Can physiotherapists contribute to care in the emergency department?

In recent years, physiotherapists have begun to practice in Australia’s emergency departments (EDs) as autonomous, primary contact clinicians responsible for many duties traditionally solely within the domain of the medical profession. This has caused controversy and raises important questions: Do physiotherapists deliver quality care in the ED? Has the introduction of physiotherapists to ED improved service delivery as intended

The Relationship Between Technology Readiness and Online Professional Development

The purpose of this quantitative, correlational study is to determine if there is a relationship between technology readiness and grades, the number of attempts taken, or the time it took to complete an online professional development. Because of the pandemic, much educator professional development has shifted online. When this occurred, many teachers were unprepared to make this shift. To study the relationship, the researcher surveyed 73 staff members of an LEA in central Pennsylvania using the Technology Readiness Index 2.0 instrument. Then, the researcher computed a correlation coefficient between each participant’s Technology Readiness Index score and their grades, number of attempts, and how long it took them to complete the online professional development. The results indicate no significant relationship between technology readiness and grades or the number of attempts. However, the correlation between technology readiness and days to completion yielded a small to moderate negative correlation. These findings support the use of online professional development and indicate that people will perform the same regardless of their technology readiness level. The only difference is that those with lower technology readiness might take longer to complete the online professional development. Expanding this study to include more variables regarding technology readiness and online professional development in the future would be beneficial

Street Outreach Workers: Best Practices and Lessons Learned

Street outreach workers are an important part of the Senator Charles E. Shannon Jr. Community Safety Initiative (CSI) comprehensive gang and youth violence reduction strategy in Massachusetts1. Street outreach involves the use of individuals to “work the streets,” making contact with youth in neighborhoods with high levels of gang activity. These individuals are generally not employed by the criminal justice system agencies but rather are based in community service organizations or other non- governmental agencies. Street outreach workers provide an important bridge between the community, gang-involved youth, and the agencies (whether social service or law enforcement) that respond to the problems of delinquency and gangs. This guide offers information, guidance, and lessons learned from street outreach programs nationally and within the Massachusetts Shannon CSI communities to help guide existing street outreach programs and support communities considering developing new street outreach programs

Two conjectures on the Stokes complex in three dimensions on Freudenthal meshes

In recent years, a great deal of attention has been paid to discretizations of the incompressible Stokes equations that exactly preserve the incompressibility constraint. These are of substantial interest because these discretizations are pressure-robust; i.e., the error estimates for the velocity do not depend on the error in the pressure. Similar considerations arise in nearly incompressible linear elastic solids. Conforming discretizations with this property are now well understood in two dimensions but remain poorly understood in three dimensions. In this work, we state two conjectures on this subject. The first is that the Scott–Vogelius element pair is inf-sup stable on uniform meshes for velocity degree k≥4; the best result available in the literature is for k≥6. The second is that there exists a stable space decomposition of the kernel of the divergence for k≥5. We present numerical evidence supporting our conjectures

Computing equilibrium states of cholesteric liquid crystals in elliptical channels with deflation algorithms

We study the problem of a cholesteric liquid crystal confined to an elliptical channel. The system is geometrically frustrated because the cholesteric prefers to adopt a uniform rate of twist deformation, but the elliptical domain precludes this. The frustration is resolved by deformation of the layers or introduction of defects, leading to a particularly rich family of equilibrium configurations. To identify the solution set, we adapt and apply a new family of algorithms, known as deflation methods, that iteratively modify the free energy extremisation problem by removing previously known solutions. A second algorithm, deflated continuation, is used to track solution branches as a function of the aspect ratio of the ellipse and preferred pitch of the cholesteric.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Open banking and Australia’s data-sharing regime: six lessons for Europe

As the phenomenon of open banking spreads, countries would be better off by working together and making data-sharing across jurisdictions a smoother process. Ross Buckley, Natalia Jevglevskaja, and Scott Farrell write that the sooner national policymakers find themselves on the same page, the more control consumers will have over their data at home, and abroad, and the more data-sharing will be able to drive needed competition in economies. They highlight six lessons from Australia’s experience that could help policymakers around the world establish robust data-sharing frameworks

Banking on Data: A comparative critique of common-law open banking frameworks.

This thesis analyses the legal structure of open banking frameworks of the two leading common-law jurisdictions (Australia and the United Kingdom) to determine whether they should incorporate legal features equivalent to those which support efficiency and safety in banking payment systems. The analysis shows that legal assessment of open banking frameworks should include evaluation against banking law principles because of the functional equivalence of customer data and customer funds as valuable information. More specifically, this research addresses the question: Should open banking frameworks include the legal features for the sharing and use of customer banking data which are comparable to those included in banking payment systems for the payment and use of customer money? The thesis develops a conceptual framework to enable a functional comparison to be made between the laws which govern the transfer and use of customer data under open banking frameworks and those which govern the payment and holding of customer money under banking and payment systems, from the foundation that both are networks for the transfer of valuable infrormation. It uses this to compare the open banking laws and regulations of Australia and the UK by reference to the legal rights to share data, the legal responsibilities for shared data and the legal relationships in sharing data. The differences are evaluated against the legal features of banking payment systems which perform similar functions with respect to customer funds, to determine deficiencies in the frameworks' legal design. The risks that arise from these deficiencies are then identified and assessed, using a risk classification developed from communication systems and banking payment systems. From this analysis, it is concluded that the some of the legal features which support effectiveness and safety in the frameworks are impaired when evaluated against equivalent features in banking payment systems. Recommendations are made for improvements by reference to the legal features of banking payment systems. The thesis provides new principles for the legal design of open banking frameworks based on the laws which protect and promote banking payment systems. Their use can ensure that when customers are ‘banking on data’ under these frameworks they are supported and protected by legal rights, responsibilities and relationships equivalent to those which customers rely on to support and protect them when they are banking with their money

A local Fourier analysis of additive Vanka relaxation for the Stokes equations

Multigrid methods are popular solution algorithms for many discretized PDEs, either as standalone iterative solvers or as preconditioners, due to their high efficiency. However, the choice and optimization of multigrid components such as relaxation schemes and grid-transfer operators is crucial to the design of optimally efficient algorithms. It is well--known that local Fourier analysis (LFA) is a useful tool to predict and analyze the performance of these components. In this paper, we develop a local Fourier analysis of monolithic multigrid methods based on additive Vanka relaxation schemes for mixed finite-element discretizations of the Stokes equations. The analysis offers insight into the choice of "patches" for the Vanka relaxation, revealing that smaller patches offer more effective convergence per floating point operation. Parameters that minimize the two-grid convergence factor are proposed and numerical experiments are presented to validate the LFA predictions.Comment: 30 pages, 12 figures. Add new sections: multiplicative Vanka results and sensitivity of convergence factors to mesh distortio