What do primary teachers need to understand, and how? Developing an applied linguistics curriculum for pre-service primary school teacher

Seminars were designed to encourage debate about the applied linguistics understandings that are most helpful to primary school teachers in designing and teaching the language and literacy curriculum, in working with pupils with identified speech and language needs, and in working with other professionals such as educational psychologists and speech and language therapists. Participants were invited to consider what would be most helpful for primary-school teachers to understand about applied linguistics perspectives, and how this understanding could best be developed. These seminars are possibly the first UK opportunity for such a wide range of people to discuss these issues. Discussion came not only from the different professional concerns and research perspectives but also from differences in how Scotland and England make, implement and monitor language and literacy education policy. The two seminars were designed to run as a conversation, and the papers in the second seminar developed themes and issues raised in the first, as well as introducing new themes of their own. The first seminar made the case for how applied linguistics perspectives can, and do, inform the curriculum and pedagogy in primary schools. Professor Debra Myhill (Exeter University) began by reporting on her research on Writers as Designers. She summarised some of the research on young writers' linguistic development - their lexical choices, syntactic features, and thematic variety - arguing that linguistic knowledge is necessary for good writers but not sufficient: good writers need also to have access to a thinking repertoire from which they design, craft and shape texts that meet their communicative goals. In doing this, the relationship between the writer, the text and context is central, and teachers need to draw on knowledge from all these perspectives

Eddy-current-free switching of permalloy thin films

Eddy current free switching of permalloy thin magnetic film, and large-angle flux reversal measurement

A safer place for patients: learning to improve patient safety

1 Every day over one million people are treated successfully by National Health Service (NHS) acute, ambulance and mental health trusts. However, healthcare relies on a range of complex interactions of people, skills, technologies and drugs, and sometimes things do go wrong. For most countries, patient safety is now the key issue in healthcare quality and risk management. The Department of Health (the Department) estimates that one in ten patients admitted to NHS hospitals will be unintentionally harmed, a rate similar to other developed countries. Around 50 per cent of these patient safety incidentsa could have been avoided, if only lessons from previous incidents had been learned. 2 There are numerous stakeholders with a role in keeping patients safe in the NHS, many of whom require trusts to report details of patient safety incidents and near misses to them (Figure 2). However, a number of previous National Audit Office reports have highlighted concerns that the NHS has limited information on the extent and impact of clinical and non-clinical incidents and trusts need to learn from these incidents and share good practice across the NHS more effectively (Appendix 1). 3 In 2000, the Chief Medical Officer’s report An organisation with a memory 1 , identified that the key barriers to reducing the number of patient safety incidents were an organisational culture that inhibited reporting and the lack of a cohesive national system for identifying and sharing lessons learnt. 4 In response, the Department published Building a safer NHS for patients3 detailing plans and a timetable for promoting patient safety. The goal was to encourage improvements in reporting and learning through the development of a new mandatory national reporting scheme for patient safety incidents and near misses. Central to the plan was establishing the National Patient Safety Agency to improve patient safety by reducing the risk of harm through error. The National Patient Safety Agency was expected to: collect and analyse information; assimilate other safety-related information from a variety of existing reporting systems; learn lessons and produce solutions. 5 We therefore examined whether the NHS has been successful in improving the patient safety culture, encouraging reporting and learning from patient safety incidents. Key parts of our approach were a census of 267 NHS acute, ambulance and mental health trusts in Autumn 2004, followed by a re-survey in August 2005 and an omnibus survey of patients (Appendix 2). We also reviewed practices in other industries (Appendix 3) and international healthcare systems (Appendix 4), and the National Patient Safety Agency’s progress in developing its National Reporting and Learning System (Appendix 5) and other related activities (Appendix 6). 6 An organisation with a memory1 was an important milestone in the NHS’s patient safety agenda and marked the drive to improve reporting and learning. At the local level the vast majority of trusts have developed a predominantly open and fair reporting culture but with pockets of blame and scope to improve their strategies for sharing good practice. Indeed in our re-survey we found that local performance had continued to improve with more trusts reporting having an open and fair reporting culture, more trusts with open reporting systems and improvements in perceptions of the levels of under-reporting. At the national level, progress on developing the national reporting system for learning has been slower than set out in the Department’s strategy of 2001 3 and there is a need to improve evaluation and sharing of lessons and solutions by all organisations with a stake in patient safety. There is also no clear system for monitoring that lessons are learned at the local level. Specifically: a The safety culture within trusts is improving, driven largely by the Department’s clinical governance initiative 4 and the development of more effective risk management systems in response to incentives under initiatives such as the NHS Litigation Authority’s Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts (Appendix 7). However, trusts are still predominantly reactive in their response to patient safety issues and parts of some organisations still operate a blame culture. b All trusts have established effective reporting systems at the local level, although under-reporting remains a problem within some groups of staff, types of incidents and near misses. The National Patient Safety Agency did not develop and roll out the National Reporting and Learning System by December 2002 as originally envisaged. All trusts were linked to the system by 31 December 2004. By August 2005, at least 35 trusts still had not submitted any data to the National Reporting and Learning System. c Most trusts pointed to specific improvements derived from lessons learnt from their local incident reporting systems, but these are still not widely promulgated, either within or between trusts. The National Patient Safety Agency has provided only limited feedback to trusts of evidence-based solutions or actions derived from the national reporting system. It published its first feedback report from the Patient Safety Observatory in July 2005

Using play and story-telling in a clinical setting to improve well-being for people with long term conditions.

This critical appraisal explores nine published works and discusses how it has informed and developed the author as a clinician, researcher, and teacher over the last nine years. As a dramatherapist, in clinical practice, across different clinical settings and populations, they clinical work has incorporated different art forms, such as storytelling, role-play and performance to support therapeutic change. This has been paired with the demands of delivering influential research and evaluation in healthcare settings through using innovative methods, and approaches including therapeutic treatment manuals to support intervention efficacy. The challenges of conducting research with standard methodologies, such as systematic reviews, case studies and feasibility studies, whilst congruent with arts therapies practice is considered

The spring bounces back: introducing the strain elevation tension spring embedding algorithm for network representation

This paper introduces the strain elevation tension spring embedding (SETSe) algorithm. SETSe is a novel graph embedding method that uses a physical model to project feature-rich networks onto a manifold with semi-Euclidean properties. Due to its method, SETSe avoids the tractability issues faced by traditional force-directed graphs, having an iteration time and memory complexity that is linear to the number of edges in the network. SETSe is unusual as an embedding method as it does not reduce dimensionality or explicitly attempt to place similar nodes close together in the embedded space. Despite this, the algorithm outperforms five common graph embedding algorithms, on graph classification and node classification tasks, in low-dimensional space. The algorithm is also used to embed 100 social networks ranging in size from 700 to over 40,000 nodes and up to 1.5 million edges. The social network embeddings show that SETSe provides a more expressive alternative to the popular assortativity metric and that even on large complex networks, SETSe’s classification ability outperforms the naive baseline and the other embedding methods in low-dimensional representation. SETSe is a fast and flexible unsupervised embedding algorithm that integrates node attributes and graph topology to produce interpretable results

Signal Processing

Contains reports on one research project.Joint Services Electronics Programs (U. S. Army, U. S. Navy, and U. S. Air Force) under Contract DA 28-043-AMC-02536(E

Thermal energy storage material thermophysical property measurement and heat transfer impact

The thermophysical properties of salts having potential for thermal energy storage to provide peaking energy in conventional electric utility power plants were investigated. The power plants studied were the pressurized water reactor, boiling water reactor, supercritical steam reactor, and high temperature gas reactor. The salts considered were LiNO3, 63LiOH/37 LiCl eutectic, LiOH, and Na2B4O7. The thermal conductivity, specific heat (including latent heat of fusion), and density of each salt were measured for a temperature range of at least + or - 100 K of the measured melting point. Measurements were made with both reagent and commercial grades of each salt

Book Review

Reviewing Charles Kramer, The Negligent Doctor, Crown Publishers Inc., 196

Extraction of Transcript Diversity from Scientific Literature

Transcript diversity generated by alternative splicing and associated mechanisms contributes heavily to the functional complexity of biological systems. The numerous examples of the mechanisms and functional implications of these events are scattered throughout the scientific literature. Thus, it is crucial to have a tool that can automatically extract the relevant facts and collect them in a knowledge base that can aid the interpretation of data from high-throughput methods. We have developed and applied a composite text-mining method for extracting information on transcript diversity from the entire MEDLINE database in order to create a database of genes with alternative transcripts. It contains information on tissue specificity, number of isoforms, causative mechanisms, functional implications, and experimental methods used for detection. We have mined this resource to identify 959 instances of tissue-specific splicing. Our results in combination with those from EST-based methods suggest that alternative splicing is the preferred mechanism for generating transcript diversity in the nervous system. We provide new annotations for 1,860 genes with the potential for generating transcript diversity. We assign the MeSH term “alternative splicing” to 1,536 additional abstracts in the MEDLINE database and suggest new MeSH terms for other events. We have successfully extracted information about transcript diversity and semiautomatically generated a database, LSAT, that can provide a quantitative understanding of the mechanisms behind tissue-specific gene expression. LSAT (Literature Support for Alternative Transcripts) is publicly available at http://www.bork.embl.de/LSAT/

Introducing Challenging Women

Non