4,078 research outputs found
Reflections on an educational intervention to encourage midwives to work in a continuity of care model - exploration and potential solutions.
OBJECTIVE:To explore barriers and facilitators for midwives working in a midwifery continuity of carer model, and to assess if an educational intervention could help address some of these barriers, designed to help achieve NHS England's target of majority of women receiving midwifery continuity of carer by March 2021. DESIGN:Two-day workshops were co-designed by experienced continuity midwives, service managers and midwifery educators using implementation theory delivered to maternity staff, with barriers assessed prior to training and re-assessed at the end. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS:1407 maternity healthcare professionals from 62 different National Health Service trusts across England attended 56 different workshops. FINDINGS:Perceived barriers to working in this model were reported more frequently than facilitators. Reported facilitators prior to training included perceived benefits to the midwife and to women. Reported barriers included personal and professional concerns, fear, issues with the national agenda and institutional and/or organisational issues. The educational intervention was able to address the majority of barriers raised. The training was well evaluated, with an average rating of 4.2 on a five-point Likert scale. KEY CONCLUSIONS:While this specific educational intervention appears to have been useful in addressing concerns with working in a continuity model, further work is needed to identify barriers to change. This will aid more local designed interventions. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE:If policy targets related to continuity of carer are to be achieved then working in this way needs to be sustainable and appeal to the current midwifery workforce
An Empirical Analysis of Synergies and Tradeoffs between Sustainable Development Goals
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a universal agenda that nations have committed to achieving by 2030. The challenge is substantial, with no country excelling across all SDGs. Using global UN data, we assess patterns of positive and negative correlations between indicators of SDG status and progress. For nearly 70% of SDG indicators, status is positively associated with GDP/capita. Progress on SDG indicators, however, occurs in both poorer and wealthier countries. When GDP/capita is controlled for, positive associations remain between health, environment and energy usage indicators. Economic growth is negatively associated with changes in some health and environment indicators. For SDGs targets to be achieved, major opportunities and conflicts will need to be identified, prioritized and acted upon
Uncovering the overlapping community structure of complex networks in nature and society
Many complex systems in nature and society can be described in terms of
networks capturing the intricate web of connections among the units they are
made of. A key question is how to interpret the global organization of such
networks as the coexistence of their structural subunits (communities)
associated with more highly interconnected parts. Identifying these a priori
unknown building blocks (such as functionally related proteins, industrial
sectors and groups of people) is crucial to the understanding of the structural
and functional properties of networks. The existing deterministic methods used
for large networks find separated communities, whereas most of the actual
networks are made of highly overlapping cohesive groups of nodes. Here we
introduce an approach to analysing the main statistical features of the
interwoven sets of overlapping communities that makes a step towards uncovering
the modular structure of complex systems. After defining a set of new
characteristic quantities for the statistics of communities, we apply an
efficient technique for exploring overlapping communities on a large scale. We
find that overlaps are significant, and the distributions we introduce reveal
universal features of networks. Our studies of collaboration, word-association
and protein interaction graphs show that the web of communities has non-trivial
correlations and specific scaling properties.Comment: The free academic research software, CFinder, used for the
publication is available at the website of the publication:
http://angel.elte.hu/clusterin
A Universal Model of Global Civil Unrest
Civil unrest is a powerful form of collective human dynamics, which has led
to major transitions of societies in modern history. The study of collective
human dynamics, including collective aggression, has been the focus of much
discussion in the context of modeling and identification of universal patterns
of behavior. In contrast, the possibility that civil unrest activities, across
countries and over long time periods, are governed by universal mechanisms has
not been explored. Here, we analyze records of civil unrest of 170 countries
during the period 1919-2008. We demonstrate that the distributions of the
number of unrest events per year are robustly reproduced by a nonlinear,
spatially extended dynamical model, which reflects the spread of civil disorder
between geographic regions connected through social and communication networks.
The results also expose the similarity between global social instability and
the dynamics of natural hazards and epidemics.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure
Quantification of the performance of chaotic micromixers on the basis of finite time Lyapunov exponents
Chaotic micromixers such as the staggered herringbone mixer developed by
Stroock et al. allow efficient mixing of fluids even at low Reynolds number by
repeated stretching and folding of the fluid interfaces. The ability of the
fluid to mix well depends on the rate at which "chaotic advection" occurs in
the mixer. An optimization of mixer geometries is a non trivial task which is
often performed by time consuming and expensive trial and error experiments. In
this paper an algorithm is presented that applies the concept of finite-time
Lyapunov exponents to obtain a quantitative measure of the chaotic advection of
the flow and hence the performance of micromixers. By performing lattice
Boltzmann simulations of the flow inside a mixer geometry, introducing massless
and non-interacting tracer particles and following their trajectories the
finite time Lyapunov exponents can be calculated. The applicability of the
method is demonstrated by a comparison of the improved geometrical structure of
the staggered herringbone mixer with available literature data.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure
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Decreased mass specific respiration under experimental warming is robust to the microbial biomass method employed
Hartley et al. question whether reduction in Rmass, under experimental warming, arises because of the biomass method. We show the method they treat as independent yields the same result. We describe why the substrate-depletion hypothesis may not solely explain observed responses, and urge caution in interpretation of the seasonal data. © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/CNRS
Contemporary medical television and crisis in the NHS
This article maps the terrain of contemporary UK medical television, paying particular attention to Call the Midwife as its centrepiece, and situating it in contextual relation to the current crisis in the NHS. It provides a historical overview of UK and US medical television, illustrating how medical television today has been shaped by noteworthy antecedents. It argues that crisis rhetoric surrounding healthcare leading up to the passing of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 has been accompanied by a renaissance in medical television. And that issues, strands and clusters have emerged in forms, registers and modes with noticeable regularity, especially around the value of affective labour, the cultural politics of nostalgia and the neoliberalisation of healthcare
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Atmospheric emissions from the deepwater Horizon spill constrain air-water partitioning, hydrocarbon fate, and leak rate
The fate of deepwater releases of gas and oil mixtures is initially determined by solubility and volatility of individual hydrocarbon species; these attributes determine partitioning between air and water. Quantifying this partitioning is necessary to constrain simulations of gas and oil transport, to predict marine bioavailability of different fractions of the gas-oil mixture, and to develop a comprehensive picture of the fate of leaked hydrocarbons in the marine environment. Analysis of airborne atmospheric data shows massive amounts (∼258,000 kg/day) of hydrocarbons evaporating promptly from the Deepwater Horizon spill; these data collected during two research flights constrain air-water partitioning, thus bioavailability and fate, of the leaked fluid. This analysis quantifies the fraction of surfacing hydrocarbons that dissolves in the water column (∼33% by mass), the fraction that does not dissolve, and the fraction that evaporates promptly after surfacing (∼14% by mass). We do not quantify the leaked fraction lacking a surface expression; therefore, calculation of atmospheric mass fluxes provides a lower limit to the total hydrocarbon leak rate of 32,600 to 47,700 barrels of fluid per day, depending on reservoir fluid composition information. This study demonstrates a new approach for rapid-response airborne assessment of future oil spills. Copyright 2011 by the American Geophysical Union
On the Complex Network Structure of Musical Pieces: Analysis of Some Use Cases from Different Music Genres
This paper focuses on the modeling of musical melodies as networks. Notes of
a melody can be treated as nodes of a network. Connections are created whenever
notes are played in sequence. We analyze some main tracks coming from different
music genres, with melodies played using different musical instruments. We find
out that the considered networks are, in general, scale free networks and
exhibit the small world property. We measure the main metrics and assess
whether these networks can be considered as formed by sub-communities. Outcomes
confirm that peculiar features of the tracks can be extracted from this
analysis methodology. This approach can have an impact in several multimedia
applications such as music didactics, multimedia entertainment, and digital
music generation.Comment: accepted to Multimedia Tools and Applications, Springe
Learning and innovative elements of strategy adoption rules expand cooperative network topologies
Cooperation plays a key role in the evolution of complex systems. However,
the level of cooperation extensively varies with the topology of agent networks
in the widely used models of repeated games. Here we show that cooperation
remains rather stable by applying the reinforcement learning strategy adoption
rule, Q-learning on a variety of random, regular, small-word, scale-free and
modular network models in repeated, multi-agent Prisoners Dilemma and Hawk-Dove
games. Furthermore, we found that using the above model systems other long-term
learning strategy adoption rules also promote cooperation, while introducing a
low level of noise (as a model of innovation) to the strategy adoption rules
makes the level of cooperation less dependent on the actual network topology.
Our results demonstrate that long-term learning and random elements in the
strategy adoption rules, when acting together, extend the range of network
topologies enabling the development of cooperation at a wider range of costs
and temptations. These results suggest that a balanced duo of learning and
innovation may help to preserve cooperation during the re-organization of
real-world networks, and may play a prominent role in the evolution of
self-organizing, complex systems.Comment: 14 pages, 3 Figures + a Supplementary Material with 25 pages, 3
Tables, 12 Figures and 116 reference
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