The Self-Reported Atitudes And Awareness Of Nurse Practitioners Towards Music Therapy

This study takes the anonymous report of nurse practitioners’ view of music therapy in adjunction with regular pharmacological care among Salem State nursing faculty who currently practice as a nurse practitioner. The study aims to gather awareness and attitudes of nurse practitioners toward using music therapy in their area of practice. There is a growing problem of prescription drug abuse that is sweeping the nation. One factor of this is the use of extremely strong and addictive pain medication used for overall healthy patients after postoperative surgery. Using music therapy in adjunction to pharmacological care helps patients deal with all the same problems of surgery like pain, anxiety, and worry while leaving out the harsh addictive qualities of only using pharmacologic medications. The study will involve an anonymous survey of questions addressing current practice habits of nurse practitioners among Salem State nursing faculty who are nurse practitioners, their level of awareness of music therapy, their personal attitudes towards music therapy as a complimentary alternative pain management approach. Additionally, I will seek to understand levels of attitudes towards music therapy in relationship to reported practice behavior

Aspects of the biology of sea turtles in the mid-Atlantic Bight

I present here an investigation of several aspects of the biology of sea turtles in the mid-Atlantic Bight. During 19 years of data collection, included in this study, strandings have increased for all species of sea turtles in Virginia. Most sea turtle strandings occurred during the spring when juvenile turtles migrate into the Bay (Kemp\u27s ridleys had a second significant stranding peak, during fall migration) along the Southern Bay and Virginia Beach Oceanfront. Sea turtles utilize the Chesapeake Bay as a feeding area when the water temperature approaches 20??C, and they leave after the water temperature drops below 20??C. Although some turtles have stranded at much lower temperatures. The number of possible anthropomorphic interactions with turtles has increased as recreational boating & fishing has increased in popularity. The cause of death attributed to the largest number of strandings is boat and propeller damage. Commercial fishery interactions (entanglement) were second in importance, but such interactions, while usually resulting in turtles drowning, were less easily detected. The vast number of the strandings having an unknown cause of death maybe attributed to carcass decomposition and lack of observer training. The VIMS data set provided the basis for morphometric analysis. Regressions calculated from the data often explain more than 90% of the variation in the measurements. These regressions may be used to estimate missing values required by State and Federal management agencies. The carapace morphology of loggerheads and Kemp\u27s ridleys changes as they grow. The carapace flattens out in larger individuals, presumably to maintain a relatively constant amount of lift while swimming at higher cruising velocities. The extra lift may be needed by hatchlings because of their low swimming speed. Using satellite imaging technology and sea turtle abundance and distribution data from coastal aerial surveys, off North Carolina, I confirmed a behavioral temperature range of 13??C to 29??C, which is well within previously established physiological limits and also encompass values recorded in the Chesapeake Bay. Magnetic resonance imaging techniques, were used to image juvenile Kemp\u27s ridley and loggerhead sea turtle heads. The location of magnetic particles in the sea turtle heads appears to be in the ethmoid, in the same region as in birds and fishes. The anomalies were bilaterally paired suggesting a possible use as a sensory system. Results from an oxytetracycline injected adult loggerhead sea turtle show that bone rings are laid down on an annual basis. Examination of whole cross sections of the humerus suggests that the dorsal and ventral regions used for taking bone cores used in previous studies is inappropriate. The failure in other studies to detect growth rings may have been due to samples being taken from the dorsal surface of the bone. The lateral edges of the humerus should be used for future oxytetracycline studies. Growth rates and ring deposition support previous data, supporting the notion that sexual maturity may occur over a very large size range

Determining electron column density fluctuations in a dominant scattering region using pulsar scintillation

Density fluctuations in the ionised interstellar medium have a profound effect on radio pulsar observations, through angular scattering, intensity scintillations, and small changes in time delays from dispersion. Here we show that it is possible to recover the variations in dispersive delays that originate from a dominant scattering region using measurements of the dynamic spectrum of intensity scintillations, provided that the pulsar velocity and scattering region location are known. We provide a theoretical framework for the technique, which involves estimating the phase gradient from the dynamic spectra and integrating that gradient to obtain phase variations. It can be used to search for "extreme scattering events" (ESEs) in pulsars for which precision dispersion delay measurements are not otherwise possible, or to separate true dispersion variations from apparent variability caused by frequency-dependent pulse shape changes. We demonstrate that it works in practice by recovering an ESE in PSR J1603$-$7202, which is known from precision dispersion delay measurements from pulsar timing. For this pulsar, we find that the phase gradients also track the long-term variations in electron column density observed by pulsar timing, indicating that the column density variations and the scattering are dominated by the same thin scattering screen. We identify a sudden increase in the scintillation strength and magnitude of phase gradients over $\sim$days in 2010, indicating a compact structure. A decrease in the electron density in 2012 was associated with persistent phase gradients and preceded a period of decreased scintillation strength and an absence of scintillation arcs.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRA

An integrated information retrieval and document management system

This paper describes the requirements and prototype development for an intelligent document management and information retrieval system that will be capable of handling millions of pages of text or other data. Technologies for scanning, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), magneto-optical storage, and multiplatform retrieval using a Standard Query Language (SQL) will be discussed. The semantic ambiguity inherent in the English language is somewhat compensated-for through the use of coefficients or weighting factors for partial synonyms. Such coefficients are used both for defining structured query trees for routine queries and for establishing long-term interest profiles that can be used on a regular basis to alert individual users to the presence of relevant documents that may have just arrived from an external source, such as a news wire service. Although this attempt at evidential reasoning is limited in comparison with the latest developments in AI Expert Systems technology, it has the advantage of being commercially available

City of Concord Complete Streets Study

The purpose of this report is to summarize the data collected as a part of the Concord Complete Streets Study and to provide the City with preliminary support in the progress to construct a safer, more bike and pedestrian friendly Concord. The developments and visions found in this document provide a platform for continued discussion on creating a more pedestrian and bicycle friendly environment that encourages other forms of transportation and provides alternatives to dependency on automobiles

Theory of Parabolic Arcs in Interstellar Scintillation Spectra

Our theory relates the secondary spectrum, the 2D power spectrum of the radio dynamic spectrum, to the scattered pulsar image in a thin scattering screen geometry. Recently discovered parabolic arcs in secondary spectra are generic features for media that scatter radiation at angles much larger than the rms scattering angle. Each point in the secondary spectrum maps particular values of differential arrival-time delay and fringe rate (or differential Doppler frequency) between pairs of components in the scattered image. Arcs correspond to a parabolic relation between these quantities through their common dependence on the angle of arrival of scattered components. Arcs appear even without consideration of the dispersive nature of the plasma. Arcs are more prominent in media with negligible inner scale and with shallow wavenumber spectra, such as the Kolmogorov spectrum, and when the scattered image is elongated along the velocity direction. The arc phenomenon can be used, therefore, to constrain the inner scale and the anisotropy of scattering irregularities for directions to nearby pulsars. Arcs are truncated by finite source size and thus provide sub micro arc sec resolution for probing emission regions in pulsars and compact active galactic nuclei. Multiple arcs sometimes seen signify two or more discrete scattering screens along the propagation path, and small arclets oriented oppositely to the main arc persisting for long durations indicate the occurrence of long-term multiple images from the scattering screen.Comment: 22 pages, 11 figures, submitted to the Astrophysical Journa