66,561 research outputs found
Nursing informatics: a personal review of the past, the present and the future
There is evidence that nurses have been involved in, or have been affected by health- related computer projects since the mid-1960's. Since those early years nurses have made many significant contributions to the wider bio-health informatics agenda. This article reflects on the evolution of Nursing Informatics, from attempts to define the discipline, through the development of support systems, to the current state-of-the-science for one particular and important field of study, namely clinical terminologies. The article concludes with a call for increased professionalisation of Nursing Informatics
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Migrant workers in the East Midlands labour market 2007
This report provides a profile of international migrants in the East Midlands and their role in the regional labour marke
Spinor-Vector Duality in Heterotic String Orbifolds
The three generation heterotic-string models in the free fermionic
formulation are among the most realistic string vacua constructed to date,
which motivated their detailed investigation. The classification of free
fermion heterotic string vacua has revealed a duality under the exchange of
spinor and vector representations of the SO(10) GUT symmetry over the space of
models. We demonstrate the existence of the spinor-vector duality using
orbifold techniques, and elaborate on the relation of these vacua to free
fermionic models.Comment: 20 pages. v2 minor corrections. Version to appear on JHEP. v3
misprints correcte
Palindromic Length of Words with Many Periodic Palindromes
The palindromic length of a finite word is the minimal
number of palindromes whose concatenation is equal to . In 2013, Frid,
Puzynina, and Zamboni conjectured that: If is an infinite word and is
an integer such that for every factor of then
is ultimately periodic.
Suppose that is an infinite word and is an integer such
for every factor of . Let be the set
of all factors of that have more than
palindromic prefixes. We show that is an infinite set and we show
that for each positive integer there are palindromes and a word such that is a factor of and is nonempty. Note
that is a periodic word and is a palindrome for each . These results justify the following question: What is the palindromic
length of a concatenation of a suffix of and a periodic word with
"many" periodic palindromes?
It is known that ,
where and are nonempty words. The main result of our article shows that
if are palindromes, is nonempty, is a nonempty suffix of ,
is the minimal period of , and is a positive integer
with then
Health systems performance in sub-Saharan Africa: Governance, outcome and equity
Copyright @ 2011 Olafsdottir et al.BACKGROUND: The literature on health systems focuses largely on the performance of healthcare systems operationalised around indicators such as hospital beds, maternity care and immunisation coverage. A broader definition of health systems however, needs to include the wider determinants of health including, possibly, governance and its relationship to health and health equity. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between health systems outcomes and equity, and governance as a part of a process to extend the range of indicators used to assess health systems performance.
METHODS: Using cross sectional data from 46 countries in the African region of the World Health Organization, an ecological analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between governance and health systems performance. The data were analysed using multiple linear regression and a standard progressive modelling procedure. The under-five mortality rate (U5MR) was used as the health outcome measure and the ratio of U5MR in the wealthiest and poorest quintiles was used as the measure of health equity. Governance was measured using two contextually relevant indices developed by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. RESULTS: Governance was strongly associated with U5MR and moderately associated with the U5MR quintile ratio. After controlling for possible confounding by healthcare, finance, education, and water and sanitation, governance remained significantly associated with U5MR. Governance was not, however, significantly associated with equity in U5MR outcomes. CONCLUSION: This study suggests that the quality of governance may be an important structural determinant of health systems performance, and could be an indicator to be monitored. The association suggests there might be a causal relationship. However, the cross-sectional design, the level of missing data, and the small sample size, forces tentative conclusions. Further research will be needed to assess the causal relationship, and its generalizability beyond U5MR as a health outcome measure, as well as the geographical generalizability of the results
The Effect of Interviewer Experience, Attitudes, Personality and Skills on Respondent Co-operation with Face-to-Face Surveys
This paper examines the role of interviewers' experience, attitudes, personality traits and inter-personal skills in determining survey co-operation, conditional on contact. We take the perspective that these characteristics influence interviewers' behaviour and hence influence the doorstep interaction between interviewer and sample member. Previous studies of the association between doorstep behaviour and co-operation have not directly addressed the role of personality traits and inter-personal skills and most have been based on small samples of interviewers. We use a large sample of 842 face-to-face interviewers working for a major survey institute and analyse co-operation outcomes for over 100,000 cases contacted by those interviewers over a 13-month period. We find evidence of effects of experience, attitudes, personality traits and inter-personal skills on co-operation rates. Several of the effects of attitudes and inter-personal skills are explained by differences in experience, though some independent effects remain. The role of attitudes, personality and skills seems to be greatest for the least experienced interviewers
The separation of the East Australian Current: A Lagrangian approach to potential vorticity and upstream control
The East Australian Current (EAC) is the western boundary current flowing along the east coast of Australia separating from the coast at approximately 34°S. After the separation two main pathways can be distinguished, the eastward flowing Tasman Front and the extension of the EAC flowing southward. The area south of the separation latitude is eddy-rich and the separation latitude of the EAC is variable. Little is known of the properties of the water masses that separate at the bifurcation of the EAC. This paper presents new insights from the Lagrangian perspective, where the water masses that veer east and those that continue south are tracked in an eddy-permitting numerical model. The transport along the two pathways is computed, and a 1:3 ratio between transport in the EAC extension and transport in the Tasman Front is found. The results show that the "fate" of the particles is to first order already determined by the particle distribution within the EAC current upstream of the separation latitude, where 85% of the particles following the EAC extension originate from below 460 m and 90% of the particles following the Tasman Front originate from the top 460 m depth at 28°S. The separation and pathways are controlled by the structure of the isopycnals in this region. Analysis of anomalies in potential vorticity show that in the region where the two water masses overlap, the fate of the water depends on the presence of anticyclonic eddies that push isopycnals down and therefore enable particles to travel further south
The complexity of dominating set reconfiguration
Suppose that we are given two dominating sets and of a graph
whose cardinalities are at most a given threshold . Then, we are asked
whether there exists a sequence of dominating sets of between and
such that each dominating set in the sequence is of cardinality at most
and can be obtained from the previous one by either adding or deleting
exactly one vertex. This problem is known to be PSPACE-complete in general. In
this paper, we study the complexity of this decision problem from the viewpoint
of graph classes. We first prove that the problem remains PSPACE-complete even
for planar graphs, bounded bandwidth graphs, split graphs, and bipartite
graphs. We then give a general scheme to construct linear-time algorithms and
show that the problem can be solved in linear time for cographs, trees, and
interval graphs. Furthermore, for these tractable cases, we can obtain a
desired sequence such that the number of additions and deletions is bounded by
, where is the number of vertices in the input graph
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Migrant workers in the East Midlands labour market 2010
This report is an update of previous intelligence (Migrant Workers in the East Midlands Labour Market 2007) on the profile and economic impact of migrant labour in the East Midlands economy
Podiatry services for patients with arthritis: an unmet need
Foot problems are extremely common in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA).
There is ample evidence that foot pain, either alone or as a comorbidity, contributes
significantly to disability. Despite the high prevalence of foot disease in RA, this
problem is often trivialised or underappreciated. The inequity in foot health provision
for patients with rheumatic disorders in New Zealand has recently been highlighted.
Expertise in dealing with foot problems is often limited among healthcare
professionals, and it has been argued that better integration of podiatric services into
rheumatology services would be beneficial. The aim of this paper is to highlight the
major issues related to foot care for patients with arthritis and provide key
recommendations that should implemented to improve access to podiatric services in
New Zealand
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