Redeployment and training of healthcare professionals to Intensive Care during COVID-19: a systematic review

Background: A rapid influx of patients to intensive care and infection control measures during the COVID-19 pandemic required the rapid development of innovative redeployment and training strategies. / Methods: We conducted a systematic search of 9 databases including key terms related to intensive care AND training AND redeployment AND healthcare workers. Analysis consisted of a narrative synthesis of quantitative study outputs, and a framework-based thematic analysis of qualitative study outputs and grey literature. These results were then combined applying an interpretative synthesis. / Results: Twenty papers were analysed. These took place primarily in the UK (N=8, 40%) and USA (N=5, 25%). Themes included in the results are Redeployment: Implementation strategies and learnings; Redeployed staff experience and strategies to address their needs; Redeployed staff learning needs; Training formats offered and training evaluations; and Future redeployment and training concerns. Some of the redeployment implementation and training strategies documented in this review are: Skills-based redeployment, buddy support systems, and agreeing on locally-specific principles, rather than strict procedures. / Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic presented unique challenges to deliver training promptly while following infection control recommendations and develop flexible redeployment strategies. This study synthesises original approaches to tackle these challenges which are relevant to inform the development of targeted and adaptative training and redeployment plans

Factors influencing online flight ticket purchasing

In spite of the rapid growth in Internet purchasing of products and services in Korea, the buying rate of online flight ticketing remains low. This research investigates the factors that influence online ticket purchasing through a survey of Internet consumers to determine the relationships between convenience, willingness to purchase and trust. From these, the present satisfaction levels can be assessed and future upgrades and requirements can be planned. It is also necessary to determine the background factors that influence Internet-using consumers who visit websites, with a view to simplifying procedures and encouraging repeat visits to the sites

Carrying Out Rapid Qualitative Research During a Pandemic: Emerging Lessons From COVID-19

Social scientists have a robust history of contributing to better understandings of and responses to disease outbreaks. The implementation of qualitative research in the context of infectious epidemics, however, continues to lag behind in the delivery, credibility, and timeliness of findings when compared with other research designs. The purpose of this article is to reflect on our experience of carrying out three research studies (a rapid appraisal, a qualitative study based on interviews, and a mixed-methods survey) aimed at exploring health care delivery in the context of COVID-19. We highlight the importance of qualitative data to inform evidence-based public health responses and provide a way forward to global research teams who wish to implement similar rapid qualitative studies. We reflect on the challenges of setting up research teams, obtaining ethical approval, collecting and analyzing data in real-time and sharing actionable findings

External perceptions of successful university brands

Branding in universities has become an increasingly topical issue, with some institutions committing substantial financial resources to branding activities. The particular characteristics of the sector present challenges for those seeking to build brands and it therefore seems to be timely and appropriate to investigate the common approaches of those institutions perceived as having successful brands. This study is exploratory in nature, seeking to investigate how successfully UK universities brand themselves, whether they are distinct and if the sector overall communicates effectively. This is approached through examining the perspective of opinion formers external to universities but closely involved with the sector – a key stakeholder group in UK higher education Overall, the research’s exploratory nature aims to further the debate on effective branding in UK higher education. The findings and conclusions identify some issues surrounding university branding activity; most UK universities were considered to be distinct from one another, but few were seen to have real fully formed brands. Although a number of institutions that were seen as having more ‘successful’ brands were identified, it was argued that whilst many UK universities communicate their brand well enough to key stakeholders, they fail to consistently do this across all audiences. It was also suggested that UK universities may concentrate on areas of perceived immediate strategic importance (in terms of branding) to an extent where others are neglected

CHERI Concentrate: Practical Compressed Capabilities

We present CHERI Concentrate, a new fat-pointer compression scheme applied to CHERI, the most developed capability-pointer system at present. Capability fat-pointers are a primary candidate for enforcing fine-grained and non-bypassable security properties in future computer systems, although increased pointer size can severely affect performance. Thus, several proposals for capability compression have been suggested but these did not support legacy instruction sets, ignored features critical to the existing software base, and also introduced design inefficiencies to RISC-style processor pipelines. CHERI Concentrate improves on the state-of-the-art region-encoding efficiency, solves important pipeline problems, and eases semantic restrictions of compressed encoding, allowing it to protect a full legacy software stack. We analyze and extend logic from the open-source CHERI prototype processor design on FPGA to demonstrate encoding efficiency, minimize delay of pointer arithmetic, and eliminate additional load-to-use delay. To verify correctness of our proposed high-performance logic, we present a HOL4 machine-checked proof of the decode and pointer-modify operations. Finally, we measure a 50%-75% reduction in L2 misses for many compiled C-language benchmarks running under a commodity operating system using compressed 128-bit and 64-bit formats, demonstrating both compatibility with and increased performance over the uncompressed, 256-bit format

Exploring rationales for branding a university: Should we be seeking to measure branding in UK universities?

Although branding is now widespread among UK universities, the application of branding principles in the higher education sector is comparatively recent and may be controversial for internal audiences who question its suitability and efficiency. This paper seeks to investigate how and whether the effectiveness of branding activity in the higher education sector should be evaluated and measured, through exploratory interviews with those who often drive it; UK University marketing professionals. Conclusions suggest that university branding is inherently complex and therefore application of commercial approaches may be over simplistic. Whilst marketing professionals discuss challenges they do not necessarily have a consistent view of the objectives of branding activity although all were able to clearly articulate branding objectives for their university, including both qualitative and, to some extent, quantitative metrics. Some measures of the real value of branding activity are therefore suggested but a key debate is perhaps whether the objectives and role of branding in higher education needs to be clarified, and a more consistent view of appropriate metrics reached? Various challenges in implementing branding approaches are also highlighted

On the Multi-Language Construction

Modern software is no more developed in a single programming language. Instead, programmers tend to exploit cross-language interoperability mechanisms to combine code stemming from different languages, and thus yielding fully-fledged multi-language programs. Whilst this approach enables developers to benefit from the strengths of each single-language, on the other hand it complicates the semantics of such programs. Indeed, the resulting multi-language does not meet any of the semantics of the combined languages. In this paper, we broaden the boundary functions-based approach a la Matthews and Findler to propose an algebraic framework that provides a constructive mathematical notion of multi-language able to determine its semantics. The aim of this work is to overcome the lack of a formal method (resp., model) to design (resp., represent) a multi-language, regardless of the inherent nature of the underlying languages. We show that our construction ensures the uniqueness of the semantic function (i.e., the multi-language semantics induced by the combined languages) by proving the initiality of the term model (i.e., the abstract syntax of the multi-language) in its category

Scintillation light detection in the 6-m drift-length ProtoDUNE Dual Phase liquid argon TPC

DUNE is a dual-site experiment for long-baseline neutrino oscillation studies, neutrino astrophysics and nucleon decay searches. ProtoDUNE Dual Phase (DP) is a 6 × 6 × 6 m3 liquid argon time-projection-chamber (LArTPC) that recorded cosmic-muon data at the CERN Neutrino Platform in 2019–2020 as a prototype of the DUNE Far Detector. Charged particles propagating through the LArTPC produce ionization and scintillation light. The scintillation light signal in these detectors can provide the trigger for non-beam events. In addition, it adds precise timing capabilities and improves the calorimetry measurements. In ProtoDUNE-DP, scintillation and electroluminescence light produced by cosmic muons in the LArTPC is collected by photomultiplier tubes placed up to 7 m away from the ionizing track. In this paper, the ProtoDUNE-DP photon detection system performance is evaluated with a particular focus on the different wavelength shifters, such as PEN and TPB, and the use of Xe-doped LAr, considering its future use in giant LArTPCs. The scintillation light production and propagation processes are analyzed and a comparison of simulation to data is performed, improving understanding of the liquid argon properties

CHERI JNI: Sinking the Java Security Model into the C

Java provides security and robustness by building a high- level security model atop the foundation of memory protection. Unfortunately, any native code linked into a Java program – including the million lines used to implement the standard library – is able to bypass both the memory protection and the higher-level policies. We present a hardware-assisted implementation of the Java native code interface, which extends the guarantees required for Java’s security model to native code. Our design supports safe direct access to buffers owned by the JVM, including hardware-enforced read-only access where appropriate. We also present Java language syntax to declaratively describe isolated compartments for native code. We show that it is possible to preserve the memory safety and isolation requirements of the Java security model in C code, allowing native code to run in the same process as Java code with the same impact on security as running equivalent Java code. Our approach has a negligible impact on performance, compared with the existing unsafe native code interface. We demonstrate a prototype implementation running on the CHERI microprocessor synthesized in FPGA.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Google, Inc. Isaac Newton Trust Thales E-Securit