2,462 research outputs found
Applying interprofessional education to the practice setting.
Interprofessional education is a key requirement identified in various professional and regulatory body education standards in the UK. However, recent high-profile investigatory reports into adverse incidents in NHS organisations have demonstrated failures of translating interprofessional education into practice. This paper explores how a university in the south of England uses service improvement projects to address this. Working with key senior clinicians, small groups of students from a variety of professional backgrounds collaborate to address an identified problem in practice to bring about better, safer practice to benefit patients. This style of learning enables students to acquire essential attributes in preparation for employment, such as critical thinking, teamworking, ethical practice and leadership
A mechanistic-empirical based overlay design method for reflective cracking
This paper describes a new and innovative mechanistically based pavement overlay design method that considers the most predominant type of overlay distress observed in the field: Reflective cracking above old cracks in the underlying pavement surface. Both dense-graded hot mix asphalt and gap-graded asphalt rubber (wet process) mixes were studied, in the laboratory and in the field, to derive the necessary mechanistic relationships
and statistically based equations. The models proposed are based on a finite element model
that closely approximates actual field phenomena. Many field test sections, in Arizona, California and Portugal, were studied during the course of the research.
Other HMA mixes used for overlays may also be calibrated and used through the proposed
method. However, the relevant mix properties of any additional materials or environmental
zones must first be determined. The two mix types studied are mainly used in the desert
southwest region of Arizona and California. The overlay design program is available from
the Rubber Pavements Association or Arizona Department of Transportation in the form of an Excel spreadsheet with an easy-to-use visual basic computer program (macro)
Note and Comment
The Ownership of Sunken Logs; Combination Among Physicians to Fix Prices for Professional Services; The Issuance of Receivers\u27 Certificates to pay Interest, Etc.; The Federal Constitution is Not Violated by a State Law Compelling one Accused of Crime to Testify Against Himself; Transfer of Negotiable Instrument Without Endorsemen
The effect of regular exercise on insulin sensitivity in type 2 diabetes mellitus: A systematic review and meta-analysis
The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of regular exercise training on insulin sensitivity in adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus ( T2DM ) using the pooled data available from randomised controlled trials. In addition, we sought to determine whether short-term periods of physical inactivity diminish the exercise-induced improvement in insulin sensitivity. Eligible trials included exercise interventions that involved ≥3 exercise sessions, and reported a dynamic measurement of insulin sensitivity. There was a significant pooled effect size ( ES ) for the effect of exercise on insulin sensitivity ( ES, –0.588; 95% confidence interval [CI], –0.816 to –0.359; P < 0.001 ). Of the 14 studies included for meta-analyses, nine studies reported the time of data collection from the last exercise bout. There was a significant improvement in insulin sensitivity in favour of exercise versus control between 48 and 72 hours after exercise ( ES, –0.702; 95% CI, –1.392 to –0.012; P=0.046 ); and this persisted when insulin sensitivity was measured more than 72 hours after the last exercise session ( ES, –0.890; 95% CI, –1.675 to –0.105; P=0.026 ). Regular exercise has a significant benefit on insulin sensitivity in adults with T2DM and this may persist beyond 72 hours after the last exercise session
Large Scale Structure in the SDSS Galaxy Survey
The Large Scale Structure (LSS) in the galaxy distribution is investigated
using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Early Data Release (SDSS EDR). Using the
Minimal Spanning Tree technique we have extracted sets of filaments, of
wall-like structures, of galaxy groups, and of rich clusters from this unique
sample. The physical properties of these structures were then measured and
compared with the expectations from Zel'dovich' theory.
The measured characteristics of galaxy walls were found to be consistent with
those for a spatially flat CDM cosmological model with
0.3 and 0.7, and for Gaussian
initial perturbations with a Harrison -- Zel'dovich power spectrum.
Furthermore, we found that the mass functions of groups and of unrelaxed
structure elements generally fit well with the expectations from Zel'dovich'
theory, although there was some discrepancy for lower mass groups which may be
due to incompleteness in the selected sample of groups. We also note that both
groups and rich clusters tend to prefer the environments of walls, which tend
to be of higher density, rather than the environments of filaments, which tend
to be of lower density.
Finally, we note evidence of systematic differences in the properties of the
LSS between the Northern Galactic Cap stripe and the Southern Galactic Cap
stripe -- in particular, in the physical properties of the walls, their spatial
distribution, and the relative numbers of clusters embedded in walls. Because
the mean separation of walls is 60 -- 70 Mpc, each stripe
only intersects a few tens of walls. Thus, small number statistics and cosmic
variance are the likely drivers of these systematic differences.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, MNRAS submitte
Comparison of results of contraceptive prevalence surveys on five countries with particular emphasis in knowledge, use and availability
New Approaches To Photometric Redshift Prediction Via Gaussian Process Regression In The Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Expanding upon the work of Way and Srivastava 2006 we demonstrate how the use
of training sets of comparable size continue to make Gaussian process
regression (GPR) a competitive approach to that of neural networks and other
least-squares fitting methods. This is possible via new large size matrix
inversion techniques developed for Gaussian processes (GPs) that do not require
that the kernel matrix be sparse. This development, combined with a
neural-network kernel function appears to give superior results for this
problem. Our best fit results for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Main
Galaxy Sample using u,g,r,i,z filters gives an rms error of 0.0201 while our
results for the same filters in the luminous red galaxy sample yield 0.0220. We
also demonstrate that there appears to be a minimum number of training-set
galaxies needed to obtain the optimal fit when using our GPR rank-reduction
methods. We find that morphological information included with many photometric
surveys appears, for the most part, to make the photometric redshift evaluation
slightly worse rather than better. This would indicate that most morphological
information simply adds noise from the GP point of view in the data used
herein. In addition, we show that cross-match catalog results involving
combinations of the Two Micron All Sky Survey, SDSS, and Galaxy Evolution
Explorer have to be evaluated in the context of the resulting cross-match
magnitude and redshift distribution. Otherwise one may be misled into overly
optimistic conclusions.Comment: 32 pages, ApJ in Press, 2 new figures, 1 new table of comparison
methods, updated discussion, references and typos to reflect version in Pres
Novel Methods for Predicting Photometric Redshifts from Broad Band Photometry using Virtual Sensors
We calculate photometric redshifts from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Main
Galaxy Sample, The Galaxy Evolution Explorer All Sky Survey, and The Two Micron
All Sky Survey using two new training-set methods. We utilize the broad-band
photometry from the three surveys alongside Sloan Digital Sky Survey measures
of photometric quality and galaxy morphology. Our first training-set method
draws from the theory of ensemble learning while the second employs Gaussian
process regression both of which allow for the estimation of redshift along
with a measure of uncertainty in the estimation. The Gaussian process models
the data very effectively with small training samples of approximately 1000
points or less. These two methods are compared to a well known Artificial
Neural Network training-set method and to simple linear and quadratic
regression. Our results show that robust photometric redshift errors as low as
0.02 RMS can regularly be obtained. We also demonstrate the need to provide
confidence bands on the error estimation made by both classes of models. Our
results indicate that variations due to the optimization procedure used for
almost all neural networks, combined with the variations due to the data
sample, can produce models with variations in accuracy that span an order of
magnitude. A key contribution of this paper is to quantify the variability in
the quality of results as a function of model and training sample. We show how
simply choosing the "best" model given a data set and model class can produce
misleading results.Comment: 36 pages, 12 figures, ApJ in Press, modified to reflect published
version and color figure
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