The physical and mental health of acute psychiatric ward staff, and its relationship to experience of physical violence

To evaluate and describe the physical and mental health of staff on acute psychiatric wards and examine whether violence exposure is linked with health status. We undertook a cross-sectional survey with 564 nursing staff and healthcare assistants from 31 psychiatric wards in nine NHS Trusts using the SF-36, a reliable and valid measure of health status and compared summary scores with national normative data. Additional violence exposure data were collated simultaneously and also compared with health status. The physical health of staff was worse, and their mental health was better than the general population. Physical health data were skewed and showed a small number of staff in relatively poor health while the majority were above average. Better physical health was associated with less time in the current post, a higher pay grade, and less exposure to mild physical violence in the past year. Better mental health was associated with being older and from an ethnic minority background. Violence exposure influenced physical health but not mental health when possible confounders were considered. Mental health was strongly influenced by ethnicity, and further research might highlight the impact on own-group ethnic density on the quality of care. The impact of staff whom are physically unwell or impaired in the workplace needs to be considered as the quality of care may be compromised despite this being an example of inclusiveness, equal opportunities employment, and positive staff motivation

Representing Partitions on Trees

In evolutionary biology, biologists often face the problem of constructing a phylogenetic tree on a set X of species from a multiset Π of partitions corresponding to various attributes of these species. One approach that is used to solve this problem is to try instead to associate a tree (or even a network) to the multiset ΣΠ consisting of all those bipartitions {A,X − A} with A a part of some partition in Π. The rational behind this approach is that a phylogenetic tree with leaf set X can be uniquely represented by the set of bipartitions of X induced by its edges. Motivated by these considerations, given a multiset Σ of bipartitions corresponding to a phylogenetic tree on X, in this paper we introduce and study the set P(Σ) consisting of those multisets of partitions Π of X with ΣΠ = Σ. More specifically, we characterize when P(Σ) is non-empty, and also identify some partitions in P(Σ) that are of maximum and minimum size. We also show that it is NP-complete to decide when P(Σ) is non-empty in case Σ is an arbitrary multiset of bipartitions of X. Ultimately, we hope that by gaining a better understanding of the mapping that takes an arbitrary partition system Π to the multiset ΣΠ, we will obtain new insights into the use of median networks and, more generally, split-networks to visualize sets of partitions

On the Effect of Semantically Enriched Context Models on Software Modularization

Many of the existing approaches for program comprehension rely on the linguistic information found in source code, such as identifier names and comments. Semantic clustering is one such technique for modularization of the system that relies on the informal semantics of the program, encoded in the vocabulary used in the source code. Treating the source code as a collection of tokens loses the semantic information embedded within the identifiers. We try to overcome this problem by introducing context models for source code identifiers to obtain a semantic kernel, which can be used for both deriving the topics that run through the system as well as their clustering. In the first model, we abstract an identifier to its type representation and build on this notion of context to construct contextual vector representation of the source code. The second notion of context is defined based on the flow of data between identifiers to represent a module as a dependency graph where the nodes correspond to identifiers and the edges represent the data dependencies between pairs of identifiers. We have applied our approach to 10 medium-sized open source Java projects, and show that by introducing contexts for identifiers, the quality of the modularization of the software systems is improved. Both of the context models give results that are superior to the plain vector representation of documents. In some cases, the authoritativeness of decompositions is improved by 67%. Furthermore, a more detailed evaluation of our approach on JEdit, an open source editor, demonstrates that inferred topics through performing topic analysis on the contextual representations are more meaningful compared to the plain representation of the documents. The proposed approach in introducing a context model for source code identifiers paves the way for building tools that support developers in program comprehension tasks such as application and domain concept location, software modularization and topic analysis

Architectures for the Future Networks and the Next Generation Internet: A Survey

Networking research funding agencies in the USA, Europe, Japan, and other countries are encouraging research on revolutionary networking architectures that may or may not be bound by the restrictions of the current TCP/IP based Internet. We present a comprehensive survey of such research projects and activities. The topics covered include various testbeds for experimentations for new architectures, new security mechanisms, content delivery mechanisms, management and control frameworks, service architectures, and routing mechanisms. Delay/Disruption tolerant networks, which allow communications even when complete end-to-end path is not available, are also discussed

Societies against the Chief? Re-examining the value of ‘heterarchy’ as a concept for examining European Iron Age societies

Carole Crumley’s (1979; 1995a; 1995b; 2015) explorations on the applicability of heterarchy as a concept within archaeology have been highly influential in Anglo-American discourse on social organization. Despite largely emerging from Crumley’s work on Iron Age France (Crumley, 1979), however, the relevance of heterarchy as a concept for challenging hierarchical models of European Iron Age societies has largely been restricted to Britain (e.g. Moore, 2007a; Hill, 2011), where evidence for “elites” seems most obviously lacking. Northwestern Iberia has also been a locus for discussion of acephalous and nonhierarchical social forms (Fernández-Posse & Sánchez-Palencia, 1998; González-García et al., 2011; González-Ruibal, 2012; Sastre-Prats, 2011), but one where explicit discussions of heterarchy have rarely featured. More recently, it has been argued that almost all European Iron Age societies can be regarded as “broadly heterarchical” (e.g. Bradley et al., 2015: 260), although the wider implications of this have yet to be explored. What is the place, then, of heterarchy in Iron Age studies? Has it merely become a label for all nonhierarchical models (Fernández-Götz, 2014: 36), creating various Iron Age “societies against the state” (Clastres, 1977), or does it offer ways of exploring not just alternatives to hierarchies but thicker descriptions of how all Iron Age societies worked

Bayesian nonparametric sparse VAR models

High dimensional vector autoregressive (VAR) models require a large number of parameters to be estimated and may suffer of inferential problems. We propose a new Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) Lasso prior (BNP-Lasso) for high-dimensional VAR models that can improve estimation efficiency and prediction accuracy. Our hierarchical prior overcomes overparametrization and overfitting issues by clustering the VAR coefficients into groups and by shrinking the coefficients of each group toward a common location. Clustering and shrinking effects induced by the BNP-Lasso prior are well suited for the extraction of causal networks from time series, since they account for some stylized facts in real-world networks, which are sparsity, communities structures and heterogeneity in the edges intensity. In order to fully capture the richness of the data and to achieve a better understanding of financial and macroeconomic risk, it is therefore crucial that the model used to extract network accounts for these stylized facts.Comment: Forthcoming in "Journal of Econometrics" ---- Revised Version of the paper "Bayesian nonparametric Seemingly Unrelated Regression Models" ---- Supplementary Material available on reques

Practices to support co-design processes: A case-study of co-designing a program for children with parents with a mental health problem in the Austrian region of Tyrol

Forms of collaborative knowledge production, such as community-academic partnerships (CAP), have been increasingly used in health care. However, instructions on how to deliver such processes are lacking. We aim to identify practice ingredients for one element within a CAP, a 6-month co-design process, during which 26 community- and 13 research-partners collaboratively designed an intervention programme for children whose parent have a mental illness. Using 22 published facilitating and hindering factors for CAP as the analytical framework, eight community-partners reflected on the activities which took place during the co-design process. From a qualitative content analysis of the data, we distilled essential practices for each CAP factor. Ten community- and eight research-partners revised the results and co-authored this article. We identified 36 practices across the 22 CAP facilitating or hindering factors. Most practices address more than one factor. Many practices relate to workshop design, facilitation methods, and relationship building. Most practices were identified for facilitating ‘trust among partners’, ‘shared visions, goals and/or missions’, ‘effective/frequent communication’, and ‘well-structured meetings’. Fewer practices were observed for ‘effective conflict resolution’, ‘positive community impact’ and for avoiding ‘excessive funding pressure/control struggles’ and ‘high burden of activities’. Co-designing a programme for mental healthcare is a challenging process that requires skills in process management and communication. We provide practice steps for delivering co-design activities. However, practitioners may have to adapt them to different cultural contexts. Further research is needed to analyse whether co-writing with community-partners results in a better research output and benefits for participants