Conducting culturally relevant assessment requires a combination of the right tools, an adaptive approach to both understanding and conducting assessments and, above all, an appreciation that each child is unique.
Proton transfer reactions are the rate-limiting steps in many biological and synthetic chemical processes, often requiring complex cofactors or catalysts to overcome the generally unfavourable thermodynamic process of carbanion intermediate formation. It has been suggested that quantum tunnelling processes enhance the kinetics of some of these reactions, which when coupled to protein motions may be an important consideration for enzyme catalysis. To obtain a better fundamental and quantitative understanding of these proton transfer mechanisms, a computational analysis of the intramolecular proton transfer from a carbon acid in the small molecule, 4-nitropentanoic acid, in aqueous solution is presented. Potential-energy surfaces from gas-phase, implicit and QM/MM (quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical) explicit solvation quantum chemistry models are compared, and the potential of mean force, for the full reaction coordinate, using umbrella-sampling molecular dynamics is analysed. Semi-classical multidimensional tunnelling corrections are also used to estimate the quantum tunnelling contributions and to understand the origin of the primary deuterium kinetic isotope effects (KIEs). The computational results are found to be in excellent agreement with the KIEs and the energetics obtained experimentally.
Assessing burn scars from photographs is a common practice given the growing trend to support health service delivery via electronic media (eg, email, videoconferencing). Scar rating scales, originally designed for in-person assessment, have been used to rate scars from photographic images. Evidence for the reliability of this practice is lacking. Five raters completed three scar rating scales (Patient and Observer Scar Scale, Manchester Scar Scale, modified Vancouver Scar Scale), both in-person and using photographs on 12 participants (seven male, five female) with 18 scar areas (3 × 3 cm). Interrater reliability for the scar parameters of vascularity, color, contour, pliability, and overall opinion achieved intraclass correlation coefficient values of between 0.71 and 0.87 (in-person) and 0.72 and 0.77 (using photographs) for multiple raters. The level of agreement between in-person and photographic assessment was below acceptable levels, which brings into question construct validity when scar rating scales are used in a way for which they were not designed. Reliability estimates in this study were likely reduced by the underrepresentation of scars in the more severe range. This limitation needs to be addressed in future research. Advances are required in the development and refinement of burn scar rating scales, specifically for photographic use, given their routine use in clinical care.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.