Naive Student Research Articles

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BACKGROUNDThere is a growing concern about stress during undergraduate medical training. The process of getting metamorphosed into a professional doctor from a naive student is not an easy ride as the training is quite challenging and time demanding.AIMTo determine the level of stress in relation to various stressors among medical students at Career Institute of Medical Sciences, LucknowMETHODA cross-sectional study was conducted in which a total of 400 undergraduate Medical students were selected as the respondents. Informed written consent was obtained from all participating students. A structured questionnaire was designed that included two categories: Demographic details and Assessment of Perceived Stress due to various stressors.RESULTSOut of 400 students, 393 responded which amounts to a response rate of 64%. Severe and high levels of stress were noted due to fear of failure in exams (76%),inability to cope with tremendous amount of syllabus(68.8%) ,burden of studying in a private medical college(60.3%),competition for post graduate seats (58.2%),insecurity regarding professional future (55.4%), financial burden (49.9%),lack of homely environment in living hostel (49.9%) and personal physical health(44.1%)CONCLUSIONOur findings are in keeping with various other studies that highlight the need to teach the medical students different stress management techniques to improve their ability to cope with the demanding professional course.

Getting Back to the Basics of Translational Research.

How do viruses cause cancer? As a naive graduate student in the years before kits and personal computers, I found myself fascinated by viral “immortalization,” the process by which a virus induces a cell to live forever. The immortalizing virus of interest was named Epstein–Barr Virus (EBV) after its co-discoverers and was isolated from tumors commonly found in African children. EBV was also known to be a major cause of infectious mononucleosis, commonly referred to as the “kissing disease,” and a potential agent in chronic fatigue syndromes. For these reasons, I suspect, EBV was slow to get the respect it deserved. We now know that EBV is found in diverse tumors and is responsible for almost ~200,000 cancer cases each year. At the time, my interests were to understand the viral mechanisms that transform a resting mortal cell to replicate uncontrollably. It was also tempting to speculate over a beer whether viral immortalization could reveal fresh insights into human mortality and life span. On more sober occasions, the question of how a virus could cause cancer seemed a big enough challenge. Over the years, my interest in viral immortalization morphed into an investigation of viral gene regulation and latency. How does EBV establish long-term latent infection and express only a few essential viral genes necessary to keep the host cell dividing and alive? To get at these questions, we needed to combine many different methods ranging from functional genomics to structural biology, requiring expertise in diverse disciplines far beyond my capabilities. Building a team of collaborators with the appropriate expertise and identifying the most appropriate technologies is essential. Selecting the right tools and team to answer the bigger questions is not always straightforward, but establishing multi-disciplinary collaborations can open many otherwise closed doors. Among the most important and challenging steps in a research career is identifying a significant long-term research problem. This sounds easy, but it has many snags. Highly ambitious long-term goals, like curing EBV cancers, may not be achievable without more mundane short-term groundwork. And short-term goals, like the need to get the next paper published or grant funded, can sometimes distract from the long-term plan. Working on tangential problems is necessary to overcome obstacles and can lead to new and unanticipated discoveries. But keeping sight of the long-term goal can be a great strength for a research program. If all goes well, the research focus will be aligned with reviewers and funding agencies. Fortunately for EBV research, foundations like Cancer Research UK have recently recognized the eradication of EBV-associated cancers as one of the decade’s grand challenges. So how best to respond to this grand challenge? From my perspective, studying the basic mechanisms of EBV latency is the best path to identify viral-specific targets for therapeutic intervention. At least half of my group is committed to developing small molecules to either inhibit EBV latency or stimulate viral reactivation, two possible strategies to treat latent viruses in cancer cells. Viral reactivation from latency is attractive because it is likely to trigger the host immune system to eliminate EBV-infected cancer cells. Inhibiting latency should lead to the loss of viral DNA from cancer cells that depend on EBV for growth and survival. In principle, inhibitors of EBV latency or activators of viral lytic antigens should be valuable therapies to treat EBV-associated cancer and related disease. Of course these more ambitious projects are risky and require vast sums of funding. The pharmaceutical industry and venture capitalists have no tolerance for financing the early stages of long-term, high-risk projects, so public funding of academic investigators will be the only possible path forward. Although there are many academics who consider translational research a corruption of academic freedom, the urgency of real-world unmet medical needs becomes very apparent if one only takes a look at the economic and human cost of disease. It will be essential for academic investigators to fulfill these obligations to society. Ironically, an editorial opposing the funding of basic academic research was recently written by Matt Ridley in The Wall Street Journal arguing that public sponsorship of basic research blocks private investment and derails innovation. In fact, the only chance for innovative solutions to long-term challenges will be through public funding of basic academic research. Encouraging scientists to focus on unmet medical needs as well as conceptual advances in basic science should be a high priority for public and private investment in a healthy future. Image 1 Paul M. Lieberman, Hilary Koprowski Professor, The Wistar Institute.

Improving the Lives of All People Affected by Type 2 Diabetes.

President of Health Care & Education for the American Diabetes Association (ADA)—how did I get here? Was it purely title and admiration for those who came before me? No. Volunteering for the ADA takes commitment, dedication, and hard work. And I've worked hard to get here. As a young and rather naive student, I was the flat sponge so many educators long for. Students in the final year of my nursing program were given a mandate to go into the community to teach a class on obstetrics, breast-feeding, or diabetes. I chose diabetes. Soon thereafter, I began volunteering for ADA as a student nurse doing presentations in the community. I could not stop at just one presentation; I wanted to know that my efforts made a difference. Moving from the classroom to Los Angeles, Calif., County Hospital as a staff nurse enhanced my ability to do the work I needed to do, both as a public health nurse and as an educator at East Los Angeles College (ELAC). Throughout this transition, I continued to work with a population of socially, financially, and educationally disadvantaged Latinos, Hispanics, and Asian-Pacific Islanders, attempting to focus on what I thought public health was really all about: prevention. My goal was to teach clients how to care for their illnesses and how to prevent recurrence and readmission into the hospital emergency department for problems for which they had received previous treatment. Working with the underrepresented, underserved, disadvantaged, and working poor became a labor of love, teaching families how to improve the quality of their lives. Complications of diabetes can be devastating. I recall having students take care of a 28-year-old Latino man with diabetes. He was what the students recognized as “noncompliant,” and he experienced what many people with diabetes face: denial, sadness, anger, helplessness, …

Naïve and Expert Geography Students' Perceptions on Digital Map Literacy

The aims of this comparative study are first to analyze the Digital Map Literacy (DML) perceptions of undergraduate geography students, and second to compare the perceptions of naive and expert students on a web based atlas. The students were selected from the Department of Geography Education at Marmara University in Istanbul. The DML scale was used to collect the data from the students. The data, including students' perceptions were analyzed and compared according to their experience levels (expert or naive) on map literacy and computer literacy. Students were classified as expert and naive on map literacy and computer literacy based on their own expression on the scale. Also, the DML perceptions of the student groups have been compared with three different perspectives: (1) cultural-aesthetical dimension: visual perception, (2) technical-informational dimension: functional perception, (3) geographical-social dimension: map perception. The data obtained has been transferred to statistics SPSS software and the findings have been analyzed within these data. At the scope of Encarta Reference Library 2003 application program, the groups' perceptions have been compared with X 2 test on a single item base and independent t-test samples in general. The results showed that there are no significant differences between the expert and the naive student groups' perceptions on the DML at 0.05 level of significance. The groups' perceptions bounded with literacy experience are the same in the digital atlas utilization on the web. Based on the Digital Map Literacy scale, it can be said that the Microsoft Encarta digital atlas provides affordance, visibility, utility, functionality, ease of use, and simplicity to the naives and the experts geography students. This result indicated that effective usability design is important to increase efficiency, productivity and understandability of the digital atlases on the web.

American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman by Thomas Carl Austenfeld (review)

Reviews American WomenWriters andtheNazis: EthicsandPoliticsin Boyle,Porter, Stafford, and Hellman.By THOMAS CARLAUSTENFELD. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. 200I. viii + I89 pp. $34.50. ISBN:0-8139-2052-3. Thomas Carl Austenfeldconcludes his criticalstudyof Kay Boyle, KatherineAnne Porter,Jean Stafford,and LillianHellman with a seriesof questions. Can a shared literary theory or philosophy, a method of conceptualizing, be detected in their works? Is there a characteristic combination of political apprenticeship, ethical conviction, and woman's intuition which emerges as an approach that can be generalizedand applied beyond these four women? Though he fights shy of a fully affirmativeresponse, the very fact that he considers 'woman's intuition' to be a meaningful concept rai'sesdoubts about the approach. Despite carefullyreminding his readers that he may be mired in a masculinistterminology, he none the less directsthem towardsthe suppositionthat an ethic of care and relationcan provide a new pattern of literaryunderstanding,and that women writersare distinguished by their interestin relationshipsand in the protectionof offspring,compromise,and the privilegingof the immediate over the remote. Although he is not in negligible company intellectually here (citing Nel Noddings and Annette Baier as relevant thinkers)these assumptionsremain unconvincing when applied to literature.What novels are not concerned with relationships?Surelymale novelistsarejust as likely to privilege the personal over the political?By Austenfeld'scriteria E. M. Forster was a woman. Austenfeld'smajor claim is that many sections of the literarylives of his four authors fall into place when they are considered as literary ethicists, women who foregrounded the moral consequences of their protagonists'activities and intended their writings as ethical signposts.Since all four were expatriatesin Germany and Austriain the I930s,witnessingthe rise of Nazism firsthand,it would be highly surprisingif their work did not bear tracesof ethical and politicaldebate. What Austenfeldneeded was a reminderfrom OscarWilde, that there are no moral or immoral books, only books which are well written or badly written. That said, the volume has plenty of local virtues,directingcriticalattentionto the formativeexperiencesof the four women outsideAmerica, and amplifyingand correctingthe conventionalequation of the term 'expatriate'with male novelistsin bars in Spain and France in the 1920s. PeripateticPorter (stuckwith very poor German in Berlin),Boyle (gaininga husband in provincialFranceand losing her US citizenship as a result),Stafford(a naive student in Heidelberg),and Hellman (much less naive, in Bonn) had quite differentexperiences from Hemingway, or indeed from each other. Austenfeld's approach is inductive, thoughtful, and produces subtly nuanced and well-argued readings, notably on the light shed by Porter'swork on notions of collective guilt, read as an illegitimate extension of the mass appeal of totalitarianpolitics. The emphasisis uneven, and rightlyso, with one chapter each devoted to Staffordand Hellman, slightlymore on Porter,and three whole chapters on Boyle, who was, afterall, in Europewithout interruptionfor eighteen years and witnessed the takeoverof both Austriaand France. Staffordwas only in Europe for two shortperiods,though her workremainsexceptionallyinterestingin thisconnection . Austenfeld offers thought-provokingreadings of the short stories. Hellman is a much more familiartopic, but the account of her film 'The North Star', a Hollywood -produced endorsement of Soviet collective life, with happy peasant dancers, lyricsby Gershwin,and a full-lengthrenditionof the 'Internationale'made interesting reading. As Austenfeld notes, Hellman uses Germany as the focus for her own message and is thereforedifferentfrom the other authors studied. They were 340 YES,34, 2004 YES,34, 2004 34I 34I concerned with Europe and themselves, Hellman with the United States and Americans. UNIVERSITY OFNOTrINGHAM JUDIENEWMAN Women Poetson theLeft:Lola Ridge,Genevieve Taggard, MargaretWalker. By NANCY BERKE. Gainesville, Tallahassee, and Tampa: University Press of Florida. 2001. viii + 202 pp. $55. ISBN:0-8130-2I15-4. This study consists of an introduction, a brief conclusion, and three chapters focusing respectivelyon the poetry of Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, and Margaret Walker. In the chapters Nancy Berke offers persuasive and informed introductions to these generally neglected poets. There is an impressiveuse of archival material, an informed and forcefulrepresentationof the I93os, and a sensitivityto the poetry that is complemented by Berke'sapposite use of quotation. Overall the book is an importantreminderof poetry'spublic dimension and of the traditionsof political writing that mappings of twentieth-centuryAmerican poetry frequently ignore. As such this book, like other recent studies, builds on...

Teaching hearing science to undergraduate nonscientists

For those students interested in potential clinical careers in Speech Pathology, or Audiology, a knowledge of some of the scientific bases is important, but should not create a distaste for science. The authors have addressed themselves to these goals: (1) calculation of period, Hz, summation of two sine waves, phase and dB; (2) anticipating undergraduate Speech Science; (3) simple examples of hearing pathology; and (4) basic psycho-acoustical issues. The classic material of Harry Helson was used to elucidate issues of context in experimental science, and that of S.S. Stevens was used to exemplify psycho-acoustical formulas of common use. Four texts that have been tried on approximately 200 students were evaluated. Surprisingly, the best provided the fewest formulas, short study questions with answers, good examples, and a list of common terms. The next best was aimed at slightly more advanced students, but each chapter contained introductory material, examples, and definitions suitable for naïve undergraduates. The least satisfactory text provided excerpts of technical material with abrupt transitions, no examples, and only part of the definitions needed for the naïve student. Perhaps the most difficult teaching issue is to avoid demanding graduate-level science from those undergraduates with clinical aspirations.

Origins in Absence: Performing Birth Stories

For the past five years, I have been more and less intentionally listening to birth stories. In line, in the hall, over coffee, at the park, and in informal interview settings, I have participated in the ritual process of recounting birth experiences-or, rather, of constituting those experiences out of the scraps of memory and bits of stories left after the ritual performance of birth itself.' I heard my first birth story near the end of my first pregnancy-when my round belly and hips betrayed the fact that I would soon be the of similar stories, that I was, for all intents and purposes, whether I liked it or not, already inside this particular narrative ring. Bound by a conspiracy of the body, contracted by maternity to hear, to tell, and to retell what others-insidiously, joyously, anxiously-told and retold me, I became both the subject of and subject to birth stories. Listening, I was the naive student, the initiate, the mother, the co-mother, the sister and friend; I was the bearer of stories; the professional (allied by doing research to institutions of medicine and science), the expert, the surveyor of good and bad births, the teacher, the outsider who should know or know better. Buffeted by conversation from one role to the next, I nonetheless seemed always to be the other with and against whose standards, norms, and practices the women and men with whom I spoke defined their own. The first story I heard left me devastated and hungry for more. I was living in a small, patrician town outside of Boston at the time (we'd arrived three months earlier and would leave again in two) and was fully nine months pregnant. I'd taken to wandering the streets in the late afternoon, enjoying the sudden, knowing smiles; the uncharacteristic deference of Boston drivers waiting patiently for me to cross the street; the general sense of surrounding pause. I was an intimate stranger to this town. My neighbors-the people I didn't know and would never know who nonetheless used the same dry cleaners and waited at the same stoplights-tended me with fascination. They traded benevolence for participation. As I later learned was so common, they felt the uncommon suspense of an imminent birth and wanted to be in on the drama, conventionally asking, When are you due? often reaching out to touch the belly that seemed to reach out to them. I always backed away from these gestures, resisting a collapse into mere public property. I wanted to re-

Yes, Teaching Grammar Does Help

People tend to make term grammar mean many different things: (a) conventions for using language forms and formats, (b) an area of school instruction, (c) materials presented in that instruction, (d) tricky points of usage, and (e) most recently, a formal description of a language. If we want to tell whether or not it helps to teach grammar in English classes, we first have to decide what we mean by grammar. It is often assumed that content of school grammar is pretty well fixed, and all we can do is argue about whether and when we're going to teach it. I'd like to present a different case. I feel that teaching grammar, though it doesn't have a very good record in past, can be both helpful and effective-on one condition. At present, most textbooks and lesson plans offer what deserves to be called a teachers' grammar. English textbooks are not written for learners so much as for other English teachers, who-please remember-decide which book learners have to buy. Publishers consistently see to it that teachers find same terms and rules they have come to expect through force of long tradition. Consequently, textbook seems obvious and easy to teachers, who can't understand why their students have so much trouble. In reality, textbooks have failed to develop and present a clear and accessible mode of discourse for naive learner. Instead, they waver between two equally unhelpful tactics. Either grammatical terms are defined by content, in which case definitions are unworkably vague, or terms are defined by structure, in which case definitions are unmanageably technical. Picture yourself as a naive student with no idea what subject and predicate mean. Would it solve your problem to be told that the subject tells who or what sentence is about, and predicate tells something about subject? Or, would it help you if someone said that the subject is a noun phrase whose head noun governs finite verb of predicate? Such definitions work only in practice when you have to find parts of a real sentence if you already know your grammar beforehand-precisely case with teachers, not learners.

Entailment and relevance1

Those who object to the identification of strict implication and entail-ment speak in such a way that for A to entail B, A must be relevant to B. This view of entailment agrees not only with that of the naive student of logic (who tends to think the phrase paradoxes of “implication” more accurate than “paradoxes” of implication), but also with that expressed in the initial chapters of many textbooks in logic under the heading “Fallacies of Relevance.”2In regard to formal theories proposed as explications of the notion of entailment, it becomes important to have at our disposal some formal account of the demand for relevance as between antecedent and consequent of an entailment.