Development of linguistic and cognitive aspects of the understanding of similarity and difference

This thesis explores various aspects of children's understanding of similarity and difference and of the terms 'same' and 'different'. Understanding of 'same' appeared to be good but there was some evidence that it might not be complete. Understanding of 'different' was clearly inferior to that of 'same' and some children misinterpreted it as meaning 'same', this being supported by an experiment looking at interpretations of 'same', 'different' and a nonsense word, following Carey. Awareness of similarity and difference was investigated in several experiments. Subjects were required to give a similarity or a difference between two items, either named or pictured, in experiments developed from Claparede's work; they had to select from an array of items one either the same as or different from a target item and to justify that choice; and they had to judge whether two items were the same or not or were different or not in an experiment similar to one devised by Vurpillot. The children found more difficulty with similarity than with difference. It was suggested that similarity was typically handled in a holistic fashion, by a process of analogy, while difference was treated by analysis into component parts. The ability to analyse similarity developed with age. If similarity is not analysed into component points, these points cannot be mentioned in responses. An information-processing model of awareness was used to explain perseverative responses and the giving of differences when similarities were requested. It was suggested that these resulted in part from a failure to make transitions in awareness between different levels appropriately

Glutamine : A novel and potent therapeutic for acute spinal cord injury

Spinal cord injury occurs at a rate of 11.5 - 53.4 per million in developed countries with great emotional and financial consequences. The damage caused by the initial injury is followed by secondary damage, a complex cascade of mechanisms including ischemia, oxidative stress, inflammation and apoptosis. Although nothing can be done to reverse the initial damage to the spinal cord once it occurs, the secondary damage can be targeted by therapeutics to improve recovery. Following injury, concentrations of the potent antioxidant glutathione (GSH) are decreased in the spinal cord which potentiates mechanisms of secondary damage. In an attempt to maintain the GSH concentrations, the non-essential amino acid glutamine was tested as it was shown to increase GSH concentrations both in vivo and in vitro. Glutamine is being used extensively in clinical research in an expansive number of physiological and pathological conditions including brain trauma. To examine the therapeutic potential of glutamine after spinal cord trauma, two compression injury models, the modified aneurysm clip and the modified forceps, were used to induce an injury in male Wistar rats. We have demonstrated the ability of glutamine treatment (1 mmol/kg), given 1 hour after a 30 g aneurysm clip injury to increase GSH not only in whole blood samples but within the spinal tissue at the site of injury. Increasing GSH in this way also resulted in improved locomotor scores and maintenance of white matter tissue at the injury epicenter. Experiments using the forceps model were then performed to determine if the potency of glutamine treatment would be carried over to a different model and at a variety of severities. Glutamine, again, demonstrated the ability to improve maintenance of whole blood GSH, locomotor scores and tissue histology. In our experiments, glutamine has proven to be a potent therapeutic for spinal cord injury with an effect that is matched by few compounds currently being studied and well exceeding the standard therapeutic, methylprednisolone. Given the breadth of knowledge regarding the effects of glutamine clinically in numerous paradigms and the potency of the therapeutic effect seen in these studies, we believe that glutamine is fit for clinical trial and has a high potential for success

Reconciling Temporalities: A Substantive Explanation of the Origins of Difficulty in the Nurse Patient Encounter

Nurses describe patients as difficult on a regular basis. Nursing research to date has assumed the existence of this phenomenon. Most studies have listed descriptors of the difficult patient and offered interventions for nurses to use to alter patient behavior. Locating of difficulty within the individual and failure to consider the context of the nurse patient encounter is problematic. The practice of locating difficulty in the individual absolves organizations and society of responsibility to work to change factors that contribute to the construction of difficulty. The purpose of this research was to move beyond a focus on the patient as difficult to examine the context of the nurse patient encounter, and to generate a substantive explanation of the origins of difficulty in the encounter. The grounded theory method was used from a constructivist approach. Data sources included (a) 120 hours of participant observation on a family medicine unit in a hospital in Atlantic Canada; (b) 12 formal interviews with former unit patients; (c) 10 formal interviews with unit nursing staff, and numerous informal interviews with nursing staff during participant observation. Reconciling temporalities was the core category that emerged in this study and was the main concern for both nursing staff and patients. The degree of reconciliation required determined the degree of difficulty in the nurse patient encounter. Knowing the patient minimized difficulty in the nurse patient encounter. Reconciliation of time was inherent in getting to know the patient. When nurses did not have the time, and patients did not feel that care has been delivered in a timely manner the result was temporal incongruency. The greater the disparity between the time needed and the time available the greater the need for reconciliation in the encounter. The factors that contributed to temporal incongruencies, and necessitated reconciliation were: Families, availability of supplies and equipment, who is working, and care space changes. Contextual conditions that influenced the process of reconciliation were: Unit reputation and labor market structure changes. The strategies that nurses used to reconcile temporalities were controlling, working together, managing families, and employing geographies of place/bodies. The context of the delivery of nursing care is an important nursing research frontier

Circular 117

The annual flower trials were planted from 30 May through 4 June, 1999 in the Perennial Landscape and All America Selections Display Garden of the Georgeson Botanical Garden (64°51N, 147°52W). Fairbanks silt loam soil was fertilized with 1 0 -2 0 -2 0 S (4 lbs per 100 sq feet, 195 g per sq meter) on 28 May. With the exception of dahlias, all flowers were grown as seedling transplants and were hardened off outdoors for one week prior to transplanting. Tuberous roots of dahlias were planted in containers five weeks prior to transplanting and were hardened off

Circular 109

Introduction -- Explanation of Plant Evaluation Tables -- Table 1. Weather records for the test years -- Table 2. All plant materials evaluated in 1996 -- Table 3. All plants that have been evaluated but did not survive the minimum number of test years -- Table 4. Plantings from 1996 that have not yet been evaluated for winter survival -- Table 5. Annual flowers evaluated in 1996 -- Appendix 1. Commercial Sources and Organizations -- Map of GB

The construction of a vocabulary test for the intermediate grades,

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

The collaborative improvement model: an interpretive study of revising a curriculum

Curriculum revisions in nursing programs are necessary to maintain currency and ensure that nursing students are prepared to competently practice nursing. Yet, the research for curriculum revisions in nursing education is sparse, leaving nursing educators with a thin evidence base upon which to revise curricula. The purpose of this phenomenological and hermeneutical study was to understand the experiences of faculty members and students who used the Collaborative Improvement Model (CIM) at a midwestern nursing department as an approach to revise their curriculum. The findings of this study demonstrate how the CIM (a) promoted student involvement in revising a curriculum, (b) facilitated faculty collaboration across two campuses with different campus cultures, (c) encouraged the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and (d) emphasized the need to use external facilitators when revising a curriculum. Faculty members in nursing programs can use this study when considering the CIM as a framework for revising their curricula

Right from the start: protocol for a pilot study for a randomised trial of the New Baby Programme for improving outcomes for children born to socially vulnerable mothers:protocol for a pilot study for a randomised trial of the New Baby Programme for improving outcomes for children born to socially vulnerable mothers

Background: Children born to mothers who experience social complexity (e.g. substance misuse, intimate partner violence, mental ill health, a history of maltreatment) are at increased risk for a range of adverse outcomes at birth and during development. Home visiting programmes have been advocated as a strategy for improving outcomes for disadvantaged mothers and children, such as the Nurse-Family Partnership for young, socially disadvantaged first-time mothers. However, no evidence-based programme is available for multiparous women or older first-time mothers. The New Baby Programme was developed in Northern Ireland. It augments the universal health visiting service available in the UK with a content designed to promote maternal health and well-being in pregnancy, maximise secure attachments of children and parents and enhance sensitive parenting and infant cognitive development.Methods/Design: This pilot study is designed to investigate whether it is possible to recruit and retain socially vulnerable mothers in a randomised trial that compares the effects of the New Baby Programme with standard antenatal and postnatal care. Feasibility issues include the referral/recruitment pathway (including inclusion and exclusion criteria), the consent and randomisation, the ability to maintain researcher blinding, the acceptability of the intervention to participants, and the feasibility and acceptability of the outcome measures. The results of the study will inform a definitive phase-3 RCT.Discussion: Trials of complex social interventions often encounter challenges that lead to the trial being abandoned (e.g. because of problems in recruitment) or present considerable analytic challenges relating to dropout, attrition and bias. This pilot study aims to maximise the chances of successful implementation.Trial registration: ISRCTN35456296 retrospectively registered.</p

CHANG-ES XI: Circular Polarization in the Cores of Nearby Galaxies

We detect 5 galaxies in the CHANG-ES (Continuum Halos in Nearby Galaxies -- an EVLA Survey) sample that show circular polarization (CP) at L-band in our high resolution data sets. Two of the galaxies (NGC~4388 and NGC~4845) show strong Stokes $V/I\,\equiv\,m_C\,\sim\,2$\%, two (NGC~660 and NGC~3628) have values of $m_C\sim \,0.3$\%, and NGC~3079 is a marginal detection at $m_C\sim \,0.2$\%. The two strongest $m_C$ galaxies also have the most luminous X-ray cores and the strongest internal absorption in X-rays. We have expanded on our previous Faraday conversion interpretation and analysis and provide analytical expressions for the expected $V$ signal for a general case in which the cosmic ray electron energy spectral index can take on any value. We provide examples as to how such expressions could be used to estimate magnetic field strengths and the lower energy cutoff for CR electrons. Four out of our detections are {\it resolved}, showing unique structures, including a {\it jet} in NGC~4388 and a CP `conversion disk' in NGC~4845. The conversion disk is inclined to the galactic disk but is perpendicular to a possible outflow direction. Such CP structures have never before been seen in any galaxy to our knowledge. None of the galaxy cores show linear polarization at L-band. Thus CP may provide a unique probe of physical conditions deep into radio AGNs.Comment: 30 pages, 4 figures, accepted to MNRA

The preventative role of exogenous melatonin administration to patients with advanced cancer who are at risk of delirium: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Background Delirium is a very common and distressing neuropsychiatric syndrome in palliative care. Increasing age, the presence of dementia and advanced cancer are well-known predisposing risk factors for delirium development. Sleep-wake cycle disturbance is frequently seen during delirium and melatonin has a pivotal role in the regulation of circadian rhythms. Current evidence across various settings suggests a potential preventative role for melatonin in patients at risk of delirium, but no studies are currently reported in patients with advanced cancer. The aim of this article is to describe the design of a feasibility study that is being conducted to inform a larger randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial (RCT) to evaluate the role of exogenously administered melatonin in preventing delirium in patients with advanced cancer. Methods/Design Adult patients with a cancer diagnosis who are admitted to the palliative care unit will be randomized into a treatment or placebo group. The pharmacological intervention consists of a single daily dose of immediate-release melatonin (3 mg) at 21:00 ± 1 h, from day 1 to day 28 of admission. The primary objective of this initial study is to assess the feasibility of conducting the proposed RCT by testing recruitment and retention rates, appropriateness of study outcome measures, acceptability of study procedures and effectiveness of the blinding process. The primary outcome measure of the proposed larger RCT is time to first inpatient incident episode of delirium. We also plan to collect data on incident rates of delirium and patient-days of delirium, adjusting for length of admission. Discussion The outcomes of this feasibility study will provide information on recruitment and retention rates, protocol violation frequency, effectiveness of the blinding process, acceptability of the study procedures, and safety of the proposed intervention. This will inform the design of a fully powered randomized controlled trial to evaluate the preventative role of melatonin administration in patients with advanced cancer. Trial registration Registered with ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT02200172 Registered on 21 July 2014. Health Canada protocol number: BRI-MELAT-2013 (Final approved protocol version (Version 3): 18 June 2014) (Notice of Amended Authorization (NOA) received 14 November 2014). Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13063-016-1525-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users