The impact of information and communication technology on family carers of older people and professionals in Sweden

Government policy in Sweden, as in other developed countries, pays increasing attention as to how best to support the family carers of older people. New and innovative means of support, such as information and communication technology, are emerging. This paper explores the perceived benefits of, and barriers to, information technology as a means of supporting family carers of older people. Following a brief overview of the care-giving literature, with particular reference to the Swedish context, interview and questionnaire data collected from 34 families who took part in the Swedish ACTION project are used to explore the role of user-friendly information and communication technology to inform and enable family carers of older people to exercise choice, to care more effectively and to work in partnership with professionals. Interview data from two groups of professionals that utilised ACTION are also examined to throw light on its potential benefits for both carers and professionals. Consideration is given to the barriers to using information technology, and to identifying those carers most likely to benefit. Areas for further development are the need for practitioners' education and a wider range of programmes to address carers' diverse needs. Clearly, lessons learned from the Swedish project have wider relevance, given that new forms of support are being developed in most technically advanced countries

Development, initial validation and reliability testing of a web-based, generic feline health-related quality of life instrument

Objectives: The objective of this study was to develop a valid, reliable web-based, generic feline health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL) questionnaire instrument to measure the affective impact of chronic disease. Methods: A large initial item pool, obtained through interviews with cat owners, was reduced using predetermined criteria, survey scores for relevance and clarity, and the ability of individual items to discriminate between healthy and sick cats when owners completed a prototype questionnaire. Using these data, factor analysis was used to derive a scoring algorithm and provide evidence for factorial validity. Validity was demonstrated further in a field trial using a ‘known groups’ approach (sick vs healthy cats will have a different HRQoL profile, and the HRQoL profile of cats will deteriorate as comorbidities increase). Test–retest reliability was assessed using intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC). Results: In total, 165 items were reduced to 20 and, on the basis of a factor analysis that explained 72.3% of the variation in scores input by 71 owners of 30 healthy and 41 sick cats using the prototype, these were allocated to three domains (vitality, comfort and emotional wellbeing [EWB]) with a scoring algorithm derived using item loadings. Subsequently, the owners of 36 healthy and 58 sick cats completed one or two (n = 48) assessments. Median scores (healthy vs sick) for all domains were significantly different (P <0.001), 78% of cats were correctly classified as healthy or sick and for comorbidities the correlation coefficients were moderate (vitality 0.64; comfort 0.63; EWB 0.50). Test–retest reliability was good (ICC vitality 0.635; comfort 0.716; EWB 0.853). Conclusions and relevance: This study provides initial evidence for the validity and reliability of a novel HRQoL instrument to aid the assessment and management of chronic diseases of cats

Association between low 25(OH) vitamin D levels, antiretroviral therapy and metabolic profile in a cohort of treated ahd therapy naive HIV positive patients in Western Australia

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CCD photometry of 2060 Chiron, 1991 January

Observations of 2060 Chiron was performed on 7 to 8 Jan. 1991 with the Mt. Palomar 1.52 m telescope in the Gunn-R passband. On-chip field stars were used to perform differential reductions. The repeatability of the 5.9 hour light curve was excellent, both within a night and from night to night. No evidence for short-term secular variations similar to those seen last year by both Luu and Jewitt (1990) and Buratti and Dunbar (1991) is seen in the new light curve. Chiron's rotational light curve appears strikingly similar to that obtained a year earlier by Luu and Jewitt (1990), both in amplitude and shape. Both light curves show strongly correlated changes over a timescale of perhaps 15 minutes. These same features were marginally visible in the 1986 light curve. Such behavior is believed to be evidence that Chiron may be more aspherical than the 4 percent intensity variation might otherwise indicate, and favors a viewing geometry where the subearth latitude is rather low. Chiron was much fainter in 1985, when a partial light curve was obtained by Marcialis. Due to the lower sampling rate of these early data, no conclusions can be made regarding the high-frequency light curve structure back then. All three of these light curves differ significantly from that obtained by Buratti and Dunbar (1991), one week before the observations of Luu and Jewitt. The Chiron field was calibrated using Landolt standards on Ut 15 Mar. 1991. A mean R-magnitude of 15.6 + or - 0.1 was found. Variability of 2060 Chiron was demonstrated over timescales of minutes, hours, and years. An intense campaign was urged to monitor the photometric behavior of Chiron throughout the 1990s

A Possible Bifurcation in Atmospheres of Strongly Irradiated Stars and Planets

We show that under certain circumstances the differences between the absorption mean and Planck mean opacities can lead to multiple solutions for an LTE atmospheric structure. Since the absorption and Planck mean opacities are not expected to differ significantly in the usual case of radiative equilibrium, non-irradiated atmospheres, the most interesting situations where the effect may play a role are strongly irradiated stars and planets, and also possibly structures where there is a significant deposition of mechanical energy, such as stellar chromospheres and accretion disks. We have presented an illustrative example of a strongly irradiated giant planet where the bifurcation effect is predicted to occur for a certain range of distances from the star.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Ap

A note on behaviour at an isotropic singularity

The behaviour of Jacobi fields along a time-like geodesic running into an isotropic singularity is studied. It is shown that the Jacobi fields are crushed to zero length at a rate which is the same in every direction orthogonal to the geodesic. We show by means of a counter-example that this crushing effect depends crucially on a technicality of the definition of isotropic singularities, and not just on the uniform degeneracy of the metric at the singularity.Comment: 13 pp. plain latex. To appear in Classical and Quantum Gravit

Patient reactions to a web-based cardiovascular risk calculator in type 2 diabetes: a qualitative study in primary care.

Use of risk calculators for specific diseases is increasing, with an underlying assumption that they promote risk reduction as users become better informed and motivated to take preventive action. Empirical data to support this are, however, sparse and contradictory

Pengaruh Kualitas Ransum Dna Temperatur Lingkungan

Penelitian untuk mengetahui pengaruh ransum dan suhu lingkungan terhadap karakteristik karkas dan daging telah dilakukan dengan menggunakan 16 ekor domba persilangan Border Leicester x Merino jantan kastrasi, umur 7 bulan, bobot 33.0+1.49 kg. Domba-bomba tersebut dialokasikan secara acak pada perlakuan dalam rancangan acak kelompok dengan struktur faktorial 2 x 2. Perlakuan yang diterapkan adalah suhu lingkungan (20° and 30°C) dan ransum (RPTS: rendah protein tinggi serat, dan TPRS: tinggi protein rendah serat). Ransum TPRS memberikan hasil persentase karkas dan ketebalan lemak punggung yang lebih tinggi daripada ransum RPTS (49.7 vs 44.4 % dan 14.2 vs 6.8 mm berturutan), tetapi tidak terdapat pengaruh nyata suhu terhadap karakteristik karkas. Terdapat interaksi nyata antara suhu dan ransum pada otot mata rusuk. Pada domba yang mendapat ransum RPTS, suhu berpengaruh nyata, sementara pada domba yang mendapat TPRS, suhu tidak berpengaruh nyata. Daging domba yang diberi RPTS mempunyai rasa yang lebih enak daripada domba yang dib,_.i TPRS. Suhu tidak berpengaruh nyata terhadap aroma daging. Baik suhu maupun ransum tidak berpengaruh nyata pada pH, warna maupun keempukan daging. (Kata kunci: Domba jantan kastrasi, Cekaman panas, Karkas, Daging)

On the existence of dyons and dyonic black holes in Einstein-Yang-Mills theory

We study dyonic soliton and black hole solutions of the ${\mathfrak {su}}(2)$ Einstein-Yang-Mills equations in asymptotically anti-de Sitter space. We prove the existence of non-trivial dyonic soliton and black hole solutions in a neighbourhood of the trivial solution. For these solutions the magnetic gauge field function has no zeros and we conjecture that at least some of these non-trivial solutions will be stable. The global existence proof uses local existence results and a non-linear perturbation argument based on the (Banach space) implicit function theorem.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures. Minor revisions; references adde

Evaluation of denoising strategies to address motion-correlated artifacts in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from the human connectome roject

Like all resting-state functional connectivity data, the data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) are adversely affected by structured noise artifacts arising from head motion and physiological processes. Functional connectivity estimates (Pearson's correlation coefficients) were inflated for high-motion time points and for high-motion participants. This inflation occurred across the brain, suggesting the presence of globally distributed artifacts. The degree of inflation was further increased for connections between nearby regions compared with distant regions, suggesting the presence of distance-dependent spatially specific artifacts. We evaluated several denoising methods: censoring high-motion time points, motion regression, the FMRIB independent component analysis-based X-noiseifier (FIX), and mean grayordinate time series regression (MGTR; as a proxy for global signal regression). The results suggest that FIX denoising reduced both types of artifacts, but left substantial global artifacts behind. MGTR significantly reduced global artifacts, but left substantial spatially specific artifacts behind. Censoring high-motion time points resulted in a small reduction of distance-dependent and global artifacts, eliminating neither type. All denoising strategies left differences between high- and low-motion participants, but only MGTR substantially reduced those differences. Ultimately, functional connectivity estimates from HCP data showed spatially specific and globally distributed artifacts, and the most effective approach to address both types of motion-correlated artifacts was a combination of FIX and MGTR