What we have learned about policy-research linkage from providing a rapid response facility for international healthcare comparisons to the Department of Health in England

In this paper we reflect on our experience of providing a rapid response facility for international healthcare policy comparisons to the English Department of Health. We examine the challenges of developing sustained relationships with policy officials while providing an 'on-demand' service in an environment with high turnover of policies and staff. It may be easier for policy makers to draw on researchers in such a setting than for researchers to foster 'linkage and exchange' relationships with policy makers. Under the facility, knowledge transfer has mostly been from researchers to policy officials, affording us little insight into the policy process or the impact of our work

Self-rated mentalizing mediates the relationship between stress and coping in a non-clinical sample

Background: The clinical concept of mentalizing has recently been extended into non-clinical contexts. In particular, the protective function of robust mentalizing as a processing capacity of interpersonal and intrapsychic events has become a focus of consideration. Theoretical approaches hypothesize that mentalizing may allow for an adequate self-awareness in the face of aversive experiences such as stress, leading to a reappraisal of these experiences and therefore enables the use of adaptive coping behaviors. Objective: The study aimed to investigate the association between coping behavior, mentalizing and experiences of stress. Method: 534 healthy adults completed the German-language Stress Processing Questionnaire (SVF), the Mentalization Questionnaire (MZQ), and a short scale of the Trierer Inventory of Chronic Stress (TICS) in a cross-sectional research design. Results: Correlational analyses suggested associations between coping and mentalizing. Furthermore, MZQ scores predicted both positive and negative coping behavior. The relationship between stress and both negative and positive coping was mediated by mentalizing capacity. Conclusion: Findings confirm the hypothesis that mentalizing may represent a coping resource within a resilience framework. An implementation of the concept in preventive mental health interventions is discussed

Self-stabilizing robot formations over unreliable networks

We describe how a set of mobile robots can arrange themselves on any specified curve on the plane in the presence of dynamic changes both in the underlying ad hoc network and in the set of participating robots. Our strategy is for the mobile robots to implement a self-stabilizing virtual layer consisting of mobile client nodes, stationary Virtual Nodes (VNs), and local broadcast communication. The VNs are associated with predetermined regions in the plane and coordinate among themselves to distribute the client nodes relatively uniformly among the VNs' regions. Each VN directs its local client nodes to align themselves on the local portion of the target curve. The resulting motion coordination protocol is self-stabilizing, in that each robot can begin the execution in any arbitrary state and at any arbitrary location in the plane. In addition, self-stabilization ensures that the robots can adapt to changes in the desired target formation.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant No. CNS-0614993