Balancing the role of the dental school in teaching, research and patient care; including care for underserved areas

Inequalities within dentistry are common and are reflected in wide differences in the levels of oral health and the standard of care available both within and between countries and communities. Furthermore there are patients, particularly those with special treatment needs, who do not have the same access to dental services as the general public. The dental school should aim to recruit students from varied backgrounds into all areas covered by the oral healthcare team and to train students to treat the full spectrum of patients including those with special needs. It is essential, however, that the dental student achieves a high standard of clinical competence and this cannot be gained by treating only those patients with low expectations for care. Balancing these aspects of clinical education is difficult. Research is an important stimulus to better teaching and better clinical care. It is recognized that dental school staff should be active in research, teaching, clinical work and frequently administration. Maintaining a balance between the commitments to clinical care, teaching and research while also taking account of underserved areas in each of these categories is a difficult challenge but one that has to be met to a high degree in a successful, modern dental school.

Weather conditions and moon phase influence on Tropical Screech Owl and Burrowing Owl detection by playback

Sampling owls in a reliable and standardized way is not easy given their nocturnal habits. Playback is a widely employed technique to survey owls. We assessed the influence of wind speed, temperature, air humidity, and moon phase on the response rate of the Tropical Screech Owl Megascops choliba and the Burrowing Owl Athene cunicularia in southeast Brazil. Tropical Screech Owl occurs in scrubland and wooded habitats, whereas the Burrowing Owl inhabits open grasslands to grassland savannah. Sixteen survey points were systematically distributed in four different landscape types, ranging from open grassland to woodland savannah. Field work was conducted in 2004 from June to December, the reproductive season of the two owl species. Our study design consisted of eight field expeditions of five nights each; four expeditions occurred under full moon and four under new moon conditions. At each survey station, we performed a broadcast/listening sequence involving several calls and vocalizations from each species, starting with Tropical Screech Owl (the smaller species). From 112 sample periods for each species within their respective preferred habitats, we obtained 54 responses from Tropical Screech Owl (48% response rate) and 30 responses (27% response rate) from Burrowing Owl. We found that the response rate of Tropical Screech Owl increased under conditions of higher temperature and air humidity, while the response rate of Burrowing Owl was higher during full moon nights.

Density profiles in the raise and peel model with and without a wall; physics and combinatorics

We consider the raise and peel model of a one-dimensional fluctuating interface in the presence of an attractive wall. The model can also describe a pair annihilation process in disordered unquenched media with a source at one end of the system. For the stationary states, several density profiles are studied using Monte Carlo simulations. We point out a deep connection between some profiles seen in the presence of the wall and in its absence. Our results are discussed in the context of conformal invariance ( c = 0 theory). We discover some unexpected values for the critical exponents, which are obtained using combinatorial methods. We have solved known ( Pascal`s hexagon) and new (split-hexagon) bilinear recurrence relations. The solutions of these equations are interesting in their own right since they give information on certain classes of alternating sign matrices.