Modernising the nursing curriculum: older people and nursing students

This article discusses the need for educationalists, students and qualified nursing staff to view working with older people as a positive and rewarding career move

A new way of linking information theory with cognitive science

The relationship between the notion of *information* in information theory, and the notion of *information processing* in cognitive science, has long been controversial. But as the present paper shows, part of the disagreement arises from conflating different formulations of measurement. Clarifying distinctions reveals it is the context-free nature of Shannon's information average that is particular problematic from the cognitive point of view. Context-sensitive evaluation is then shown to be a way of addressing the problems that arise

A low sidelobe asymmetric beam antenna for high altitude platform communications

In a communications network served by a high altitude platform, the antenna beams illuminating each cell require minimized sidelobe powers. Asymmetric beams are advantageous so that cell footprints remain circular. At millimeter wavelengths a lens antenna can have the desired properties. We have chosen a 6 km diameter cell at 32 degrees elevation angle and shown how the required beam asymmetry can be implemented using an optimized polynomial for describing the lens profile. The measured average sidelobe level is below -42 dB

Values based practice and authoritarianism

Values based practice (VBP) is a radical view of the place of values in medicine which develops from a philosophical analysis of values, illness and the role of ethical principles. It denies two attractive and traditional but misguided views of medicine: that diagnosis is a merely factual matter and that the values that should guide treatment and management can be codified in principles. But, in the work of KWM (Bill) Fulford, it goes further in the form of a radical liberal view: that the idea of an antecedently good outcome should be replaced by that of a right process. That however leads to a dilemma as to whether it can account for its own normative status. Given that difficulty, why might one adopt the radical version? I sketch a possible motive drawing on Rorty’s rejection of authoritarianism which replaces objectivity with solidarity as the aim of judgement. But I argue that, nevertheless, this does not justify the rejection of the more modest particularist version of VBP

Should comprehensive diagnosis include idiographic understanding?

The World Psychiatric Association has emphasised the importance of idiographic understanding as a distinct component of comprehensive assessment but in introductions to the idea it is often assimilated to the notion of narrative judgement. This paper aims to distinguish between supposed idiographic and narrative judgement. Taking the former to mean a kind of individualised judgement, I argue that it has no place in psychiatry in part because it threatens psychiatric validity. Narrative judgement, by contrast, is a genuinely distinct complement to criteriological diagnosis but it is, nevertheless, a special kind of general judgement and thus can possess validity. To argue this I first examine the origin of the distinction between idiographic and nomothetic in Windelband's 1894 rectorial address. I argue that none of three ways of understanding that distinction is tenable. Windelband's description of historical methods, as a practical example, does not articulate a genuine form of understanding. A metaphysical distinction between particulars and general kinds is guilty of subscribing to the Myth of the Given. A distinction based on an abstraction of essentially combined aspects of empirical judgement cannot underpin a distinct empirical method. Furthermore, idiographic elements understood as individualised judgements threaten the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. In the final part I briefly describe some aspects of the logic of narrative judgements and argue that in the call for comprehensive diagnosis, narrative rather than idiographic elements have an important role. Importantly, however, whilst directed towards individual subjects, narratives are framed in intrinsically general concepts and thus can aspire to validity

The Pixel Frontier: Electronic Books Twenty-first Century In The Library

The author examines the growing popularity and acceptance of e-books by taking a look at their availability, strengths and weaknesses, acceptance by users, and ways to introduce readers to the format. This was accomplished through a survey of the literature, observations of users, and an informal survey of students at Carson-Newman College