <
0\arcsecpoint 31. Although these objects are visually classified as elliptical
galaxies, we find that they are disk-dominated with bulge fractions < 0.5.
Given the existing large dataset of HDF galaxies with measured spectroscopic
redshifts, we are able to determine that the majority of distant galaxies
() from this sample are disk-dominated. Our analysis reveals a subset of
HDF galaxies which have profiles flatter than a pure exponential profile.Comment: 35 pages, LaTeX, 18 Postscript Figures, Tables available at
http://astro.berkeley.edu/~marleau/. Accepted for Publication in The
Astrophysical Journa
Strongly Non-Equilibrium Bose-Einstein Condensation in a Trapped Gas
We present a qualitative (and quantitative, at the level of estimates)
analysis of the ordering kinetics in a strongly non-equilibrium state of a
weakly interacting Bose gas, trapped with an external potential. At certain
conditions, the ordering process is predicted to be even more rich than in the
homogeneous case. Like in the homogeneous case, the most characteristic feature
of the full-scale non-equilibrium process is the formation of superfluid
turbulence.Comment: 4 pages, revtex, no figures. Submitted to PR
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