Public Health Nurse Interventions for Women in Dependency Drug Court

There are an increasing number of children placed into foster care due to abuse and neglect. Parents of these children often have difficult drug abuse problems leading to the removal of their children. The cost of caring for these children is staggering reaching billions dollars. One program in Santa Clara County that has been created to assist parents is dependency drug court. This court utilizes many disciplines including nursing in its efforts to stabilize and reunify the children. Previous research has shown that home visitations by the public health nurse using interventions based on support of the family has aided in the decrease of child abuse This research utilized qualitative and quantitative data to understand the perceived needs of women who have graduated from this dependency drug court and what they think the public health nurse could do to intervene in the difficult process of going through dependency drug court, and reunifying with their children

Is There a Tension Between Peer Interaction and Distance or E-Learning in Education Studies?

The expansion that has resulted in a move from an elite to a mass system of higher education has been associated with a number of fundamental changes in the system at all levels. These changes have had an influence on learning and teaching in Education Studies. Widening participation and equality of opportunity for an increasingly diverse student body has resulted in many of us taking advantage of new technologies in helping to meet the learning needs of our students. Whilst not wishing to be seen as a luddite, there is a need to reflect upon the teaching and learning process involved and whether there are tensions between our desire to reach a wider clientele and our need to provide quality learning opportunities. Does the use of distance (or even blended) learning necessarily mean important aspects of learning like engaging with tutors and peers have to be sidelined or ignored

Polymer Dissolution Model: An Energy Adaptation Of The Critical Ionization Theory

The current scale of features size in the microelectronics industry has reached the point where molecular level interactions affect process fidelity and produce excursions from the continuum world like line edge roughness (LER). Here we present a 3D molecular level model based on the adaptation of the critical ionization (CI) theory using a fundamental interaction energy approach. The model asserts that it is the favorable interaction between the ionized part of the polymer and the developer solution which renders the polymer soluble. Dynamic Monte Carlo methods were used in the current model to study the polymer dissolution phenomenon. The surface ionization was captured by employing an electric double layer at the interface, and polymer motion was simulated using the Metropolis algorithm. The approximated interaction parameters, for different species in the system, were obtained experimentally and used to calibrate the simulated dissolution rate response to polymer molecular weight and developer concentration. The predicted response is in good agreement with experimental dissolution rate data. The simulation results support the premise of the CI theory and provide an insight into the CI model from a new prospective. This model may provide a means to study the contribution of development to LER and other related defects based on molecular level interactions between distinct components in the polymer and the developer.Chemical Engineerin

Mediating Vision: Wordsworth’s Allusions to Thomson’s Seasons in The Prelude

This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently under an indefinite embargo pending publication by Edinburgh University Press.The importance of James Thomson's eighteenth-century poem The Seasons to Wordsworth's The Prelude has been systematically underestimated by critics, who take at face value Wordsworth's dismissals in his prose writings of Thomson's diction. In fact The Prelude contains a large number of allusions to and direct borrowings from The Seasons. Examining three of the most significant of these allusions, this essay argues that Wordsworth turned to Thomson in order to find a language that could express communion with the external, natural world, and specifically a communion that is mediated by the ‘bodily eyes’, with all their flaws and susceptibility to misapprehension. The poetic vision that is produced out of the eyes’ inaccurate vision is fundamentally ambivalent; mediation between the internal and external creates a space for the mind to exercise its creative and subjective power, but also reveals the mind's limitations. As well as assisting Wordsworth to articulate the mediated character of his encounters with nature, Thomson's language acts as a mediating presence itself, both facilitating and impeding Wordsworth's relationship with another great predecessor, Milton.This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Introduction: Environmental Humanities Approaches to Climate Change

The development of the environmental humanities as an interdisciplinary formation is a response to an ecological and planetary crisis [...

Evaluation of marking of peer marking in oral presentation.

BACKGROUND: Peer marking is an important skill for students, helping them to understand the process of learning and assessment. This method is increasingly used in medical education, particularly in formative assessment. However, the use of peer marking in summative assessment is not widely adopted because many teachers are concerned about biased marking by students of their peers. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to investigate whether marking of summative peer assessment can improve the reliability of peer marking. METHODS: In a retrospective analysis, the peer-marking results of a summative assessment of oral presentations of two cohorts of students were compared. One group of students was told that their peer marks would be assessed against a benchmark consisting of the average of examiner marks and that these scores together with the peer and examiner marks would form their final exam results. The other group of students were just informed that their final exam results would be determined based on the examiner and peer marks. RESULTS: Based on examiner marks, both groups of students performed similarly in their summative assessment, agreement between student markers was less consistent and more polar than the examiners. When compared with the examiners, students who were told that their peer marking would be scored were more generous markers (their average peer mark was 2.4 % points higher than the average examiner mark) while students who were not being scored on their marking were rather harsh markers (their average peer mark was 4.2 % points lower than the average examiner mark), with scoring of the top-performing students most affected. CONCLUSIONS: Marking of peer marking had a small effect on the marking conduct of students in summative assessment of oral presentation but possibly indicated a more balanced marking performance