Facilitating child witness interviews\u27 understanding of evidential requirements through prosecutor instruction

Prosecutors report that the evidential usefulness of child witness statements about abuse is often limited by unnecessary interview content and excessive length. Prior research indicates that this limitation may be attributed to a mismatch between interviewers\u27 and prosecutors\u27 understandings of the legal requirements of an interview. The aim of this study is to examine whether differences in the evidential qualities that are perceived as important by prosecutors and interviewers can be reduced through simple instruction. Five prosecutors and 33 interviewers completed a written exercise wherein participants were required to identify what aspects of information required follow-up in five hypothetical narrative accounts of abuse. Twenty of the interviewers had (prior to completing the exercise) received prosecutor instruction on the requirements of interviews in terms of the elements and particulars of sexual offences, and the manner in which necessary information is best elicited in an interview (from a legal perspective). The responses to the exercise of interviewers who had and had not received prosecutor instruction were compared. The results indicated that interviewers who had received instruction were more consistent with prosecutors in their responses to the exercise. The importance of these findings, and directions for future research, are discussed

What do cyclists need to see to avoid single-bicycle crashes?

The number of single-bicycle crash victims is substantial in countries with high levels of cycling. To study the role of visual characteristics of the infrastructure, such as pavement markings, in single-bicycle crashes, a study in two steps was conducted. In Study 1, a questionnaire study was conducted among bicycle crash victims (n = 734). Logistic regression was used to study the relationship between the crashes and age, light condition, alcohol use, gaze direction and familiarity with the crash scene. In Study 2, the image degrading and edge detection method (IDED-method) was used to investigate the visual characteristics of 21 of the crash scenes. The results of the studies indicate that crashes, in which the cyclist collided with a bollard or road narrowing or rode off the road, were related to the visual characteristics of bicycle facilities. Edge markings, especially in curves of bicycle tracks, and improved conspicuity of bollards are recommended. Statement of Relevance: Elevated single-bicycle crash numbers are common in countries with high levels of cycling. No research has been conducted on what cyclists need to see to avoid this type of crash. The IDED-method to investigate crash scenes is new and proves to be a powerful tool to quantify 'visual accessibility'. © 2011 Taylor & Francis

A modified Ehrenfest formalism for efficient large-scale ab initio molecular dynamics

We present in detail the recently derived ab-initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) formalism [Phys. Rev. Lett. 101 096403 (2008)], which due to its numerical properties, is ideal for simulating the dynamics of systems containing thousands of atoms. A major drawback of traditional AIMD methods is the necessity to enforce the orthogonalization of the wave-functions, which can become the bottleneck for very large systems. Alternatively, one can handle the electron-ion dynamics within the Ehrenfest scheme where no explicit orthogonalization is necessary, however the time step is too small for practical applications. Here we preserve the desirable properties of Ehrenfest in a new scheme that allows for a considerable increase of the time step while keeping the system close to the Born-Oppenheimer surface. We show that the automatically enforced orthogonalization is of fundamental importance for large systems because not only it improves the scaling of the approach with the system size but it also allows for an additional very efficient parallelization level. In this work we provide the formal details of the new method, describe its implementation and present some applications to some test systems. Comparisons with the widely used Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics method are made, showing that the new approach is advantageous above a certain number of atoms in the system. The method is not tied to a particular wave-function representation, making it suitable for inclusion in any AIMD software package.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures, published in a special issue of J. Chem. Theory Comp. in honour of John Perde

Characterizing hospital workers' willingness to report to duty in an influenza pandemic through threat- and efficacy-based assessment

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Hospital-based providers' willingness to report to work during an influenza pandemic is a critical yet under-studied phenomenon. Witte's Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM) has been shown to be useful for understanding adaptive behavior of public health workers to an unknown risk, and thus offers a framework for examining scenario-specific willingness to respond among hospital staff.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We administered an anonymous online EPPM-based survey about attitudes/beliefs toward emergency response, to all 18,612 employees of the Johns Hopkins Hospital from January to March 2009. Surveys were completed by 3426 employees (18.4%), approximately one third of whom were health professionals.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Demographic and professional distribution of respondents was similar to all hospital staff. Overall, more than one-in-four (28%) hospital workers indicated they were not willing to respond to an influenza pandemic scenario if asked but not required to do so. Only an additional 10% were willing if required. One-third (32%) of participants reported they would be unwilling to respond in the event of a more severe pandemic influenza scenario. These response rates were consistent across different departments, and were one-third lower among nurses as compared with physicians. Respondents who were hesitant to agree to work additional hours when required were 17 times less likely to respond during a pandemic if asked. Sixty percent of the workers perceived their peers as likely to report to work in such an emergency, and were ten times more likely than others to do so themselves. Hospital employees with a perception of high efficacy had 5.8 times higher declared rates of willingness to respond to an influenza pandemic.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Significant gaps exist in hospital workers' willingness to respond, and the EPPM is a useful framework to assess these gaps. Several attitudinal indicators can help to identify hospital employees unlikely to respond. The findings point to certain hospital-based communication and training strategies to boost employees' response willingness, including promoting pre-event plans for home-based dependents; ensuring adequate supplies of personal protective equipment, vaccines and antiviral drugs for all hospital employees; and establishing a subjective norm of awareness and preparedness.</p