Using web-based reflection with video to enhance high fidelity undergraduate nursing clinical skills education

The United States is currently facing a crisis in health care and health professions education. Various studies (Committee on Quality of Health Care in America 2000; 2001; General Accounting Office, 2001) have documented astonishing death rates from medical errors as well as nursing and physician shortages. Thus it is obvious that the traditional “hands on” model historically used to teach and assess clinical judgment competence is or has become inadequate. New advances in simulation and web-based technologies can, if leveraged well, help educators address these challenges. Thus far, high fidelity simulation (HFS) clinical skills education sessions have been primarily conducted and debriefed in real time and the use of any related video recordings has been confined to faculty regarding its review. The goal of this project was to pilot test the impact of providing students the opportunity to review the video of their simulated session while reflecting on their performance within a structured format. The live debriefing that is a part of HFS sessions is also a form of reflection. The guided reflection prompt exercise used in this pilot is a secondary form of reflection. This paper describes the theoretical basis for this exercise, the findings of its initial evaluation and post study research that illuminates its limitations

Improving Software Citation and Credit

The past year has seen movement on several fronts for improving software citation, including the Center for Open Science's Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, the Software Publishing Special Interest Group that was started at January's AAS meeting in Seattle at the request of that organization's Working Group on Astronomical Software, a Sloan-sponsored meeting at GitHub in San Francisco to begin work on a cohesive research software citation-enabling platform, the work of Force11 to "transform and improve" research communication, and WSSSPE's ongoing efforts that include software publication, citation, credit, and sustainability. Brief reports on these efforts were shared at the BoF, after which participants discussed ideas for improving software citation, generating a list of recommendations to the community of software authors, journal publishers, ADS, and research authors. The discussion, recommendations, and feedback will help form recommendations for software citation to those publishers represented in the Software Publishing Special Interest Group and the broader community.Comment: Birds of a Feather session organized by the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL, http://ascl.net/ ); to be published in Proceedings of ADASS XXV (Sydney, Australia; October, 2015). 4 page

An Abundance Analysis for Five Red Horizontal Branch Stars in the Extremely Metal Rich Globular Cluster NGC 6553

We provide a high dispersion line-by-line abundance analysis of five red HB stars in the extremely metal rich galactic globular cluster NGC 6553. These red HB stars are significantly hotter than the very cool stars near the tip of the giant branch in such a metal rich globular cluster and hence their spectra are much more amenable to an abundance analysis than would be the case for red giants. We find that the mean [Fe/H] for NGC 6553 is -0.16 dex, comparable to the mean abundance in the galactic bulge found by McWilliam & Rich (1994) and considerably higher than that obtained from an analysis of two red giants in this cluster by Barbuy etal (1999). The relative abundance for the best determined alpha process element (Ca) indicates an excess of alpha process elements of about a factor of two. The metallicity of NGC 6553 reaches the average of the Galactic bulge and of the solar neighborhood.Comment: 29 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in the Ap

GNOSIS: the first instrument to use fibre Bragg gratings for OH suppression

GNOSIS is a prototype astrophotonic instrument that utilizes OH suppression fibres consisting of fibre Bragg gratings and photonic lanterns to suppress the 103 brightest atmospheric emission doublets between 1.47-1.7 microns. GNOSIS was commissioned at the 3.9-meter Anglo-Australian Telescope with the IRIS2 spectrograph to demonstrate the potential of OH suppression fibres, but may be potentially used with any telescope and spectrograph combination. Unlike previous atmospheric suppression techniques GNOSIS suppresses the lines before dispersion and in a manner that depends purely on wavelength. We present the instrument design and report the results of laboratory and on-sky tests from commissioning. While these tests demonstrated high throughput and excellent suppression of the skylines by the OH suppression fibres, surprisingly GNOSIS produced no significant reduction in the interline background and the sensitivity of GNOSIS and IRIS2 is about the same as IRIS2. It is unclear whether the lack of reduction in the interline background is due to physical sources or systematic errors as the observations are detector noise-dominated. OH suppression fibres could potentially impact ground-based astronomy at the level of adaptive optics or greater. However, until a clear reduction in the interline background and the corresponding increasing in sensitivity is demonstrated optimized OH suppression fibres paired with a fibre-fed spectrograph will at least provide a real benefits at low resolving powers.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figures, accepted to A

NGC 2419 -- Another Remnant of Accretion by the Milky Way

We isolate a sample of 43 upper RGB stars in the extreme outer halo Galactic globular cluster NGC 2419 from two Keck/DEIMOS slitmasks. The probability that there is more than one contaminating halo field star in this sample is extremely low. Analysis of moderate resolution spectra of these cluster members, as well as of our Keck/HIRES high resolution spectra of a subsample of them, demonstrates that there is a small but real spread in Ca abundance of ~ 0.2 dex within this massive metal-poor globular cluster. This provides additional support to earlier suggestions that NGC 2419 is the remnant of a dwarf galaxy accreted long ago by the Milky Way.Comment: Accepted to the Astrophysical Journa

Investigating poultry trade patterns to guide avian influenza surveillance and control: a case study in Vietnam

Live bird markets are often the focus of surveillance activities monitoring avian influenza viruses (AIV) circulating in poultry. However, in order to ensure a high sensitivity of virus detection and effectiveness of management actions, poultry management practices features influencing AIV dynamics need to be accounted for in the design of surveillance programmes. In order to address this knowledge gap, a cross-sectional survey was conducted through interviews with 791 traders in 18 Vietnamese live bird markets. Markets greatly differed according to the sources from which poultry was obtained, and their connections to other markets through the movements of their traders. These features, which could be informed based on indicators that are easy to measure, suggest that markets could be used as sentinels for monitoring virus strains circulating in specific segments of the poultry production sector. AIV spread within markets was modelled. Due to the high turn-over of poultry, viral amplification was likely to be minimal in most of the largest markets. However, due to the large number of birds being introduced each day, and challenges related to cleaning and disinfection, environmental accumulation of viruses at markets may take place, posing a threat to the poultry production sector and to public health

The Chemical Evolution of the Ursa Minor Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy

We present an abundance analysis based on high resolution spectra of 10 stars selected to span the full range in metallicity in the Ursa Minor dwarf spheroidal galaxy. We find [Fe/H] for the sample stars ranges from -1.35 to -3.10 dex and establish the trends of the abundance ratios [X/Fe]. In key cases, particularly for the alpha-elements, these resemble those for stars in the outer part of the Galactic halo, especially at the lowest metallicities probed. The n-capture elements show a r-process distribution over the full range of Fe-metallicity. This suggests that the duration of star formation in the UMi dSph was shorter than in other dSph galaxies. The derived ages for a larger sample of UMi stars with more uncertain metallicities also suggest a population dominated by uniformly old (~13 Gyr) stars, with a hint of an age-metallicity relationship. In comparing our results for UMi, our earlier work in Draco, and published studies of more metal-rich dSph Galactic satellites, there appears to be a pattern of moving from a chemical inventory for dSph giants with [Fe/H] < -2 dex which is very similar to that of stars in the outer part of the Galactic halo (enhanced alpha/Fe relative to the Sun, coupled with subsolar [X/Fe] for the heavy neutron capture elements and r-process domination), switching to subsolar alpha-elements and super-solar s-process dominated neutron capture elements for the highest [Fe/H] dSph stars. The combination of low star formation rates over a varying and sometimes extended duration that produced the stellar populations in the local dSph galaxies with [Fe/H] > -1.5 dex leads to a chemical inventory wildly discrepant from that of any component of the Milky Way.Comment: Accepted to the Astrophysical Journal. 22 pages of text, total length 68 pages includes 11 page table 3 to be published in full in electronic form onl