For vehicles to operate in unmapped areas with some degree of autonomy, it would be useful to aggregate and store processed sensor data so that it can be used later. In this paper, a tool that records and optimizes the placement of costmap data on a persistent map is presented. The optimization takes several factors into account, including local vehicle odometry, GPS signals when available, local map consistency, deformation of map regions, and proprioceptive GPS offset error. Results illustrating the creation of maps from previously unseen regions (a 100 m × 880 m test track and a 1.2 km dirt trail) are presented, with and without GPS signals available during the creation of the maps. Finally, two examples of the use of these maps are given. First, a path is planned along roads that have been seen exactly once during the mapping phase. Secondly, the map is used for vehicle localization in the absence of GPS signals.

Systems and methods are disclosed for an underground antenna structure for radiating through a dissipative medium, the antenna structure. The antenna structure includes a dielectric Substrate, a feeding structure disposed on the Substrate, and one or more electrical conductors. The one or more electrical conductors are disposed on the substrate, oriented, and buried within the dissipative medium. The electrical conductors are also adapted to radiate signals at a frequency in a half-space adjacent to the dissipative medium. The adaptation include a beamwidth state for one or more of the electrical conductors based at

"Interactive reflective writing-enhanced reflection and professional identity formation in medical education – in reply to (1) Hichem Bouayed, Samiullah Dost, and Tanzeel Hussian and (2) Alexander Morgan, James Moore and Alexander Duff." Medical Teacher, 41(2), pp. 236–237

Aim: Clerkship-specific interactive reflective writing (IRW)-enhanced reflection may enhance professional identity formation (PIF), a fundamental goal of medical education. PIF process as revealed in students? reflective writing (RW) has been understudied. Methods: The authors developed an IRW curriculum within a Family Medicine Clerkship (FMC) and analyzed students? reflections about challenging/difficult patient encounters using immersion-crystallization qualitative analysis. Results: The qualitative analysis identified 26 unique emergent themes and five distinct thematic categories (1. Role of emotions, 2. Role of cognition, 3. Behaviorally responding to situational context, 4. Patient factors, and 5. External factors) as well as an emergent PIF model from a directed content analysis. The model describes students? backgrounds, emotions and previous experiences in medicine merging with external factors and processed during student?patient interactions. The RWs also revealed that processing often involves polarities (e.g. empathy/lack of empathy or encouragement/disillusionment) as well as dissonance between idealized visions and lived reality. Conclusions: IRW facilitates and ideally supports grappling with the lived reality of medicine; uncovering a "positive hidden curriculum" within medical education. The authors propose engaging learners in guided critical reflection about complex experiences for meaning-making within a safe learning climate as a valuable way to cultivate reflective, resilient professionals with "prepared" minds and hearts for inevitable challenges of healthcare practice.

With both of his schools having faced inspection last year, headteacher Anthony David will, in this three-part series, offer his advice on effectively handling the preparations, the inspection itself, and the aftermath. He begins with how to prepare for Ofsted…

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Family medicine clerkship directors depend on community preceptors to teach and attract medical students to family medicine. Many community preceptors do not provide the full range of family medicine services, and some are not family physicians. This study aimed to determine the types of practices in which family medicine clerkship students train and whether scope of practice is associated with family medicine Match rates.METHODS: Data were collected as part of the 2014 Council of Academic Family Medicine Educational Research Alliance (CERA) Family Medicine Clerkship Director Survey. Clerkship directors estimated the percentage of their preceptor sites providing each of nine clinical services and the percentage of students placed with internal medicine physicians for their family medicine rotations. We devised a Scope of Practice Index (SPI) to assess scope of practice and measured the association between a clerkship's SPI and family medicine Match rate.RESULTS: Limited scopes of practice were common. SPI was lowest in the Northeast and highest in the West. In bivariate and multivariable analyses, a lower SPI was associated with lower family medicine Match rates. Preventive gynecological care was the service most highly associated with family medicine Match rates. Family medicine Match rates were lower when programs used internal medicine sites for their family medicine rotations.CONCLUSIONS: Many clerkship students are exposed to practices with limited scopes of family medicine practice, and this is associated with lower family medicine Match rates. These findings have implications for the specialty as preceptor scope of practice declines.

High‐flying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are transforming industrial and research agriculture by delivering high spatiotemporal resolution data on a field environment. While current UAVs fly high above fields collecting aerial imagery, future low‐flying aircraft will directly interact with the environment and will utilize a wider variety of sensors. Safely and reliably operating close to unstructured environments requires improving UAVs' sensing, localization, and control algorithms. To this end, we investigate localizing a micro‐UAV in corn phenotyping trials using a laser scanner and IMU to control the altitude and position of the vehicle relative to the plant rows. In this process, the laser scanner is not only a means of localization, but also a scientific instrument for measuring plant properties. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the is capable of safely and reliably operating in real‐world phenotyping trials. We experimentally validate the system in both low and high wind conditions in fully mature corn fields. Using test data from 18 test flights, we show that the UAV is capable of localizing its position to within one field row of the true position.

PURPOSE:Medical students commonly encounter electronic medical records (EMRs) in their ambulatory family medicine clerkships, but how students interact with this technology varies tremendously and presents challenges to students and preceptors. Little research to date has evaluated the impact of EMRs on medical student education in the ambulatory setting; this three-institution study aimed to identify behaviors of ambulatory family medicine preceptors as they relate to EMRs and medical students.METHOD:In 2015, the authors sent e-mails to ambulatory preceptors who in the preceding year had hosted medical students during family medicine clerkships, inviting them to participate in the survey, which asked questions about each preceptor's methods of using the EMR with medical students.RESULTS:Of 801 ambulatory preceptors, 265 (33%) responded. The vast majority of respondents used an EMR and provided students with access to it in some way, but only 62.2% (147/236) allowed students to write electronic notes. Of those who allowed students electronic access, one-third did so by logging students in under their own (the preceptor's) credentials, either by telling the students their log-in information (22/202; 10.9%) or by logging in the student without revealing their passwords (43/202; 21.3%).CONCLUSIONS:Ambulatory medical student training in the use of EMRs not only varies but also requires many preceptors to break rules for students to learn important documentation skills. Without changes to the policies surrounding student access to and use of EMRs, future physicians will enter residency without the training they need to appropriately document patient care.

With both of his schools having faced inspection recently, headteacher Anthony David offers his advice on preparing for inspection, handling the inspection itself, and the aftermath. In the second article in this series, he focuses on the inspection itself and what to expect after receiving the call…

Background and Objectives: The United States of America is currently experiencing a shortage of physicians caring for underserved populations, perpetuated in part by increasingly negative attitudes during medical school towards working with these populations. The objective of this study is to provide a baseline assessment of the attitudes of all medical students at our institution towards caring for the underserved that will then guide the development, implementation and evaluation of a multi-pronged, 5-year intervention. Methods: For this mixed methods, cross-sectional study, we administered the validated Medical Student Attitudes Towards the Underserved (MSATU) survey to all 4 classes at one medical school within one academic year. Statistical analysis was performed through bivariate analyses followed by multivariate regression analyses for significant bivariate associations. Three focus groups involving a total of 23 second-, third- and fourth-year medical students provided qualitative data. Results: The s urvey response rate was 72% (n= 280/395). Higher MSATU scores were significantly associated with an interest in a primary care career and with prior work with the medically underserved. We found no significant association between score and year of training. Focus group participants cited: (1) exposure to underserved populations and (2) clinician role models as major factors affecting their attitudes towards the underserved. Conclusions: In our cross-sectional analysis, student attitudes towards underserved populations did not decline over the span of 4 medical school classes. Ongoing research will attempt to understand more deeply the relationship between medical student characteristics and the decision to care for underserved patients after graduation.

Schools are embracing the role of tablets in the classroom, but with so many options out there it is hard to know where to start. Anthony David reviews some of the possibilities for schools

Recent calls for an expanded perspective on medical education and training include focusing on complexities of professional identity formation (PIF). Medical educators are challenged to facilitate the active constructive, integrative developmental process of PIF within standardized and personalized and/or formal and informal curricular approaches. How can we best support the complex iterative PIF process for a humanistic, resilient health care professional? How can we effectively scaffold the necessary critical reflective learning and practice skill set for our learners to support the shaping of a professional identity?The authors present three pedagogic innovations contributing to the PIF process within undergraduate and graduate medical education (GME) at their institutions. These are (1) interactive reflective writing fostering reflective capacity, emotional awareness, and resiliency (as complexities within physician-patient interactions are explored) for personal and professional development; (2) synergistic teaching modules about mindful clinical practice and resilient responses to difficult interactions, to foster clinician resilience and enhanced well-being for effective professional functioning; and (3) strategies for effective use of a professional development e-portfolio and faculty development of reflective coaching skills in GME.These strategies as "bridges from theory to practice" embody and integrate key elements of promoting and enriching PIF, including guided reflection, the significant role of relationships (faculty and peers), mindfulness, adequate feedback, and creating collaborative learning environments. Ideally, such pedagogic innovations can make a significant contribution toward enhancing quality of care and caring with resilience for the being, relating, and doing of a humanistic health care professional.

Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to deploy sensor networks promises an autonomous and useful method of installation in remote or hard to access locations. Some sensors, such as soil moisture sensors, must be physically installed in soft soil, yet UAVs cannot easily determine soil softness with remote sensors. In this paper, we use data from an onboard accelerometer measured during UAV landings to determine the softness of the ground. We collect and analyze over 200 data sets gathered from 8 different materials: foam, carpet, wood, tile, grass, dirt, concrete, and woodchips. Based on this analysis, we examine a number of features from the accelerometer and four classification algorithms: LDA, QDA, SVM, and binary decision trees. The decision tree performs well and is simple to implement onboard the UAV. We implement this in our UAV control system and perform experiments to verify that the UAV can accurately classify the softness of the surface with 90% accuracy. This lays the groundwork for our future work on developing a UAV capable of installing sensors in soft soil.

Increasingly, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) are changing the way that scientists and practitioners collect environmental data. Current UASs, however, are largely relegated to collecting data while flying remotely, far away in the air. This article examines two case studies where micro-UASs fly in immediate proximity to the environment, enabling them to collect physical samples and capture sensor data that cannot be obtained at a distance. The first case study presents an aerial water sampler that flies to remote locations and dips a pump into the water to collect samples for lab analysis. The second case study examines a UAS that flies within a meter of crops to accurately measure their height. Each requires different sensors and methods specifically tailored to operating and interacting near the environment. This article evaluates the performance of these systems and also presents preliminary validation that they collect datasets that are compatible with those gathered by existing approaches. Futhermore, it distills some common underlying design and operating principles shared by UASs aimed at working close to the environment. Finally, this article concludes that in spite of numerous pending challenges, UASs that directly interact with the environment will transform the way environmental data is collected.

Recent calls for an expanded perspective on medical education and training include focusing on complexities of professional identity formation (PIF). Medical educators are challenged to facilitate the active constructive, integrative developmental process of PIF within standardized and personalized and/or formal and informal curricular approaches. How can we best support the complex iterative PIF process for a humanistic, resilient health care professional? How can we effectively scaffold the necessary critical reflective learning and practice skill set for our learners to support the shaping of a professional identity? The authors present three pedagogic innovations contributing to the PIF process within undergraduate and graduate medical education (GME) at their institutions. These are (1) interactive reflective writing fostering reflective capacity, emotional awareness, and resiliency (as complexities within physician–patient interactions are explored) for personal and professional development; (2) synergistic teaching modules about mindful clinical practice and resilient responses to difficult interactions, to foster clinician resilience and enhanced well-being for effective professional functioning; and (3) strategies for effective use of a professional development e-portfolio and faculty development of reflective coaching skills in GME. These strategies as “bridges from theory to practice” embody and integrate key elements of promoting and enriching PIF, including guided reflection, the significant role of relationships (faculty and peers), mindfulness, adequate feedback, and creating collaborative learning environments. Ideally, such pedagogic innovations can make a significant contribution toward enhancing quality of care and caring with resilience for the being, relating, and doing of a humanistic health care professional.

The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University is introducing a longitudinal integrated clerkship for third year students in the Primary Care-Population Medicine Program as an alternative to more traditional clerkship models. In developing the longitudinal integrated clerkship, program faculty incorporated a historical perspective of medical education, modern knowledge about students' development of clinical skills, and educational science as it relates to faculty development and learner evaluation. The longitudinal integrated clerkship is being tailored to the fit the Brown University system; as such, it will be unique in its attention to population medicine, including its exposure of students to several distinct health care systems within a single geographic region, and integration of clinical training with completion of a Master's in Population Medicine.

In the first of his new monthly column, Anthony David scrutinises the landscape for assessment and advises readers to get back to the basics of good marking.

With an election looming, Anthony David looks at the policies of the three main political parties and shares his opinions on what the implications of a new administration might be.