Evaluation of a personal professional mentor scheme for newly qualified nurses.

Newly qualified nurses are known to experience a range of feelings and fears in the first transitional 12 months post-qualifying, with absence and turnover among potential outcomes. To evaluate the personal professional mentor role and scheme, a new pastoral support initiative, from the perspective of participating newly qualified nurses. Newly qualified paediatric nurses ( =10), who had been assigned a personal professional mentor (an experienced nurse who worked elsewhere in their employing NHS Trust), completed a semi-structured interview. The data were analysed using thematic analysis. The personal professional mentor counteracted some aspects of transition isolation for the newly qualified nurses. They were an independent, accessible, experienced confidant and a welcome new supportive role. Pairing experienced nurses with newly qualified nurses provided a new type of workplace support during transition. Inexpensive to set up and run, it is an easy addition to any portfolio of support strategies

Directed polymers in random media under confining force

The scaling behavior of a directed polymer in a two-dimensional (2D) random potential under confining force is investigated. The energy of a polymer with configuration $\{y(x)\}$ is given by H\big(\{y(x)\}\big) = \sum_{x=1}^N \exyx + \epsilon \Wa^\alpha, where $\eta(x,y)$ is an uncorrelated random potential and \Wa is the width of the polymer. Using an energy argument, it is conjectured that the radius of gyration $R_g(N)$ and the energy fluctuation $\Delta E(N)$ of the polymer of length $N$ in the ground state increase as $R_g(N)\sim N^{\nu}$ and $\Delta E(N)\sim N^\omega$ respectively with $\nu = 1/(1+\alpha)$ and $\omega = (1+2\alpha)/(4+4\alpha)$ for $\alpha\ge 1/2$. A novel algorithm of finding the exact ground state, with the effective time complexity of \cO(N^3), is introduced and used to confirm the conjecture numerically.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

The Filing and Briefing of Cross-Motions in State and Federal Court

Misunderstandings regarding the definition of a crossmotion often lead to problems during the filing and briefing of cross-motions in state and federal courts. This article focuses on defining and illustrating the elements of a proper cross-motion, identifying and illustrating common problems caused by the filing and briefing of improper crossmotions, and offering solutions to those problems. As most commonly understood by judges and practitioners, a cross-motion in state or federal court possesses three elements: (1) it is filed against the originally moving party; (2) it is filed by a party against whom the original motion was filed; and (3) it requests an order similar to that requested by the originally moving party against the cross-moving party. Common problems posed by the filing and briefing of improper cross-motions in state and federal court include (1) a violation of the action’s motion-filing deadline, (2) a violation of the court’s proscription against the filing of replies on cross-motions, (3) a violation of the court’s proscription against the filing of sur-replies on dispositive motions, and (4) a violation of the court’s page limitation on memoranda of law. Possible solutions to those common problems include (1) filing a motion before the opposing party files its motion, (2) requesting leave to depart from the action’s scheduling order or the court’s local rules, (3) moving to strike the improper cross-motion, and (4) in the context of pleading amendments, filing a timely amended complaint rather than a cross-motion for leave to file an amended complaint in response to a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim

Long-Term Effects of Alternative Group Selection Harvesting Designs on Stand Production

Interest in group selection harvesting has increased in recent years because of limitations associated with both clearcutting and single-tree selection. Field data have suggested that group selection openings can have higher production rates than single-tree gaps, but whether this translates into higher production rates at the stand level is not clear. We used CANOPY, a crown-based northern hardwoods model calibrated with data from uneven-aged and even-aged stands, to simulate sustainable harvest volumes of a number of different group selection approaches over 300 years, and also compared results with those from single-tree selection and clearcutting. When a combination of single-tree and group selection was used with groups making up 3% of the stand area per cutting cycle, net harvestable production rates were similar to those of single-tree selection, and opening size (100-4000m2) had little effect on production rates. As the percentage of the matrix in groups increased from 1 to 9% per cutting cycle, production actually showed a small but consistent decline of about 6 to 7%. When group selection was used alone with no cutting between the groups, production rates varied considerably depending on opening size and rotation age. Small group selection (200 m2) had production rates similar to or slightly higher than single-tree selection, whereas 2000 m2 openings resulted in a production declines of 30 to 35%. Large patch sizes appear to have relatively low net production because of unsalvaged mortality. Similar trends were observed in unthinned even-aged stands compared to those thinned at 15-yr intervals. Although our results confirmed that trees in even-aged stands are more efficient producers than those in uneven-aged stands, there appear to be countervailing tendencies that reduce production rates in large single-cohort patches, including a lag time during the first few decades when production rates of merchantable volume in large openings are very low

Teaching reading through imaginative play situations in grades one and two

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Investigating Women's Experiences of Asthma Care in Pregnancy: A Qualitative Study.

Background : Most asthmatic women have normal pregnancies and complications are infrequent when their asthma is well-controlled. Symptom control and medical treatment are concerning to pregnant asthma suffers, as is the impact that their illness and treatment might have on their unborn baby. The aim was to investigate in a qualitative study the thoughts and feelings of women's experiences of asthma in pregnancy. Twenty-two women with asthma who had a pregnancy within two years were asked to participate. Seven women were interviewed when data saturation was achieved. Interviews were transcribed and analysed using the 'Framework' Method, independently analysed by two researchers and consensus reached concerning the construction of themes. The key themes that emerged were Asthma and pregnancy; Pregnancy and post-natal experiences; and Health professionals. These findings are globally interesting because of the prevalence of maternal asthma and they illustrate participants' experiences concerning their asthma care and their views on its improvement. Pregnant asthmatic women have concerns about their care and treatment which might be alleviated by outreach, joint working between respiratory doctors and nurse specialists, midwives and General Practice nurses. Targeted educational activities could form a part of this care delivery

Crowdsourcing Linked Data on listening experiences through reuse and enhancement of library data

Research has approached the practice of musical reception in a multitude of ways, such as the analysis of professional critique, sales figures and psychological processes activated by the act of listening. Studies in the Humanities, on the other hand, have been hindered by the lack of structured evidence of actual experiences of listening as reported by the listeners themselves, a concern that was voiced since the early Web era. It was however assumed that such evidence existed, albeit in pure textual form, but could not be leveraged until it was digitised and aggregated. The Listening Experience Database (LED) responds to this research need by providing a centralised hub for evidence of listening in the literature. Not only does LED support search and reuse across nearly 10,000 records, but it also provides machine-readable structured data of the knowledge around the contexts of listening. To take advantage of the mass of formal knowledge that already exists on the Web concerning these contexts, the entire framework adopts Linked Data principles and technologies. This also allows LED to directly reuse open data from the British Library for the source documentation that is already published. Reused data are re-published as open data with enhancements obtained by expanding over the model of the original data, such as the partitioning of published books and collections into individual stand-alone documents. The database was populated through crowdsourcing and seamlessly incorporates data reuse from the very early data entry phases. As the sources of the evidence often contain vague, fragmentary of uncertain information, facilities were put in place to generate structured data out of such fuzziness. Alongside elaborating on these functionalities, this article provides insights into the most recent features of the latest instalment of the dataset and portal, such as the interlinking with the MusicBrainz database, the relaxation of geographical input constraints through text mining, and the plotting of key locations in an interactive geographical browser

Non-perturbative renormalization of the KPZ growth dynamics

We introduce a non-perturbative renormalization approach which identifies stable fixed points in any dimension for the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang dynamics of rough surfaces. The usual limitations of real space methods to deal with anisotropic (self-affine) scaling are overcome with an indirect functional renormalization. The roughness exponent $\alpha$ is computed for dimensions $d=1$ to 8 and it results to be in very good agreement with the available simulations. No evidence is found for an upper critical dimension. We discuss how the present approach can be extended to other self-affine problems.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Phys. Rev. Let

Ground State Wave Function of the Schr\"odinger Equation in a Time-Periodic Potential

Using a generalized transfer matrix method we exactly solve the Schr\"odinger equation in a time periodic potential, with discretized Euclidean space-time. The ground state wave function propagates in space and time with an oscillating soliton-like wave packet and the wave front is wedge shaped. In a statistical mechanics framework our solution represents the partition sum of a directed polymer subjected to a potential layer with alternating (attractive and repulsive) pinning centers.Comment: 11 Pages in LaTeX. A set of 2 PostScript figures available upon request at [email protected] . Physical Review Letter