Survey of psychosocial support provided by UK paediatric oncology centres

Aim: To obtain a comprehensive overview of current patterns of psychosocial support provided by National Health Service ( NHS) paediatric oncology treatment centres across the UK. Methods: A postal questionnaire was sent to co-ordinators in the UK Children's Cancer Study Group ( a professional body that is responsible for the organisation of treatment and management of childhood cancer in the UK) in 21 treatment centres and three separate Teenage Cancer Trus units. A range of psychosocial topics were explored, including ratio of staff providing support to patients; facilities provided for children and families; psychosocial support services such as support groups; information provision; and transition support. Results: There were many good areas of support provided by centres, but there was also a lack of standard practices and procedures. All centres employed social workers, play specialists, and paediatric oncology outreach nurses, but patient to staff ratios varied across centres. The poorest staff provision was among psychologists, where patient to staff ratios ranged from 132:1 to 1100:1. Written information was standard practice, while provision of other types of information (audiovisual, online) varied; none of the centres provided audio information specifically for children/young people. Conclusion: This variability in practices among centres frequently occurred, as centres rarely had procedures formally agreed or recorded in writing. British government policy currently seeks to develop standards and guidelines of care throughout the National Health Service. This study further demonstrates the importance of standards and the need to agree guidelines for the provision of psychosocial support for children/young people and their families throughout the course of the illness

Spatial and temporal magnetic correlations in transition metal solid solutions

Imperial Users onl

Deformations and D-branes

I discuss the relation of Hochschild cohomology to the physical states in the closed topological string. This allows a notion of deformation intrinsic to the derived category. I use this to identify deformations of a quiver gauge theory associated to a D-branes at a singularity with generalized deformations of the geometry of the resolution of the singularity. An explicit map is given from noncommutative deformations (ie, B-fields) to terms in the superpotential.Comment: 33 pages, uses utarticle.cls, dcpic.sty; v2: minor corrections and refs adde

Circular 40

For cooperation and assistance in the work reported here, we gratefully acknowledge Dr. William Burgoyne, State of Alaska Division of Environmental Conservation and Mr. Delon Brown, USDA, Alaska Crop and Livestock Reporting Service. We especially appreciate the efforts of numerous pesticide manufacturers, distributors, dealers, and users who took the necessary time to provide information essential for this compilation. Richard Maxwell, Agricultural Chemicals Specialist, Cooperative Extension Service, Washington State University, provided difficult to locate pesticide label information. The editors of Farm Chemicals Handbook, 1980, provided the list of preferred names as well as information regarding general application of pesticide products.Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Reference -- Pesticide Use in Alaska, 197

Potential for measuring the longitudinal and lateral profile of muons in TeV air showers with IACTs

Muons are copiously produced within hadronic extensive air showers (EAS) occurring in the Earth's atmosphere, and are used by particle air shower detectors as a means of identifying the primary cosmic ray which initiated the EAS. Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs), designed for the detection of gamma-ray initiated EAS for the purposes of Very High Energy (VHE) gamma-ray astronomy, are subject to a considerable background signal due to hadronic EAS. Although hadronic EAS are typically rejected for gamma-ray analysis purposes, single muons produced within such showers generate clearly identifiable signals in IACTs and muon images are routinely retained and used for calibration purposes. For IACT arrays operating with a stereoscopic trigger, when a muon triggers one telescope, other telescopes in IACT arrays usually detect the associated hadronic EAS. We demonstrate for the first time the potential of IACT arrays for competitive measurements of the muon content of air showers, their lateral distribution and longitudinal profile of production slant heights in the TeV energy range. Such information can provide useful input to hadronic interaction models.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physic

Identification of phenological stages and vegetative types for land use classification

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Evaluation of surface water resources from machine-processing of ERTS multispectral data

The surface water resources of a large metropolitan area, Marion County (Indianapolis), Indiana, are studied in order to assess the potential value of ERTS spectral analysis to water resources problems. The results of the research indicate that all surface water bodies over 0.5 ha were identified accurately from ERTS multispectral analysis. Five distinct classes of water were identified and correlated with parameters which included: degree of water siltiness; depth of water; presence of macro and micro biotic forms in the water; and presence of various chemical concentrations in the water. The machine processing of ERTS spectral data used alone or in conjunction with conventional sources of hydrological information can lead to the monitoring of area of surface water bodies; estimated volume of selected surface water bodies; differences in degree of silt and clay suspended in water and degree of water eutrophication related to chemical concentrations

The conduciveness of CA-rule graphs

Given two subsets A and B of nodes in a directed graph, the conduciveness of the graph from A to B is the ratio representing how many of the edges outgoing from nodes in A are incoming to nodes in B. When the graph's nodes stand for the possible solutions to certain problems of combinatorial optimization, choosing its edges appropriately has been shown to lead to conduciveness properties that provide useful insight into the performance of algorithms to solve those problems. Here we study the conduciveness of CA-rule graphs, that is, graphs whose node set is the set of all CA rules given a cell's number of possible states and neighborhood size. We consider several different edge sets interconnecting these nodes, both deterministic and random ones, and derive analytical expressions for the resulting graph's conduciveness toward rules having a fixed number of non-quiescent entries. We demonstrate that one of the random edge sets, characterized by allowing nodes to be sparsely interconnected across any Hamming distance between the corresponding rules, has the potential of providing reasonable conduciveness toward the desired rules. We conjecture that this may lie at the bottom of the best strategies known to date for discovering complex rules to solve specific problems, all of an evolutionary nature