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THE Professional Development Phase (PDP) was conceived by the RCVS Education Strategy Steering Group, which began work in 2000 and piloted the first PDP logbook in 2002/03. Refinement over succeeding years led to its full introduction for the 2007 cohort of graduates. The scheme remains voluntary under the terms of the current Veterinary Surgeons Act, but has become a professional obligation for anyone qualifying after 2007, who will need to have completed their PDP before enrolling to study for a RCVS postgraduate certificate. Here, Julian Wells provides an update on how the scheme is progressing.

Popular understandings of the financial crisis tend to focus on the rents extracted by elite personnel in the financial sector. Professional discussions, however, have addressed the faulty assumptions underlying theory and practice – in particular, the assumption that returns to financial assets follow the Gaussian distribution, in the face of much empirical evidence that these have power law distributions with far higher kurtosis. It turns out that the power law tails of returns to financial assets are also a feature of the distribution of company rates of profit, a discovery that stems from proposals to ‘dissolve’ the traditional transformation problem by abandoning the condition of a uniform rate of profit and instead considering its distribution.Marx himself was aware of the importance of considering the distributional properties of economic variables, based on his reading of Quetelet. In fact, heavy-tailed distributions characterise a wide range of variables in capitalist economies, the best-known probably being the Paretian tail component in distributions of income and wealth. Nor is this simply an empirical fact – such distributions emerge readily from a range of agent-based simulations.Capitalist economies are, in a particular technical sense, complex self-organising systems perpetually on the brink of crisis. This modern understanding is prefigured in Marx’s discussion of how the compulsive character of social relations emerges from the atomistic exercise of human free will in commercial society. The developing literature of probabilistic Marxism successfully applies these insights to the wider fields of econophysics and complexity, demonstrating the continuing relevance of Marx’s thought.

In its strategic plan, the University of Greenwich envisages a significant shift to resource-based learning (RBL). Enterprise in Higher Education (EHE) has funded five pilot RBL projects during the past year, including one in introductory economics. The project was managed by three lecturers in the School of Social Sciences, supported by an Academic Development Officer. Learning outcomes were completely revised, and a range of assessment strategies, including computer-based tests, was identified. A resources guide was produced which identified the materials and activities that would enable students to achieve the learning outcomes. A number of innovations were adopted, including: • computer-based curriculum delivery, assessment, and student evaluation of the course; • an open approach to assessment; • abolishing lectures in favour of a diverse range of teaching and learning activities.DOI:10.1080/0968776960040114

Greenwich University’s School of Social Sciences has recently completed pilot delivery of a new introductory economics unit making extensive use of computers for assessment and learning. A number of other innovations were introduced into this Enterprise-Funded project, whose students were drawn from a wide variety of pathways including Mathematics, Computing, Chemistry, Humanities and Engineering.

The professional development phase (PDP) was introduced three years ago to help support veterinary graduates as they begin their careers in clinical practice. Julian Wells, one of the scheme9s postgraduate deans, assesses progress so far