103 research outputs found
Practice and professional development plans (PPDPs): results of a feasibility study
BACKGROUND: Dissatisfaction with uniprofessional education structures as a means of improving the quality of healthcare has led to proposals to develop ways of integrating professional learning and organisational development. AIMS: Test the feasibility of introducing practice and professional development plans using a centrally sponsored project in Wales. DESIGN: Qualitative observational study. STUDY SAMPLE: All 541 practices in Wales were alerted to the project and invited to apply. A selection process was suggested to Health Authorities but not always efficiently conducted: 23 practices were selected and 18 participated in the process. METHOD: Central funding was made available to health authorities. The project framework was designed by an educational department and conceptualised as the development of personal portfolios linked to one key organisation change in each practice, facilitated by external consultants who would typically hold workshops or other events. An independent researcher using non-participant observation techniques at workshops and practices undertook documentary analysis and fieldwork in four health authorities. RESULTS: Difficulties were encountered with the process of implementing the project: marketing and practice selection inconsistencies delayed the work and it was difficult to recruit practices into the project. The lack of experienced individuals to do the work and practitioner suspicion about perceived 'management' agendas were significant problems. After initial hesitancies most practices appreciated the value of developing wider ownership and commitment to proposed practice changes. Organisations found it difficult to support individual completion of the personal portfolio component of the plans. The ability to develop systems for clinical services was dependent on having already established a culture of effective teamwork in the organisation. CONCLUSIONS: This work supports the view that organisational development has considerable potential for bringing about effective change, and individual contributions could form a valuable component of personal portfolios. We believe that the existing structures in education and management in the health service are not yet able to support these processes. Evidence from the fields of risk management and quality improvement all point to the need to develop effective organisational systems and the results of this feasibility study indicate that alternative models of sustaining organisational development need careful evaluation
The Canada-UK Deep Submillimetre Survey VIII: Source Identifications in the 3-hour field
We present optical, near-infrared and radio observations of the 3-hour field
of the Canada-UK Deep Submillimetre Survey. Of the 27 submillimetre sources in
the field, nine have secure identifications with either a radio source or a
near-IR source. We show that the percentage of sources with secure
identifications in the CUDSS is consistent with that found for the bright `8
mJy' submillimetre survey, once allowance is made for the different
submillimetre and radio flux limits. Of the 14 secure identifications in the
two CUDSS fields, eight are VROs or EROs, five have colours typical of normal
galaxies, and one is a radio source which has not yet been detected at
optical/near-IR wavelengths. Eleven of the identifications have optical/near-IR
structures which are either disturbed or have some peculiarity which suggests
that the host galaxy is part of an interacting system. One difference between
the CUDSS results and the results from the 8-mJy survey is the large number of
low-redshift objects in the CUDSS; we give several arguments why these are
genuine low-redshift submillimetre sources rather than being gravitational
lenses which are gravitationally amplifying a high- submillimetre source. We
construct a diagram for various classes of high-redshift galaxy and show
that the SCUBA galaxies are on average less luminous than classical radio
galaxies, but are very similar in both their optical/IR luminosities and their
colours to the host galaxies of the radio sources detected in Jy radio
surveys.Comment: accepted for publication in MNRAS, 18 pages, full-resolution versions
of Figure 1 and 2 can be found at
http://www.astro.cf.ac.uk/groups/cosmo/papers.htm
The removal of shear-ellipticity correlations from the cosmic shear signal: Influence of photometric redshift errors on the nulling technique
Cosmic shear is regarded one of the most powerful probes to reveal the
properties of dark matter and dark energy. To fully utilize its potential, one
has to be able to control systematic effects down to below the level of the
statistical parameter errors. Particularly worrisome in this respect is
intrinsic alignment, causing considerable parameter biases via correlations
between the intrinsic ellipticities of galaxies and the gravitational shear,
which mimic lensing. In an earlier work we have proposed a nulling technique
that downweights this systematic, only making use of its well-known redshift
dependence. We assess the practicability of nulling, given realistic conditions
on photometric redshift information. For several simplified intrinsic alignment
models and a wide range of photometric redshift characteristics we calculate an
average bias before and after nulling. Modifications of the technique are
introduced to optimize the bias removal and minimize the information loss by
nulling. We demonstrate that one of the presented versions is close to optimal
in terms of bias removal, given high quality of photometric redshifts. For
excellent photometric redshift information, i.e. at least 10 bins with a small
dispersion, a negligible fraction of catastrophic outliers, and precise
knowledge about the redshift distributions, one version of nulling is capable
of reducing the shear-intrinsic ellipticity contamination by at least a factor
of 100. Alternatively, we describe a robust nulling variant which suppresses
the systematic signal by about 10 for a very broad range of photometric
redshift configurations. Irrespective of the photometric redshift quality, a
loss of statistical power is inherent to nulling, which amounts to a decrease
of the order 50% in terms of our figure of merit.Comment: 26 pages, including 16 figures; minor changes to match accepted
version; published in Astronomy and Astrophysic
BLAST: the Redshift Survey
The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) has recently
surveyed ~8.7 deg^2 centered on GOODS-South at 250, 350, and 500 microns. In
Dye et al. (2009) we presented the catalogue of sources detected at 5-sigma in
at least one band in this field and the probable counterparts to these sources
in other wavebands. In this paper, we present the results of a redshift survey
in which we succeeded in measuring redshifts for 82 of these counterparts. The
spectra show that the BLAST counterparts are mostly star-forming galaxies but
not extreme ones when compared to those found in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
Roughly one quarter of the BLAST counterparts contain an active nucleus. We
have used the spectroscopic redshifts to carry out a test of the ability of
photometric redshift methods to estimate the redshifts of dusty galaxies,
showing that the standard methods work well even when a galaxy contains a large
amount of dust. We have also investigated the cases where there are two
possible counterparts to the BLAST source, finding that in at least half of
these there is evidence that the two galaxies are physically associated, either
because they are interacting or because they are in the same large-scale
structure. Finally, we have made the first direct measurements of the
luminosity function in the three BLAST bands. We find strong evolution out to
z=1, in the sense that there is a large increase in the space-density of the
most luminous galaxies. We have also investigated the evolution of the
dust-mass function, finding similar strong evolution in the space-density of
the galaxies with the largest dust masses, showing that the luminosity
evolution seen in many wavebands is associated with an increase in the
reservoir of interstellar matter in galaxies.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Maps and
associated results are available at http://blastexperiment.info
Simultaneous measurement of cosmology and intrinsic alignments using joint cosmic shear and galaxy number density correlations
Cosmic shear is a powerful method to constrain cosmology, provided that any
systematic effects are under control. The intrinsic alignment of galaxies is
expected to severely bias parameter estimates if not taken into account. We
explore the potential of a joint analysis of tomographic galaxy ellipticity,
galaxy number density, and ellipticity-number density cross-correlations to
simultaneously constrain cosmology and self-calibrate unknown intrinsic
alignment and galaxy bias contributions. We treat intrinsic alignments and
galaxy biasing as free functions of scale and redshift and marginalise over the
resulting parameter sets. Constraints on cosmology are calculated by combining
the likelihoods from all two-point correlations between galaxy ellipticity and
galaxy number density. The information required for these calculations is
already available in a standard cosmic shear dataset. We include contributions
to these functions from cosmic shear, intrinsic alignments, galaxy clustering
and magnification effects. In a Fisher matrix analysis we compare our
constraints with those from cosmic shear alone in the absence of intrinsic
alignments. For a potential future large area survey, such as Euclid, the extra
information from the additional correlation functions can make up for the
additional free parameters in the intrinsic alignment and galaxy bias terms,
depending on the flexibility in the models. For example, the Dark Energy Task
Force figure of merit is recovered even when more than 100 free parameters are
marginalised over. We find that the redshift quality requirements are similar
to those calculated in the absence of intrinsic alignments.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures; extended discussion, otherwise minor changes to
match accepted version; published in Astronomy and Astrophysic
Constraining warm dark matter with cosmic shear power spectra
We investigate potential constraints from cosmic shear on the dark matter
particle mass, assuming all dark matter is made up of light thermal relic
particles. Given the theoretical uncertainties involved in making cosmological
predictions in such warm dark matter scenarios we use analytical fits to linear
warm dark matter power spectra and compare (i) the halo model using a mass
function evaluated from these linear power spectra and (ii) an analytical fit
to the non-linear evolution of the linear power spectra. We optimistically
ignore the competing effect of baryons for this work. We find approach (ii) to
be conservative compared to approach (i). We evaluate cosmological constraints
using these methods, marginalising over four other cosmological parameters.
Using the more conservative method we find that a Euclid-like weak lensing
survey together with constraints from the Planck cosmic microwave background
mission primary anisotropies could achieve a lower limit on the particle mass
of 2.5 keV.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures, minor changes to match the version accepted for
publication in JCA
A panchromatic study of BLAST counterparts: total star-formation rate, morphology, AGN fraction and stellar mass
We carry out a multi-wavelength study of individual galaxies detected by the
Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) and identified at
other wavelengths, using data spanning the radio to the ultraviolet (UV). We
develop a Monte Carlo method to account for flux boosting, source blending, and
correlations among bands, which we use to derive deboosted far-infrared (FIR)
luminosities for our sample. We estimate total star-formation rates for BLAST
counterparts with z < 0.9 by combining their FIR and UV luminosities. Star
formation is heavily obscured at L_FIR > 10^11 L_sun, z > 0.5, but the
contribution from unobscured starlight cannot be neglected at L_FIR < 10^11
L_sun, z < 0.25. We assess that about 20% of the galaxies in our sample show
indication of a type-1 active galactic nucleus (AGN), but their submillimeter
emission is mainly due to star formation in the host galaxy. We compute stellar
masses for a subset of 92 BLAST counterparts; these are relatively massive
objects, with a median mass of ~10^11 M_sun, which seem to link the 24um and
SCUBA populations, in terms of both stellar mass and star-formation activity.
The bulk of the BLAST counterparts at z<1 appear to be run-of-the-mill
star-forming galaxies, typically spiral in shape, with intermediate stellar
masses and practically constant specific star-formation rates. On the other
hand, the high-z tail of the BLAST counterparts significantly overlaps with the
SCUBA population, in terms of both star-formation rates and stellar masses,
with observed trends of specific star-formation rate that support strong
evolution and downsizing.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. 44 pages, 11
figures. The SED template for the derivation of L_FIR has changed (added new
figure) and the discussion on the stellar masses has been improved. The
complete set of full-color postage-stamps can be found at
http://blastexperiment.info/results_images/moncelsi
The 2dF-SDSS LRG and QSO Survey: The Star Formation Histories of Luminous Red Galaxies
We present a detailed investigation into the recent star formation histories
of 5,697 Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) based on the Hdelta (4101A) and [OII]
(3727A) lines. LRGs are luminous (L>3L*), galaxies which have been selected to
have photometric properties consistent with an old, passively evolving stellar
population. For this study we utilise LRGs from the recently completed 2dF-SDSS
LRG and QSO survey (2SLAQ). Equivalent widths of the Hdelta and [OII] lines are
measured and used to define three spectral types, those with only strong Hdelta
absorption (k+a), those with strong [OII] in emission (em) and those with both
(em+a). All other LRGs are considered to have passive star formation histories.
The vast majority of LRGs are found to be passive (~80 per cent), however
significant numbers of k+a (2.7 per cent), em+a (1.2 per cent) and em LRGs (8.6
per cent) are identified. An investigation into the redshift dependence of the
fractions is also performed. A sample of SDSS MAIN galaxies with colours and
luminosities consistent with the 2SLAQ LRGs is selected to provide a low
redshift comparison. While the em and em+a fractions are consistent with the
low redshift SDSS sample, the fraction of k+a LRGs is found to increase
significantly with redshift. This result is interpreted as an indication of an
increasing amount of recent star formation activity in LRGs with redshift. By
considering the expected life time of the k+a phase, the number of LRGs which
will undergo a k+a phase can be estimated. A crude comparison of this estimate
with the predictions from semi-analytic models of galaxy formation shows that
the predicted level of k+a and em+a activity is not sufficient to reconcile the
predicted mass growth for massive early-types in a hierarchical merging
scenario.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 13 pages, 10 figure
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