A study into the learning of bioscience by student nurses

Background: The introduction of the Diploma in Nursing Higher Education (H.Ed) in the late eighties and early nineties resulted in a substantial change in the way that nurses were trained. While the new courses included much bioscience within the curriculum there continues to be concern about how the students link the formal theory that they are taught in the classroom and their experiences in the practice setting. Many of the events occurring in the practice setting are wholly dependent on knowledge of bioscience yet evaluations made of the Diploma since 1995 suggest that bioscience theory is being taught unaccompanied by the opportunity to understand it in practice. This suggests a very large knowledge gap in essential teaching. Aim: This study sought to identify the processes that student nurses use to bring about a learning of bioscience that informs their practice. Design: An action research approach was begun and qualitative methods used to collect data from nursing students on the Diploma of Nursing course. They were: nominal group technique, focused interviews, the recording of critical incidents and learning style assessments questionnaires. One hundred and twenty students in all took part in this study. Findings: The results that emerged from the data suggested that the dominant factors in the learning process for the students were the presence of the real patient and other professionals. Interactions with patients aroused emotional feelings and their presence assisted in promoting bioscience learning that was useful to the students in subsequent practice. Students claimed that they relearned this subject beginning with the disordered bioscience that they met in the placement setting. In order to achieve this learning students' changed their learning style for this subject. They made no attempt to link the previous taught theories of the classroom with what they saw in practice. Conclusion: The learning process preferred by the students was based on problem-solving and involved a change to the students' initial learning style. Future teaching methods for the subject of bioscience should be based on real patients and their problems as encountered within the clinical setting. The action research cycle could not be completed at this time due to the nature of other new changes to the nursing programme from government directives

Looking for Stars and Finding the Moon: Effects of Lunar Gamma-ray Emission on Fermi LAT Light Curves

We are conducting a search for new gamma-ray binaries by making high signal-to-noise light curves of all cataloged Fermi LAT sources and searching for periodic variability using appropriately weighted power spectra. The light curves are created using a variant of aperture photometry where photons are weighted by the probability that they came from the source of interest. From this analysis we find that the light curves of a number of sources near the ecliptic plane are contaminated by gamma-ray emission from the Moon. This shows itself as modulation on the Moon's sidereal period in the power spectra. We demonstrate that this contamination can be removed by excluding times when the Moon was too close to a source. We advocate that this data screening should generally be used when analyzing LAT data from a source located close to the path of the Moon.Comment: 2012 Fermi Symposium proceedings - eConf C12102

Shutters and slats for the integral sunshade of an optical reception antenna

Optical reception antennas used at a small Sun-Earth-probe angle (small solar elongation E) require sunshading to prevent intolerable scattering of light from the surface of the primary mirror. An integral sunshade consisting of hexagonal tubes aligned with the segmentation of a large mirror was proposed for use down to E = 12 degrees. For smaller angles, asterisk-shaped vanes inserted into the length of the hexagonal tubes would allow operation down to about 6 degrees with a fixed obscuration of 3.6 percent. Two alternative methods are investigated to extend the usefulness of the integral sunshade to smaller angles by adding either variable-area shutters to block the tube corners that admit off-axis sunlight or by inserting slats (partial vanes) down the full length of some tubes. Slats are effective for most operations down to 6 degrees, and obscure only 1.2 percent. For E between 10.75 and 12 degrees, shutters cause even less obscuration

Development of biaxial test fixture includes cryogenic application

Test fixture has the capability of producing biaxial stress fields in test specimens to the point of failure. It determines biaxial stress by dividing the applied load by the net cross section. With modification it can evaluate materials, design concepts, and production hardware at cryogenic temperatures

Global attractors and extinction dynamics of cyclically competing species

Transitions to absorbing states are of fundamental importance in nonequilibrium physics as well as ecology. In ecology, absorbing states correspond to the extinction of species. We here study the spatial population dynamics of three cyclically interacting species. The interaction scheme comprises both direct competition between species as in the cyclic Lotka-Volterra model, and separated selection and reproduction processes as in the May-Leonard model. We show that the dynamic processes leading to the transient maintenance of biodiversity are closely linked to attractors of the nonlinear dynamics for the overall species' concentrations. The characteristics of these global attractors change qualitatively at certain threshold values of the mobility and depend on the relative strength of the different types of competition between species. They give information about the scaling of extinction times with the system size and thereby the stability of biodiversity. We define an effective free energy as the negative logarithm of the probability to find the system in a specific global state before reaching one of the absorbing states. The global attractors then correspond to minima of this effective energy landscape and determine the most probable values for the species' global concentrations. As in equilibrium thermodynamics, qualitative changes in the effective free energy landscape indicate and characterize the underlying nonequilibrium phase transitions. We provide the complete phase diagrams for the population dynamics and give a comprehensive analysis of the spatio-temporal dynamics and routes to extinction in the respective phases

Water Resources Allocation: Reclaiming Municipal Wastewater for Agricultural Use: Outline

26 pages (includes illustrations)