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Background: Musculoskeletal disorders are commonly encountered by physicians and affected an estimated 126.6 million Americans in 2012. Nonetheless, musculoskeletal education has been inadequate in United States medical schools. Objective: To determine the musculoskeletal competency of third-year medical students. Method: A nationally validated cross-sectional, 25-question musculoskeletal competency exam was given to third-year medical students. A survey was given to second- and third-year medical students to assess students' level of interest in musculoskeletal medicine and obtain their feedback regarding the curriculum. Results: The mean score of the competency exam was 69.0%. Forty-eight out of 107 students (44.9%) reached the minimum passing score of 70%. Free-response feedback from both classes featured themes of more hands-on learning, a longer clinical block, and more small-group learning sessions. Conclusions: Third-year medical students scored relatively well on the exam. Student feedback suggests the 2-week musculoskeletal block is useful and relevant to their future careers.

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2451.2009.01693.x Byline: Stjepan G. Mestrovic (1), Ryan Ashley Caldwell (2) Abstract: In a continued attempt to comprehend Durkheim's original understanding of anomie as a form of dereglement or derangement, we begin with a discussion of how the experiences of abuse at Abu Ghraib fit his model of a deranged, anomic social system. To bolster our interpretation we show how this, more accurate, understanding of anomie as derangement is useful for understanding war crimes in general, an area where Durkheim's concept of anomie has been infrequently applied as a descriptor for research and analysis. Additionally, the concept of post-emotionalism is used to capture a number of related themes in this discussion pertaining to the sociology of knowledge: how and why original meanings of both the abuse at Abu Ghraib and Durkheim's concept of derangement have been taken out of context and result in displaced emotions, scapegoating and misplaced responsibility in intellectual discourse as well as the military justice system. Author Affiliation: (1)Texas A&M University (2)Soka University of America in southern California

Multicarrier code-division multiple access (CDMA) with time and frequency spreading has been recently considered as a candidate for fourth-generation (4G) wireless systems. This signaling scheme simultaneously utilizes code spreading in the time and frequency domains to simultaneously improve frequency diversity and minimize multiuser access interference. As a result, it is capable of outperforming multicarrier CDMA systems that employ 1-D spreading. In this paper, a novel adaptive subcarrier allocation algorithm is developed for multicarrier CDMA with time and frequency spreading to improve the overall bit error rate (BER) performance for all spreading configurations. This algorithm assigns users to subcarrier groups that provide favorable fading characteristics while simultaneously reducing the amount of interference caused to other users. The proposed algorithm is shown to provide a performance improvement, ranging from 1.5 dB with 2 x 16 (time x frequency) and spreading to 7 dB with 16 x 2 (time x frequency) spreading. The algorithm is also shown to maintain or improve the BER floor for each spreading configuration. It is concluded that at higher and lower levels of [E.sub.b]/[N.sub.o], a higher frequency- and time-domain spreading should be, respectively, employed to improve BER performance. Furthermore, the [E.sub.b]/[N.sub.o] threshold level to switch between time and frequency spreading for the analyzed system is found to be 2.5 dB. Index Terms--Adaptive subcarrier allocation, multicarrier code-division multiple access (CDMA), synchronous reverse links, time- and frequency-domain spreading.