Perceived Differences in the Management of Mental Health Patients in Remote and Rural Australia and Strategies for Improvement: Findings from a National Qualitative Study of Emergency Clinicians

Introduction. We aimed to describe perceptions of Australian emergency clinicians of differences in management of mental health patients in rural and remote Australia compared with metropolitan hospitals, and what could be improved. Methods. Descriptive exploratory study using semi-structured telephone interviews of doctors and nurses in Australian emergency departments (EDs), stratified to represent states and territories and rural or metropolitan location. Content analysis of responses developed themes and sub-themes. Results. Of 39 doctors and 32 nurses responding to email invitation, 20 doctors and 16 nurses were interviewed. Major themes were resources/environment, staff and patient issues. Clinicians noted lack of access in rural areas to psychiatric support services, especially alcohol and drug services, limited referral options, and a lack of knowledge, understanding and acceptance of mental health issues. The clinicians suggested resource, education and guideline improvements, wanting better access to mental health experts in rural areas, better support networks and visiting specialist coverage, and educational courses tailored to the needs of rural clinicians. Conclusion. Clinicians managing mental health patients in rural and remote Australian EDs lack resources, support services and referral capacity, and access to appropriate education and training. Improvements would better enable access to support and referral services, and educational opportunities

The role of data visualization in Railway Big Data Risk Analysis

Big Data Risk Analysis (BDRA) is one of the possible alleys for the further development of risk models in the railway transport. Big Data techniques allow a great quantity of information to be handled from different types of sources (e.g. unstructured text, signaling and train data). The benefits of this approach may lie in improving the understanding of the risk factors involved in railways, detecting possible new threats or assessing the risk levels for rolling stock, rail infrastructure or railway operations. For the efficient use of BDRA, the conversion of huge amounts of data into a simple and effective display is particularly challenging. Especially because it is presented to various specific target audiences. This work reports a literature review of risk communication and visualization in order to find out its applicability to BDRA, and beyond the visual techniques, what human factors have to be considered in the understanding and risk perception of the infor-mation when safety analysts and decision-makers start basing their decisions on BDRA analyses. It was found that BDRA requires different visualization strategies than those that have normally been carried out in risk analysis up to now

Detecting modification of biomedical events using a deep parsing approach

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>This work describes a system for identifying event mentions in bio-molecular research abstracts that are either speculative (e.g. <it>analysis of IkappaBalpha phosphorylation</it>, where it is not specified whether phosphorylation did or did not occur) or negated (e.g. <it>inhibition of IkappaBalpha phosphorylation</it>, where phosphorylation did <it>not </it>occur). The data comes from a standard dataset created for the BioNLP 2009 Shared Task. The system uses a machine-learning approach, where the features used for classification are a combination of shallow features derived from the words of the sentences and more complex features based on the semantic outputs produced by a deep parser.</p> <p>Method</p> <p>To detect event modification, we use a Maximum Entropy learner with features extracted from the data relative to the trigger words of the events. The shallow features are bag-of-words features based on a small sliding context window of 3-4 tokens on either side of the trigger word. The deep parser features are derived from parses produced by the English Resource Grammar and the <it>RASP </it>parser. The outputs of these parsers are converted into the Minimal Recursion Semantics formalism, and from this, we extract features motivated by linguistics and the data itself. All of these features are combined to create training or test data for the machine learning algorithm.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Over the test data, our methods produce approximately a 4% absolute increase in F-score for detection of event modification compared to a baseline based only on the shallow bag-of-words features.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our results indicate that grammar-based techniques can enhance the accuracy of methods for detecting event modification.</p

The Effects of Twitter Sentiment on Stock Price Returns

Social media are increasingly reflecting and influencing behavior of other complex systems. In this paper we investigate the relations between a well-know micro-blogging platform Twitter and financial markets. In particular, we consider, in a period of 15 months, the Twitter volume and sentiment about the 30 stock companies that form the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) index. We find a relatively low Pearson correlation and Granger causality between the corresponding time series over the entire time period. However, we find a significant dependence between the Twitter sentiment and abnormal returns during the peaks of Twitter volume. This is valid not only for the expected Twitter volume peaks (e.g., quarterly announcements), but also for peaks corresponding to less obvious events. We formalize the procedure by adapting the well-known "event study" from economics and finance to the analysis of Twitter data. The procedure allows to automatically identify events as Twitter volume peaks, to compute the prevailing sentiment (positive or negative) expressed in tweets at these peaks, and finally to apply the "event study" methodology to relate them to stock returns. We show that sentiment polarity of Twitter peaks implies the direction of cumulative abnormal returns. The amount of cumulative abnormal returns is relatively low (about 1-2%), but the dependence is statistically significant for several days after the events

Vertical integration and firm boundaries : the evidence

Since Ronald H. Coase's (1937) seminal paper, a rich set of theories has been developed that deal with firm boundaries in vertical or input–output structures. In the last twenty-five years, empirical evidence that can shed light on those theories also has been accumulating. We review the findings of empirical studies that have addressed two main interrelated questions: First, what types of transactions are best brought within the firm and, second, what are the consequences of vertical integration decisions for economic outcomes such as prices, quantities, investment, and profits. Throughout, we highlight areas of potential cross-fertilization and promising areas for future work

'Everyday memory' impairments in autism spectrum disorders

‘Everyday memory’ is conceptualised as memory within the context of day-to-day life and, despite its functional relevance, has been little studied in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). In the first study of its kind, 94 adolescents with an ASD and 55 without an ASD completed measures of everyday memory from the Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test (RBMT) and a standard word recall task (Children’s Auditory Verbal Learning Test-2: CAVLT-2). The ASD group showed significant impairments on the RBMT, including in prospective memory, alongside impaired performance on the CAVLT-2. Social and communication ability was significantly associated with prospective remembering in an everyday memory context but not with the CAVLT-2. The complex nature of everyday memory and its relevance to ASD is discussed

Gender Differences in Russian Colour Naming

In the present study we explored Russian colour naming in a web-based psycholinguistic experiment (http://www.colournaming.com). Colour singletons representing the Munsell Color Solid (N=600 in total) were presented on a computer monitor and named using an unconstrained colour-naming method. Respondents were Russian speakers (N=713). For gender-split equal-size samples (NF=333, NM=333) we estimated and compared (i) location of centroids of 12 Russian basic colour terms (BCTs); (ii) the number of words in colour descriptors; (iii) occurrences of BCTs most frequent non-BCTs. We found a close correspondence between females’ and males’ BCT centroids. Among individual BCTs, the highest inter-gender agreement was for seryj ‘grey’ and goluboj ‘light blue’, while the lowest was for sinij ‘dark blue’ and krasnyj ‘red’. Females revealed a significantly richer repertory of distinct colour descriptors, with great variety of monolexemic non-BCTs and “fancy” colour names; in comparison, males offered relatively more BCTs or their compounds. Along with these measures, we gauged denotata of most frequent CTs, reflected by linguistic segmentation of colour space, by employing a synthetic observer trained by gender-specific responses. This psycholinguistic representation revealed females’ more refined linguistic segmentation, compared to males, with higher linguistic density predominantly along the redgreen axis of colour space

Perceptions of nurse practitioners by emergency department doctors in Australia

BACKGROUND: The Australian Medical Association is strongly opposed to the nurse practitioner (NP) role with concerns that NPs may become doctor substitutes without the requisite training and education that the medical role demands. Despite this, NPs have been heralded by some as a potential solution to the access block, workforce shortage and increased demand affecting emergency departments (EDs). AIMS: The purpose of this study was to determine the perception of NPs by medical staff working in Australian EDs. METHODS: Semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with closed and open-ended questions. Participants were drawn from a representative stratified sample of two city, two metropolitan and two provincial hospitals of each State/Territory. RESULTS: A total of 95 doctors from 35 EDs participated in this study including 36 Departmental Directors; 36% of participating Directors indicated having an NP on staff. Doctors were strongly opposed to the statement that NPs could replace either nurses or other prevocational doctors; 71 interviewees commented on the role of NPs in the ED. Thematic analyses revealed polarised views held by doctors. Eight major themes were identified, the most common being that there is a lack of clarity of the NP role definition, their scope of practice and differentiation from the medical role. CONCLUSION: Although ED NPs represent a highly skilled professional group their role is poorly understood by ED doctors. Opposition to the NP role is a significant barrier to the introduction of great numbers of ED NPs as a strategy to overcome the medical workforce shortage. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s12245-010-0214-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users