9,862 research outputs found
Workshop in Moodle: a tool for peer critiquing
This paper will begin with a brief discussion of the benefits of peer assessment and peer critiquing. In particular, it will examine how both can be beneficial in
helping to introduce, and reinforce, valuable graduate attributes in students throughout their university careers.
It will then examine the tools available at the University of Glasgow and evaluate them in terms of their strengths and weaknesses. In order to explain this in detail, a real life case study from a third year class in Nursing will be presented. The paper will conclude that, while there are obvious benefits to peer critiquing tools being used with a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), some modifications
are necessary in order to make them more easily usable by staff and students
Outcomes and costs of blunt trauma in England and Wales
Background Trauma represents an important public health
concern in the United Kingdom, yet the acute costs of blunt
trauma injury have not been documented and analysed in detail.
Knowledge of the overall costs of trauma care, and the drivers
of these costs, is a prerequisite for a cost-conscious approach
to improvement in standards of trauma care, including evaluation
of the cost-effectiveness of new healthcare technologies.
Methods Using the Trauma Audit Research Network database,
we examined patient records for persons aged 18 years and
older hospitalised for blunt trauma between January 2000 and
December 2005. Patients were stratified by the Injury Severity
Score (ISS).
Results A total of 35,564 patients were identified; 60% with an
ISS of 0 to 9, 17% with an ISS of 10 to 16, 12% with an ISS of
17 to 25, and 11% with an ISS of 26 to 75. The median age was
46 years and 63% of patients were men. Falls were the most
common cause of injury (50%), followed by road traffic
collisions (33%). Twenty-nine percent of patients were admitted
to critical care for a median length of stay of 4 days. The median
total hospital length of stay was 9 days, and 69% of patients
underwent at least one surgical procedure. Seven percent of the
patients died before discharge, with the highest proportion of
deaths among those in the ISS 26–75 group (32%). The mean
hospital cost per person was £9,530 (± 11,872). Costs varied
significantly by Glasgow Coma Score, ISS, age, cause of injury,
type of injury, hospital mortality, grade and specialty of doctor
seen in the accident and emergency department, and year of
admission.
Conclusion The acute treatment costs of blunt trauma in
England and Wales vary significantly by injury severity and
survival, and public health initiatives that aim to reduce both the
incidence and severity of blunt trauma are likely to produce
significant savings in acute trauma care. The largest component
of acute hospital cost is determined by the length of stay, and
measures designed to reduce length of admissions are likely to
be the most effective in reducing the costs of blunt trauma care
Update to the Mid-Term Evaluation for the CSFF for Objective 3, Report 321, Department for Work and Pensions
The impacts of tourism on two communities adjacent to the Kruger National Park, South Africa
This paper explores the socioeconomic impacts of tourism associated with the Kruger National Park, South Africa's flagship national park, on the neighbouring villages of Cork and Belfast. Case study research, where the study area was characterised as a social-ecological system, was used to investigate the impacts of Park tourism on these communities. The findings offer a micro-scale, local community perspective of these impacts and indicate that the enclave nature of Park tourism keeps local communities separate from the Park and makes it hard for them to benefit from it. The paper concludes with reflections on this perceived separation, and suggests the need to make the Park boundaries more 'permeable' so as to improve relationships with adjacent communities, while also pragmatically managing community expectation
Succinct Representations of Permutations and Functions
We investigate the problem of succinctly representing an arbitrary
permutation, \pi, on {0,...,n-1} so that \pi^k(i) can be computed quickly for
any i and any (positive or negative) integer power k. A representation taking
(1+\epsilon) n lg n + O(1) bits suffices to compute arbitrary powers in
constant time, for any positive constant \epsilon <= 1. A representation taking
the optimal \ceil{\lg n!} + o(n) bits can be used to compute arbitrary powers
in O(lg n / lg lg n) time.
We then consider the more general problem of succinctly representing an
arbitrary function, f: [n] \rightarrow [n] so that f^k(i) can be computed
quickly for any i and any integer power k. We give a representation that takes
(1+\epsilon) n lg n + O(1) bits, for any positive constant \epsilon <= 1, and
computes arbitrary positive powers in constant time. It can also be used to
compute f^k(i), for any negative integer k, in optimal O(1+|f^k(i)|) time.
We place emphasis on the redundancy, or the space beyond the
information-theoretic lower bound that the data structure uses in order to
support operations efficiently. A number of lower bounds have recently been
shown on the redundancy of data structures. These lower bounds confirm the
space-time optimality of some of our solutions. Furthermore, the redundancy of
one of our structures "surpasses" a recent lower bound by Golynski [Golynski,
SODA 2009], thus demonstrating the limitations of this lower bound.Comment: Preliminary versions of these results have appeared in the
Proceedings of ICALP 2003 and 2004. However, all results in this version are
improved over the earlier conference versio
Feed-forward and its role in conditional linear optical quantum dynamics
Nonlinear optical quantum gates can be created probabilistically using only
single photon sources, linear optical elements and photon-number resolving
detectors. These gates are heralded but operate with probabilities much less
than one. There is currently a large gap between the performance of the known
circuits and the established upper bounds on their success probabilities. One
possibility for increasing the probability of success of such gates is
feed-forward, where one attempts to correct certain failure events that
occurred in the gate's operation. In this brief report we examine the role of
feed-forward in improving the success probability. In particular, for the
non-linear sign shift gate, we find that in a three-mode implementation with a
single round of feed-forward the optimal average probability of success is
approximately given by p= 0.272. This value is only slightly larger than the
general optimal success probability without feed-forward, P= 0.25.Comment: 4 pages, 3 eps figures, typeset using RevTex4, problems with figures
resolve
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