44,483 research outputs found
General practitionersâ perceptions of asynchronous telemedicine in a randomized controlled trial of teledermatology.
Background: Telemedicine is viewed as having a key role to play in the Governmentâs plans to modernise the NHS.1 However, to date there are few studies which have explored the views and acceptability of GPs towards telemedicine in primary care.
Aim: To elicit the perceptions of GPs towards teledermatology (TD) before and after itâs introduction into their Practices and to observe whether GP views of TD had changed over the course of the study.
Design of study: A postal questionnaire administered as part of a wider randomised controlled trial of telemedicine in dermatology.
Setting: A locality group of eight General Practices in Sheffield and a single teaching hospital in Sheffield that provided the local dermatology referral service.
Method: A postal questionnaire circulated to all GPs from the eight participating Practices.
Results: A 85.7% (36/42) response rate was achieved. Only 21% (n=7; 95% CI: 10-37%) of respondents felt satisfied/very satisfied with TD in their Practice, 47% (n=16) said that they were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. Thirty one per cent (n=10; 95% CI: 18-49%) said that they felt confident about diagnosis and management of care through TD, with 28% (n=9) reporting that they were unconfident. Only 23% (n=8; 95% CI: 12-39%) of respondents said that they would consider using a telemedicine system in the future, 34% (n=12) said they would probably or definitely not and 43% (n=15) were unsure. There was some evidence that GPs views about TD became more negative over the course of the study. Conclusions: The study reports less favourable GP responses to telemedicine than observed in previous studies, and suggests that the model of telemedicine described in this study paper would not be widely acceptable to GPs
Can consumer research panels form an effective part of the cancer research community?
The North Trent Cancer Research Networkâs Consumer Research Panel (NTCRN CRP) was established in December 2001 by the Academic Unit of Supportive Care at the University of Sheffield. In three years, the CRP has succeeded in nurturing a climate of sustainable consumer involvement within the NTCRN and this has become embedded in the culture of the network. Furthermore, the panel have championed a sustainable development of consumer involvement in health and social care research by testing new ground and forging a new way of working between health professionals and patients and carers. The CRP model has been held up as an example to other cancer networks, with new panels being set up around the country to emulate its success. This paper describes the Sheffield model of patient and public involvement and using the eight key principles of successful consumer involvement in research, identified in a recent paper by Telford et al (2003), provides a useful framework for analysing the work of the Panel. This demonstrates how consumers and professionals can inform each other to work constructively and synergistically to achieve impressive research results. The need for measurable outcomes to assess the impact and effect of consumer involvement is finally explored
Charles M. Breder, Jr.: Bahamas and Florida
Dr. Charles M. Breder, a well known ichthyologist, kept meticulous field diaries throughout his career. This publication is a transcription of field notes recorded during the Bacon Andros Expeditions, and trips to Florida, Ohio and Illinois during the 1930s. Breder's work in Andros included exploration of a "blue hole", inland ecosystems, and collection of marine and terrestrial specimens. Anecdotes include descriptions of camping on the beach, the "filly-mingoes" (flamingos) of Andros Island, the Marine
Studios of Jacksonville, FL, a trip to Havana, and the birth of seahorses. This publication is part of a series of transcriptions of Dr. Breder's diaries. (PDF contains 55 pages
Charles M. Breder, Jr.: Atlantis Expedition, 1934
Dr. Charles M. Breder participated on the 1934 expedition of the Atlantis from Woods Hole, Massachusetts to Panama and back and kept a field diary of daily activities. The Atlantis expedition of 1934, led by Prof. A. E. Parr, was a milestone in the history of scientific discovery in the Sargasso Sea and the West Indies. Although naturalists had visited the Sargasso Sea for many years, the Atlantis voyage was the first attempt to investigate in detailed quantitative manner biological problems about this varying, intermittent âfalseâ bottom of living, floating plants and associated fauna. In addition to Dr. Breder, the party also consisted of Dr. Alexander Forbes, Harvard University and Trustee of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI); T. S. Greenwood, WHOI hydrographer; M. D. Burkenroad, Yale Universityâs Bingham Laboratory, carcinology and Sargasso epizoa; M. Bishop, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Zoology Dept., collections and preparations and H. Sears, WHOI ichthyologist. The itinerary included the following waypoints: Woods Hole, the Bermudas, Turks Islands, Kingston, Colon, along the Mosquito Bank off of Nicaragua, off the north coast of Jamaica, along the south coast of Cuba, Bartlett Deep, to off the Isle of Pines, through the Yucatan Channel, off Havana, off Key West, to Miami, to New York City, and then the return to Woods Hole. During the expedition, Breder collected rare and little-known flying fish species and developed a method for hatching and growing flying fish larvae. (PDF contains 48 pages
Renormalization and resummation in finite temperature field theories
Resummation, ie. reorganization of perturbative series, can result in an
inconsistent perturbation theory, unless the counterterms are reorganized in an
appropriate way. In this paper two methods are presented for resummation of
counterterms: one is a direct method where the necessary counterterms are
constructed order by order; the other is a general one, based on
renormalization group arguments. We demonstrate at one hand that, in mass
independent schemes, mass resummation can be performed by gap equations
renormalized prior to the substitution of the resummed mass for its argument.
On the other hand it is shown that any (momentum-independent) form of mass and
coupling constant resummation is compatible with renormalization, and one can
explicitly construct the corresponding counterterms.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, revtex
Fractal templates in the escape dynamics of trapped ultracold atoms
We consider the dynamic escape of a small packet of ultracold atoms launched
from within an optical dipole trap. Based on a theoretical analysis of the
underlying nonlinear dynamics, we predict that fractal behavior can be seen in
the escape data. This data would be collected by measuring the time-dependent
escape rate for packets launched over a range of angles. This fractal pattern
is particularly well resolved below the Bose-Einstein transition temperature--a
direct result of the extreme phase space localization of the condensate. We
predict that several self-similar layers of this novel fractal should be
measurable and we explain how this fractal pattern can be predicted and
analyzed with recently developed techniques in symbolic dynamics.Comment: 11 pages with 5 figure
A Kaluza-Klein Model with Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking: Light-Particle Effective Action and its Compactification Scale Dependence
We investigate decoupling of heavy Kaluza-Klein modes in an Abelian Higgs
model with space-time topologies and
. After integrating out heavy KK
modes we find the effective action for the zero mode fields. We find that in
the topology the heavy modes do not decouple in
the effective action, due to the zero mode of the 5-th component of the 5-d
gauge field . Because is a scalar under 4-d Lorentz
transformations, there is no gauge symmetry protecting it from getting mass and
interaction terms after loop corrections. In addition, after
symmetry breaking, we find new divergences in the mass that did not
appear in the symmetric phase. The new divergences are traced back to the
gauge-goldstone mixing that occurs after symmetry breaking. The relevance of
these new divergences to Symanzik's theorem is discussed. In order to get a
more sensible theory we investigate the
compactification. With this kind of compact topology, the zero mode
disappears. With no , there are no new divergences and the heavy modes
decouple. We also discuss the dependence of the couplings and masses on the
compactification scale. We derive a set of RG-like equations for the running of
the effective couplings with respect to the compactification scale. It is found
that magnitudes of both couplings decrease as the scale increases. The
effective masses are also shown to decrease with increasing compactification
scale. All of this opens up the possibility of placing constraints on the size
of extra dimensions.Comment: 35 pages, 6 figure
Hard-scattering factorization with heavy quarks: A general treatment
A detailed proof of hard scattering factorization is given with the inclusion
of heavy quark masses. Although the proof is explicitly given for
deep-inelastic scattering, the methods apply more generally The
power-suppressed corrections to the factorization formula are uniformly
suppressed by a power of \Lambda/Q, independently of the size of heavy quark
masses, M, relative to Q.Comment: 52 pages. Version as published plus correction of misprint in Eq.
(45
LHC Signals from Cascade Decays of Warped Vector Resonances
Recently (arXiv:1608.00526), a new framework for warped higher-dimensional
compactifications with "bulk" standard model (SM) was proposed: in addition to
the UV (Planck scale) and IR (a couple of TeV) branes, there is an intermediate
brane, taken to be around 10 TeV. The SM matter and Higgs fields propagate from
the UV brane down to this intermediate brane only, while gauge and gravity
fields propagate in the entire bulk. Such a configuration renders the lightest
gauge Kaluza-Klein (KK) states within LHC reach, simultaneously satisfying
flavor and CP constraints. In addition, the usual leading decay modes of the
lightest KK gauge bosons into top and Higgs bosons are suppressed. This effect
permits erstwhile subdominant channels to become significant. These include
flavor-universal decays to SM fermions and Higgs bosons, and a novel channel -
decay to a radion and a SM gauge boson, followed by radion decay to a pair of
SM gauge bosons. In this work, we first delineate the parameter space where the
above mentioned cascade decay of gauge KK particles dominates, and thereby can
be the discovery mode at the LHC. We then perform a detailed analysis of the
LHC signals from this model, finding that 300/fb suffices for evidence of
KK-gluon in tri-jet, jet + di-photon and jet + di-boson channels. However, KK
photon in photon + di-jet, and KK-W in leptonic W + di-jet require 3000/fb. The
crucial feature of this decay chain is a "double" resonance, i.e. 3-particle
and 2-particle invariant mass peaks, corresponding to the KK gauge boson and
the radion respectively.Comment: 50 page
Violations of local realism by two entangled quNits
Results obtained in two recent papers, \cite{Kaszlikowski} and \cite{Durt},
seem to indicate that the nonlocal character of the correlations between the
outcomes of measurements performed on entangled systems separated in space is
not robust in the presence of noise. This is surprising, since entanglement
itself is robust. Here we revisit this problem and argue that the class of
gedanken-experiments considered in \cite{Kaszlikowski} and \cite{Durt} is too
restrictive. By considering a more general class, involving sequences of
measurements, we prove that the nonlocal correlations are in fact robust.Comment: Reference added, 3 pages, accepted for publication in J. Phys. A:
Math. and Genera
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