Community pharmacies: an ideal setting to promote continence

Stage One of the Pharmacy Continence Care Project (the project) was undertaken in 2003-2004 by the Continence Advisory Service of WA Incorporated. The aim of the project was to establish current best practice in the provision of continence care within community pharmacies in Australia and internationally, and to develop a model of best practice based upon these findings. These materials will be trialed and evaluated in the second stage of the project. Research, including a literature search, surveys of pharmacy staff, consumer focus groups and a consumer survey was conducted. A survey of consumers found that they were generally uncertain of knowledge levels of pharmacy staff in relation to continence issues.This uncertainty was demonstrated by consumers indicating that they would primarily seek continence advice from a doctor or other health care professional rather than a pharmacist. While a definitive model was not found, components of a best practice model and opportunities to promote continence were identified. Stage one of the project concluded with the development of draft training modules. In response to input from pharmacy staff, a selection of supportive material, such as product selection guides was developed to enhance pharmacy staff skills in providing information and advice on continence care. The second stage of the project will involve the evaluation and modification of the training materials

Tonal prisms: iterated quantization in chromatic tonality and Ravel's 'Ondine'

The mathematics of second-order maximal evenness has far-reaching potential for application in music analysis. One of its assets is its foundation in an inherently continuous conception of pitch, a feature it shares with voice-leading geometries. This paper reformulates second-order maximal evenness as iterated quantization in voice-leading spaces, discusses the implications of viewing diatonic triads as second-order maximally even sets for the understanding of nineteenth-century modulatory schemes, and applies a second-order maximally even derivation of acoustic collections in an in-depth analysis of Ravel's ‘Ondine’. In the interaction between these two very different applications, the paper generalizes the concepts and analytical methods associated with iterated quantization and also pursues a broader argument about the mutual dependence of mathematical music theory and music analysis.Accepted manuscrip

UKIRT follow-up observations of the old open cluster FSR0358 (Kirkpatrick1)

We aim to characterise the properties of the stellar clusters in the Milky Way. Utilising an expectation-maximisation method we determined that the cluster FSR0358, originally discovered by J.D.Kirkpatrick, is the most likely real cluster amongst the cluster candidates from Froebrich et al.. Here we present new deep high resolution near infrared imaging of this object obtained with UKIRT. The analysis of the data reveals that FSR0358 (Kirkpatrick1) is a 5+-2Gyr old open cluster in the outer Milky Way. Its age, metallicity of Z=0.008 and distance from the Galactic Centre of 11.2kpc are typical for the known old open galactic clusters. So far six of the FSR cluster candidates have been identified as having an age above 5Gyr. This shows the significance of this catalogue in enhancing our knowledge of the oldest open clusters in the Galaxy.Comment: 8 pages, 1 table, 5 figures, accepted for publication by MNRAS, a version with higher resolution figures can be found at http://astro.kent.ac.uk/~df

Fracture propagation to the base of the Greenland Ice Sheet during supraglacial lake drainage

Author Posting. © The Authors, 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of American Association for the Advancement of Science for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science 320 (2008): 778-781, doi:10.1126/science.1153360.Surface meltwater that reaches the base of an ice sheet creates a mechanism for the rapid response of ice flow to climate change. The process whereby such a pathway is created through thick, cold ice has not, however, been previously observed. We describe the rapid (<2 hours) drainage of a large supraglacial lake down 980 m through to the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet initiated by water-driven fracture propagation evolving into moulin flow. Drainage coincided with increased seismicity, transient acceleration, ice sheet uplift and horizontal displacement. Subsidence and deceleration occurred over the following 24 hours. The short-lived dynamic response suggests an efficient drainage system dispersed the meltwater subglacially. The integrated effect of multiple lake drainages could explain the observed net regional summer ice speedup.Support was provided jointly by NSF and NASA through ARC-0520077 (S.B.D., M.P.B., I.M.H.) and ARC- 520382 (I.J.); The WHOI OCCI and Clark Arctic Research Initiative provided additional support to S.B.D., M.D.B., and D.L.; and a NERC (UK) Research Fellowship supported M.A.K

A metadata-aware application for remote scoring and exchange of tissue microarray images.

BACKGROUND: The use of tissue microarrays (TMA) and advances in digital scanning microscopy has enabled the collection of thousands of tissue images. There is a need for software tools to annotate, query and share this data amongst researchers in different physical locations. RESULTS: We have developed an open source web-based application for remote scoring of TMA images, which exploits the value of Microsoft Silverlight Deep Zoom to provide a intuitive interface for zooming and panning around digital images. We use and extend existing XML-based standards to ensure that the data collected can be archived and that our system is interoperable with other standards-compliant systems. CONCLUSION: The application has been used for multi-centre scoring of TMA slides composed of tissues from several Phase III breast cancer trials and ten different studies participating in the International Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC). The system has enabled researchers to simultaneously score large collections of TMA and export the standardised data to integrate with pathological and clinical outcome data, thereby facilitating biomarker discovery.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are