Signing and Signifyin\u27: Negotiating Deaf and African American Identities

For individuals who are both African American and Deaf finding a place to belong is a process of navigating their many cultural identities. In this paper I explore the following questions: where do individuals who are African American and Deaf find and make community? To which communities do they perceive they belong? Is their primary identity African American, Deaf or something else? Does belonging to one community negate membership in another? Does the presence of African American Deaf individuals have an impact on either community or are they forced to create an entirely new one for themselves

An Administrative View of Model Uncertainty in Public Health

Dr. Carrington reviews several ways to deal with model uncertainty, including those failing to acknowledge any use of models. He then evaluates six such methods with regard to, e.g., transparency and cost of execution

FORTRAN program flow chart is automatically produced

Computer under control of the flo-tran program automatically produces and updates flowcharts of fortran program source decks fed to it. The flowcharts are produced on either 35mm film or paper

Achieving patient-focused maintenance services/systems

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify and investigate the contribution made from the estates services to the quality of the patient experience from the perspective of all estates staff ranging from front-line staff to directors of estates and facilities. The work is exploratory in nature owing to no known earlier studies in this area. Design/methodology/approach – A postal questionnaire is distributed to a non-random self-selecting group of National Health Service (NHS) estates staff – therefore those staff working in the areas of maintenance, engineering, building, gardening and general office estates management. A total of 920 questionnaires are distributed to the 46 NHS trusts. There are 202 responses, which is a return rate of 22 per cent. Findings – It is clear that overall estates staff consider their job/service to be important to the patient experience, 94 per cent of respondents indicate they did. This is further confirmed by 82 per cent of estates line managers considering their job to be important to the patient experience. In terms of how estates feel they contribute to the patient experience, there is a range of responses, however the main reason highlighted is the recognition that the hospital could not function without the service being provided, i.e. the maintenance of essential services, water, power and the general infrastructure. Estates departments perhaps need on patient awareness of the services they provide and the importance of them in making the hospital function. Research limitations/implications – The results presented provide a useful insight into how estates departments in the NHS perceive their contribution to the patient experience. However, they are not without limitations. First, the sample size is relatively small; and second non-random sampling techniques are used. Originality/value – The findings suggest a number of avenues for future work. The most obvious would be to investigate the level of awareness from patients regarding estates services in the NHS

Accelerating Staggered Fermion Dynamics with the Rational Hybrid Monte Carlo (RHMC) Algorithm

Improved staggered fermion formulations are a popular choice for lattice QCD calculations. Historically, the algorithm used for such calculations has been the inexact R algorithm, which has systematic errors that only vanish as the square of the integration step-size. We describe how the exact Rational Hybrid Monte Carlo (RHMC) algorithm may be used in this context, and show that for parameters corresponding to current state-of-the-art computations it leads to a factor of approximately seven decrease in cost as well as having no step-size errors.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl