Student nurse perceptions : a case study to illuminate the perceptions developed by student nurses which result in absenteeism as the behaviour of choice in response to difficulties in their educational programme

The problem which prompted the undertaking of this study was that of increasing absenteeism amongst student nurses at one South African Nursing College. The information, obtained from individual and group interviews, was analysed to identify the perceptions developed by student nurses. Absenteeism is shown to be a behavioural response to environmental and other factors in the world of the student nurse. A theoretical model is proposed to explain three main types of absenteeism and the factors which contribute to absenteeism and attendance

Understanding The “Dance” In Radical Screendance

There was a time when screendance implied a dancing body. The “dance” may have taken the shape of formal vocabulary or a looser interpretation of movement as dance, but common to either approach would have been the sight of humans in motion. Certain recent screendance films, however, such as David Hinton’s Birds (2000), Becky Edmunds’s This Place (2008), and Constantini Georgescu’s Spin (2009) are void of human presence. Yet whilst screendance making revels in the freedom of reconceptualization and reinvention, questions arise with regard to the experience of viewing, namely: what is the “dance” in screendance now that the human body has left center stage, and do audiences have the requisite concepts to identify and appreciate works that have outgrown traditional models? This paper investigates just what is required of viewers’ perceptions that might allow them access to screendance today. It also explores the field’s current relationship with dance through an analysis of those works that lie at screendance’s outermost edges, which here shall be referred to as “Radical Screendance.&rdquo

Sounding Severn: Landscape and music

This research project set out to investigate the landscape of the River Severn, in particular the sounds created by the interaction between the river and its environs, and to create a series of original compositions that chart the relationship between geographical site and composed sound. The questions that were posed were: what creative strategies and methodologies have composers used to engage with and represent landscape in their work? What is the relationship between site, composer, and new work? How are the impressions of the phenomena like the river, formed in the composer’s mind, then recreated as music or sound? It should be borne in mind that this has been a personal project. It has involved field recordings of the sound of the river, both under and above the water, and the recording of sounds activated by interaction with the landscape; studying aspects of the river itself, its history, underlying geology, and the complex social, economic, political and emotional interaction it has had with the people who live by it. It has also involved assembling resources on instruments not generally associated with orchestral music, to extend the palette of sounds, and examining ways of transference of behaviours such as river flow and cloud formations from the physical to the sonic. I endeavour to explain how I developed my methodologies, derived from my own observations. The major part of the thesis comprises a critical commentary on the pieces of music I have produced, showing how these methodologies were employed. The pieces and their recordings are grouped into a suite, Severn Journey; representative trial pieces; a collage piece Severn Words of Wisdom, representing a journey down the Severn and Sounding Severn, a piece in five sections which shows many of my key methodologies at work

Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Crystallite Interactions in Shock-compressed Columnar Polycrystals

Poster presented at the 2018 Defence and Security Doctoral Symposium.The need for a fundamental understanding of the strength of materials that are deforming extremely rapidly under high stress has driven intense research efforts on both theoretical and experimental fronts. Recent advances in "ultrafast" x-ray imaging techniques have made it possible to track how a material evolves during the course of extreme deformation processes that might take place over the course of only a few nanoseconds: by carefully analysing the image formed by x-rays scattered from the sample, one can calculate how its constituent atoms are arranged and, with further analysis, infer how strong the material is. However, the form of the x-ray image depends not only on the strength of the material, but also on the manner in which the crystallites of which it is composed interact with each other during the deformation process. We have performed a study of the physics of crystallite interaction in a shock-compressed metal using multi-million atom simulations. Our study reveals that neighbouring crystallites in the wake of the shock can deform in a "cooperative" manner, in which one crystallite expands while the other contracts. We quantify the change in atomic arrangement effected by this cooperative deformation, and the amount of stress it relieves. We further find that cooperative deformation can actually replace ordinary deformation mechanisms at lower pressures, and activate new deformation mechanisms at higher pressures.EPSRC and AW

Airborne profiling of ice thickness using a short pulse radar

The acquisition and interpretation of ice thickness data from a mobile platform has for some time been a goal of the remote sensing community. Such data, once obtainable, is of value in monitoring the changes in ice thickness over large areas, and in mapping the potential hazards to traffic in shipping lanes. Measurements made from a helicopter-borne ice thickness profiler of ice in Lake Superior, Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair river as part of NASA's program to develop an ice information system are described. The profiler described is a high resolution, non-imaging, short pulse radar, operating at a carrier frequency of 2.7 GHz. The system can resolve reflective surfaces separated by as little as 10 cm. and permits measurement of the distance between resolvable surfaces with an accuracy of about 1 cm. Data samples are given for measurements both in a static (helicopter hovering), and a traverse mode. Ground truth measurements taken by an ice auger team traveling with the helicopter are compared with the remotely sensed data and the accuracy of the profiler is discussed based on these measurements