Telephone survey evaluation of the educational impact of a distance learning course

The educational impact of a distance learning (DL) course entitled ''Health Screening for Health Promotion, was investigated using a telephone questionnaire survey. An introduction to the DL course was distributed to all community pharmacists in England (16,400); the main body of the course, on which pharmacists were examined, was distributed free of charge to all pharmacists who requested it (1,485). Pharmacists participating in the survey (868) were organized by random selection into groups and stratified according to age, sex and postcode. A matched control group was randomly drawn from those pharmacists who had not participated in the course. The DL course improved pharmacists' knowledge about health screening/health promotion issues (e.g., mean score of 66 percent achieved by a group who had completed the course; 51 percent achieved by the control group; P<0.001). Factors influencing score achieved included sex and year of registration. Males performed better than females (P<0.008) while performance decreased with number of years on the register (P<0.001).

The Paralax Infrastructure: Automatic Parallelization With a Helping Hand

Speeding up sequential programs on multicores is a challenging problem that is in urgent need of a solution. Automatic parallelization of irregular pointer-intensive codes, exempli?ed by the SPECint codes, is a very hard problem. This paper shows that, with a helping hand, such auto-parallelization is possible and fruitful. This paper makes the following contributions: (i) A compiler framework for extracting pipeline-like parallelism from outer program loops is presented. (ii) Using a light-weight programming model based on annotations, the programmer helps the compiler to ?nd thread-level parallelism. Each of the annotations speci?es only a small piece of semantic information that compiler analysis misses, e.g. stating that a variable is dead at a certain program point. The annotations are designed such that correctness is easily veri?ed. Furthermore, we present a tool for suggesting annotations to the programmer. (iii) The methodology is applied to autoparallelize several SPECint benchmarks. For the benchmark with most parallelism (hmmer), we obtain a scalable 7-fold speedup on an AMD quad-core dual processor. The annotations constitute a parallel programming model that relies extensively on a sequential program representation. Hereby, the complexity of debugging is not increased and it does not obscure the source code. These properties could prove valuable to increase the ef?ciency of parallel programming.