Clinical Preparedness in a Dental School Setting: A Collaborative Approach to Patient Care through Teaching, Learning, and Clinical Preparedness

Background: At Tufts University School of Dental Medicine (TUSDM), the conclusion of second year didactic courses initiates the move to a more clinically driven course load and the simultaneous transition into providing patient care. This study investigated the attitudes and perceptions of dental students towards the Introduction to the Dental Patient (IDP) II and III courses, as well as clinical preparedness, as students transition from preclinical didactic courses to the clinic.

Cultural inheritance is driving a major transition in human evolution

An evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI) is the emergence of a new level of biological complexity, such as multicellular life or eusocial insects. There is disagreement on the degree to which the human species is undergoing such a transition. Here, we advance a theory of long-term human evolution in which a transition in individuality is driven by an underlying transition in inheritance from DNA to cultural signals. We argue that such a transition could be driven by three features of human culture. First, human cultural inheritance provides greater capacity for rapid adaptation than genetic inheritance. Second, culture constitutes a mechanism of extreme heritable behavioral plasticity. These two features are sufficient to drive an evolutionary transition in inheritance. Third, cultural evolution generates and favors group-level adaptations. Therefore, we argue that an inheritance transition from genes to culture will cause a simultaneous transition in individuality from individual to group. We present a conceptual model of a coupled evolutionary transition in inheritance and individuality and review available evidence. The coupled transition hypothesis has major implications for causation in human evolution and the social sciences. We suggest a set of testable predictions and outline a research agenda on the culture-driven transition in human evolution.

Protection of Transport Nodes and Resistibility of Pipeline Systems

The analysis has been carried out and the laws of occurrence of emergency threats at pipeline transport facilities associated with the sequential damage of structural elements have been established. When an emergency situation develops, blocking of a separate system node is associated with simultaneous transition to a state of inoperability of all pipelines converging into the zone of that node. Such damage to the point element of the network structure prevents product flows from passing through that point. The ability of a system to withstand a progressive blocking depends on its composition, structure, and is characterized by an indicator of persistence, the value of which is calculated using a simulation method. An example of the use of cluster schemes in solving the problem of structural synthesis and the selection of the best protection option for a pipeline transport system has been considered.

Universality and scaling in networks of period-doubling maps with a pacemaker

The networks of globally coupled maps with a pacemaker have been introduced. We consider a generalization of the Kaneko model with a pacemaker represented by a single period-doubling element coupled unidirectionally with a set of other mutually coupled cells. We also investigate the dynamics of a system of two unidirectionally coupled elements, which manifests a special type of critical behaviour, known asbicriticality, at the point of simultaneous transition to chaos in both subsystems. With the help of the renormalization group (RG), we show for a case of two mutually coupled bicritical maps with a pacemaker that there are two types of coupling: dissipative and inertial. We investigate the dynamics of a network with a pacemaker with two types of global coupling and the properties of universality and scaling in this system.

Time effects in the magnetic cooling method

In consequence of the magnetic and exchange interactions between the ions of a paramagnetic salt, a new mechanism of interaction between ion and lattice is possible, involving the simultaneous transition of two or more ions with the emission or absorption of only one elastic quantum. This new mechanism seems to be capable of removing the discrepancy between theory and experiment for iron alum, and considerably reduces the discrepancy for caesium titanium alum.