Profile of the physiotherapy profession in New South Wales (1975–2002)

This was the first study known to the authors exploring workforce data from the New South Wales Physiotherapists Registration Board over several decades. Labour force statistics were examined from various data sources over the years 1975 to 2002. The results indicate that the demographics and working patterns of physiotherapists in New South Wales have remained remarkably stable over time. The workforce continues to grow, however the growth rate has decreased markedly with only a 2.3% increase from 2001 to 2002. The proportion of men within the profession is steadily increasing; in 1975 men accounted for 5.2% of physiotherapists, in 2000 23.5% of physiotherapists were male. While the male workforce increases, the female workforce is ageing. The modal age for female physiotherapists has steadily increased from 25–29 years in 1975 to 40–44 years in 2001. Importantly, in relation to attrition, the degree of workforce participation has not undergone significant change since 1987. Although labour force analysis has demonstrated that the workforce is in shortage, attrition does not appear to be the major contributor to this situation. The proportion of the profession who are inactive has remained relatively stable since 1987. More pertinent to the current shortage is the slowing of the growth rate of the profession while demand for physiotherapy services continues to rise

Saving Software and Using Emulation to Reproduce Computationally Dependent Research Results

Using digital data necessarily involves software. How do institutions think about software in the context of the long-term usability of their data assets? How do they address usability challenges uniquely posed by software such as, license restrictions, legacy software, code rot, and dependencies? These questions are germane to the agenda set forth by the FAIR principles. At Yale University, a team in the Library is looking into the application of a novel approach to emulation as a potential solution. In this presentation, we will outline the work of the Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) program, discuss our plans for integrating the tooling of the EaaSI program into archiving and scientific workflows, and report on early work exploring how emulation relates to the computational reproduction of results from data archived at Yale\u27s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) and other research data repositories

Real-World Literacy Activity in Pre-school

In this article, we share real-world literacy activities that we designed and implemented in two early literacy classes for preschoolers from two inner-city neighborhoods that were part of an intergenerational family literacy program, Literacy for Life (LFL). The program was informed by research that shows that young children in high literate homes develop important emergent literacy knowledge by engaging in meaningful and functional activities in their homes and communities that are mediated by print. We defined real-world literacy activity as reading, writing, or listening to real-life texts for real-life purposes. The children made significant gains in literacy knowledge when compared to the norm group. We share examples of how we integrated real-world literacy activities into daily classroom management/organizational routines, whole class and small group instruction, celebrations and special events and how we took advantage of teachable moments to make explicit the purposes and functions of print and texts in developmentally appropriate ways

Genetic Improvement of Bermudagrass for Hay Producers

Bermudagrass (Cynodon spp.) is considered the most valuable warm-season perennial grass for hay producers in the Southeastern United States. Bermudagrass genotypes have overall good forage quality, high yields, and store well. However, there are challenges to producing good hay for the market. First, early green-up in the spring is needed to allow for four to five productive clippings during the summer. When first establishing production fields, quick emergence and cover are important for reducing weeds. Forage bermudagrass is somewhat tolerant to drought, however, low rainfall substantially reduces yields. If rainfall is too abundant, it is difficult to have timely curing in the field for baling. This is especially true for the higher quality thick-stemmed cultivars such as Tifton 85. More recently, the bermudagrass stem maggot (BSM, Atherigona reversura) has caused yield reductions and reduced net income for hay producers. Plant breeding has attempted to address all these issues. This talk will highlight some areas of research that has been done over the past few decades to improve bermudagrass for hay production

Towards the Unification of Gravity and other Interactions: What has been Missed?

Faced with the persisting problem of the unification of gravity with other fundamental interactions we investigate the possibility of a new paradigm, according to which the basic space of physics is a multidimensional space ${\cal C}$ associated with matter configurations. We consider general relativity in ${\cal C}$. In spacetime, which is a 4-dimensional subspace of ${\cal C}$, we have not only the 4-dimensional gravity, but also other interactions, just as in Kaluza-Klein theories. We then consider a finite dimensional description of extended objects in terms of the center of mass, area, and volume degrees of freedom, which altogether form a 16-dimensional manifold whose tangent space at any point is Clifford algebra Cl(1,3). The latter algebra is very promising for the unification, and it provides description of fermions.Comment: 11 pages; Talk presented at "First Mediterranean Conference on Classical and Quantum Gravity", Kolymbari, Crete, Greece, 14-18 September 200

Moving Warm-Season Forage Bermudagrass (\u3ci\u3eCynodon\u3c/i\u3e sp.) into Temperate Regions of North America

Warm-season (C4) perennial grasses are grown over millions of hectares in the Southeastern United States. These grasses produce optimal growth at 30 to 38°C diurnal temperature. Bermudagrass (Cynodon sp.) has been adopted as the preferred forage for many livestock and hay producers. Compared to other native and introduced warm-season perennial grass species, improved bermudagrass varieties produce high biomass with enhanced digestibility for ruminant grazing or feed. Until the 1930’s pastures in the region consisted of unimproved ‘common’ bermudagrass (Cynodon dactylon (L.) Pers.) that had been introduced earlier. However, in the early 20th century, new germplasm, including stargrass (C nlemfuënsis Vanderyst) was collected, primarily from Africa. This germplasm provided a source for major improvements in yield and digestibility. Unfortunately, stargrass is not cold tolerant, limiting it to regions between 30°N and 30°S. Intercrossing of C. nlemfuënsis with C. dactylon has produced highly successful cultivars, such as Tifton 85, which can survive at northern latitudes of at least 35°. However, there has been a desire to extend adaptation further north into the warm-season/cool-season grass transition zone. This would require a combination of breeding to improve cold tolerance in clonally-propagated varieties and development of seeded varieties that could be re-seeded following extremely cold winters. Earlier work at Oklahoma State University indicated that some cultivars had significantly different tolerance to freeze. Screening the Tifton, GA, USA core collection of 175 accessions in a northern, high-altitude location, has identified germplasm with promising cold tolerance. A breeding line (Tifton 79-16) had significantly higher yields at the northern Georgia location than the cold tolerant cultivar (Tifton 44). A number of plant introductions had higher yields as well

Non–Water–Stressed Baseline as a Tool for Dynamic Control of a Misting System for Propagation of Poinsettias

A technique is presented for dynamically adjusting misting intervals during propagation of vegetative cuttings. A crop setpoint temperature for activation of misting was defined by a non-water-stressed baseline concept, using infrared thermometry to acquire canopy temperature for plant feedback. The critical crop setpoint temperature was calculated from instantaneous values of air temperature, incident radiation, and air vapor pressure deficit (VPDair). Misting was activated when the actual crop temperature exceeded the critical crop setpoint temperature. The dynamic control was shown to have the potential to reduce the amount of applied water from 9 to 12 times during low levels of VPDair (0.8 to 1.1 kPa) and under dark conditions when compared to a conventional on/off misting interval of 5 s each 5 min. In addition, misting intervals were reduced three-fold, from 30 to 11 min, when incident radiation increased from 0 to 100 W m-2 and VPDair was maintained in the range from 2.3 to 2.6 kPa. Further increases in radiation levels from 200 to 300 W m-2 did not appreciably change the misting frequency. The dynamic misting control provides a large potential for increasing the period between misting events under dark conditions and with low to moderate levels of incident radiation. It automatically increases misting frequency as VPDair and/or radiation increase