The Experiences of Family Members Witnessing the Diminishing Drinking of a Dying Relative in Hospital: A Narrative Inquiry

Abstract Background Palliative care aims to support the family members of people with life-threatening illnesses, alongside those who are ill. In the United Kingdom (UK), family members have expressed concern about the management of diminishing drinking and its consequences, particularly in the hospital environment, and the area is a priority for research. Aim This research aims to explore the experiences of family members when witnessing the diminishing drinking of a dying relative in order to identify areas in which professional support of family members might be improved. The exploration is framed within key notions of pragmatism as espoused by William James and John Dewey. Methodology and Method Thirteen family members who had witnessed diminishing drinking of a relative dying in hospital were recruited through the hospital bereavement service of one National Health Service trust in the UK. Their experiences were collected and analysed using narrative inquiry methodology, derived by Jean Clandinin and her colleagues from pragmatism.   Findings Participants experienced diminishing drinking as an unfolding process which was part of overall decline associated with advancing illness. They all believed it to be detrimental. Three groups of responses were identified: promoting, accepting and ameliorating. Participants reported positive experiences of healthcare when staff actively supported relatives to drink, but they also found that staff could sometimes be too busy to attend to drinking. Tension occurred within families, and between healthcare staff and families over different approaches to managing aspiration risk and clinically assisted hydration. Conclusion This thesis offers a unique understanding of family members’ experiences of diminishing drinking, which has the potential to inform new palliative endeavour in the field. It argues for a re-conceptualisation of diminishing drinking aligned to family members’ experiences; for supporting family members through listening to their experiences with insight, and for supporting their agency within the management of their relatives with diminishing drinking. The thesis also offers an exemplar of how palliative care might be framed and executed through a pragmatic lens, enabling appraisal of its value to wider palliative research

Hoarding in four southern African rodent species

The comparative hoarding behaviour of four rodent species,Saccostomus campeslris, Desmodillus auricularis. Tatera brantsii and T. leucogaster was studied under semi-natural conditions after prior determination of the seed preferences of each species.The results are consistent with all available ecological data.  Desmodillus  and Saccostomus are true larder-hoarders, although Desmodillus also scatter-hoards on occasion. The Tatera spp. did not hoard, but frequently covered seeds, a possible primitive form of scatter-hoarding

The helminth fauna of the digestive tracts of chacma baboons, Papio ursinus, from different localities in the Transvaal

All of the 111 baboons examined from the Loskop Dam, Suikerbosrand and Scrutton Nature Reserves and the Sabie-Tweefontein Forest Reserve were infested with helminths of the digestive tract. The helminths recovered were Bertiella studeri, Enterobius vermicularis, Oesophagostomum bifurcum, Physaloptera caucasica, Streptopharagus pigmentatus, Strongyloides fülleborni, Trichostrongylus falculatus, Trichuris trichiura and females of Trichuris which possibly belong to a new species. Most baboons harboured 3, and some as many as 6, species of helminths. Burdens of the various helminths varied greatly, even among baboons from the same locality, age group and sex. All helminths found in the present study can occur in very young animals. Worm burdens generally increased as the host aged, with a subsequent decrease among adult baboons for Enterobius vermicularis, Strongyloides fülleborni and Trichostrongylus falculatus. Heavier worm burdens were found in the wet season for Bertiella studeri and Oesophagostomum bifurcum, whereas Trichostrongylus falculatus occurred in greater numbers during the dry season. No significant differences between worm burdens in male and female baboons were found, but Physaloptera caucasica was more prevalent in males. Trichostrongylus falculatus and Enterobius vermicularis are new records for the chacma baboon.The articles have been scanned in colour with a HP Scanjet 5590; 600dpi. Adobe Acrobat XI Pro was used to OCR the text and also for the merging and conversion to the final presentation PDF-format.am201

UTOPIA—User-Friendly Tools for Operating Informatics Applications

Bioinformaticians routinely analyse vast amounts of information held both in large remote databases and in flat data files hosted on local machines. The contemporary toolkit available for this purpose consists of an ad hoc collection of data manipulation tools, scripting languages and visualization systems; these must often be combined in complex and bespoke ways, the result frequently being an unwieldy artefact capable of one specific task, which cannot easily be exploited or extended by other practitioners. Owing to the sizes of current databases and the scale of the analyses necessary, routine bioinformatics tasks are often automated, but many still require the unique experience and intuition of human researchers: this requires tools that support real-time interaction with complex datasets. Many existing tools have poor user interfaces and limited real-time performance when applied to realistically large datasets; much of the user's cognitive capacity is therefore focused on controlling the tool rather than on performing the research. The UTOPIA project is addressing some of these issues by building reusable software components that can be combined to make useful applications in the field of bioinformatics. Expertise in the fields of human computer interaction, high-performance rendering, and distributed systems is being guided by bioinformaticians and end-user biologists to create a toolkit that is both architecturally sound from a computing point of view, and directly addresses end-user and application-developer requirements

Velocity-Based LOD Reduction in Virtual Reality: A Psychometric Approach

Virtual Reality headsets enable users to explore the environment by performing self-induced movements. The retinal velocity produced by such motion reduces the visual system's ability to resolve fine detail. We measured the impact of self-induced head rotations on the ability to detect quality changes of a realistic 3D model in an immersive virtual reality environment. We varied the Level-of-Detail (LOD) as a function of rotational head velocity with different degrees of severity. Using a psychophysical method, we asked 17 participants to identify which of the two presented intervals contained the higher quality model under two different maximum velocity conditions. After fitting psychometric functions to data relating the percentage of correct responses to the aggressiveness of LOD manipulations, we identified the threshold severity for which participants could reliably (75\%) detect the lower LOD model. Participants accepted an approximately four-fold LOD reduction even in the low maximum velocity condition without a significant impact on perceived quality, which suggests that there is considerable potential for optimisation when users are moving (increased range of perceptual uncertainty). Moreover, LOD could be degraded significantly more in the maximum head velocity condition, suggesting these effects are indeed speed dependent