Service user involvement in the evaluation of psycho-social intervention for self-harm: a systematic literature review

Background: The efficacy of interventions and treatments for self-harm is well researched. Previous reviews of the literature have highlighted the lack of definitively effective interventions for self-harm and have highlighted the need for future research. These recommendations are also reflected in clinical guidelines published by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE, 2004) which also call for service user involvement in studies of treatment efficacy. Aims: A systematic review was undertaken to determine i) what contributions service users have made to the evaluation of psychosocial interventions ii) by what methods have service users been involved iii) in what ways could service user involvement supplement empirical evidence for interventions

Enriching later life through higher education: profiting from international experience

Social, technological, and environmental change presents Europeans of all ages with the need to engage in diverse forms of learning to survive, thrive and enhance their quality of life. Progressive reductions in state support for older people across Europe requires them to become more resilient and adaptable, and better able to care for themselves and one another. Diverse forms of learning can contribute to this, as well as being intrinsically valuable. Modern technology, the range of learning provision, and older people’s sustained motivation to learn all favour their engagement in this. Evidence from the UK shows significant changes in patterns of learning by older people, with increasing participation in more community-based provision, and on-line and independent learning, and substantial disengagement from higher education. In Spain, by contrast, extensive development of university level provision for older people has taken place. Combining subject expertise, an adapted pedagogy, and intergenerational learning opportunities, such programmes offer older people a distinctive experience, with evidence of significant benefit. In the UK very few universities have developed such programmes. However, a survey of older people in Nottingham indicates significant interest in such provision. Limited evidence of benefit and of expertise are barriers to its development in the UK. But both are available from countries such as Spain with greater experience of such provision. International transfer of these assets promises substantial benefits to older people and universities in many developed societies in Europe and elsewhere

Formation and Collapse of Nonaxisymmetric Protostellar Cores in Planar Magnetic Interstellar Clouds: Formulation of the Problem and Linear Analysis

We formulate the problem of the formation and collapse of nonaxisymmetric protostellar cores in weakly ionized, self-gravitating, magnetic molecular clouds. In our formulation, molecular clouds are approximated as isothermal, thin (but with finite thickness) sheets. We present the governing dynamical equations for the multifluid system of neutral gas and ions, including ambipolar diffusion, and also a self-consistent treatment of thermal pressure, gravitational, and magnetic (pressure and tension) forces. The dimensionless free parameters characterizing model clouds are discussed. The response of cloud models to linear perturbations is also examined, with particular emphasis on length and time scales for the growth of gravitational instability in magnetically subcritical and supercritical clouds. We investigate their dependence on a cloud's initial mass-to-magnetic-flux ratio (normalized to the critical value for collapse), the dimensionless initial neutral-ion collision time, and also the relative external pressure exerted on a model cloud. Among our results, we find that nearly-critical model clouds have significantly larger characteristic instability lengthscales than do more distinctly sub- or supercritical models. Another result is that the effect of a greater external pressure is to reduce the critical lengthscale for instability. Numerical simulations showing the evolution of model clouds during the linear regime of evolution are also presented, and compared to the results of the dispersion analysis. They are found to be in agreement with the dispersion results, and confirm the dependence of the characteristic length and time scales on parameters such as the initial mass-to-flux ratio and relative external pressure.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figures Accepted by Ap

The Intrinsic Shapes of Molecular Cloud Fragments over a Range of Length Scales

We decipher intrinsic three-dimensional shape distributions of molecular clouds, cloud cores, Bok globules, and condensations using recently compiled catalogues of observed axis ratios for these objects mapped in carbon monoxide, ammonia, through optical selection, or in continuum dust emission. We apply statistical techniques to compare assumed intrinsic axis ratio distributions with observed projected axis ratio distributions. Intrinsically triaxial shapes produce projected distributions which agree with observations. Molecular clouds mapped in $^{12}$CO are intrinsically triaxial but more nearly prolate than oblate, while the smaller cloud cores, Bok globules, and condensations are also intrinsically triaxial but more nearly oblate than prolate.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures. Version with color figures can be found at http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~cjones/ or http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~basu/. To appear in ApJ, 10 April 2002, v. 569, no.

Ammonia from cold high-mass clumps discovered in the inner Galactic disk by the ATLASGAL survey

The APEX Telescope Large Area Survey: The Galaxy (ATLASGAL) is an unbiased continuum survey of the inner Galactic disk at 870 \mu m. It covers +/- 60 deg in Galactic longitude and aims to find all massive clumps at various stages of high-mass star formation in the inner Galaxy, particularly the earliest evolutionary phases. We aim to determine properties such as the gas kinetic temperature and dynamics of new massive cold clumps found by ATLASGAL. Most importantly, we derived their kinematical distances from the measured line velocities. We observed the ammonia (J,K) = (1,1) to (3,3) inversion transitions toward 862 clumps of a flux-limited sample of submm clumps detected by ATLASGAL and extracted 13CO (1-0) spectra from the Galactic Ring Survey (GRS). We determined distances for a subsample located at the tangential points (71 sources) and for 277 clumps whose near/far distance ambiguity is resolved. Most ATLASGAL clumps are cold with rotational temperatures from 10-30 K. They have a wide range of NH3 linewidths, which by far exceeds the thermal linewidth, as well as a broad distribution of high column densities with an NH3 abundance in the range of 5 to 30 * 10^{-8}. We found an enhancement of clumps at Galactocentric radii of 4.5 and 6 kpc. The high detection rate (87%) confirms ammonia as an excellent probe of the molecular content of the massive, cold clumps revealed by ATLASGAL. A clear trend of increasing rotational temperatures and linewidths with evolutionary stage is seen for source samples ranging from 24 \mu m dark clumps to clumps with embedded HII regions. The survey provides the largest ammonia sample of high-mass star forming clumps and thus presents an important repository for the characterization of statistical properties of the clumps and the selection of subsamples for detailed, high-resolution follow-up studies

On the fidelity of the core mass functions derived from dust column density data

Aims: We examine the recoverability and completeness limits of the dense core mass functions (CMFs) derived for a molecular cloud using extinction data and a core identification scheme based on two-dimensional thresholding. Methods: We performed simulations where a population of artificial cores was embedded into the variable background extinction field of the Pipe nebula. We extracted the cores from the simulated extinction maps, constructed the CMFs, and compared them to the input CMFs. The simulations were repeated using a variety of extraction parameters and several core populations with differing input mass functions and differing degrees of crowding. Results: The fidelity of the observed CMF depends on the parameters selected for the core extraction algorithm for our background. More importantly, it depends on how crowded the core population is. We find that the observed CMF recovers the true CMF reliably when the mean separation of cores is larger than their mean diameter (f>1). If this condition holds, the derived CMF is accurate and complete above M > 0.8-1.5 Msun, depending on the parameters used for the core extraction. In the simulations, the best fidelity was achieved with the detection threshold of 1 or 2 times the rms-noise of the extinction data, and with the contour level spacings of 3 times the rms-noise. Choosing larger threshold and wider level spacings increases the limiting mass. The simulations show that when f>1.5, the masses of individual cores are recovered with a typical uncertainty of 25-30 %. When f=1 the uncertainty is ~60 %. In very crowded cases where f<1 the core identification algorithm is unable to recover the masses of the cores adequately. For the cores of the Pipe nebula f~2.0 and therefore the use of the method in that region is justified.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in A&