How experienced nurses gather and use data.

This exploratory study was designed to add to the body of knowledge related to clinical decision-making. It had two purposes. The first was to develop, clarify, and elaborate concepts that describe nurses\u27 clinical decision-making. The second was to observe and describe activities for gathering information used by nurses in the clinical environment. Six experienced nurses were observed while they interacted with patients at the beginning of their shift. Subjects were asked during post-observation interviews to describe what they were thinking about when they asked patients questions. A five-stage model that described the decision-making process evolved from the analysis of data. Experts in decision-making were asked to provide reactions to the findings with respect to its clarity, validity and usefulness. Results of the study indicated that subjects used three modes--scanning mode, focusing mode, and a context building mode--when gathering information at the beginning of their shift in order to plan patient care. Experienced nurses used three activities for gathering information to make clinical decisions--listening or reading report, reading records, and interacting with patients. Subjects described using information from report together with their knowledge of patients\u27 conditions to decide what information they needed from other sources to make decisions about patients\u27 needs. Findings suggested that subjects made decisions related to what information to gather, what information to accept as sufficient to form hypotheses or conclusions, what information area to drop, and what action to take. Subjects\u27 verbalized that knowledge of patients\u27 conditions and patients\u27 responses determined if they used a scanning mode or a focusing mode to gather information

On instantaneous codes

Maximal instantaneous codes are characterized by the property that they allow unique parsing of every infinite string. The sequence of codeword lengths of a maximal instantaneous code, sequenced in lexicographic order of the codewords, completely determines the code itself. Any increasing, decreasing or unimodal reordering of such a sequence again corresponds to a maximal instantaneous code. Lexicographic length sequences are characterized by a family of Kraft-type equalities

Effect of Methanol Content on Specific Adsorption of Chloride Ions at Hg/HCI Interface

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Detection of REM Sleep Behaviour Disorder by Automated Polysomnography Analysis

Evidence suggests Rapid-Eye-Movement (REM) Sleep Behaviour Disorder (RBD) is an early predictor of Parkinson's disease. This study proposes a fully-automated framework for RBD detection consisting of automated sleep staging followed by RBD identification. Analysis was assessed using a limited polysomnography montage from 53 participants with RBD and 53 age-matched healthy controls. Sleep stage classification was achieved using a Random Forest (RF) classifier and 156 features extracted from electroencephalogram (EEG), electrooculogram (EOG) and electromyogram (EMG) channels. For RBD detection, a RF classifier was trained combining established techniques to quantify muscle atonia with additional features that incorporate sleep architecture and the EMG fractal exponent. Automated multi-state sleep staging achieved a 0.62 Cohen's Kappa score. RBD detection accuracy improved by 10% to 96% (compared to individual established metrics) when using manually annotated sleep staging. Accuracy remained high (92%) when using automated sleep staging. This study outperforms established metrics and demonstrates that incorporating sleep architecture and sleep stage transitions can benefit RBD detection. This study also achieved automated sleep staging with a level of accuracy comparable to manual annotation. This study validates a tractable, fully-automated, and sensitive pipeline for RBD identification that could be translated to wearable take-home technology.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure

New 4-Thiazolidinones of Nicotinic Acid with 2-Amino-6-methylbenzothiazole and their Biological Activity

The title compounds 6a–j, 2-[(6-methyl-1,3-benzothiazol-2-yl)amino]-N-[2-(substituted phenyl/furan-2-yl)-4-oxo-1,3-thiazolidin-3-yl]nicotinamides, were prepared from 2-chloropyridine-3-carboxylic acid (1) and 2-amino-6-methyl-benzothiazole (2) by known methods. All the compounds have been established by IR, 1H NMR, 13C NMR and elemental analyses. The in vitro antimicrobial screening of the compounds were carried out against two Gram positive (S. aureus, S. pyogenes), two Gram negative (E. coli, P. aeruginosa) bacteria and three fungal species (C. albicans, A. niger, A. clavatus) using the broth microdilution method. Some of the compounds are comparable with standard drugs