A horizon scanning system for identifying new telehealth innovations

The paper presents the development of a new horizon scanning tool to identify recent innovations in telehealth technologies; specifically, those that are relevant to the care and management of long-term conditions (LTCs). It also discusses the issues regarding matching appropriate technologies with relevant applications

CROSSING THE GOALLINE: IDENTIFYING THE SUCCESS OF BLACK FOOTBALL PLAYERS AT A PREDOMINANTLY WHITE INSTITUTION

The presence of Black football players in predominantly white institutions in athletic programs often highlights the racial disparities in college athletics. It is important to understand the dynamic discrepancies in the resources, support, and opportunities provided to Black football players to obtain success. This research examines the lived experiences of Black football players at a PWI located in the Midwest. Data was coded and analyzed into categories. There are six themes that emerged. 1. The attention to have academic focus. 2. The ability to maintain a connection and support from family and other important figures. 3. Constantly navigating microaggressions from peers. 4. Finding a sense of belonging. 5 Being true to themselves in obtaining a strong identity. 6. Finding resilience and integration. Results from this study provided evidence on lived experiences of Black football players, and how they make meaning of success on their campus. The findings revealed the university will need to implement several key factors to support, develop a sense of belonging, and integrate Black football players into the campus community. The recommended changes include the following, but are not limited to mentorships and building relationships, orientation, anti-racism training, and diverse hiring practices. Some examples are connecting with HBCUs to build relationships between their athletic programs for players to be successful. Second, create an advisory board of stakeholders from diverse backgrounds who can help guide recruitment efforts for Black football players into the university\u27s athletics programs. If this path is followed, significant success will be upon these players

Martin County School District Turn-around Initiative

A capstone submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education in the College of Education at Morehead State University by Mark Andrew Blackburn on April 10, 2014

Virtual Design and Verification of Cyber-physical Systems: Industrial Process Plant Design

AbstractThis paper discusses a research project to support virtual design and verification of industrial process plant designs. Process plants are a class of cyber-physical systems (CPS), and these research results should generally apply to other types of CPS such as those associated with the Smart Grid. Modeling is an essential part of process plant design and integral in other applications such as manufacturing. Models produced in design have obvious roles in system implementation, deployment and certification. For manufacturing systems, models also have use in downstream activities including system certification, performance optimization, real-time diagnostics and prognostics, and maintenance. The paper discusses the results associated with a prototype that uses domain-specific models of different views of a system design that improves collaboration through integrated models and aligned semantics and provides examples of how the integration with formal methods can identify defects in designs, and automatically generate test vectors with requirement-to-test traceability

Experimental Trials Based on a Neocortex-based Adaptive System Pattern

AbstractThis paper proposes a general design pattern for building adaptive systems. The Neocortex Adaptive System Pattern (NASP) architecture is an adaptive decision-making architecture. It is derived from the physical architecture observed within the neocortex of a primate brain. This architectural pattern is used as a basis to provide necessary functions to adaptive systems, allowing different adaptive system components with different methodologies and techniques to coexist and cooperate within a single system. Properties of the NASP are illustrated using an agent-based simulation experiment framework composed of simulated tank vs. tank game. This study supplies experimental results that compare adaptive decisions based on accuracy and timeliness. It shows that a more accurate decision may in fact be the less optimal one due to time constraints. The experimentation results suggest that multi-system adaptation can increase system performance, and learned information can identify time frames when an adaptation can increase system performance. The practice of designing and building agent based systems shares many principles and approaches with the NASP. An agent-based architecture has a common environment that is utilized to share the state of the system with member agents. It contains autonomous entities that communicate with each other in order to perform their designed functions. A unique contribution of the NASP approach over other research is to add the ability for different agents to create alternative courses of action and controls such as rule-based, neural, or Bayesian that are used to choose from those alternatives based on their latest information. While counter intuitive, the findings suggest that increased performance in this combatant domain suggest that earlier adaptations, using less information, improve the performance of the adaptive system. The paper provides a literature review of relevant neuroscience literature that describes the parallels between the architecture of the neocortex and NASP. The paper discusses the simulation experiments and associated results that illustrate how tradeoffs between information completeness and timeliness affect system performance within a NASP-based system

Readability and Suitability of COPD Consumer Information

Copyright © 2017 Kathryn Fullmann et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Peer ReviewedBackground. Information leaflets have been shown to positively or negatively impact adherence, depending on their content. The objective of this study was to perform an appraisal of the consumer information provided in COPD inhaler monographs. Methods. COPD inhalers were identified from the Health Canada Drug Product Database. Medication information and instructions for inhaler use were analyzed for readability by seven formulas, with an acceptability threshold of grades 6–8. Three researchers rated suitability using a modified Suitability Assessment of Materials (SAM) tool and assessed leaflets for explicit warnings. Results. Twenty-six inhalers with a COPD indication were evaluated. Medication information sections were rated as “difficult to read” or “hard,” and 85% (22/26) had a reading level above grade 8. The instructions for inhaler use were rated as “easy” or “fairly easy” to read and 63% (16/26) met the threshold by all formulas. While all leaflets achieved superior suitability ratings, extreme warnings included risk of premature death (), risks of serious injury (), serious interactions (), and statements that convey a serious consequence to therapy (). Conclusion. While COPD information leaflets in Canada performed well in terms of readability and suitability, overemphasis on side effects, warnings, and precautions may contribute to patient fear and nonadherence

The probability that a pair of elements of a finite group are conjugate

Let $G$ be a finite group, and let $\kappa(G)$ be the probability that elements $g$, $h\in G$ are conjugate, when $g$ and $h$ are chosen independently and uniformly at random. The paper classifies those groups $G$ such that $\kappa(G) \geq 1/4$, and shows that $G$ is abelian whenever $\kappa(G)|G| < 7/4$. It is also shown that $\kappa(G)|G|$ depends only on the isoclinism class of $G$. Specialising to the symmetric group $S_n$, the paper shows that $\kappa(S_n) \leq C/n^2$ for an explicitly determined constant $C$. This bound leads to an elementary proof of a result of Flajolet \emph{et al}, that $\kappa(S_n) \sim A/n^2$ as $n\rightarrow \infty$ for some constant $A$. The same techniques provide analogous results for $\rho(S_n)$, the probability that two elements of the symmetric group have conjugates that commute.Comment: 34 pages, corrected version, to appear in Journal of the London Mathematical Societ

Mainstreaming business support targeted at disadvantaged communities

This Report aims to lay the foundations for criteria which can be used to assess the feasibility of mainstreaming targeted business support initiatives. This will require first, a ground clearing exercise on the concept of mainstreaming, and second, an assessment of these characteristics when applied to five case studies which have experienced some form of mainstreaming. This literature and empirical based approach should help in establishing criteria for gauging the appropriateness and viability of targeted initiatives for mainstreaming. The report then draws on interviews with representatives from four sub-national mainstream bodies in order to understand how initiatives for disadvantaged groups and areas are developed