A study of personalisation and the factors affecting the uptake of personal budgets by mental health service users in the UK - A research study commissioned by MIND

This project was commissioned by Mind to add to its knowledge base and existing work on Personalisation so as to support individuals to have greater choice and control over their care and support needs. The project was funded by the Department of Health as part of its Strategic Development fund „Personalisation and Choice of Care and Support (IESD1) 2011‟. This report provides an overview of the main findings of this qualitative study, exploring the concept of personalisation, the factors affecting its operationalisation by voluntary and statutory sector organisations, and service users‟ experiences of its implementation, particularly in relation to what affects their uptake and experience of Personal Budgets. In the course of our investigation into current practice and experience, we have identified a number of barriers and enablers. Our view is that the impact of effective action to tackle the barriers will result in an improved experience of the Personal Budget process and its outcomes for carers and front line staff as well as service users. Recommendations are made for future work in this area

Examining the Impact of Leadership Style and School Climate on Student Achievement

The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate whether or not leadership style and school climate are significant predictors of student achievement. The target population consisted of elementary and high school teachers from Virginia public schools who had taught under the leadership of their respective current principals for at least 4 years. Nine school divisions were randomly selected from each of the following regions—rural, suburban, and urban—within the Commonwealth of Virginia. Data were collected using two surveys. Bass\u27s (1985) Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (Form 5X) was used to assess principals\u27 leadership style—transactional, transformational, or laissez-faire—as perceived by teachers. The Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire (OCDQ), which was originally developed by Halpin and Croft (1963), was used to assess school climate. The OCDQ-RE was administered to elementary school participants; the OCDQ-RS was administered to high school participants. Both versions of the OCDQ identify overall school climate type: open, engaged, disengaged, or closed climate. All participants were also asked to complete a demographics questionnaire. Student achievement was measured using 3-year average scores on the Virginia Standards of Learning tests in reading and math for grades 3 and 11. The data revealed that both teacher and principal participants most often viewed their school\u27s dominant leadership style as transformational; transactional leadership style was the second most often perceived style. School climate varied—open, engaged, disengaged, or closed—according to teacher participants, whereas principal participants viewed their respective school climates as either open or disengaged. The findings indicate that 6% of variance in scores can be accounted for by leadership style and school climate with the math SOL score as the dependent variable; however, a smaller percentage, only 2%, of the variance in scores is associated with the reading SOL score dependent variable. The researcher found no significant differences in school climate among the three regions: rural, suburban, urban

Optical Communication Activities Through the Laser-Enhanced Mission Communications Navigation and Operational Services (LEMNOS) Office

The Laser-Enhanced Mission Communications Navigation and Operational Services (LEMNOS) office at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) manages two NASA optical communication related projects, the Orion EM-2 Optical Communications Terminal (O2O) and the Integrated Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) projects. The main goal of LEMNOS project is to implement optical communications technologies on NASA missions starting with demonstrations of operational utility on Orion EM-2 and the International Space Station

Optical Communications Systems for NASA's Human Space Flight Missions

The Laser-Enhanced Mission Communications Navigation and Operational Services (LEMNOS) office at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) manages two NASA optical communication related projects, the Orion EM-2 Optical Communications Terminal (O2O) and the Integrated Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) projects. The main goal of LEMNOS is the advancement and implementation of optical communications systems and technologies for NASA missions. The O2O mission is sponsored by NASA's Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate. The O2O project will provide optical communications capability to the Orion series of spacecraft, starting with the demonstration of operational utility on EM-2. It will be the first time a human exploration mission will rely on optical communications for its high-bandwidth link. ILLUMA-T is sponsored by the Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Program Office. It is destined for the International Space Station (ISS) as an external payload attached to the Japanese Experiment Module - Exposed Facility (JEM-EF). The ILLUMA-T project is developing an optical communications user terminal to demonstrate high bandwidth data transfer between LEO and the ground through the geosynchronous LCRD relay. ILLUMA-T will be the first demonstration of a LEO user of the LCRD system, pointing and tracking from a moving spacecraft at LEO to GEO satellite and vice versa, end-to-end operational utility of optical communications, and 51 Mbps forward link to ISS from ground. Both projects are collaborations between GSFC, Massachusetts Institute of Technology " Lincoln Laboratory (MIT-LL), and a number of contractors

Rural Health in Virginia: Disparities, Dilemmas, and Overview of a JMU School of Nursing Solution

Background: There is no unified definition of rurality; this makes studying rurality, rural health, and associated health disparities and health outcomes difficult. Rural Americans constitute approximately 15% of the U.S. population, and they experience multiple barriers to healthcare and numerous health disparities as a result, particularly related to chronic disease, mental health, and increased lifestyle-linked health risks. Rural Americans should be viewed as a unique and vulnerable population, one with specific health promotion and disease prevention needs. Local problem: Although Virginia as a whole is a wealthy state, much inequity exists between the “Golden Crescent” and the “Rural Horseshoe” regions of Virginia, which includes the western portion of the State. Rural Virginians face higher unemployment, a higher poverty rate, and decreased access to care. One such area is Page County, Virginia, a local underserved health professional shortage area. Methods: In 2018, JMU obtained a HRSA grant focusing on Nursing Education, Practice, Quality, and Retention called, “The Undergraduate Primary Care and Rural Education (UPCARE) Project: a Community-based Nursing Education Collaboration. Intervention: The UPCARE Project allows JMU School of Nursing to respond to the needs for 1) BSN student education focusing on community health and primary care in a rural area, and 2) the creation two RN preceptor positions which incorporate a enhanced primary care RN role within 4 Rural Health Clinics (RHCs), all of whom are facilitated by a faculty-led grant team, including a Nurse Liaison. This two-pronged approach enables nurses to work to meet the health needs of the residents of Page County, Virginia. It is an innovative approach in keeping with Virginia’s State Rural Health Plan. Results: The JMU UPCARE Project is a collaborative, community-focused solution to the rural health disparities facing Page County. To date, nine students have started their clinical experiences in Page County, and two RN preceptors are starting their enhanced primary care RN role in the Rural Health Clinics. Conclusions/ Implications: This presentation will focus on rural health nursing in general, rural health disparities in Virginia, the creation of the UPCARE Project as part of the solution to meet the health care needs of rural Virginians. In keeping with the theme of the conference, the presentation will focus on the development of an enhanced primary care RN role, which is designed for RNs to work at the top of their practice scope

Dynamic intermediate ocean circulation in the North Atlantic during Heinrich Stadial 1: a radiocarbon and neodymium isotope perspective

The last deglaciation was characterised by a series of millennial scale climate events that have been linked to deep ocean variability. While often implied in interpretations, few direct constraints exist on circulation changes at mid-depths. Here we provide new constraints on the variability of deglacial mid-depth circulation using combined radiocarbon and neodymium isotopes in 24 North Atlantic deep-sea corals. Their aragonite skeletons have been dated by uranium-series, providing absolute ages and the resolution to record centennial scale changes, while transects spanning the lifetime of a single coral allow sub-centennial tracer reconstruction. Our results reveal that rapid fluctuations of water mass sourcing and radiocarbon affected the mid-depth water column (1.7-2.5 km) on timescales of less than 100 years during the latter half of Heinrich Stadial 1. The neodymium isotopic variability (−14.5 to −11.0) ranges from the composition of the modern northern-sourced waters towards more radiogenic compositions that suggest the presence of a greater southern-sourced component at some times. However, in detail, simple two-component mixing between well-ventilated northern-sourced and radiocarbon-depleted southern-sourced water masses cannot explain all our data. Instead, corals from ~15.0 ka and ~15.8 ka may record variability between southern-sourced intermediate waters and radiocarbon-depleted northern-sourced waters, unless there was a major shift in the neodymium isotopic composition of the northern endmember. In order to explain the rapid shift towards the most depleted radiocarbon values at ~15.4 ka, we suggest a different mixing scenario involving either radiocarbon-depleted deep water from the Greenland-Iceland-Norwegian Seas or a southern-sourced deep water mass. Since these mid-depth changes preceded the Bolling-Allerod warming, and were apparently unaccompanied by changes in the deep Atlantic, they may indicate an important role for the intermediate ocean in the early deglacial climate evolution

Poverty rate prediction using multi-modal survey and earth observation data

This work presents an approach for combining household demographic and living standards survey questions with features derived from satellite imagery to predict the poverty rate of a region. Our approach utilizes visual features obtained from a single-step featurization method applied to freely available 10m/px Sentinel-2 surface reflectance satellite imagery. These visual features are combined with ten survey questions in a proxy means test (PMT) to estimate whether a household is below the poverty line. We show that the inclusion of visual features reduces the mean error in poverty rate estimates from 4.09% to 3.88% over a nationally representative out-of-sample test set. In addition to including satellite imagery features in proxy means tests, we propose an approach for selecting a subset of survey questions that are complementary to the visual features extracted from satellite imagery. Specifically, we design a survey variable selection approach guided by the full survey and image features and use the approach to determine the most relevant set of small survey questions to include in a PMT. We validate the choice of small survey questions in a downstream task of predicting the poverty rate using the small set of questions. This approach results in the best performance -- errors in poverty rate decrease from 4.09% to 3.71%. We show that extracted visual features encode geographic and urbanization differences between regions.Comment: In 2023 ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS 23) Short Papers Trac

Sea-ice control on deglacial lower cell circulation changes recorded by Drake Passage deep-sea corals

Financial support to DJW, TS, and TvdF was provided by the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/N001141/1), the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-398), the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, and a Marie Curie Reintegration grant (IRG 230828). LFR acknowledges support from the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/N003861/1) and the European Research Council (278705).The sequence of deep ocean circulation changes between the Last Glacial Maximum and the Holocene provides important insights for understanding deglacial climate change and the role of the deep ocean in the global carbon cycle. Although it is known that significant amounts of carbon were sequestered in a deep overturning cell during glacial periods and released during deglaciation, the driving mechanisms for these changes remain unresolved. Southern Ocean sea-ice has recently been proposed to play a critical role in setting the global deep ocean stratification and circulation, and hence carbon storage, but testing such conceptual and modelling studies requires data constraining past circulation changes. To this end, we present the first deglacial dataset of neodymium (Nd) isotopes measured on absolute-dated deep-sea corals from modern Lower Circumpolar Deep Water depths in the Drake Passage. Our record demonstrates deglacial variability of 2.5 εNd units, with radiogenic values of up to during the Last Glacial Maximum providing evidence for a stratified glacial circulation mode with restricted incorporation of Nd from North Atlantic Deep Water in the lower cell. During the deglaciation, a renewed Atlantic influence in the deep Southern Ocean is recorded early in Heinrich Stadial 1, coincident with Antarctic sea-ice retreat, and is followed by a brief return to more Pacific-like values during the Antarctic Cold Reversal. These changes demonstrate a strong influence of Southern Ocean processes in setting deep ocean circulation and support the proposed sea-ice control on deep ocean structure. Furthermore, by constraining the Nd isotopic composition of Lower Circumpolar Deep Water in the Southern Ocean, our new data are important for interpreting deglacial circulation changes in other ocean basins and support a spatially asynchronous return of North Atlantic Deep Water to the deep southeast and southwest Atlantic Ocean.PostprintPostprintPeer reviewe