Older Patients’ Perceptions of Nurse Caring Behaviors

poster abstractBecause patient satisfaction impacts Medicare reimbursement for hospitals today, it is important to look at factors that affect patient satisfaction and patient perceptions of caring. Old-old and oldest old populations are vastly growing and make up the majority of those receiving Medicare benefits. Current research supports older adults’ greater need for relational aspects of care, but little focus has been placed on the effect of non-modifiable factors such as age and education level and perceived health related to patient perceptions of nurse caring behaviors. The purpose of this study was to determine relationships between age, education level, and perceived health and older adult’s perceptions of nurse caring behaviors. A secondary analysis was conducted using data from a quantitative study of nurse caring behaviors using the Caring Assessment Tool (CAT). Of 321 subjects in the original study, s sub-sample of 45 adults age 75 and older who reported education level and perceived health were included. Descriptive statistics and ANOVA were used to analyze the data. Statistical significance was found on the relationship between education and patient CAT scores (p=.003). There was no significant relationship between patient’s perceived health or age and CAT score (p= 0.8). These results show that there is importance in non-modifiable factors, specifically education, when looking at patient perceptions of nurse caring which could impact patient satisfaction scores. Because education is a non-modifiable patient characteristic, healthcare providers must focus on ways to address hospitalized older adult patients’ needs with education levels in mind. Future implications include devising interventions for nurses and other health care staff to improve care for patients of all education levels and how interventions effect patient perceptions of nurse caring. Further study about patients’ perceptions of care is indicated to identify specific needs of patients with varied education levels and their perceptions of nursing care

Painting from Photographs

Based on the premise that all paintings should be derived from what can be visually observed at length, this paper explores the use of photographs as a painting aid to the artist. The paper has three main sections. The first section contains historical data, the second contains advantages in using photographic assists, and the third contains personal experiments by the author. The paper incorporates a brief survey of twenty-five major artists who have worked from photographs with the benefits they obtained from this approach. The artists surveyed were from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. The second section of the paper outlines various advantages to any contemporary artist working from the photographic media. It also includes information on work techniques. The last section contains the personal experiments of the author in four categories: painting from published photographs, incorporating photographic transfers into paintings, painting from non-published colored photographs and painting from non-published black and white photographs. The categories are broken into a series of eighteen painting experiments comprised of detailed text and colored illustrations

Painting from Photographs

Based on the premise that all paintings should be derived from what can be visually observed at length, this paper explores the use of photographs as a painting aid to the artist. The paper has three main sections. The first section contains historical data, the second contains advantages in using photographic assists, and the third contains personal experiments by the author. The paper incorporates a brief survey of twenty-five major artists who have worked from photographs with the benefits they obtained from this approach. The artists surveyed were from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. The second section of the paper outlines various advantages to any contemporary artist working from the photographic media. It also includes information on work techniques. The last section contains the personal experiments of the author in four categories: painting from published photographs, incorporating photographic transfers into paintings, painting from non-published colored photographs and painting from non-published black and white photographs. The categories are broken into a series of eighteen painting experiments comprised of detailed text and colored illustrations

The Regeneration Games: Commodities, Gifts and the Economics of London 2012

This paper considers contradictions between two concurrent and tacit conceptions of the Olympic ‘legacy’, setting out one conception that understands the games and their legacies as gifts alongside and as counterpoint to the prevailing discourse, which conceives Olympic assets as commodities. The paper critically examines press and governmental discussion of legacy, in order to locate these in the context of a wider perspective contrasting ‘gift’ and ‘commodity’ Olympics – setting anthropological conceptions of gift-based sociality as a necessary supplement to contractual and dis-embedded socioeconomic organizational assumptions underpinning the commodity Olympics. Costbenefit planning is central to modern city building and mega-event delivery. The paper considers the insufficiency of this approach as the exclusive paradigm within which to frame and manage a dynamic socio-economic and cultural legacy arising from the 2012 games

Submillimeter, millimeter, and microwave spectral line catalogue, revision 3

A computer-accessible catalog of submillimeter, millimeter, and microwave spectral lines in the frequency range between 0 and 10,000 GHz (i.e., wavelengths longer than 30 micrometers) is described. The catalog can be used as a planning or as an aid in the identification and analysis of observed spectral lines. The information listed for each spectral line includes the frequency and its estimated error, the intensity, the lower state energy, and the quantum number assignment. This edition of the catalog has information on 206 atomic and molecular species and includes a total of 630,924 lines. The catalog was constructed by using theoretical least square fits of published spectral lines to accepted molecular models. The associated predictions and their estimated errors are based upon the resultant fitted parameters and their covariances. Future versions of this catalog will add more atoms and molecules and update the present listings as new data appear. The catalog is available as a magnetic data tape recorded in card images, with one card image per spectral line, from the National Space Science Data Center, located at Goddard Space Flight Center

Sca-1+ Cardiac Stem Cells Mediate Acute Cardioprotection via Paracrine Factor SDF-1 following Myocardial Ischemia/Reperfusion

Cardiac stem cells (CSCs) promote myocardial recovery following ischemia through their regenerative properties. However, little is known regarding the implication of paracrine action by CSCs in the setting of myocardial ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury although it is well documented that non-cardiac stem cells mediate cardioprotection via the production of paracrine protective factors. Here, we studied whether CSCs could initiate acute protection following global myocardial I/R via paracrine effect and what component from CSCs is critical to this protection.A murine model of global myocardial I/R was utilized to investigate paracrine effect of Sca-1+ CSCs on cardiac function. Intracoronary delivery of CSCs or CSC conditioned medium (CSC CM) prior to ischemia significantly improved myocardial function following I/R. siRNA targeting of VEGF in CSCs did not affect CSC-preserved myocardial function in response to I/R injury. However, differentiation of CSCs to cardiomyocytes (DCSCs) abolished this protection. Through direct comparison of the protein expression profiles of CSCs and DCSCs, SDF-1 was identified as one of the dominant paracrine factors secreted by CSCs. Blockade of the SDF-1 receptor by AMD3100 or downregulated SDF-1 expression in CSCs by specific SDF-1 siRNA dramatically impaired CSC-induced improvement in cardiac function and increased myocardial damage following I/R. Of note, CSC treatment increased myocardial STAT3 activation after I/R, whereas downregulation of SDF-1 action by blockade of the SDF-1 receptor or SDF-1 siRNA transfection abolished CSC-induced STAT3 activation. In addition, inhibition of STAT3 activation attenuated CSC-mediated cardioprotection following I/R. Finally, post-ischemic infusion of CSC CM was shown to significantly protect I/R-caused myocardial dysfunction.This study suggests that CSCs acutely improve post-ischemic myocardial function through paracrine factor SDF-1 and up-regulated myocardial STAT3 activation

Assessment of the impact of CT calibration procedures for proton therapy planning on paediatric treatments

PURPOSE: Relative stopping powers (RSP) for proton therapy are estimated using single-energy CT (SECT), calibrated with standardised tissues of the adult male. It is assumed that those tissues are representative of tissues of all age and sex. Female, male and paediatric tissues differ from one another in density and composition. In this study, we use tabulated paediatric tissues and computational phantoms to investigate the impact of this assumption on paediatric proton therapy. The potential of dual-energy CT (DECT) to improve the accuracy of these calculations is explored. METHODS: We study 51 human body tissues, categorised into male/female for the age groups newborn, 1-, 5-, 10-, 15-year old and adult, with given compositions and densities. CT numbers are simulated and RSPs are estimated using SECT and DECT methods. Estimated tissue RSPs from each method are compared to theoretical RSP. The dose and range errors of each approach is evaluated on 3 computational phantoms (Ewing's sarcoma, salivary sarcoma, glioma) derived from paediatric proton therapy patients. RESULTS: With SECT, soft tissues have mean estimation errors and standard deviation up to (1.96 ± 4.18)% observed in newborns, compared to (0.20 ± 1.15)% in adult males. Mean estimation errors for bones are up to (-3.35 ± 4.76)% in paediatrics as opposed to (0.10 ± 0.66)% in adult males. With DECT, mean errors reduce to (0.17 ± 0.13)% and (0.23 ± 0.22)% in newborns (soft tissues/bones). With SECT, dose errors in a Ewing's sarcoma phantom are exceeding 5 Gy (10% of prescribed dose) at the distal end of the treatment field, with volumes of dose errors >5 Gy of Vdiff> 5 = 4630.7mm3 . Similar observations are made in the head and neck phantoms, with overdoses to healthy tissue exceeding 2 Gy (4%). A systematic Bragg peak shift resulting in either over- or underdosage of healthy tissues and target volumes depending on the crossed tissues RSP prediction errors is observed. Water equivalent range errors of single beams are between -1.53mm and 5.50mm (min, max) (Ewing's sarcoma phantom), -0.78mm and 3.62mm (salivary sarcoma phantom), and -0.43mm and 1.41mm (glioma phantom). DECT can reduce dose errors to <1 Gy and range errors to <1 mm. CONCLUSION: SECT estimates RSPs for paediatric tissues with systematic shifts. DECT improves the accuracy of RSPs and dose distributions in paediatric tissues compared to the SECT calibration curve based on adult males tissues

Outflow and dense gas emission from massive Infrared Dark Clouds

Infrared Dark Clouds are expected to harbor sources in different, very young evolutionary stages. To better characterize these differences, we observed a sample of 43 massive Infrared Dark Clouds, originally selected as candidate high-mass starless cores, with the IRAM 30m telescope covering spectral line tracers of low-density gas, high-density gas, molecular outflows/jets and temperature effects. The SiO(2-1) observations reveal detections toward 18 sources. Assuming that SiO is exclusively produced by sputtering from dust grains, this implies that at least in 40% of this sample star formation is on-going. A broad range of SiO line-widths is observed (between 2.2 and 65km/s), and we discuss potential origins for this velocity spread. While the low-density tracers 12CO(2-1) and 13CO(1-0) are detected in several velocity components, the high-density tracer H13CO+(1--0) generally shows only a single velocity component and is hence well suited for kinematic distance estimates of IRDCs. Furthermore, the H13CO+ line-width is on average 1.5 times larger than that of previously observed NH3(1,1). This is indicative of more motion at the denser core centers, either due to turbulence or beginning star formation activity. In addition, we detect CH3CN toward only six sources whereas CH3OH is observed toward approximately 40% of the sample. Estimates of the CH3CN and CH3OH abundances are low with average values of 1.2x10^{-10} and 4.3x10^{-10}, respectively. These results are consistent with chemical models at the earliest evolutionary stages of high-mass star formation. Furthermore, the CH3OH abundances compare well to recently reported values for low-mass starless cores.Comment: 22 pages (ApJ referee style), 7 figures, accepted for Ap

A 2000-year annual record of snow accumulation rates for Law Dome, East Antarctica

Accurate high-resolution records of snow accumulation rates in Antarctica are crucial for estimating ice sheet mass balance and subsequent sea level change. Snowfall rates at Law Dome, East Antarctica, have been linked with regional atmospheric circulation to the mid-latitudes as well as regional Antarctic snowfall. Here, we extend the length of the Law Dome accumulation record from 750 years to 2035 years, using recent annual layer dating that extends to 22 BCE. Accumulation rates were calculated as the ratio of measured to modelled layer thicknesses, multiplied by the long-term mean accumulation rate. The modelled layer thicknesses were based on a power-law vertical strain rate profile fitted to observed annual layer thickness. The periods 380–442, 727–783 and 1970–2009 CE have above-average snow accumulation rates, while 663–704, 933–975 and 1429–1468 CE were below average, and decadal-scale snow accumulation anomalies were found to be relatively common (74 events in the 2035-year record). The calculated snow accumulation rates show good correlation with atmospheric reanalysis estimates, and significant spatial correlation over a wide expanse of East Antarctica, demonstrating that the Law Dome record captures larger-scale variability across a large region of East Antarctica well beyond the immediate vicinity of the Law Dome summit. Spectral analysis reveals periodicities in the snow accumulation record which may be related to El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) frequencies

’Team GB’ and London 2012: The Paradox of National and Global Identities

This article explores the problems associated with ’national identity’ in the UK and examines the tensions arising between the international and local dimensions of the games through examples of domestic (UK) and international (Brazil, Chicago) media coverage of the key debates relating to London’s period of preparation. The chapter proposes a conception of London 2012 as exemplar of an event poised to generate insights and experiences connected to a new politics of ’cosmopolitan’ identity; insights central to grasping the cultural politics of contemporary urban development-and the paradoxes of national identity in current discourses of Olympism. Properly speaking, cosmopolitanism suits those people who have no country, while internationalism should be the state of mind of those who love their country above all, who seek to draw to it the friendship of foreigners by professing for the countries of those foreigners an intelligent and enlightened sympathy. © 2010 Taylor & Francis