A brief educational intervention in personal finance for medical residents.

IntroductionAlthough medical educational debt continues to escalate, residents receive little guidance in financial planning.AimTo educate interns about long-term investment strategies.SettingUniversity-based medicine internship program.Program descriptionAn unselected cohort of interns (n = 52; 84% of all interns) underwent a 90-minute interactive seminar on personal finance, focusing on retirement savings. Participants completed a preseminar investor literacy test to assess baseline financial knowledge. Afterward, interns rated the seminar and expressed their intention to make changes to their long-term retirement accounts. After 37 interns had attended the seminar, a survey was administered to all interns to compare actual changes to these accounts between seminar attendees and non-attendees.Measurements and main resultsInterns' average score on the investor literacy test was 40%, equal to the general population. Interns strongly agreed that the seminar was valuable (average 5.0 on 5-point Likert scale). Of the 46 respondents to the account allocation survey, interns who had already attended the seminar (n = 25) were more likely than interns who had not yet attended (n = 21) to have switched their investments from low to high-yield accounts at the university hospital (64 vs 19%, P = 0.003) and to enroll in the county hospital retirement plan (64 vs 33%, P = 0.07).ConclusionsOne 90-minute seminar on personal finances leads to significant changes in allocation of tax-deferred retirement savings. We calculate that these changes can lead to substantial long-term financial benefits and suggest that programs consider automatically enrolling trainees into higher yield retirement plans

To fail is human: remediating remediation in medical education.

IntroductionRemediating failing medical learners has traditionally been a craft activity responding to individual learner and remediator circumstances. Although there have been moves towards more systematic approaches to remediation (at least at the institutional level), these changes have tended to focus on due process and defensibility rather than on educational principles. As remediation practice evolves, there is a growing need for common theoretical and systems-based perspectives to guide this work.MethodsThis paper steps back from the practicalities of remediation practice to take a critical systems perspective on remediation in contemporary medical education. In doing so, the authors acknowledge the complex interactions between institutional, professional, and societal forces that are both facilitators of and barriers to effective remediation practices.ResultsThe authors propose a model that situates remediation within the contexts of society as a whole, the medical profession, and medical education institutions. They also outline a number of recommendations to constructively align remediation principles and practices, support a continuum of remediation practices, destigmatize remediation, and develop institutional communities of practice in remediation.DiscussionMedical educators must embrace a responsible and accountable systems-level approach to remediation if they are to meet their obligations to provide a safe and effective physician workforce

A statistical mechanics framework for multi-particle production in high energy reactions

We deduce the particle distributions in particle collisions with multihadron-production in the framework of mechanical statistics. They are derived as functions of x, P_T^2 and the rest mass of different species for a fixed total number of all produced particles, inelasticity and total transverse energy. For P_T larger than the mass of each particle we get the behaviour \frac{dn_i}{dP_T} \sim \sqrt{P_T} e^{-\frac{P_T}{T_H}} Values of _\pi, _K, and _{\bar{p}} in agreement with experiment are found by taking T_H=180MeV (the Hagedorn temperature).Comment: 9 pages, RevTe

Research study on materials processing in space experiment number M512: Nickel - 12 wt percent tin alloy evaluation

Nickel-tin (12 wt percent tin) samples were processed in the sphere forming experiment on Skylab 2. The results were characterized for sphericity, density, microhardness, porosity, surface morphology, segregation, chemical composition, Curie point, and crystallography. These results are discussed along with conclusions and recommendations

An efficient routine for infrared radiative transfer in a cloudy atmosphere

A FORTRAN program that calculates the atmospheric cooling rate and infrared fluxes for partly cloudy atmospheres is documented. The IR fluxes in the water bands and the 9.6 and 15 micron bands are calculated at 15 levels ranging from 1.39 mb to the surface. The program is generalized to accept any arbitrary atmospheric temperature and humidity profiles and clouds as input and return the cooling rate and fluxes as output. Sample calculations for various atmospheric profiles and cloud situations are demonstrated

New Production Mechanism of Neutral Higgs Bosons with Right scalar tau neutrino as the LSP

Motived by the neutrino oscillation data, we consider the lightest tau sneutrino $\tilde \nu_{\tau_1}$ (which is mostly the right tau sneutrino) to be the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) in the framework of the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model. Both the standard and the non-standard trilinear scalar coupling terms are included for the right tau sneutrino interactions. The decay branching ratio of $\tilde \nu_{\tau_2} \to \tilde \nu_{\tau_1}+ h^0$ can become so large that the production rate of the lightest neutral Higgs boson ($h^0$) can be largely enhanced at electron or hadron colliders, either from the direct production of $\tilde \nu_{\tau_2}$ or from the decay of charginos, neutralinos, sleptons, and the cascade decay of squarks and gluinos, etc. Furthermore, because of the small LSP annihilation rate, $\tilde \nu_{\tau_1}$ can be a good candidate for cold dark matter.Comment: 11 pages, RevTex, 3 eps figures. We clarify the theoretical framework of this study, with a note added in the end, and correct an equation, with updated figure