‘Four pots good, two pots bad’: exploring the limits of quantification in the study of archaeological ceramics

‘Four pots good, two pots bad’: exploring the limits of quantification in the study of archaeological ceramic

Student Nurse Perceptions of Effective Medication Administration Education

Nursing faculty strive to educate students in a manner that prevents errors, promoting quality, patient-centered care. This endeavor is dependent upon meaningful and effective education that incorporates educational experiences reflective of the service sector. Anecdotal reports from clinical faculty and student nurses suggest that academic medication administration education may not optimally prepare students for safe entry into clinical practice. The aim of this phenomenologic qualitative research is to understand student nurse perceptions regarding teaching strategies and learning activities that prepared them for safe medication administration in acute care clinical settings. Focus group interviews resulted in two broad themes that are identified as Effective Education and Gaps in Education. Within these broad themes, findings revealed that students value faculty demonstrations, peer-learning opportunities, and repetitive practice with timely feedback. Study findings also pointed to educational gaps. Students reported needing to learn communication and conflict resolution strategies that would help them manage real-world interruptions, distractions, and computer generated alerts. Study findings recommend implementing relevant decision-support technology within academic lab learning activities

Eiríksjökull plateau icefield landsystem, Iceland

A 1:9500 scale map of the Eiríksjökull plateau icefield and its post-Little Ice Age (LIA) foreland geomorphology and surficial geology is presented as a modern exemplar of an asymmetrically developed mountain glacier typical of the style of glacierization that dominated during mid-latitude Quaternary cold stages. Features regarded as diagnostic for this setting include (a) ice-cored hummocky terrain, indicative of controlled moraine construction in polythermal snouts, and localized breach lobe development, incremental stagnation and rock glacierization, all indicative of a debris-charged glacier snout; (b) fluted till and moraines, indicative of temperate basal ice conditions up-ice from polythermal glacier margins and (c) glacifluvial and debris flow deposits, occurring as steep fans emanating from glacier snouts at the plateau edge and in ice-contact fans or ramps fed directly by debris-covered glacier margins at the LIA. Although this plateau icefield landsystem is similar to those previously reported from Iceland, a remarkable debris-covered snout/ice-cored moraine complex on the foreland of Klofajökull is a more extreme example of the depositional zone that characterizes the valleys surrounding the more sediment-starved plateau ice dispersal centres

Increasing dependence on industry-funded research creates higher risk of biased reporting in medical physics

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Surficial geology and geomorphology of the Kumtor Gold Mine, Kyrgyzstan: human impacts on mountain glacier landsystems

A 1:50,000 scale map of the surficial geology and geomorphology of the mountain glacier landsystem and the human impacts of the Kumtor Gold Mine operations in the Akshiirak massif was compiled from a 0.5 m resolution pan-sharpened image from Digital Globe's WorldView-2 platform dated 5 September 2014. The map depicts 11 surficial geology units, 6 of which are classified according to natural genetic origins and 5 relating to recent human interference with glaciological and land surface processes. When compared to historical imagery the map records a number of important, not unrelated, cryospheric responses to mining activity, including: (a) the triggering of human-induced glacier speed-up events or surges due to dumping of mine spoil on receding and thinning glacier snouts; (b) the reactivation by internal creep of buried glacier ice due to the expansion of spoil dumping onto down valley areas of ice-cored moraine; and (c) accelerated ice drawdown and significant incursions of ice into the mine pit walls due to the artificial removal of substantial areas of glacier ablation zones

Evaluation of modelling approaches for predicting the spatial distribution of soil organic carbon stocks at the national scale

Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays a major role in the global carbon budget. It can act as a source or a sink of atmospheric carbon, thereby possibly influencing the course of climate change. Improving the tools that model the spatial distributions of SOC stocks at national scales is a priority, both for monitoring changes in SOC and as an input for global carbon cycles studies. In this paper, we compare and evaluate two recent and promising modelling approaches. First, we considered several increasingly complex boosted regression trees (BRT), a convenient and efficient multiple regression model from the statistical learning field. Further, we considered a robust geostatistical approach coupled to the BRT models. Testing the different approaches was performed on the dataset from the French Soil Monitoring Network, with a consistent cross-validation procedure. We showed that when a limited number of predictors were included in the BRT model, the standalone BRT predictions were significantly improved by robust geostatistical modelling of the residuals. However, when data for several SOC drivers were included, the standalone BRT model predictions were not significantly improved by geostatistical modelling. Therefore, in this latter situation, the BRT predictions might be considered adequate without the need for geostatistical modelling, provided that i) care is exercised in model fitting and validating, and ii) the dataset does not allow for modelling of local spatial autocorrelations, as is the case for many national systematic sampling schemes