Assessing schematic knowledge of introductory probability theory

[Abstract]: The ability to identify schematic knowledge is an important goal for both assessment and instruction. In the current paper, schematic knowledge of statistical probability theory is explored from the declarative-procedural framework using multiple methods of assessment. A sample of 90 undergraduate introductory statistics students was required to classify 10 pairs of probability problems as similar or different; to identify whether 15 problems contained sufficient, irrelevant, or missing information (text-edit); and to solve 10 additional problems. The complexity of the schema on which the problems were based was also manipulated. Detailed analyses compared text-editing and solution accuracy as a function of text-editing category and schema complexity. Results showed that text-editing tends to be easier than solution and differentially sensitive to schema complexity. While text-editing and classification were correlated with solution, only text-editing problems with missing information uniquely predicted success. In light of previous research these results suggest that text-editing is suitable for supplementing the assessment of schematic knowledge in development

Workforce issues in nursing in Queensland: 2001 and 2004

[Abstract]: Aims and objectives: The aim of the study was to identify the factors impacting upon nursing work and to use the results to inform strategic planning of the Queensland Nurses Union. Background: In 2001 and 2004, a study was undertaken to gather data on the level of satisfaction of nurses with their working life. This paper reports the 2004 results on workload, skill mix, remuneration and morale. Where applicable, the results are compared to 2001 data. Methods: A questionnaire was mailed to 3000 Assistants-in-Nursing, Enrolled and Registered Nurses in October 2004. All participants were members of the Queensland Nurses Union. The results are reported in three sectors – public, private and aged care. A total of 1349 nurses responded to the survey, a response rate of 45%. Results: Nurses in the 2004 study believed: their workload was heavy; their skills and experience poorly rewarded; work stress was high; morale was perceived to be poor and, similar to 2001, deteriorating; the skill mix was often inadequate; and the majority of nurses are unable to complete their work in the time available. Nursing morale was found to be associated with autonomy, workplace equipment, workplace safety, teamwork, work stress, the physical demand of nursing work, workload, rewards for skills and experience, career prospects, status of nursing, and remuneration. Conclusion: Overall the findings of the study are consistent with those determined by the 2001 survey. Relevance to clinical practice. The findings of this study indicate the importance of factors such as workplace autonomy, teamwork, the levels of workplace stress, workload and remuneration on nursing morale. The data also indicate that workplace safety and workplace morale are linked. These findings provide information for policy makers and nurse managers on areas that need to be addressed to retain nurses within aged care, acute hospital and community nursing

Nurses worth listening to

[Executive Summary]: In 2001 the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) in conjunction with the Queensland Nurses’ Union (QNU) undertook a study of enrolled and registered nurse and assistant-in-nursing members. In Queensland, registered nurses (RNs) and enrolled nurses (ENs) are qualified to practice nursing and are licensed by the Queensland Nursing Council (QNC), an independent body responsible for the setting and maintaining of nursing standards in the State. Although not licensed by the QNC Assistants in Nursing (AINs) work within a nursing model of care. These workers may also have other titles such as Personal Care Assistants or Carers. Regardless of their title, they work under the direct or indirect supervision of a RN. The study was confined to nurses employed in the public sector (acute hospitals, community health), the private sector (acute hospitals and domicillary nursing) and the aged care sector (government and non-government). In 2004 a similar study was conducted. The major findings of the 2004 study were that nurses believed: • nursing is emotionally challenging and physically demanding • their workload is heavy and that their skills and experience as a professional nurse are poorly rewarded (remunerated or recognised) • work stress is high and morale is perceived to be poor and, similar to 2001, deteriorating • there are insufficient staff in their workplace and that the skill mix is inadequate • the majority of nurses are unable to complete their work to their level of professional satisfaction in the time available. While there were some changes between 2001 and 2004 (some could be seen as improvements, others deteriorations), the overwhelming impression one has, especially from the qualitative data, is of a workforce frustrated and unable to provide safe and quality care to their patients/clients within the time allocated

Maintaining prostate contouring consistency following an educational intervention

IntroductionThe aim of this study was to assess variation in prostate contouring 12 months following a structured interactive educational intervention (EI) and to test the hypothesis that EIs positively impact on prostate contouring accuracy and consistency long term

Single-molecule imaging of DNA gyrase activity in living Escherichia coli

Bacterial DNA gyrase introduces negative supercoils into chromosomal DNA and relaxes positive supercoils introduced by replication and transiently by transcription. Removal of these positive supercoils is essential for replication fork progression and for the overall unlinking of the two duplex DNA strands, as well as for ongoing transcription. To address how gyrase copes with these topological challenges, we used high-speed single-molecule fluorescence imaging in live Escherichia coli cells. We demonstrate that at least 300 gyrase molecules are stably bound to the chromosome at any time, with ~12 enzymes enriched near each replication fork. Trapping of reaction intermediates with ciprofloxacin revealed complexes undergoing catalysis. Dwell times of ~2 s were observed for the dispersed gyrase molecules, which we propose maintain steady-state levels of negative supercoiling of the chromosome. In contrast, the dwell time of replisome-proximal molecules was ~8 s, consistent with these catalyzing processive positive supercoil relaxation in front of the progressing replisome

Privacy-aware access control with generalization boundaries

Privacy is today an important concern for both data providers and data users. Data generalization can provide signicant protection of an individual's privacy, which means the data value can be replaced by a less specic but semantically consistent value and the personal information can be collected in a generalized form. However, over-generalized data may render data of little value. A key question is whether or not a certain generalization strategy provides a sufficient level of privacy and usability? In this paper, we introduce a new approach, called privacy-aware generalization boundaries, which can satisfy the requirements of both data providers and data users. We propose a privacy-aware access control model related to a retention period. Formal definitions of authorization actions and rules are presented. Further, we discuss how to manage a valid access process and analysis the access control policy. Finally, we extend our model to support highly complex privacy-related policies by taking into account features of obligations and conditions

Advanced permission-role relationship in role-based access control

Permission-role assignment is an important issue in role-based access control (RBAC). There are two types of problems that may arise in permission-role assignment. One is related to authorization granting process. Conflicting permissions may be granted to a role, and as a result, users with the role may have or derive a high level of authority. The other is related to authorization revocation. When a permission is revoked from a role, the role may still have the permission from other roles. In this paper, we discuss granting and revocation models related to mobile and immobile memberships between permissions and roles, then provide proposed authorization granting algorithm to check conflicts and help allocate the permissions without compromising the security. To our best knowledge, the new revocation models, local and global revocation, have not been studied before. The local and global revocation algorithms based on relational algebra and operations provide a rich variety. We also apply the new algorithms to an anonymity scalable payment scheme

An efficient hash-based algorithm for minimal k-anonymity

A number of organizations publish microdata for purposes such as public health and demographic research. Although attributes of microdata that clearly identify individuals, such as name and medical care card number, are generally removed, these databases can sometimes be joined with other public databases on attributes such as Zip code, Gender and Age to re- identify individuals who were supposed to remain anonymous. 'Linking' attacks are made easier by the availability of other complementary databases over the Internet. k-anonymity is a technique that prevents 'linking' attacks by generalizing and/or suppressing portions of the released microdata so that no individual can be uniquely distinguished from a group of size k. In this paper, we investigate a practical model of k- anonymity, called full-domain generalization. We examine the issue of computing minimal k-anonymous table based on the definition of minimality described by Samarati. We introduce the hash-based technique previously used in mining associate rules and present an efficient hash-based algorithm to find the minimal k-anonymous table, which improves the previous binary search algorithm first proposed by Samarati

The administration and supply of controlled and restricted medication by nurses in rural and remote Queensland.

Nurses working in rural and remote areas of Australia often have an expanded role compared to their counterparts working in metropolitan areas. Recent changes in legislation recognise and attempt to accommodate some of these differences. The most important area in which differences exist is that involving the medication of clients. This report describes the results of a study of the medication practices of nurses extant in rural and remote Queensland in 2001 and 2002 and addresses issues concerning the compliance with recent state legislation of that practice

A comparative study of classification methods for microarray data analysis

In response to the rapid development of DNA Microarray technology, many classification methods have been used for Microarray classification. SVMs, decision trees, Bagging, Boosting and Random Forest are commonly used methods. In this paper, we conduct experimental comparison of LibSVMs, C4.5, BaggingC4.5, AdaBoostingC4.5, and Random Forest on seven Microarray cancer data sets. The experimental results show that all ensemble methods outperform C4.5. The experimental results also show that all five methods benefit from data preprocessing, including gene selection and discretization, in classification accuracy. In addition to comparing the average accuracies of ten-fold cross validation tests on seven data sets, we use two statistical tests to validate findings. We observe that Wilcoxon signed rank test is better than sign test for such purpose