5,149 research outputs found
The History of the Kings of Britain From the Fall of Troy to the Death of Gogmagog: An Edition with a Grammar of the Language and a Glossary
This thesis consists of three main parts, a grammar of the language of The History of the Kings of Britain from the Fall of Troy to the Death of Gogmagog, and edition of The History, and a glossary to the vocabulary of the edition.
In the grammar the major points of accidence and syntax are taken up--verb classification and conjugation; declination of nouns and pronouns, and of adjectives; formation of adverbs; clause construction--and discussed synchronically and diachronically.
The edition is of fols. 8r col. 2-13v col. 1 of MS. Arundel XXII in the College of Arms, London, a prose version of Book I of Geoffrey of Monmouth\u27s Historia Regum Britanniae, written in the middle of the fourteenth century. The edition presents a typescript of the MS. with abrivations expanded and errors emendei.
The glossary contains the vocabulary of the edition with modern synonyms
Loving-kindness meditation: a tool to improve healthcare provider compassion, resilience, and patient care
Background:
Stress is a critical problem facing many healthcare institutions. The consequences of stress include increased provider burnout and decreased quality of care for patients. Ironically, a key factor that may help buffer the impact of stress on provider well-being and patient health outcomes—compassion—is low in healthcare settings and declines under stress. This gives rise to an urgent question: what practical steps can be taken to increase compassion, thereby benefitting both provider well-being and patient care?
Methods:
We investigated the relative effectiveness of a short, 10-minute session of loving-kindness meditation (LKM) to increase compassion and positive affect. We compared LKM to a non-compassion positive affect induction (PAI) and a neutral visualization (NEU) condition. Self- and other-focused affect, self-reported measures of social connection, and semi-implicit measures of self-focus were measured pre- and post- meditation using repeated measures ANOVAs and via paired sample t-tests for follow-up comparisons.
Results:
Findings show that LKM improves well-being and feelings of connection over and above other positive-affect inductions, at both explicit and implicit levels, while decreasing self-focus in under 10 minutes and in novice meditators.
Conclusions:
These findings suggest that LKM may be a viable, practical, and time-effective solution for preventing burnout and promoting resilience in healthcare providers and for improving quality of care in patients
Effects of Initial Flow on Close-In Planet Atmospheric Circulation
We use a general circulation model to study the three-dimensional (3-D) flow
and temperature distributions of atmospheres on tidally synchronized extrasolar
planets. In this work, we focus on the sensitivity of the evolution to the
initial flow state, which has not received much attention in 3-D modeling
studies. We find that different initial states lead to markedly different
distributions-even under the application of strong forcing (large day-night
temperature difference with a short "thermal drag time") that may be
representative of close-in planets. This is in contrast with the results or
assumptions of many published studies. In general, coherent jets and vortices
(and their associated temperature distributions) characterize the flow, and
they evolve differently in time, depending on the initial condition. If the
coherent structures reach a quasi- stationary state, their spatial locations
still vary. The result underlines the fact that circulation models are
currently unsuitable for making quantitative predictions (e.g., location and
size of a "hot spot") without better constrained, and well posed, initial
conditions.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal; 23 pages, 9
figures
Computational Complexity of Iterated Maps on the Interval (Extended Abstract)
The exact computation of orbits of discrete dynamical systems on the interval
is considered. Therefore, a multiple-precision floating point approach based on
error analysis is chosen and a general algorithm is presented. The correctness
of the algorithm is shown and the computational complexity is analyzed. As a
main result, the computational complexity measure considered here is related to
the Ljapunow exponent of the dynamical system under consideration
A study of longitudinal data examining concomitance of pain and cognition in an elderly long-term care population
Allison H Burfield1, Thomas TH Wan2, Mary Lou Sole3, James W Cooper41Gerontology Program, School of Nursing, College of Health and Human Services, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC, USA; 2Health Services, Administration, and Medical Education, Director, Doctoral Program in Public Affairs, Associate Dean for Research, College of Health and Public Affairs, 3College of Nursing, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA; 4College of Pharmacy, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USAPurpose: To examine if a concomitant relationship exists between cognition and pain in an elderly population residing in long-term care.Background/significance: Prior research has found that cognitive load mediates interpretation of a stimulus. In the presence of decreased cognitive capacity as with dementia, the relationship between cognition and increasing pain is unknown in the elderly.Patients and methods: Longitudinal cohort design. Data collected from the Minimum Data Set-Resident Assessment Instrument (MDS-RAI) from the 2001–2003 annual assessments of nursing home residents. A covariance model was used to evaluate the relationship between cognition and pain at three intervals.Results: The sample included 56,494 subjects from nursing homes across the United States, with an average age of 83 ± 8.2 years. Analysis of variance scores (ANOVAs) indicated a significant effect (P < 0.01) for pain and cognition, with protected t test revealing scores decreasing significantly with these two measures. Relative stability was found for pain and cognition over time. Greater stability was found in the cognitive measure than the pain measure. Cross-legged effects observed between cognition and pain measures were inconsistent. A concomitant relationship was not found between cognition and pain. Even though the relationship was significant at the 0.01 level, the correlations were low (r ≤ 0.08), indicating a weak association between cognition and pain.Conclusion: Understanding the concomitance of pain and cognition aids in defining additional frameworks to extend models to include secondary needs, contextual factors, and resident outcomes. Cognitive decline, as with organic brain diseases, is progressive. Pain is a symptom that can be treated and reduced to improve resident quality of life. However, cognition can be used to determine the most appropriate method to assess pain in the elderly, thereby improving accuracy of pain detection in this population.Keywords: cognitive impairment, Cognitive Performance Scale (CPS), Minimum Data Set 2.
A dearth of OH/IR stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud
We present the results of targeted observations and a survey of 1612-, 1665-,
and 1667-MHz circumstellar OH maser emission from asymptotic giant branch (AGB)
stars and red supergiants (RSGs) in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), using the
Parkes and Australia Telescope Compact Array radio telescopes. No clear OH
maser emission has been detected in any of our observations targeting luminous,
long-period, large-amplitude variable stars, which have been confirmed
spectroscopically and photometrically to be mid- to late-M spectral type. These
observations have probed 3 - 4 times deeper than any OH maser survey in the
SMC. Using a bootstrapping method with LMC and Galactic OH/IR star samples and
our SMC observation upper limits, we have calculated the likelihood of not
detecting maser emission in any of the two sources considered to be the top
maser candidates to be less than 0.05%, assuming a similar pumping mechanism as
the LMC and Galactic OH/IR sources. We have performed a population comparison
of the Magellanic Clouds and used Spitzer IRAC and MIPS photometry to confirm
that we have observed all high luminosity SMC sources that are expected to
exhibit maser emission. We suspect that, compared to the OH/IR stars in the
Galaxy and LMC, the reduction in metallicity may curtail the dusty wind phase
at the end of the evolution of the most massive cool stars. We also suspect
that the conditions in the circumstellar envelope change beyond a simple
scaling of abundances and wind speed with metallicity
The Molecular Gas Environment around Two Herbig Ae/Be Stars: Resolving the Outflows of LkHa 198 and LkHa 225S
Observations of outflows associated with pre-main-sequence stars reveal
details about morphology, binarity and evolutionary states of young stellar
objects. We present molecular line data from the Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland
Association array and Five Colleges Radio Astronomical Observatory toward the
regions containing the Herbig Ae/Be stars LkHa 198 and LkHa 225S. Single dish
observations of 12CO 1-0, 13CO 1-0, N2H+ 1-0 and CS 2-1 were made over a field
of 4.3' x 4.3' for each species. 12CO data from FCRAO were combined with high
resolution BIMA array data to achieve a naturally-weighted synthesized beam of
6.75'' x 5.5'' toward LkHa 198 and 5.7'' x 3.95'' toward LkHa 225S,
representing resolution improvements of factors of approximately 10 and 5 over
existing data. By using uniform weighting, we achieved another factor of two
improvement. The outflow around LkHa 198 resolves into at least four outflows,
none of which are centered on LkHa 198-IR, but even at our resolution, we
cannot exclude the possibility of an outflow associated with this source. In
the LkHa 225S region, we find evidence for two outflows associated with LkHa
225S itself and a third outflow is likely driven by this source. Identification
of the driving sources is still resolution-limited and is also complicated by
the presence of three clouds along the line of sight toward the Cygnus
molecular cloud. 13CO is present in the environments of both stars along with
cold, dense gas as traced by CS and (in LkHa 225S) N2H+. No 2.6 mm continuum is
detected in either region in relatively shallow maps compared to existing
continuum observations.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures (5 color), accepted for publication in Ap
The secret world of shrimps: polarisation vision at its best
Animal vision spans a great range of complexity, with systems evolving to
detect variations in optical intensity, distribution, colour, and polarisation.
Polarisation vision systems studied to date detect one to four channels of
linear polarisation, combining them in opponent pairs to provide
intensity-independent operation. Circular polarisation vision has never been
seen, and is widely believed to play no part in animal vision. Polarisation is
fully measured via Stokes' parameters--obtained by combined linear and circular
polarisation measurements. Optimal polarisation vision is the ability to see
Stokes' parameters: here we show that the crustacean \emph{Gonodactylus
smithii} measures the exact components required. This vision provides optimal
contrast-enhancement, and precise determination of polarisation with no
confusion-states or neutral-points--significant advantages. We emphasise that
linear and circular polarisation vision are not different modalities--both are
necessary for optimal polarisation vision, regardless of the presence of
strongly linear or circularly polarised features in the animal's environment.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 2 table
The Collapse of Large Extra Dimensions
In models of spacetime that are the product of a four-dimensional spacetime
with an ``extra'' dimension, there is the possibility that the extra dimension
will collapse to zero size, forming a singularity. We ask whether this collapse
is likely to destroy the spacetime. We argue, by an appeal to the
four-dimensional cosmic censorship conjecture, that--at least in the case when
the extra dimension is homogeneous--such a collapse will lead to a singularity
hidden within a black string. We also construct explicit initial data for a
spacetime in which such a collapse is guaranteed to occur and show how the
formation of a naked singularity is likely avoided.Comment: Uses revtex
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