Appreciative assessment.

In this article, we propose a new 'appreciative' attitude towards assessment, on two grounds. Firstly, in order to accommodate and benefit from diversity, in both medical practice and medical education; and secondly in order to promote critical thinking, self awareness and capability in trainees more generally. Appreciative assessment requires a dialogic approach - an approach which is already well established in the context of educational supervision, but which we argue is just as applicable to assessment.

A pedagogy of the particular - towards training capable GPs.

The General Medical Council (GMC) has called upon the Royal Postgraduate Medical Colleges to redesign their curricula using principles of capability. This offers an opportunity to better align the General Practice training curriculum with the role of the general practitioner, and we argue that approaches have already been developed that may be adapted to support the teaching and assessment of capability. We set out our understanding of how capability differs from competency, in particular how the former emphasises the ongoing creation of everyday knowledge within clinical practice. We offer an expanded version of capability comprising a prospective disposition towards noticing and responding to novelty. We offer some suggestions around how capability can be developed: through heightened sensitivity to context, development of divergent thinking and assessment of zones of professional practice. We emphasise the role of the supervisor in helping to support these dispositions through an appreciative, and collaborative, approach that acknowledges the full range of reasonable decisions applicable to each particular context.

The effect of many-body interactions on the electrostatic force in an array of spherical particles.

The effect of many-body interactions on the electrostatic force between spheres in an array of charged spherical particles has been quantified by solving the non-linear Poisson-Boltzmann equation (PBE) using a finite element method (FEM) model. The equation is solved for conditions of constant surface potential. The effect of the dimensionless Debye length scaled radius of the spheres on the electrostatic force between them has been determined and a significant reduction of the force is observed as the dimensionless Debye radius is decreased. Calculations based on the dimensionless separation distance between a pair of charged spheres in isolation confirm an exponential decay of the repulsive electrostatic force as the surface to surface separation distance is increased. In contrast, calculations based on an array of interacting spheres in certain critical packing conditions reveal considerable reduction in the magnitude of the repulsive electrostatic force at separation distances less than half the sphere radius. The latter results are explained by considering the directional cancellation effects of the electrical double layer between adjacent spheres placed in certain orientations within the array. This is believed to be a surprising many-body effect which has been overlooked in previous studies and whose validity can be used to explain the stability and strength of charged sphere arrays under certain critical geometric configurations.