Becoming an effective practitioner through guided reflection

The study aimed to develop, monitor and explore the process and outcomes of guided reflection and its impact on enabling practitioners to achieve desirable and effective caring practice. A secondary focus of the study was to monitor and explore the process and outcomes of guided reflection as a form of critical action research which may generate theoretical insights regarding its use in clinical supervisory practices. The process referred to as 'guided reflection' was developed and used to guide this study. Guided reflection represents a form of social action research which was framed within an ontology and process of critical and reflexive phenomenology of experience between practitioners and their supervisors over a period of four years. Whilst each guided reflection relationship was written as a critical narrative to illuminate the reflexive development of effective practice, these narratives became a secondary level of analysis to construct meta-narratives of the nature of effective work and dynamics of guided reflection. Various frameworks were developed and tested within a reflexive process that was appropriately informed and juxtaposed with extant theory to adequately interpret and present the process and ou.tc omes of the study. The method and process of guided reflection generated two major empirical and theoretical insights. • 'The 'Being available' framework to know effective caring practice, presented as one major exemplar of 'Pru'. • Meta-reflection of methods and process of guided reflection. Three frameworks in particular are significant: • 'Being available' as a parallel framework for effective supervision practice. This parallel framework supports the coherence between developmental and research processes. • The Model for Structured Reflection as an heuristic device for knowing reflection. • 'Framing perspectives' as a series of integrated lenses to focus on discrete layers of learning within reflection. The insights gained through the study have considerable significance for informing and guiding the future development of reflective practice within nursing curriculum, clinical supervision within practice, and the future development of nursing knowledge. The development of nursing knowledge is of particular significance in understanding the meaning and nuances of holistic nursing as a lived reality and have significantly contributed to the reflexive development of the Burford NDU Model: Caring in Practice. The study has become a springboard for research to gain further insight into the factors that facilitate or constrain the efficacy of guided reflection in enabling practitioners to know and realise desirable practice within everyday practic

Observations of the plasma flow in comet P/Swift‐Tuttle

We present direct ground based observations of the plasma flow sunward and tailward of the nucleus of comet P/Swift‐Tuttle. The observations are long‐slit high resolution spectra of the H_2O^+ emission centered at 6199Å with a velocity resolution of about 7 km s^(−1) (FWHM) and a spatial resolution of about 10^4 km at the comet. Emission is visible from just inside the predicted position of the cometopause on the sunward side of the nucleus out to 5 × 10^5 km on the tailward side. The deceleration of the solar plasma on the sunward side is clearly observed as is the acceleration of cometary ions into the tail. These observations show the effectiveness of ground based methods for the systematic study of cometary plasmas and point to the need for a better theoretical understanding of their acceleration mechanisms

How Hot is the Wind from TW Hydrae?

It has recently been suggested that the winds from Classical T Tauri stars in general, and the wind from TW Hya in particular, reaches temperatures of at least 300,000 K while maintaing a mass loss rate of $\sim 10^{-11}$ \Msol yr$^{-1}$ or larger. If confirmed, this would place strong new requirements on wind launching and heating models. We therefore re-examine spectra from the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph aboard the Hubble Space Telescope and spectra from the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer satellite in an effort to better constrain the maximum temperature in the wind of TW Hya. We find clear evidence for a wind in the \ion{C}{2} doublet at 1037 \AA and in the \ion{C}{2} multiplet at 1335 \AA. We find no wind absorption in the \ion{C}{4} 1550 \AA doublet observed at the same time as the \ion{C}{2} 1335 \AA line or in observations of \ion{O}{6} observed simultaneously with the \ion{C}{2} 1037 \AA line. The presence or absence of \ion{C}{3} wind absorption is ambiguous. The clear lack of a wind in the \ion{C}{4} line argues that the wind from TW Hya does not reach the 100,000 K characteristic formation temperature of this line. We therefore argue that the available evidence suggests that the wind from TW Hya, and probably all classical T Tauri stars, reaches a maximum temperature in the range of 10,000 -- 30,000 K.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, Figure 1 in 2nd version fixes a small velocity scaling error and new revision adds a reference to an additional paper recently foun

Vision infinity for food security: Dr Shashi B. Sharma

In the introductory abstract to ‘Vision Infinity for Food Security,’ (Sharma and Wightman 2015), co-author Dr Shashi Sharma draws our attention to the 1798 prediction by Thomas Malthus that human kind’s ability to feed itself was limited by population size. Malthus foresaw a time when human numbers would exhaust the capacity of planetary food producing resources with catastrophic consequences. After all, a secure food supply is essential for species survival. Food security can be defined as ensuring that all people, at all times, have both physical and economic access to the basic food that they need or, put more simply, for each individual to have sufficient food, each day, to provide the nutrients and energy to maintain a healthy and active life. The book calls for a fundamental and philosophical re-thinking and re-structuring of our food production, distribution and consumption. FDI has taken the opportunity to interview Professor Sharma about his book and his vision for a world perpetually free from food insecurity; that is, food security for all forever