Caregiver Characteristics, Situational Factors, Coping Style, and Personal Adjustment of Hospice Nurses

The questions addressed in this study were: 1. Are there any significant relationships between selected personal and professional characteristics of the hospice nurse and his/her ability to cope with work stress? 2. Which personal characteristics of the hospice nurse are the best predictors of adequate adjustment to his/her work? The sample studied consisted of 79 registered nurse hospice care providers in the state of Oregon. The survey instrumentation included: a personal data form; the Daily Hassles Scale (DHS), and the Ways of Coping Scale (WOC) by Lazarus and Folkman; the Staff Burnout Scale for Health Professionals (SBS) by Jones; Olson\u27s Family Adaptability and Cohesion Scale (FACES); a social support scale (SS) by LaRocco, House, and French; and Templer\u27s Death Anxiety Scale (DAS). Correlational analysis and analysis of variance relating all data to the SBS were used to address the first research question. Stepwise regression was used to answer the second question. Correlational analysis revealed that all of the subscales on the DHS correlated positively with SBS as well as clinical frustration due to lack of funding and SS coworker subscale and SS total scale. Age and woe Positive Reappraisal subscale were negatively correlated with SBS. Analysis of variance revealed specific job training, and a regular support group in the hospice program to be significant contributors to the reduction of burnout. Faith in Jesus Christ as the means of access to God\u27s presence after death also contributed to lower burnout levels when compared with nurses who endorsed universalism or an access through good works orientation. The combined DHS was found to be the best single predictor of staff burnout. The study supports the notion that the nurse\u27s work situation, home situation, personal beliefs and life philosophy may be more significantly related to burnout than actual clinical situations. It may not be the stressor as much as the personal context into which the stressor is injected which determines burnout

The Welfare Costs of Unreliable Water Service

Throughout the developing world, many water distribution systems are unreliable. As a result, it becomes necessary for each household to store its own water as a hedge against this uncertainty. Since arrivals of water are not synchronized across households, serious distributional inefficiencies arise. We develop a model describing the optimal intertemporal depletion of each household’s private water storage when it is uncertain when water will next arrive to replenish supplies. The model is calibrated using survey data from Mexico City, a city where many households store water in sealed rooftop tanks known as tinacos. The calibrated model is used to evaluate the potential welfare gains that would occur if alternative modes of water provision were implemented. We estimate that most of the potential distributional inefficiencies can be eliminated simply by making the frequency of deliveries the same across households which now face haphazard deliveries. This would require neither costly investments in infrastructure nor price increases.Water Supply Uncertainty, Water Storage, Distributional Inefficiency

Oscillation pressure device for dynamic calibration of pressure transducers

Method and apparatus for obtaining dynamic calibrations of pressure transducers. A calibration head (15), a flexible tubing (23) and a bellows (20) enclose a volume of air at atmospheric pressure with a transducer (11) to be calibrated subject to the pressure inside the volume. All of the other apparatus in the drawing apply oscillations to bellows (20) causing the volume to change thereby applying oscillating pressures to transducer (11) whereby transducer (11) can be calibrated

The History of the Department of Photography & Cinema of The Ohio State University

Prepared for the Centennial of The Ohio State University

Monitoring the behavior and multi-dimensional movements of Weddell seals using an animal-borne video and data recorder

We have developed an animal-borne video and data recorder to observe Weddell seals foraging and to reconstruct their three-dimensional movements. The video and data recorder consists of a low-light-sensitive video camera with near-infrared light-emitting diodes that is mounted on top of the seal\u27s head to obtain close-up images of the seal\u27s muzzle and the area in front of the animal. The main housing, which is mounted on the animal\u27s back, contains an 8-mm video tape recorder that can record for 6 h, batteries, a microcomputer and transducers for pressure, water speed, compass bearing, and flipper stroke frequency. Sound is recorded on one audio channel of the tape recorder with a hydrophone. Using these instruments, we have recorded over 500 h of underwater video and over 1000 three-dimensional dive paths with corresponding swimming performance data from 31 adult Weddell seals. We have documented seals foraging in the water column, on the sea floor, and at the under-ice surface. Mid-water foraging included encounters with large Antarctic toothfish and smaller Antarctic silverfish. Multivariate statistical analysis of variables derived from the temporal and spatial characteristics of three-dimensional dive paths have enabled us to classify dive types and, in some cases, assign a function such as foraging

Land price trends in Missouri

Digitized 2007 AES.Includes bibliographical references

An Efficient Hybrid Algorithm for the Separable Convex Quadratic Knapsack Problem

This article considers the problem of minimizing a convex, separable quadratic function subject to a knapsack constraint and a box constraint. An algorithm called NAPHEAP has been developed to solve this problem. The algorithm solves the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker system using a starting guess to the optimal Lagrange multiplier and updating the guess monotonically in the direction of the solution. The starting guess is computed using the variable fixing method or is supplied by the user. A key innovation in our algorithm is the implementation of a heap data structure for storing the break points of the dual function and computing the solution of the dual problem. Also, a new version of the variable fixing algorithm is developed that is convergent even when the objective Hessian is not strictly positive definite. The hybrid algorithm NAPHEAP that uses a Newton-type method (variable fixing method, secant method, or Newton's method) to bracket a root, followed by a heap-based monotone break point search, can be faster than a Newton-type method by itself, as demonstrated in the numerical experiments

Patterns of Psychotherapy Attendance in Emerging and Mature Adults

Approximately 760,000 emerging adults use outpatient psychotherapy in the U.S. each year (Olfson et al.,2002). Emerging adults are 1.6-7.9 times more likely to drop out of mental health treatment than fully mature adults (Edlund et al., 2002; Olfson et al., 2002). This Study compared temporal patterns of attendance and non attendance between emerging and mature adult