1,275 research outputs found
Overcoming change fatigue: lessons from Glasgow's National Health Service
Structured Abstract
Purpose of this paper
This paper explores the practicalities of organizational change in complex settings where much change has already occurred. It therefore offers insights into tackling and overcoming change fatigue.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses a longitudinal study of change within a healthcare organization. The paper draws on interviews, focus groups and observations during a 2.5 year long action research project.
Findings
The paper reports findings on the speed at which change takes place, the importance of communication and the burden placed on senior officers during such communication and consultation processes, the use of appropriate external resources and expertise, the benefits of sharing best practice across sectors and the role of academic researchers in change processes.
What is original/value of paper
The paper offers valuable insights to those charged with effecting organizational change in change fatigued settings
Rapid Divergence of Wing Volatile Profiles Between Subspecies of the Butterfly Pieris rapae (Lepidoptera: Pieridae)
Complex signaling traits such as pheromone profiles can play an important role in the early stages of reproductive isolation between populations. These signals can diverge along multiple trait axes, and signal receivers are often sensitive to subtle differences in signal properties. In the Lepidoptera, prior research has highlighted that natural selection can drive rapid chemical signal divergence, for instance via mate recognition to maintain species boundaries. Much less is known about the occurrence of such changes for predominantly sexually selected chemical signals, such as those released by many male lepidopterans. We evaluated the divergence in male and female wing volatile profiles between two recently isolated subspecies of the pierid butterfly Pieris rapae Linnaeus (Lepidoptera: Pieridae): P. rapae rapae and P. rapae crucivora. In laboratory settings, these subspecies exhibit strong premating isolation, with females rejecting males of the opposite subspecies despite the fact that males direct equivalent courtship effort toward females of either subspecies. Using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, we analyzed the volatile chemical profiles of individual males and females of each subspecies. We find that males of each subspecies differ in their wing volatile profiles, including quantitative differences in a male sex pheromone, ferrulactone. In contrast, female wing volatiles profiles have diverged significantly less. These sexspecific patterns suggest that male chemical profiles may play a role in the observed premating isolation between these two subspecies, providing support for future investigations of sexually selected chemical traits in population divergence
Density of Phonon States in Superconducting FeSe as a Function of Temperature and Pressure
The temperature and pressure dependence of the partial density of phonon
states of iron atoms in superconducting Fe1.01Se was studied by 57Fe nuclear
inelastic scattering (NIS). The high energy resolution allows for a detailed
observation of spectral properties. A sharpening of the optical phonon modes
and shift of all spectral features towards higher energies by ~4% with
decreasing temperature from 296 K to 10 K was found. However, no detectable
change at the tetragonal - orthorhombic phase transition around 100 K was
observed. Application of a pressure of 6.7 GPa, connected with an increase of
the superconducting temperature from 8 K to 34 K, results in an increase of the
optical phonon mode energies at 296 K by ~12%, and an even more pronounced
increase for the lowest-lying transversal acoustic mode. Despite these strong
pressure-induced modifications of the phonon-DOS we conclude that the
pronounced increase of Tc in Fe1.01Se with pressure cannot be described in the
framework of classical electron-phonon coupling. This result suggests the
importance of spin fluctuations to the observed superconductivity
Interaction between episodic and semantic memory networks in the acquisition and consolidation of novel spoken words
When a novel word is learned, its memory representation is thought to undergo a process of consolidation and integration. In this study, we tested whether the neural representations of novel words change as a function of consolidation by observing brain activation patterns just after learning and again after a delay of one week. Words learned with meanings were remembered better than those learned without meanings. Both episodic (hippocampus-dependent) and semantic (dependent on distributed neocortical areas) memory systems were utilised during recognition of the novel words. The extent to which the two systems were involved changed as a function of time and the amount of associated information, with more involvement of both systems for the meaningful words than for the form-only words after the one-week delay. These results suggest that the reason the meaningful words were remembered better is that their retrieval can benefit more from these two complementary memory system
Manic Depressive Disorder (Bipolar Disorder) and its effect on the family unit
Bipolar affective disorder can mean many years of pain, confusion and loneliness for sufferers. This can also be said to be true for their families. Most relatives develop a fixed set of attitudes ranging from supportive, whatever the circumstances, to the persistently critical and hostile. It is not possible to know if the latter may be a trait or the outcome of a developmental process, but the complexity of these emotions would have some significance in the relapse, and on the family unit as a whole. This study focuses on how family members are affected by living with bipolar disorder sufferers. It is based on relative studies of schizophrenia (The Nithsdale Schizophrenia Surveys 1993, McCreadie et al). Aspects examined include: relationships, practical management, emotional support care given to relatives suffering from bipolar disorder on relative's own health, the extreme difficulty that people with the illness experience in learning from life, and the significance of stress for relatives, both financial and social. The study uses in-depth interviewing and questionnaires methodology to measure the emotions, attitudes and feelings of relatives living closely with the sufferers, and the social consequences on the family unit. The results show that the high-EE (Expressed Emotion) critical families, when the sufferers and relatives are in conflict there is a prolonged and escalating "mutual" negativity. It makes no distinction as to the originators of the negative sequence. Furthermore, in contrast to work on EE or affective style, the results indicate that in low-EE families there is an actively supportive attitude to the sufferers. This parallel is present in the study, but the findings also stress the need for the sufferers to be supporting of their carers. The cases of relapse show that the sufferers and the carers play at least an equal part in the negative inter-action associated with relapse
Non-uniform carrier density in CdAs evidenced by optical spectroscopy
We report the detailed optical properties of CdAs crystals in a wide
parameter space: temperature, magnetic field, carrier concentration and crystal
orientation. We investigate high-quality crystals synthesized by three
different techniques. In all the studied samples, independently of how they
were prepared and how they were treated before the optical experiments, our
data indicate conspicuous fluctuations in the carrier density (up to 30%).
These charge puddles have a characteristic scale of 100 m, they become
more pronounced at low temperatures, and possibly, they become enhanced by the
presence of crystal twinning. The Drude response is characterized by very small
scattering rates ( meV) for as-grown samples. Mechanical treatment,
such as cutting or polishing, influences the optical properties of single
crystals, by increasing the Drude scattering rate and also modifying the high
frequency optical response. Magneto-reflectivity and Kerr rotation are
consistent with electron-like charge carriers and a spatially non-uniform
carrier density.Comment: Accepted in Physical Review
Trimer Formation and Metal-Insulator Transition in Orbital Degenerate Systems on a Triangular Lattice
As a prototypical self-organization in the system with orbital degeneracy, we
theoretically investigate trimer formation on a triangular lattice, as observed
in LiVO2. From the analysis of an effective spin-orbital coupled model in the
strong correlation limit, we show that the previously-proposed orbital-ordered
trimer state is not the lowest-energy state for a finite Hund's-rule coupling.
Instead, exploring the ground state in a wide range of parameters for a
multiorbital Hubbard model, we find an instability toward a different
orbital-ordered trimer state in the intermediately correlated regime in the
presence of trigonal crystal field. The trimer phase appears in the competing
region among a paramagnetic metal, band insulator, and Mott insulator. The
underlying mechanism is nesting instability of the Fermi surface by a
synergetic effect of Coulomb interactions and trigonal-field splitting. The
results are compared with experiments in triangularlattice compounds, LiVX2
(X=O, S, Se) and NaVO2.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in J. Phys. Soc. Jp
Evaluation of the United States National Air Quality Forecast Capability experimental real-time predictions in 2010 using Air Quality System ozone and NO<sub>2</sub> measurements
The National Air Quality Forecast Capability (NAQFC) project provides the US with operational and experimental real-time ozone predictions using two different versions of the three-dimensional Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system. Routine evaluation using near-real-time AIRNow ozone measurements through 2011 showed better performance of the operational ozone predictions. In this work, quality-controlled and -assured Air Quality System (AQS) ozone and nitrogen dioxide (NO<sub>2</sub>) observations are used to evaluate the experimental predictions in 2010. It is found that both ozone and NO<sub>2</sub> are overestimated over the contiguous US (CONUS), with annual biases of +5.6 and +5.1 ppbv, respectively. The annual root mean square errors (RMSEs) are 15.4 ppbv for ozone and 13.4 ppbv for NO<sub>2</sub>. For both species the overpredictions are most pronounced in the summer. The locations of the AQS monitoring sites are also utilized to stratify comparisons by the degree of urbanization. Comparisons for six predefined US regions show the highest annual biases for ozone predictions in Southeast (+10.5 ppbv) and for NO<sub>2</sub> in the Lower Middle (+8.1 ppbv) and Pacific Coast (+7.1 ppbv) regions. The spatial distributions of the NO<sub>2</sub> biases in August show distinctively high values in the Los Angeles, Houston, and New Orleans areas. In addition to the standard statistics metrics, daily maximum eight-hour ozone categorical statistics are calculated using the current US ambient air quality standard (75 ppbv) and another lower threshold (70 ppbv). Using the 75 ppbv standard, the hit rate and proportion of correct over CONUS for the entire year are 0.64 and 0.96, respectively. Summertime biases show distinctive weekly patterns for ozone and NO<sub>2</sub>. Diurnal comparisons show that ozone overestimation is most severe in the morning, from 07:00 to 10:00 local time. For NO<sub>2</sub>, the morning predictions agree with the AQS observations reasonably well, but nighttime concentrations are overpredicted by around 100%
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