3,474 research outputs found
A systematic review and critical appraisal of quality indicators to assess optimal palliative care for older people with dementia
UK end-of-life care services in dementia, initiatives and sustainability: results of a national online survey
BACKGROUND: People living and dying with non-cancer diagnoses, including dementia, have poorer access to generalist and specialist palliative care than people with cancer, and experience worse outcomes in terms of pain and symptom control, and quality and experience of care. In the UK, the National Council for Palliative Care (NCPC) ran a national survey of services for end-of-life care for people with dementia (2008) in which 16 services were identified, and reported on case studies and examples of good practice. We updated the NCPC survey to review progress in previously identified services, identify factors that lead to sustainable services and identify new initiatives in this area of care. METHODS: An online survey was developed and piloted before use. Initiatives were contacted via targeted (N=63) and open call invitations. The survey was made up of 5 sections. Quantitative data were analysed using descriptive statistics. RESULTS: 15 services responded. They engaged in a wide range of activities predominately providing direct care (80%) and workforce development/advisory or educational activities (87%). Results suggest that sustainability of services is reliant on clinicians with a leadership role and wider system support through funding mechanisms and a minimum level of integration within normal service provision. CONCLUSIONS: Recent initiatives are largely built on the expertise of the nursing profession (with or without input from medical consultants), and driven mainly by the charity and hospice sector. This has generated a potential new model of care provision in end of life dementia care, 'Hospice-enabled Dementia Care'
Cartilage degeneration in the human patellae and its relationship to the mineralisation of the underlying bone
Time Resolved Correlation measurements of temporally heterogeneous dynamics
Time Resolved Correlation (TRC) is a recently introduced light scattering
technique that allows to detect and quantify dynamic heterogeneities. The
technique is based on the analysis of the temporal evolution of the speckle
pattern generated by the light scattered by a sample, which is quantified by
, the degree of correlation between speckle images recorded at
time and . Heterogeneous dynamics results in significant
fluctuations of with time . We describe how to optimize TRC
measurements and how to detect and avoid possible artifacts. The statistical
properties of the fluctuations of are analyzed by studying their
variance, probability distribution function, and time autocorrelation function.
We show that these quantities are affected by a noise contribution due to the
finite number of detected speckles. We propose and demonstrate a method to
correct for the noise contribution, based on a extrapolation
scheme. Examples from both homogeneous and heterogeneous dynamics are provided.
Connections with recent numerical and analytical works on heterogeneous glassy
dynamics are briefly discussed.Comment: 19 pages, 15 figures. Submitted to PR
Regular and chaotic motion in softened gravitational systems
The stability of the dynamical trajectories of softened spherical
gravitational systems is examined, both in the case of the full -body
problem and that of trajectories moving in the gravitational field of
non-interacting background particles. In the latter case, for ,
some trajectories, even if unstable, had exceedingly long diffusion times,
which correlated with the characteristic e-folding timescale of the
instability. For trajectories of systems this timescale
could be arbitrarily large --- and thus appear to correspond to regular orbits.
For centrally concentrated systems, low angular momentum trajectories were
found to be systematically more unstable. This phenomenon is analogous to the
well known case of trajectories in generic centrally concentrated non-spherical
smooth systems, where eccentric trajectories are found to be chaotic. The
exponentiation times also correlate with the conservation of the angular
momenta along the trajectories. For up to a few hundred, the instability
timescales of -body systems and their variation with particle number are
similar to those of the most chaotic trajectories in inhomogeneous
non-interacting systems. For larger (up to a few thousand) the values of
the these timescales were found to saturate, increasing significantly more
slowly with . We attribute this to collective effects in the fully
self-gravitating problem, which are apparent in the time-variations of the time
dependent Liapunov exponents. The results presented here go some way towards
resolving the long standing apparent paradoxes concerning the local instability
of trajectories of gravitational systems (abridged).Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures, Monthly Notices styl
Performance of care for end‐of‐life cancer patients in Tuscany: The interplay between place of care, aggressive treatments, opioids, and place of death. A retrospective cohort study
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Simulation of networks of spiking neurons: A review of tools and strategies
We review different aspects of the simulation of spiking neural networks. We
start by reviewing the different types of simulation strategies and algorithms
that are currently implemented. We next review the precision of those
simulation strategies, in particular in cases where plasticity depends on the
exact timing of the spikes. We overview different simulators and simulation
environments presently available (restricted to those freely available, open
source and documented). For each simulation tool, its advantages and pitfalls
are reviewed, with an aim to allow the reader to identify which simulator is
appropriate for a given task. Finally, we provide a series of benchmark
simulations of different types of networks of spiking neurons, including
Hodgkin-Huxley type, integrate-and-fire models, interacting with current-based
or conductance-based synapses, using clock-driven or event-driven integration
strategies. The same set of models are implemented on the different simulators,
and the codes are made available. The ultimate goal of this review is to
provide a resource to facilitate identifying the appropriate integration
strategy and simulation tool to use for a given modeling problem related to
spiking neural networks.Comment: 49 pages, 24 figures, 1 table; review article, Journal of
Computational Neuroscience, in press (2007
On The Power of Tree Projections: Structural Tractability of Enumerating CSP Solutions
The problem of deciding whether CSP instances admit solutions has been deeply
studied in the literature, and several structural tractability results have
been derived so far. However, constraint satisfaction comes in practice as a
computation problem where the focus is either on finding one solution, or on
enumerating all solutions, possibly projected to some given set of output
variables. The paper investigates the structural tractability of the problem of
enumerating (possibly projected) solutions, where tractability means here
computable with polynomial delay (WPD), since in general exponentially many
solutions may be computed. A general framework based on the notion of tree
projection of hypergraphs is considered, which generalizes all known
decomposition methods. Tractability results have been obtained both for classes
of structures where output variables are part of their specification, and for
classes of structures where computability WPD must be ensured for any possible
set of output variables. These results are shown to be tight, by exhibiting
dichotomies for classes of structures having bounded arity and where the tree
decomposition method is considered
Towards Controlling the Acceptance Factors for a Collaborative Platform in Engineering Design
International audienceThis paper might serve as a guide to take step towards a better acceptance of computer-based Knowledge management (KM) tools in institutional setting. At first time, it investigates a set of factors with different origins which are proved to have an effect on usage decision. Secondly, we set a list of candidate factor which are supposed to influence future users of a collaborative KM platform (Dimocode). At the end, we develop a methodology to take into account the selected factors and master their positive or negative impacts. The contents of this paper would be an appropriate framework in the way of Knowledge management systems (KMS) deployment
Computable de Finetti measures
We prove a computable version of de Finetti's theorem on exchangeable
sequences of real random variables. As a consequence, exchangeable stochastic
processes expressed in probabilistic functional programming languages can be
automatically rewritten as procedures that do not modify non-local state. Along
the way, we prove that a distribution on the unit interval is computable if and
only if its moments are uniformly computable.Comment: 32 pages. Final journal version; expanded somewhat, with minor
corrections. To appear in Annals of Pure and Applied Logic. Extended abstract
appeared in Proceedings of CiE '09, LNCS 5635, pp. 218-23
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