Optimising support for informal carers of the long-term disabled to enhance resilience and sustainability

Optimising carer resilience has direct benefits to carers, and additional benefits to the overall care support system by reducing dependence on paid care. Executive summary People with severe and chronic disabilities represent a significant proportion of the population who require assistance to live in their own home and be a part of the community. In addition to assistance from the paid carer workforce, this assistance is provided by family, relatives or friends who are not paid or formally trained in the provision of care and support. These informal carers assist with a variety of tasks including activities of daily living, emotional care and support and accessing medical care and ongoing therapy to optimise independence. There are 2.7 million people in Australia who provide informal (unpaid) care to a person with a disability or long-term health condition, of which 770,000 provide the majority of care and support to people with a severe disability. Given their substantial contribution to care provision and the physical, emotional and other impacts of providing care, it is important to understand the experience of informal carers and address their support needs. In recent years, studies have elucidated the substantial effects of providing care on the psychological, physical, social and other impacts of providing care to a person with a long-term disability. There are a range of interventions to mitigate these impacts, which are provided in Australia through a variety of national and local government and nongovernment entities with varying efficacy. Optimising carer resilience has direct benefits to carers, and additional benefits to the overall care support system by reducing dependence on paid care. This NTRI Forum aims to investigate effective strategies for providing support (excluding skills-related education and training, i.e. manual handling and transfers) to informal carers that can help to optimise their resilience, and the sustainability of the long-term disabled. An evidence review of literature identified 25 relevant reviews and primary studies and a further 16 ongoing primary studies. The overall results of reviews of carer support interventions were inconclusive, therefore firm conclusions regarding what works and doesn’t work cannot be made. However, evidence was reported as ‘good’ for educational and psycho-educational interventions, counselling and psychosocial interventions and multicomponent interventions; Evidence for care co-ordination and family support interventions was described as ‘promising’; Evidence for technology-based interventions was conflicting in the setting of Dementia, but more positive in the area of catastrophic injury; Evidence for respite care was described as ‘not strong’, and although benefits were reported, the importance of additional support strategies in conjunction with respite care was emphasised. Similarly, emerging positive evidence in favour of support groups was reported, however additional concurrent support strategies were recommended. Passive information dissemination alone was found to be ineffective. The review also outlined a range of factors to consider in interpreting this evidence and identified implications for practice and research

Natriuretic Peptides in the Cardiovascular System. Multifaceted Roles in Physiology, Pathology and Therapeutics

The natriuretic peptides (NPs) family includes a class of hormones and their receptors needed for the physiological control of cardiovascular functions. The discovery of NPs provided a fundamental contribution into our understanding of the physiological regulation of blood pressure, and of heart and kidney functions. NPs have also been implicated in the pathogenesis of several cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), including hypertension, atherosclerosis, heart failure, and stroke. A fine comprehension of the molecular mechanisms dependent from NPs and underlying the promotion of cardiovascular damage has contributed to improve our understanding of the molecular basis of all major CVDs. Finally, the opportunity to target NPs in order to develop new therapeutic tools for a better treatment of CVDs has been developed over the years. The current Special Issue of the Journal covers all major aspects of the molecular implications of NPs in physiology and pathology of the cardiovascular system, including NP-based therapeutic approaches

Post-Westgate SWAT : C4ISTAR Architectural Framework for Autonomous Network Integrated Multifaceted Warfighting Solutions Version 1.0 : A Peer-Reviewed Monograph

Police SWAT teams and Military Special Forces face mounting pressure and challenges from adversaries that can only be resolved by way of ever more sophisticated inputs into tactical operations. Lethal Autonomy provides constrained military/security forces with a viable option, but only if implementation has got proper empirically supported foundations. Autonomous weapon systems can be designed and developed to conduct ground, air and naval operations. This monograph offers some insights into the challenges of developing legal, reliable and ethical forms of autonomous weapons, that address the gap between Police or Law Enforcement and Military operations that is growing exponentially small. National adversaries are today in many instances hybrid threats, that manifest criminal and military traits, these often require deployment of hybrid-capability autonomous weapons imbued with the capability to taken on both Military and/or Security objectives. The Westgate Terrorist Attack of 21st September 2013 in the Westlands suburb of Nairobi, Kenya is a very clear manifestation of the hybrid combat scenario that required military response and police investigations against a fighting cell of the Somalia based globally networked Al Shabaab terrorist group.Comment: 52 pages, 6 Figures, over 40 references, reviewed by a reade

The Ouroboros Model

At the core of the Ouroboros Model lies a self-referential recursive process with alternating phases of data acquisition and evaluation. Memory entries are organized in schemata. Activation at a time of part of a schema biases the whole structure and, in particular, missing features, thus triggering expectations. An iterative recursive monitor process termed ‘consumption analysis’ is then checking how well such expectations fit with successive activations. A measure for the goodness of fit, “emotion”, provides feedback as (self-) monitoring signal. Contradictions between anticipations based on previous experience and actual current data are highlighted as well as minor gaps and deficits. The basic algorithm can be applied to goal directed movements as well as to abstract rational reasoning when weighing evidence for and against some remote theories. A sketch is provided how the Ouroboros Model can shed light on rather different characteristics of human behavior including learning and meta-learning. Partial implementations proved effective in dedicated safety systems

Complexity and biourbanism: thermodynamical architectural and urban models integrated in modern geographic mapping

The paper was presented on 5th April 2012 by Eleni Tracada in Theoretical Currents II conference in the University of Lincoln.Abstract Vital elements in urban fabric have been often suppressed for reasons of ‘style’. Recent theories, such as Biourbanism, suggest that cities risk becoming unstable and deprived of healthy social interactions. Our paper aims at exploring the reasons for which, fractal cities, which have being conceived as symmetries and patterns, can have scientifically proven and beneficial impact on human fitness of body and mind. During the last few decades, modern urban fabric lost some very important elements, only because urban design and planning turned out to be stylistic aerial views or new landscapes of iconic technological landmarks. Biourbanism attempts to re-establish lost values and balance, not only in urban fabric, but also in reinforcing human-oriented design principles in either micro or macro scale. Human life in cities and beyond emerges during ‘connectivity’ via geometrical continuity of grids and fractals, via path connectivity among highly active nodes, via exchange/movement of people and, finally via exchange of information (networks). All these elements form a hypercomplex system of several interconnected layers of a dynamic structure, all influencing each other in a non-linear manner. Sometimes networks of communication at all levels may suffer from sudden collapse of dynamic patterns, which have been proved to be vital for a long time either to landscapes and cityscapes. We are now talking about negotiating boundaries between human activities, changes in geographic mapping and, mainly about sustainable systems to support continuous growth of communities. We are not only talking about simple lives (‘Bios’) as Urban Syntax (bio and socio-geometrical synthesis), but also about affinities between developing topographies created by roadways and trajectories and the built environment. We shall also have the opportunity to show recent applications of these theories in our postgraduate students’ work, such as a 3D model as a new method of cartography of the Island of Mauritius, with intend to highlight developments in topography and architecture through a series of historical important events and mutating socio-political and economical geographies. This model may be able to predict failures in proposed and/or activated models of expansion, which do not follow strictly morphogenetic and physiological design processes. The same kind of modelling is capable to enable recognition of ‘optimal forms’ at different feedback scales, which, through morphogenetic processes, guarantee an optimal systemic efficiency, and therefore quality of life.ADT funds, university of Derby