I know this has been posted on numerous other websites and social networks, but I find it incredible. This prosthetic arm developed by the UK company RSLSteeper has amazing functionality, controlled by muscles in the upper arm. If it were covered in artificial skin it might look like Luke Skywalker's prosthesis from Star Wars!
Here is a video of the arm in action:
A pretty amazing video showcasing a prosthetic forearm. It's one of those times where I wish I could just travel forward a few decades to see what's in the pipeline!
This is pretty darn funny. Basically, my old university is launching a YouTube appeal to try and get five thousand students to lip-sync to Bonnie Tyler to raise money for LOROS and Prostaid, who offer hospice care and raise awareness for prostate cancer respectively.
I’m probably not going to be able to see it, but if you’re in Leicester, make sure to visit De Montfort University to check it out! It’s taking place on the 7th November 2012 in Magazine Square, which is right on the campus.
Read updates about this by following De Montfort’s Vice Chancellor on Twitter: @DMUVC.
The UKCAT is the United Kingdom Clinical Aptitude Test. It is a two-hour exam used by the majority of medical schools in the UK to distinguish between applicants. It is sat in designated test centres via a computer and all the questions are multiple choice. It is also probably one of the most difficult tests ever to prepare for.
The reason for this is that the UKCAT isn’t testing you on anything in particular, and the stuff it does test you on isn’t to do with medicine. It’s more like a series of little puzzles and logic tests under a very restrictive time limit. The idea is to test your ability to think rather than remember, and to see if you can cope in doing it in such a small amount of time.
In this post I hope to provide some little nuggets of information to help you through, as well as a handy resource list at the bottom.
Introduction
If you’re preparing to sit the UKCAT, the first thing you should do is click onto Amazon (or go to your local bookshop) and pick up a copy of ‘600 UKCAT Questions‘ by ISC Medical. This is by far and away the best resource to prepare from. And I say prepare, not revise, because the test is built from the ground up to try to stop you revising for it.
The book contains a bulk of sample questions (well … 600 of them) covering four sections: verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, abstract reasoning and decision analysis. Here’s a quick breakdown of what these odd titles mean.
Verbal Reasoning
22 minutes
44 questions
Each question in this section starts with a big block of writing to read. After you’ve read it, you’re given a statement, and you have to deduce from the text whether the statement is correct, false, or cannot be proved to be either.
Quantitative Reasoning
23 minutes
33 questions
Basically, this section is GCSE maths in multiple choice format. The 600 UKCAT book sample questions for this section are vastly more difficult than the real deal. You’re given a calculator and some space to work out the answers.
Abstract Reasoning
16 minutes
65 questions
For each question, you are shown a shape, and have to decide whether it belongs in one group of shapes (A) or another (B). I found this section the hardest. Just try to look for traits about the shape that might identify it to a group – e.g. if it’s a rectangle, it probably belongs with other rectangles.
Decision Analysis
32 minutes
26 questions
Here, you are given a ‘decoding’ table which shows various symbols and their ‘meanings’. For example, there might be a plus sign ‘+’ with the word ‘elephant’, which means that whenever you see a ‘+’ in the question, you should identify it as meaning elephant. The questions are then given as codes, like ‘< + = B $’. After decoding the meanings via the table, you then choose between four written interpretations, picking based on whichever seems most appropriate to the original code.
N.B. There is technically a fifth section – the situational judgement test. Don’t worry about this though. It’s like a basic ‘what would you do’ set of scenarios to see what your personality’s like. You don’t get a score for this section, but hey, you may as well just answer honestly.
Flagging and Guessing
One of the most important things to remember when sitting the UKCAT is the idea of flagging. The UKCAT program has a little flag shaped button which when pressed ‘flags’ the question. You can then skip right on to the next question and review the flagged questions later. The reason this is so important is because of the very short time limit. There are simply so many questions with such little time to do them that there is no point sitting stuck on just one.
The moment you start thinking ‘wow, this question is hard’ is the moment you should be flagging and guessing. This is especially true in quantitative reasoning: I was advised that if I came across any question longer than one line, I should flag it, guess it and leave it. When you guess randomly, always guess the same letter to maximise your odds; as a set amount of answers are bound to be, say, answer C.
Use Their Stuff!
Another tip is that even though the test is done on a computer screen, that doesn’t mean you can’t jot things down. As well as a calculator, you are provided with a whiteboard and pen. These are very important tools. Use them to follow your working on maths questions with several stages (assuming you don’t just flag and guess these outright), and to jot down decoded phrases during decision analysis. It seriously makes the last section so much simpler to see it written out.
And finally – always keep your cool. Manage your time well and you will do great. If you liked this short guide, or have any questions, let me know in the comments. Good luck!
So whilst I’ve been getting ready to hit the books again, I’ve been having a think about how to improve my way of studying. What I used to do was print off literally everything, PowerPoints, case studies, the lot – then bung it in huge folders to lug around. This isn’t the best system for several reasons, such as ink costs (and back ache).
My friends before med school always used to be very into taking notes digitally. Most of them did computer science, so it made sense for them really – it meant they could check their coding and other strange wizardry. When I was studying my first degree in English though, taking a computer into lectures never really seemed necessary. Out of a class of about eighty, exactly no-one used anything but scribbles on paper. Medicine works differently, though. Whereas in English, a lot of the work was interpreting, medicine will often require you to just gobble down vast quantities of information. Printing and annotating slides or keeping a notepad can work, but it isn’t perfect.
So my new goal is to go paperless. I want all my notes to be everywhere I go, and searchable so I don’t have to dig around for them. The way other bloggers have recommended doing this is to get a tablet, annotate your slides on that and then send everything into something called Evernote. Evernote is basically like a big digital filing cabinet in the sky that you can throw all of your files at. It’ll then let you organise and search through them from any PC, or on your phone, or whatever. So you could be sat typing up your lecture notes on your tablet/netbook and then read them later on the bus from your phone.
A lot of medical students have blogs specifically on Evernote that you can read – one that looks at it in a lot of detail is managingmedicine.wordpress.com – which you should definitely check out. Hope this stuff helps!
I think it’s time for a quick update. To cut a long story short, I am now retaking the first year of medicine, having had to interrupt study on health reasons. This was very unfortunate, but I had a ton of support from everyone involved.
My medical school was nothing short of excellent during the whole process, providing me with all the advice I needed about what my options were. I owe a big thank you to my family and friends too, who made me realise I am one very lucky guy. Every effort was made to make the whole thing easier to deal with, and I’m happy to say that everything is now well and truly sorted out.
Anyway, so I recently got asked if I was going to keep the site going, and had two thoughts. One was ‘I totally forgot about that’ and the other was ‘yeah!’.
Just as a quick disclaimer – my blog entries are probably going to become a lot more off the cuff than I’ve been doing them in the past. It’s just tricky finding the time to write full-bodied posts. Hopefully the shorter style means I’ll be able to update this blog more frequently though – I know it hasn’t been getting a lot of attention as late.
Well, it’s been a long, hard slog getting here, but I’m incredibly happy to say that I am now the proud owner of a first class BA honours degree in Creative Writing and English, as well as a place at medical school!
It’s a pretty amazing feeling. So much so that I’m not really sure what to write. I’m definitely going to scrape together some ‘top tips’ about the whole experience.
For now though, I’m hugely thankful to everyone who’s helped me get to where I am. I can think of dozens, but one group is at the very forefront. My tutors at De Montfort University are some of the most delightful people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, and I cannot thank them enough for their help. Others include the kind consultant I shadowed and the volunteering bods at the Leicester Royal Infirmary, the Med Success team at the University of Leicester, and especially, my friends and family – who never failed to remind me how mad they thought I was!
Graduation was an absolute blast. It was great catching up with people and hearing about what they’re up to next. Everyone seems to have something lined up, from staying on at De Montfort (a prospect I am very envious of!) to other jobs and grad schemes up and down the country.
In a way, it kind of highlighted to me how odd it’s going to be to start a whole new degree in a whole new place. I can only say that if it’s half as good as this one’s been, I’ll be happy as Larry.
P.S. I never thought I’d say this, but gowns are fun as heck to wear.
So, I handed in my last piece of university work the other week. Yesterday I ordered my graduation robes. Doesn’t life fly by?
It has been a great three years. I’ve studied a lot of weird and wonderful stuff and can honestly say I’m a very different person now than when I started. I still remember my first creative writing session. I walked in and was immediately freaked out by the workshop, wherein we sat in a large circle and talked about ourselves à la Alcoholics Anonymous. Reading out work in front of others was not a strong point of mine.
It didn’t take long before I really got into it, though. You get a real sense of satisfaction when you see your writing work its magic. It almost makes up for the awkward times when it doesn’t.
My English literature seminars were a little more traditional, but no less thought provoking. I’ve always enjoyed reading, but it’s terrific to have been steered in such a varied direction. It’s like soaking up centuries of cherry-picked thoughts and ideas. Everybody should have a chance to study the humanities.
My graduation is on the 22nd July. I hope my mortarboard isn’t too tight. I’m going to miss this place.
‘The Book Lives On’ – that’s the tag-line for the Amazon Kindle, perhaps the most popular e-book reader on the market.
I wrote an essay just before Christmas entitled The Impact of Electronic Publishing: Are The Book’s Page’s Numbered? After congratulating myself on the title, I spent around two thousand words debating the book’s unsure future. Is it on its way out? How can it compete with the glossy new e-book?
The ‘digitalisation’ of literature isn’t always a pretty process, though. For one thing, writers will arguably take a hit due to unfair royalties. Think of it this way: currently, writers don’t get a huge amount of their books’ profits, because their publishers are footing production costs, including printing. E-books, conversely, have next to no production or distribution costs, as customers can simply buy it on-line.
As a result, writers are looking for improved royalties to make up for the fact that the publishers have less legwork, but the publishers won’t budge. This is just one of several dilemmas, including a possible loss of ‘culture’, that have caused some public distrust towards electronic publishing.
It’s therefore interesting to see the Kindle sidestep this hullabaloo by calling itself the ‘new book’. But perhaps this is exactly right. After all, the original book as we know it didn’t just spring up out of the ground. Its predecessor was the manuscript, and there was no doubt a similar public outcry back then towards the book on its arrival.
Who knows, maybe in a hundred years time, what we know as e-books and Kindles will be called, simply, ‘books’.
So, I’ve been messing around with Google Body. It’s great.
If you haven’t already, head on down to Google to try it out. It’s basically a map of the body that you can explore, with scalers and toggles to hide or show different levels, e.g. the circulatory system or the skeleton. You can also use the search tool to highlight particular parts.
What I’m interested about is what this will mean for medical schools. I mean, all you need is a half decent PC and an internet connection and you’re away, connected to possibly one of the best pieces of anatomical software out there. Imagine how much of a difference this will make, accessible on near enough anything, even tablets. I’ll bet you that it’ll only be a couple of months before we see this taken up by universities and colleges up and down the country.
Jack O'Sullivan
