Staff development: A practitioner\u27s reaction

Efforts need to be intensified for the new teacher

USING THE SAFE SYSTEM APPROACH TO KEEP OLDER DRIVERS SAFELY MOBILE

In 2003, Australian road transport jurisdictions collectively accepted that the greatest road safety gains would be achieved through adopting a Safe System approach, derived from Sweden's Vision Zero and the Netherlands' Sustainable Safety strategies. A key objective of all three approaches is to manage vehicles, the road infrastructure, speeds, road users and the interactions between these components, to ensure that in the event of crashes, crash energies will remain at levels that minimize the probability of death and serious injury. Older drivers pose a particular challenge to the Safe System approach, given particularly their greater physical frailty, their driving patterns and for some at least, their reduced fitness to drive. This paper has analyzed the so-called ‘older driver problem’ and identified a number of key factors underpinning their crash levels, for which countermeasures can be identified and implemented within a Safe System framework. The recommended countermeasures consist of: (1) safer roads, through a series of design improvements particularly governing urban intersections; (2) safer vehicles, through both the promotion of crashworthiness as a critical consideration when purchasing a vehicle and the wide use of developed and developing ITS technologies; (3) safer speeds especially at intersections; and (4) safer road users, through both improved assessment procedures to identify the minority of older drivers with reduced fitness to drive and educational efforts to encourage safer driving habits particularly but not only through self-regulation. Document type: Articl

Interoperable Knowledge Modeling in Emergency Care: Application of the HL7 Emergency Care Domain Analysis Model

The Emergency Care System (ECS) in the United States provides intermittent unscheduled care to an increasing number of patients annually. Every ECS patient encounter generates data in a myriad of unlinked systems at regional emergency services and hospitals. Often, their prior health records are not available in a timely manner, fragmented, or not found. To address availability and interoperability data relevant to emergency care, the Health Level Seven (HL7) Emergency Care Workgroup seeks to ensure evolving health data interoperability standards incorporate ECS considerations. Foundational to that effort is a comprehensive model of Emergency Care information. This emergency care domain analysis model consists of interlinked layers of vocabulary, information models, health record functions and emergency department workflow. This poster will describe the HL7 Emergency Care Domain Analysis Model (EC-DAM), the design considerations and the impact of the EC-DAM on related information standards such as FHIR resources in prehospital care, trauma care, disease surveillance, and clinical research. The EC-DAM provides an integrated, standardized platform for creation of interoperable EC related knowledge tools. This poster presentation is particularly relevant to developers of health information standards and health information systems that involve the ECS.https://digitalcommons.unmc.edu/com_emerg_pres/1000/thumbnail.jp

Convexity estimates for hypersurfaces moving by convex curvature functions

We consider the evolution of compact hypersurfaces by fully nonlinear, parabolic curvature flows for which the normal speed is given by a smooth, convex, degree-one homogeneous function of the principal curvatures. We prove that solution hypersurfaces o

Modelling trade offs between public and private conservation policies

To reduce global biodiversity loss, there is an urgent need to determine the most efficient allocation of conservation resources. Recently, there has been a growing trend for many governments to supplement public ownership and management of reserves with incentive programs for conservation on private land. At the same time, policies to promote conservation on private land are rarely evaluated in terms of their ecological consequences. This raises important questions, such as the extent to which private land conservation can improve conservation outcomes, and how it should be mixed with more traditional public land conservation. We address these questions, using a general framework for modelling environmental policies and a case study examining the conservation of endangered native grasslands to the west of Melbourne, Australia. Specifically, we examine three policies that involve: i) spending all resources on creating public conservation areas; ii) spending all resources on an ongoing incentive program where private landholders are paid to manage vegetation on their property with 5-year contracts; and iii) splitting resources between these two approaches. The performance of each strategy is quantified with a vegetation condition change model that predicts future changes in grassland quality. Of the policies tested, no one policy was always best and policy performance depended on the objectives of those enacting the policy. This work demonstrates a general method for evaluating environmental policies and highlights the utility of a model which combines ecological and socioeconomic processes.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

Convexity estimates for hypersurfaces moving by convex curvature functions

We consider the evolution of compact hypersurfaces by fully non-linear, parabolic curvature ows for which the normal speed is given by a smooth, convex, degree one homoge- neous function of the principal curvatures. We prove that solution hypersurfaces on which the speed is initially positive become weakly convex at a singularity of the ow. The result extends the convexity estimate [HS99b] of Huisken and Sinestrari for the mean curvature ow to a large class of speeds, and leads to an analogous description of `type-II\u27 singularities. We remark that many of the speeds considered are positive on larger cones than the positive mean half-space, so that the result in those cases also applies to non-mean-convex initial data

Non-collapsing in fully nonlinear curvature flows

We consider embedded hypersurfaces evolving by fully nonlinear flows in which the normal speed of motion is a homogeneous degree one, concave or convex function of the principal curvatures, and prove a non-collapsing estimate: Precisely, the function which gives the curvature of the largest interior sphere touching the hy- persurface at each point is a subsolution of the linearized flow equation if the speed is concave. If the speed is convex then there is an analogous statement for exterior spheres. In particular, if the hypersurface moves with positive speed and the speed is concave in the principal curvatures, then the curvature of the largest touching inte- rior sphere is bounded by a multiple of the speed as long as the solution exists. The proof uses a maximum principle applied to a function of two points on the evolving hypersurface. We illustrate the techniques required for dealing with such functions in a proof of the known containment principle for flows of hypersurfaces

Accessing Information on the World Wide Web: Predicting Usage Based on Involvement

Advice for Web designers often includes an admonition to use short, scannable, bullet-pointed text, reflecting the common belief that browsing the Web most often involves scanning rather than reading. Literature from several disciplines focuses on the myriad combinations of factors related to online reading but studies of the users' interests and motivations appear to offer a more promising avenue for understanding how users utilize information on Web pages. This study utilized the modified Personal Involvement Inventory (PII), a ten-item instrument used primarily in the marketing and advertising fields, to measure interest and motivation toward a topic presented on the Web. Two sites were constructed from Reader's Digest Association, Inc. online articles and a program written to track students' use of the site. Behavior was measured by the initial choice of short versus longer versions of the main page, the number of pages visited and the amount of time spent on the site. Data were gathered from students at a small, private university in the southwest part of the United States to answer six hypotheses which posited that subjects with higher involvement in a topic presented on the Web and a more positive attitude toward the Web would tend to select the longer text version, visit more pages, and spend more time on the site. While attitude toward the Web did not correlate significantly with any of the behavioral factors, the level of involvement was associated with the use of the sites in two of three hypotheses, but only partially in the manner hypothesized. Increased involvement with a Web topic did correlate with the choice of a longer, more detailed initial Web page, but was inversely related to the number of pages viewed so that the higher the involvement, the fewer pages visited. An additional indicator of usage, the average amount of time spent on each page, was measured and revealed that more involved users spent more time on each page

Quantum process tomography of a controlled-NOT gate

We demonstrate complete characterization of a two-qubit entangling process - a linear optics controlled-NOT gate operating with coincident detection - by quantum process tomography. We use maximum-likelihood estimation to convert the experimental data into a physical process matrix. The process matrix allows accurate prediction of the operation of the gate for arbitrary input states, and calculation of gate performance measures such as the average gate fidelity, average purity and entangling capability of our gate, which are 0.90, 0.83 and 0.73, respectively.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. v2 contains new data corresponding to improved gate operation. Figure quality slightly reduced for arXi