Orientation to mission: Assessing the perceptions of effectiveness of an in-house orientation program focussed on mission, vision and values within a large-scale, not-for-profit, private hospital

St John of God Healthcare (SJGHC), as a large Catholic, not-for-profit, healthcare provider, has explicit statements which reflect the Mission, Vision and Values of the organisation. New employees receive a comprehensive induction and orientation program, part of which includes ensuring new recruits are conversant with the Mission, Vision and Values. This program is deemed as formation, rather than training, to reflect a desire for the input to have a direct and personal impact on new employees, to increase their motivation and engagement with the ideals of the organisation. This research attempted to measure the perceived efficacy of the Mission component of Orientation at one particular SJGHC site, the hospital located in Subiaco, Western Australia, through both participant surveys and interviews. The results of 120 surveys were analysed and 16 semi-structured interviews were used to validate and probe information obtained from the participant surveys. Importantly, the research demonstrated that the session was perceived as valuable by participants and showed an increase in knowledge. This research has led to further ongoing research to determine if the perceptions of patients and their visitors align with staff perceptions of the way Mission is integrated in to the life of this hospital. The latter work will provide an important adjunct to this project since the work of hospital staff is ultimately not measured by individual staff members’ knowledge, attitude or intentions, but by how their work impacts on the patients and their visitors

Predator empire: the geopolitics of U.S. drone warfare

This paper critically assesses the CIA’s drone program and proposes that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is driving an increasingly paramilitarized U.S. national security strategy. The paper suggests that large-scale ground wars are being eclipsed by fleets of weaponized drones capable of targeted killings across the planet. Evidence for this shift is found in key security documents that mobilize an amorphous war against vaguely defined al-Qa’ida “affiliates”. This is further legitimized by the White House’s presentation of drone warfare as a bureaucratic task managed by a “disposition matrix”. Such abstract narratives are challenged through the voices of people living in the tribal areas of Pakistan. What I call the Predator Empire names the biopolitical power that catalogues and eliminates threatening “patterns of life”. This permanent war is enabled by a topological spatial power that folds the environments of the “affiliate” into the surveillance machinery of the Homeland

Process for the leaching of AP from propellant

A method for the recovery of ammonium perchlorate from waste solid rocket propellant is described wherein shredded particles of the propellant are leached with an aqueous leach solution containing a low concentration of surface active agent while stirring the suspension

Rho Electroproduction and the Hadronic Contribution to Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering

A two-gluon-exchange model incorporating perturbative and non-perturbative effects is presented for rho electroproduction which provides an excellent description of all current data. This is then used to calculate the contribution from the rho to deeply virtual Compton scattering via the vector-meson-dominance transition rho -> gamma. This is found to be sufficiently large to provide a significant contribution through interference with the perturbative QCD term.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Introduction to Diffractive Photoprocesses

The objectives of my talk are to provide a very brief introduction to diffractive photoprocesses in general and the colour dipole model in particular; and to comment on possible gluon saturation effects at HERA and beyond.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures. Introductory talk to the plenary session on "Diffraction" at PHOTON2000(Ambleside, U.K., August 2000

Recovery of aluminum from composite propellants

Aluminum was recovered from solid rocket propellant containing a small amount of oxidizer by depolymerizing and dissolving propellant binders (containing functional or hydrolyzable groups in a solution of sodium methoxide) in an alcohol solvent optionally containing an aliphatic or aromatic hydrocarbon co-solvent. The solution was filtered to recover substantially all the aluminum in active form

Software for the grouped optimal aggregation technique

The grouped optimal aggregation technique produces minimum variance, unbiased estimates of acreage and production for countries, zones (states), or any designated collection of acreage strata. It uses yield predictions, historical acreage information, and direct acreage estimate from satellite data. The acreage strata are grouped in such a way that the ratio model over historical acreage provides a smaller variance than if the model were applied to each individual stratum. An optimal weighting matrix based on historical acreages, provides the link between incomplete direct acreage estimates and the total, current acreage estimate