11,378 research outputs found
Roles, service knowledge and priorities in the provision of palliative care: a postal survey of London GPs
Objectives: To explore general practitioners' (GPs) current involvement in and attitudes towards the provision of palliative care in primary care. Methods: Postal survey of 356 London-based GPs, assessing attitudes towards palliative care provision, district nursing and specialist palliative care services, and priorities for future service development. Results: Currently, 65% of GPs were providing palliative care to patients on their list; 72% agreed or strongly agreed palliative care was a central part of their role; and 27% wanted to hand care over to specialists. Most GPs (66%) disagreed with the statement that 'palliative care is mainly district nursing (DN) work'. Many were unaware of out-of-hours DN and specialist palliative care services. Multi-variable analysis found four GP characteristics - larger practice size, more years experience as a GP, receipt of palliative care education, and current provision of palliative care - were associated with agreement that palliative care was central to a GP's role. Conclusion: A minority of NHS GPs in London would rather have no involvement in palliative care in primary care. Knowledge of current services for palliative care is generally poor among GPs. These findings highlight potential gaps in services, particularly in small practices. Specialists will need to consider these factors in working with GPs to develop primary palliative care and to enable greater access to specialist palliative care
Entangled and disentangled evolution for a single atom in a driven cavity
For an atom in an externally driven cavity, we show that special initial
states lead to near-disentangled atom-field evolution, and superpositions of
these can lead to near maximally-entangled states. Somewhat counterintutively,
we find that (moderate) spontaneous emission in this system actually leads to a
transient increase in entanglement beyond the steady-state value. We also show
that a particular field correlation function could be used, in an experimental
setting, to track the time evolution of this entanglement
Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook
A crucial task in the analysis of on-line social-networking systems is to
identify important people --- those linked by strong social ties --- within an
individual's network neighborhood. Here we investigate this question for a
particular category of strong ties, those involving spouses or romantic
partners. We organize our analysis around a basic question: given all the
connections among a person's friends, can you recognize his or her romantic
partner from the network structure alone? Using data from a large sample of
Facebook users, we find that this task can be accomplished with high accuracy,
but doing so requires the development of a new measure of tie strength that we
term `dispersion' --- the extent to which two people's mutual friends are not
themselves well-connected. The results offer methods for identifying types of
structurally significant people in on-line applications, and suggest a
potential expansion of existing theories of tie strength.Comment: Proc. 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and
Social Computing (CSCW), 201
Recovery of corals a decade after a bleaching event in Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Elevated sea surface temperatures in the late 1990s were associated with widespread coral mortality in the Arabian Gulf, particularly in Acropora dominated areas. This study investigates the composition, condition, and recruitment patterns of coral communities in Saih Al-Shaib, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a decade after mass bleaching. Five statistically distinct communities were identified by cluster analysis, with grouping optimized from 17 significant indicator species. Overall, 25 species of scleractinian coral were observed, representing 35 ± 1.6% coral cover. Densities of recruits were low (0.8 ± 0.2 m-2), and composition generally reflected that of the surrounding adult community. Ten years after mass mortality, Acropora dominated assemblages were observed in three of the six sites examined and coral cover (41.9 ± 2.5%) was double post-bleaching cover. One shallow near-shore site appears to have had recovery of Acropora reset by a further bleaching event in 2002. However, the prevalence of young Acropora colonies here indicates that recovery may recur in several years. One area formerly dominated by Acropora is now dominated by faviids and poritids, with adult and juvenile composition suggesting this dominance shift is likely to persist. Porites lutea and Porites harrisoni dominated communities were negligibly impacted by the bleaching events, and the limited change in coral cover and composition in intervening years likely results from slow growth and low recruitment. Despite strong recovery of several dominant Acropora species, five formerly common species from this area were not observed suggesting local extinction. Dubai coral communities exhibit both resistance and resilience to elevated sea temperatures. The conservation of these patch reefs is warranted given the predicted increase in bleaching events, and the role that these communities may play in regional recovery. © 2008 Springer-Verlag
Quantum hierarchic models for information processing
Both classical and quantum computations operate with the registers of bits.
At nanometer scale the quantum fluctuations at the position of a given bit,
say, a quantum dot, not only lead to the decoherence of quantum state of this
bit, but also affect the quantum states of the neighboring bits, and therefore
affect the state of the whole register. That is why the requirement of reliable
separate access to each bit poses the limit on miniaturization, i.e, constrains
the memory capacity and the speed of computation. In the present paper we
suggest an algorithmic way to tackle the problem of constructing reliable and
compact registers of quantum bits. We suggest to access the states of quantum
register hierarchically, descending from the state of the whole register to the
states of its parts. Our method is similar to quantum wavelet transform, and
can be applied to information compression, quantum memory, quantum
computations.Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX, 1 eps figur
First-Principles Approach to Electrorotation Assay
We have presented a theoretical study of electrorotation assay based on the
spectral representation theory. We consider unshelled and shelled spheroidal
particles as an extension to spherical ones. From the theoretical analysis, we
find that the coating can change the characteristic frequency at which the
maximum rotational angular velocity occurs. The shift in the characteristic
frequency is attributed to a change in the dielectric properties of the
bead-coating complex with respect to those of the uncoated particles. By
adjusting the dielectric properties and the thickness of the coating, it is
possible to obtain good agreement between our theoretical predictions and the
assay data.Comment: 17 pages, 4 eps figures; minor revisions, accepted for publications
by J. Phys.: Condens. Matte
Integrated electrical and mechanical modelling of integrated-full-electric-propulsion systems
Integrated Full Electric Propulsion (IFEP) systems are the subject of much interest at present. Current research is focused on analysing and improving aspects of subsystem and system performance. However, there is a great need to look more widely at the `multi-physics' problem of characterising the dynamic interactions between the electrical and mechanical systems. This paper will discuss the changing nature of modelling and simulation to aid research into IFEP systems, outlining the alternative angle taken by the Advanced Marine Electrical Propulsion Systems (AMEPS) project to characterise and investigate electrical-mechanical system interactions. The paper will describe this approach and highlight the unique challenges associated with the problem, discussing the suitable methods that will be adopted to address these challenges. Finally, an overview of the present and future research opportunities facilitated via the AMEPS project will be presented
Postirradiation behavior of p-channel charge-coupled devices irradiated at 153 K
The displacement damage hardness that can be achieved using p-channel charge-coupled devices (CCD) was originally demonstrated in 1997, and since then a number of other studies have demonstrated an improved tolerance to radiation-induced CTI when compared to n-channel CCDs. A number of recent studies have also shown that the temperature history of the device after the irradiation impacts the performance of the detector, linked to the mobility of defects at different temperatures. This study describes the initial results from an e2v technologies p-channel CCD204 irradiated at 153 K with a 10 MeV equivalent proton fluences of 1.24Ă—109 and 1.24Ă—1011 protons cm-2. The dark current, cosmetic quality and the number of defects identified using trap pumping immediately were monitored after the irradiation for a period of 150 hours with the device held at 153 K and then after different periods of time at room temperature. The device also exhibited a flatband voltage shift of around 30 mV / krad, determined by the reduction in full well capacity
MOS CCDs for the wide field imager on the XEUS spacecraft
In recent years the XEUS mission concept has evolved and has been the subject of several industrial studies. The mission concept has now matured to the point that it could be proposed for a Phase A study and subsequent flight programme. The key feature of XEUS will be its X-ray optic with collecting area ~30-100x that of XMM. The mission is envisaged at an orbit around the L2 point in space, and is formed from two spacecraft; one for the mirrors, and the other for the focal plane detectors. With a focal length of 50m, the plate scale of the optic is 6.5x that of XMM, which using existing focal plane technology will reduce the effective field of view to a few arc minutes. Cryogenic instrumentation, with detector sizes of a few mm can only be used for narrow field studies of target objects, and a wide field instrument is under consideration using a DEPFET pixel array to image out to a diameter of 5 arcminutes, requiring an array of dimension 70mm. It is envisaged to extend this field of view possibly out to 15 arcminutes through the use of an outer detection ring comprised of MOS CCD
Percentage of ordinary chondrite mineralogies among S-complex and Q-type Near-Earth Asteroids
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