The experience of whanau caring for members disabled from the effects of stroke : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy at Massey University

This thesis explores the experience of whanau caring for members disabled from the effects of stroke. The decision to undertake this study arose from my experience in rehabilitation nursing where I observed Maori accepting the responsibility for the care of their whanau member following a stroke with little assistance from existing rehabilitation and community based services. I wanted to understand why this was so, from the perspectives of the whanau. A review of epidemiological data demonstrated the negative disparity in the incidence of stroke in Maori when compared with non-Maori. Further review of the literature specifically related to Maori health issues revealed that whilst there was acknowledgement of the importance of whanau, kaumatua and kuia to Maori as a society, there was little that dealt with disability issues and stroke in particular. Where issues related to the provision of, and access to, health and disability services had been noted, little appears to have been accomplished. A descriptive qualitative research study was undertaken in the Taranaki region with support of the eight Taranaki iwi. Seven whanau focus groups interviews and three key informant interviews were undertaken. From analysis of the data a descriptive account of the whanau experience of onset of the stroke event, hospitalisation and service delivery following discharge of their whanau member is provided. The impact on the whanau of their ongoing provision of care with limited service provision from health and disability services is explored. On the basis of this analysis a number of recommendations are made. The key recommendation is that there needs to be a review of current rehabilitation service provision in Taranaki. From such a review it is hoped that changes will be implemented that will enable service provision to be more beneficial, accessible and acceptable to Taranaki Maori

Supersymmetry Breaking, Extra Dimensions and Neutralino Dark Matter

We show some phenomenological implications for the dark matter problem of a class of models with deflected anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking in the context of the MSSM. This scenario can be naturally embedded in a brane world model with one compactified extra dimension. It turns out that in these models the neutralino is still the LSP and so a good candidate as cold dark matter. We found that the neutralino is quite a pure bino in almost all the parameter space. Moreover we computed the thermal relic density and we found wide cosmologically allowed regions for the neutralino.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures; typos removed and some minor correction. Talk given at the Third Workshop on Science with the New Generation of High Energy Gamma-ray Experiments Cividale del Friuli, Italy - May 30-31 and June 1, 200

Nurses\u27 Perceptions of Structural Empowerment: A Practice Review Process Pilot

Nurses are professionally and morally obliged to monitor and evaluate nursing practice via active participation in review mechanisms that are designed to promote patient safety and care delivery, thereby improving patient care quality (American Nurses Association [ANA], 1988, 2001, 2004; O\u27Rourke, 2006). The purpose of this Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) project was to develop, pilot, and evaluate a nurse practice review process with frontline nurses within Fresno Heart & Surgical Hospital (FHSH), a small specialty hospital, affiliated with Community Medical Centers (CMC) in Fresno, California. A nurse practice algorithm was subsequently developed and structural empowerment was assessed with the Conditions of Work Effectiveness Questionnaire-II (CWEQ-II) (Laschinger, Finegan, Shamian, & Wilk, 2001). While there was a small sample size, the DNP project evaluation demonstrated that frontline nurses want to participate in improvement activities within the facility and believed the nurse practice review algorithm would effectively monitor and evaluate nursing practice

A group-theoretic approach to formalizing bootstrapping problems

The bootstrapping problem consists in designing agents that learn a model of themselves and the world, and utilize it to achieve useful tasks. It is different from other learning problems as the agent starts with uninterpreted observations and commands, and with minimal prior information about the world. In this paper, we give a mathematical formalization of this aspect of the problem. We argue that the vague constraint of having "no prior information" can be recast as a precise algebraic condition on the agent: that its behavior is invariant to particular classes of nuisances on the world, which we show can be well represented by actions of groups (diffeomorphisms, permutations, linear transformations) on observations and commands. We then introduce the class of bilinear gradient dynamics sensors (BGDS) as a candidate for learning generic robotic sensorimotor cascades. We show how framing the problem as rejection of group nuisances allows a compact and modular analysis of typical preprocessing stages, such as learning the topology of the sensors. We demonstrate learning and using such models on real-world range-finder and camera data from publicly available datasets