[Novel admission procedure for medical students leads to equal opportunities for the individuals-but may aggravate the shortage of rural doctors]. / Neues Zulassungsverfahren Humanmedizin: höhere individuelle Gerechtigkeit, aber Verstärkung des Landarztmangels?

BACKGROUND: In 2017, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled several aspects of the German student admission process unconstitutional. Consequently, the waiting time quota was replaced by an aptitude quota in 2020. Students are now allowed to simultaneously apply to all German medical faculties and an adjustment algorithm for school leaving grades from different federal states was introduced. The present study investigates the impact of these changes on the new study cohorts. METHODS: Records from the federal admission trust were used to compare the final two winter semesters before the change to the first three thereafter. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The impact of the new procedure on students with previous medical training cannot yet be conclusively assessed. While grade point average (GPA) and sex of the students remained comparable and students still prefer to study close to home; however, they have become younger. The adjustment for school leaving grades indeed led to equal opportunities for the individual applicant; however, this may aggravate the shortage of rural doctors. The current adjustment mechanism considers applicant numbers, yet less people apply from rural areas while at the same time these areas suffer from a shortage of physicians. As rural upbringing and education are the best predictors of rural practice after licensing, the shortage may worsen. To counteract this, the compensation mechanism for the school leaving grades could easily be adjusted.

Applying to college: Do information deficits lower the likelihood of college-eligible students from less-privileged families to pursue their college intentions?: Evidence from a field experiment.

Information deficits are considered an important source of why students from less-privileged families do not enroll in college, even when they are college-eligible and intend to go to college. In this paper, we examine whether correct and detailed information on the costs of and returns to higher education increases the likelihood of college applications of less-privileged high school graduates who expressed college intentions in their junior high school year. We employ an experimental design with a randomly assigned 25-minute information treatment about funding opportunities for, and returns to, higher education given at Berlin schools awarding university entrance qualifications. Our analyses show that our information treatment indeed substantially increases the likelihood of treated less-privileged students to apply to college. Our study indicates that our low-cost provision of financial information not only increased their college knowledge but also substantially changed their college application behavior, despite other existing barriers, like economic constraints.

Single-Station Coda Wave Interferometry: A Feasibility Study Using Machine Learning.

Coda wave interferometry usually is applied with pairs of stations analyzing the signal transmitted from one station to another. A feasibility study was performed to evaluate if one single station could be used. In this case, the reflected coda wave signal from a zone to be identified was analyzed. Finite-difference simulations of wave propagation were used to study whether ultrasonic measurements could be used to detect velocity changes in such a zone up to a depth of 1.6 m in a highly scattering medium. For this aim, 1D convolutional neural networks were used for prediction. The crack density, the crack length, and the intrinsic attenuation were varied in the considered background material. The influence of noise and the sensor width was elaborated as well. It was shown that, in general, the suggested single-station approach is a possible way to identify damage zones, and the method was robust against the studied variations. The suggested workflow also took advantage of machine-learning techniques, and can be transferred to the detection of defects in concrete structures.

Sensitivity of Ultrasonic Coda Wave Interferometry to Material Damage-Observations from a Virtual Concrete Lab.

Ultrasonic measurements are used in civil engineering for structural health monitoring of concrete infrastructures. The late portion of the ultrasonic wavefield, the coda, is sensitive to small changes in the elastic moduli of the material. Coda Wave Interferometry (CWI) correlates these small changes in the coda with the wavefield recorded in intact, or unperturbed, concrete specimen to reveal the amount of velocity change that occurred. CWI has the potential to detect localized damages and global velocity reductions alike. In this study, the sensitivity of CWI to different types of concrete mesostructures and their damage levels is investigated numerically. Realistic numerical concrete models of concrete specimen are generated, and damage evolution is simulated using the discrete element method. In the virtual concrete lab, the simulated ultrasonic wavefield is propagated from one transducer using a realistic source signal and recorded at a second transducer. Different damage scenarios reveal a different slope in the decorrelation of waveforms with the observed reduction in velocities in the material. Finally, the impact and possible generalizations of the findings are discussed, and recommendations are given for a potential application of CWI in concrete at structural scale.