PROBLEM Physicians need training in community engagement, leadership, and population health to prepare them to work with partners within the community and to adapt medical care to address population health needs. APPROACH With an overall goal of training primary care practitioners to be change agents for improving population health, the Duke University School of Medicine launched the Primary ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES International health (IH) experiences are popular among medical students and may influence career choices. The International Health Fellowship Program (IHFP) consisted of preparatory coursework and field experience in a developing country. We conducted a survey 4-7 years later to assess the career influence of IHFP participation. METHODS Fellows completed a questionn...

articles written over the last few years have drawn attention to the disappearance of young physician scientists (1–5). There are nearly 25% fewer physician scientists on medical school faculties today than two decades ago (6) and now we know some of the reasons. The heavy accumulation of debt through many years of research training is one explanation (7). So is the difficulty of providing a us...

In order to achieve higher levels of abstraction in architectural design, we investigate extensions to parallel program design based on the use of explicit state variables to accommodate the action-based discipline of interaction that is typical of architecture description languages. Our study focus on primitives that support non-determinism, choice and fairness in guarded-command based languag...

We set the basis for a theory of testing for distributed transactions in service oriented systems where each service definition is decorated with a transactional attribute (inspired by the Java Transaction API). Transaction attributes discipline how services are executed with respect to the transactional scope of the invoking party. We define a language of observers and show that, in general, t...

In order to achieve higher levels of abstraction in architectural design, we investigate extensions to parallel program design based on the use of explicit state variables to accommodate the action-based discipline of interaction that is typical of architecture description languages. Our study focus on primitives that support non-determinism, choice and fairness in guarded-command based languag...

The author’s laboratory studies the neural basis of learning and decisionmaking using a combination of techniques from neuroscience, economics and psychology. Behavioral studies of decision-making in both human and non-human primates guide physiological experiments using single neuron recording and functional magnetic resonance imaging. The goal of the laboratory is to achieve an interdisciplin...

In this paper we consider a queuing system in which the service times of customers are independent and identically distributed random variables, the arrival process is stationary and has the property of orderliness, and the queue discipline is arbitrary. For this queuing system we obtain the steady state second moment of the queue size in terms of the stationary waiting time distribution of a s...

Unsolicited commercial communications now represent more than fifty per cent of the e-mail traffic in the European Union and around the world. This paper is about the legal EU approach to such an issue. Through the analysis of the evolution of the legislative framework, it aims to define, under a legal perspective, what spam is, to explain why the opt-in choice has been adopted by the EU, and t...

Assessment task design plays a major role in influencing how students engage with their studies. This paper uses a case study approach to explore the assessment practice of five award-winning teachers across five different disciplines. The research method involved ethnographically-oriented classroom observations and multiple interviews with participants. Four key features of assessment task des...