Rasch Analysis of the International Quality of Life Basic Data Set Version 2.0

Objective: To examine the internal construct validity of the International Spinal Cord Injury Quality of Life Basic Data Set Version 2.0 (QoL-BDS V2.0) and compare this with the internal construct validity of the original version of the QoL-BDS. Design: International cross-sectional psychometric study. Setting: Spinal rehabilitation units, clinics, and community. Participants: The study involved 5 sites and 4 countries, 2 of whose primary language is not English. Each site included a consecutive sample of inpatients with spinal cord injury or disease (SCI/D) and a convenience sample of individuals with SCI/D living in the community (N=565). Main outcome measures: The QoL-BDS V2.0 consists of the 3 original items on satisfaction with life as a whole, physical health, psychological health of the QoL-BDS, and an additional item on satisfaction with social life. All 4 items are answered on a 0-10 numeric rating scale. Rasch analysis was performed on versions 1.0 and 2.0 of the QoL-BDS to examine the ordering of the items' response options, item scaling, reliability, item fit, local item independence, differential item functioning, and unidimensionality. Results: The sample included 565 participants with 57% outpatients and 43% inpatients. Mean age was 51.4 years; 71% were male; 65% had a traumatic injury, 40% had tetraplegia, and 67% were wheelchair users. Item thresholds were collapsed for ordering, and subsequent analyses showed good internal construct validity for the QoL-BDS V2.0 with a person separation reliability of 0.76 and Cronbach α of 0.81. Infit and outfit statistics ranged 0.62-0.91. No local dependencies and multidimensionality were found. Differential item functioning was observed only for country and inpatients vs outpatients but not for other participants' characteristics. Differences in internal construct validity between the 3-item and 4-item versions were minimal. Conclusions: The results of this Rasch analysis support the internal construct validity of the QoL-BDS V2.0

International Comparison of Vocational Rehabilitation for Persons With Spinal Cord Injury:Systems, Practices, and Barriers

Background: Employment rates among people with spinal cord injury or spinal cord disease (SCI/D) show considerable variation across countries. One factor to explain this variation is differences in vocational rehabilitation (VR) systems. International comparative studies on VR however are nonexistent. Objectives: To describe and compare VR systems and practices and barriers for return to work in the rehabilitation of persons with SCI/D in multiple countries. Methods: A survey including clinical case examples was developed and completed by medical and VR experts from SCI/D rehabilitation centers in seven countries between April and August 2017. Results: Location (rehabilitation center vs community), timing (around admission, toward discharge, or after discharge from clinical rehabilitation), and funding (eg, insurance, rehabilitation center, employer, or community) of VR practices differ. Social security services vary greatly. The age and preinjury occupation of the patient influences the content of VR in some countries. Barriers encountered during VR were similar. No participant mentioned lack of interest in VR among team members as a barrier, but all mentioned lack of education of the team on VR as a barrier. Other frequently mentioned barriers were fatigue of the patient (86%), lack of confidence of the patient in his/her ability to work (86%), a gap in the team's knowledge of business/legal aspects (86%), and inadequate transportation/accessibility (86%). Conclusion: VR systems and practices, but not barriers, differ among centers. The variability in VR systems and social security services should be considered when comparing VR study results

Three-dimensional adaptive evolution of gravitational waves in numerical relativity

Adaptive techniques are crucial for successful numerical modeling of gravitational waves from astrophysical sources such as coalescing compact binaries, since the radiation typically has wavelengths much larger than the scale of the sources. We have carried out an important step toward this goal, the evolution of weak gravitational waves using adaptive mesh refinement in the Einstein equations. The 2-level adaptive simulation is compared with unigrid runs at coarse and fine resolution, and is shown to track closely the features of the fine grid run.Comment: REVTeX, 7 pages, including three figures; submitted to Physical Review

'Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place': Anti-discrimination Legislation in the Liberal State and the Fate of the Australian Disability Discrimination Act

This article offers a critical analysis of some of the practical implications for disabled people of the Disability Discrimination Act of 1992. Specifically, it raises questions about politics and the role of the law as an instrument of social change?taking greater account of the interests of disabled people?on the one hand, and of the reliance of the social model of disability on a strategy based upon legal rights on the other. The article also suggests that the constraining effects of Australia's constitutional protections of rights and its federal system of government hinder the mildly progressive elements of the Disability Discrimination Act. To illustrate this, the paper employs empirical evidence to suggest that these effects have been exacerbated by the passage of the Human Rights Legislation Amendment Act in 1999

The ESCAPE project : Energy-efficient Scalable Algorithms for Weather Prediction at Exascale

In the simulation of complex multi-scale flows arising in weather and climate modelling, one of the biggest challenges is to satisfy strict service requirements in terms of time to solution and to satisfy budgetary constraints in terms of energy to solution, without compromising the accuracy and stability of the application. These simulations require algorithms that minimise the energy footprint along with the time required to produce a solution, maintain the physically required level of accuracy, are numerically stable, and are resilient in case of hardware failure. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) led the ESCAPE (Energy-efficient Scalable Algorithms for Weather Prediction at Exascale) project, funded by Horizon 2020 (H2020) under the FET-HPC (Future and Emerging Technologies in High Performance Computing) initiative. The goal of ESCAPE was to develop a sustainable strategy to evolve weather and climate prediction models to next-generation computing technologies. The project partners incorporate the expertise of leading European regional forecasting consortia, university research, experienced high-performance computing centres, and hardware vendors. This paper presents an overview of the ESCAPE strategy: (i) identify domain-specific key algorithmic motifs in weather prediction and climate models (which we term Weather & Climate Dwarfs), (ii) categorise them in terms of computational and communication patterns while (iii) adapting them to different hardware architectures with alternative programming models, (iv) analyse the challenges in optimising, and (v) find alternative algorithms for the same scheme. The participating weather prediction models are the following: IFS (Integrated Forecasting System); ALARO, a combination of AROME (Application de la Recherche a l'Operationnel a Meso-Echelle) and ALADIN (Aire Limitee Adaptation Dynamique Developpement International); and COSMO-EULAG, a combination of COSMO (Consortium for Small-scale Modeling) and EULAG (Eulerian and semi-Lagrangian fluid solver). For many of the weather and climate dwarfs ESCAPE provides prototype implementations on different hardware architectures (mainly Intel Skylake CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, Intel Xeon Phi, Optalysys optical processor) with different programming models. The spectral transform dwarf represents a detailed example of the co-design cycle of an ESCAPE dwarf. The dwarf concept has proven to be extremely useful for the rapid prototyping of alternative algorithms and their interaction with hardware; e.g. the use of a domain-specific language (DSL). Manual adaptations have led to substantial accelerations of key algorithms in numerical weather prediction (NWP) but are not a general recipe for the performance portability of complex NWP models. Existing DSLs are found to require further evolution but are promising tools for achieving the latter. Measurements of energy and time to solution suggest that a future focus needs to be on exploiting the simultaneous use of all available resources in hybrid CPU-GPU arrangements

Towards an Economy of Higher Education

This paper draws a distinction between ways thinking and acting, and hence of policy and practice in higher education, in terms of different kinds of economy: economies of exchange and economies of excess. Crucial features of economies of exchange are outlined and their presence in prevailing conceptions of teaching and learning is illustrated. These are contrasted with other possible forms of practice, which in turn bring to light the nature of an economy of excess. In more philosophical terms, and to expand on the picture, economies of excess are elaborated with reference, first, to the understanding of alterity in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and, second, to the idea of Dionysian intensity that is to be found in Nietzsche. In the light of critical comment on some current directions in policy and practice, the implications of these ways of thinking for the administrator, the teacher and the student in higher education are explored

Temperature and Malaria Trends in Highland East Africa

There has been considerable debate on the existence of trends in climate in the highlands of East Africa and hypotheses about their potential effect on the trends in malaria in the region. We apply a new robust trend test to mean temperature time series data from three editions of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit database (CRU TS) for several relevant locations. We find significant trends in the data extracted from newer editions of the database but not in the older version for periods ending in 1996. The trends in the newer data are even more significant when post-1996 data are added to the samples. We also test for trends in the data from the Kericho meteorological station prepared by Omumbo et al. We find no significant trend in the 1979-1995 period but a highly significant trend in the full 1979-2009 sample. However, although the malaria cases observed at Kericho, Kenya rose during a period of resurgent epidemics (1994-2002) they have since returned to a low level. A large assembly of parasite rate surveys from the region, stratified by altitude, show that this decrease in malaria prevalence is not limited to Kericho

In search of the authentic nation: landscape and national identity in Canada and Switzerland

While the study of nationalism and national identity has flourished in the last decade, little attention has been devoted to the conditions under which natural environments acquire significance in definitions of nationhood. This article examines the identity-forming role of landscape depictions in two polyethnic nation-states: Canada and Switzerland. Two types of geographical national identity are identified. The first – what we call the ‘nationalisation of nature’– portrays zarticular landscapes as expressions of national authenticity. The second pattern – what we refer to as the ‘naturalisation of the nation’– rests upon a notion of geographical determinism that depicts specific landscapes as forces capable of determining national identity. The authors offer two reasons why the second pattern came to prevail in the cases under consideration: (1) the affinity between wild landscape and the Romantic ideal of pure, rugged nature, and (2) a divergence between the nationalist ideal of ethnic homogeneity and the polyethnic composition of the two societies under consideration