897 research outputs found
Moral decisions, moral distress, and the psychological health of nurses
The major focus of this thesis is the role of feelings and emotions in moral thinking/knowing, ethical
conduct and, in particular, moral distress in nursing. Research has consistently found that the moral
decisions nurses must make can sometimes lead to distress. However, such experiences are overly individualised in the literature. An alternative view of the person, drawing on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (e.g. 1927-8/1978) and the recent work of Paul Stenner (e.g. 2008), sees human subjectivity or mind as processual and always embodied and in-the-world. The emphasis
upon the body draws attention to the role of felt experiences this thesis views feelings as integral to both sense-making knowing and thinking and sensibility or emotionality. The emphasis in-the-world highlights that subjectivity is embedded within social contexts, which include relations of power and organisations of material and symbolic capital aligned with those relations. Influenced by deep empiricism (e.g. Stenner, 2011a), this thesis develops a novel bricolage methodology based on a metaphor of diffraction to explore nurses experiences of moral distress. Nurses feelings of discomfort, a particular form of feelings of knowing , appear to be the seeds of moral distress. Various situations seem to be important antecedents for these seeds to bloom into full moral distress, including certain clinical issues, ethical conflict with colleagues, and issues of
competency. Nurses also experience some aspects of their job as systemic barriers to high
standards of care, which can also be morally distressing. Such distress sometimes affects nurses
relationships, their physical health, and their mental health. Participants have found several
strategies useful in coping with their distress. It is argued that these strategies are about altering one s feelings through changing one s activities and/or environment. Additionally, past distress may remain a dormant part of a person s subjectivity and re-emerge or become (re)enacted in the narrations of those past distressing experiences. It is suggested that subjectivity entails an
organisation of past experiences in the present, for present purposes and in anticipation of the future. Six dominant thematic patternings, which recurred throughout the analyses, are discussed: (i) the centrality of feelings; (ii) the relationality of felt experiences; (iii) the complexity of morality, moral conduct, and moral distress moral/ethical issues become entangled with identity, power,
professional competency, and social relations; (iv) the prominence of power and interest; (v) nurses' lives as afflicted by moral distress; and (vi) life-as-process. Discussion of these motifs leads to a rethinking of moral distress. Implications for nursing practice, moral distress research and the study of feelings, emotions, and affect are discussed
Orienting melt to produce on lab-microscale high performance and ultra thin foils
Efficient molecular orientation of polymers in the melt-or solution state requires concentric contraction flows, which result in single or multi-filament fiber shaped products. Directed molecular orientation in pipes, sheets, foils and films, like strip bi-axially, planar or tri-axial, are difficult to achieve and require complex multi-stage processing often supported by the addition of extra external magnetic, electric, or temperature gradient fields that put constraints to the materials to be processed. Here we aim at a simple continuous process to produce uni-axially oriented foils, by designing a special die in a standard miniaturized laboratory scale film casting process. The internal of the die consist of a fiber forming, and a fiber fusing part. The specific design of the fiber forming part allows the combination of the fibers formed, without them crossing, into a line that forms a sheet. Flow in the total volume around the slit ends up in molecularly oriented flow inside the slit. To preserve orientation, an air gap extrusion process follows the exiting slit flow, to allow for a strong draw down under high melt stress. Small air-gaps and a cold cooling nose, combined with a supporting carrying film, make the total process easy, clean and cheap, and the products unique. We will demonstrate that, mounted on the miniature Xplore MC 15 lab compounder, the device is able to produce not only high performance fully oriented foils based on a thermotropic liquid crystalline polyester (Vectra), but also extremely thin foils of polyamides and polyesters. In the last application, the melt orientation is used only to temporary obtain a high melt strength that allows a high draw-ability in the air gap.</p
Third-order relativistic many-body calculations of energies and lifetimes of levels along the silver isoelectronic sequence
Energies of 5l_j (l= s, p, d, f, g) and 4f_j states in neutral Ag and Ag-like
ions with nuclear charges Z = 48 - 100 are calculated using relativistic
many-body perturbation theory. Reduced matrix elements, oscillator strengths,
transition rates and lifetimes are calculated for the 17 possible 5l_j-5l'_{j'}
and 4f_j-5l_{j'} electric-dipole transitions. Third-order corrections to
energies and dipole matrix elements are included for neutral Ag and for ions
with Z60. Comparisons are made
with available experimental data for transition energies and lifetimes.
Correlation energies and transition rates are shown graphically as functions of
nuclear charge Z for selected cases. These calculations provide a theoretical
benchmark for comparison with experiment and theory.Comment: 8 page
Estimation of Buttiker-Landauer traversal time based on the visibility of transmission current
We present a proposal for the estimation of B\"uttiker-Landauer traversal
time based on the visibility of transmission current. We analyze the tunneling
phenomena with a time-dependent potential and obtain the time-dependent
transmission current. We found that the visibility is directly connected to the
traversal time. Furthermore, this result is valid not only for rectangular
potential barrier but also for general form of potential to which the WKB
approximation is applicable . We compared these results with the numerical
values obtained from the simulation of Nelson's quantum mechanics. Both of them
fit together and it shows our method is very effective to measure
experimentally the traversal time.Comment: 12 pages, REVTeX, including 7 eps figure
Possibility Of Simultaneous Observation Of Nucleus Fragment And -ray Family In The Stratosphere
We propose simultaneous observation of surviving fragment nuclei (,Li,...) and the -ray family (,e,N,...) produced by the collision of an ultrahigh-energy cosmic-ray nucleus (10141016 eV/nucleus) with an air target in the stratosphere (10 g/cm2). We support the proposal with extensive Monte Carlo calculations, which are also relevant to analysis of other atmospheric cascade experiments. © 1987 The American Physical Society.36378379
Limits on the Ununified Standard Model
The ununified standard model is an extension of the standard model that
contains separate electroweak gauge groups for quarks and leptons. When it was
originally proposed, data allowed the new gauge bosons to be quite light. We
use recent data from precision electroweak measurements to put stringent bounds
on the ununified standard model. In particular, at the 95% confidence level, we
find that the ununified gauge bosons must have masses above about 2 TeV.Comment: 14 pages, plain TeX, 2 postscript figures, figures also available at
http://smyrd.bu.edu/htfigs/figure.htm
New Strong Interactons at the Tevatron ?
Recent results from CDF indicate that the inclusive cross section for jets
with GeV is significantly higher than that predicted by QCD. We
describe here a simple flavor-universal variant of the ``coloron" model of Hill
and Parke that can accommodate such a jet excess, and which is not in
contradiction with other experimental data. As such, the model serves as a
useful baseline with which to compare both the data and other models proposed
to describe the jet excess. An interesting theoretical feature of the model is
that if the global chiral symmetries of the quarks remain unbroken in the
confining phase of the coloron interaction, it realizes the possibility that
the ordinary quarks are composite particles.Comment: added contributions to scattering cross-sections; 10
pages, LaTeX, includes 1 figure. Full postscript version at
http://smyrd.bu.edu/htfigs/htfigs.htm
Interstitials, Vacancies and Dislocations in Flux-Line Lattices: A Theory of Vortex Crystals, Supersolids and Liquids
We study a three dimensional Abrikosov vortex lattice in the presence of an
equilibrium concentration of vacancy, interstitial and dislocation loops.
Vacancies and interstitials renormalize the long-wavelength bulk and tilt
elastic moduli. Dislocation loops lead to the vanishing of the long-wavelength
shear modulus. The coupling to vacancies and interstitials - which are always
present in the liquid state - allows dislocations to relax stresses by climbing
out of their glide plane. Surprisingly, this mechanism does not yield any
further independent renormalization of the tilt and compressional moduli at
long wavelengths. The long wavelength properties of the resulting state are
formally identical to that of the ``flux-line hexatic'' that is a candidate
``normal'' hexatically ordered vortex liquid state.Comment: 21 RevTeX pgs, 7 eps figures uuencoded; corrected typos, published
versio
Tunneling Time Distribution by means of Nelson's Quantum Mechanics and Wave-Particle Duality
We calculate a tunneling time distribution by means of Nelson's quantum
mechanics and investigate its statistical properties. The relationship between
the average and deviation of tunneling time suggests the exsistence of
``wave-particle duality'' in the tunneling phenomena.Comment: 14 pages including 11 figures, the text has been revise
Resonant tunneling of electromagnetic waves through polariton gaps
We consider resonant tunneling of electromagnetic waves through an optical
barrier formed by dielectric layers with the frequency dispersion of their
dielectric permiability. The frequency region between lower and upper polariton
branches in these materials presents a stop band for electromagnetic waves. We
show that resonance tunneling through this kind of barriers is qualitatevely
different from tunneling through other kind of optical barriers as well as from
quantum mechanic tunneling through a rectangular barrier. We find that the
width of the resonance maxima of the transmission coeffcient tends to zero as
frequency approach the lower boundary of the stop band in a very sharp
non-analytical way. Resonance transmission peaks give rise to new photonic
bands inside the stop band if one considers periodical array of the layers.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure
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