Competency and Capability: Imperative for Nurse Practitioner Education

Objective The objective of this study was to conduct research to inform the development of standards for nurse practitioner education in Australia and New Zealand and to contribute to the international debate on nurse practitioner practice. Setting The research was conducted in all states of Australia where the nurse practitioner is authorised and in New Zealand Subjects The research was informed by multiple data sources including nurse practitioner program curriculae documents from all relevant universities in Australia and New Zealand, interviews with academic convenors of these programs and interviews with nurse practitioners. Primary argument Findings from this research include support for masters level of education as preparation for the nurse practitioner. These programs need to have a strong clinical learning component and in-depth education for the sciences of specialty practice. Additionally an important aspect of education for the nurse practitioner is the centrality of student directed and flexible learning models. This approach is well supported by the literature on capability. Conclusions There is agreement in the literature about the lack of consistent standards in nurse practitioner practice, education and nomenclature. The findings from this research contribute to the international debate in this area and bring research informed standards to nurse practitioner education in Australia and New Zealand

Nurse Practitioner Competency Standards: Findings from Collaborative Australian and New Zealand Research

Background: The title, Nurse Practitioner, is protected in most jurisdictions in Australia and in New Zealand and the number of nurse practitioners is increasing in health services in both countries. Despite this expansion of the role there is scant national or international research to inform development of nurse practitioner competency standards. Objectives: The aim of the study was to research nurse practitioner practice to inform development of generic standards that could be applied for the education, authorisation and practice of nurse practitioners in both countries. Design: The research used a multi-methods approach to capture a range of data sources including research of policies and curricula, and interviews with clinicians. Data were collected from relevant sources in Australia and New Zealand Settings: The research was conducted in New Zealand and the five states and territories in Australia where, at the time of the research, the title of nurse practitioner was legally protected. Participants: The research was conducted with a purposeful sample of nurse practitioners from diverse clinical settings in both countries. Interview and material data were collected from a range of sources and data were analysed within and across these data modalities. Results: Findings included identification of three generic standards for nurse practitioner practice namely, Dynamic Practice, Professional Efficacy and Clinical Leadership. Each of these standards has a number of practice competencies, each of these competencies with their own performance indicators. Conclusions: Generic Standards for nurse practitioner practice will support a standardised approach and mutual recognition of nurse practitioner authorisation across the two countries. Additionally these research outcomes can more generally inform education providers, authorising bodies and clinicians on the standards of practice for the nurse practitioner whilst also contributing to the current international debate on nurse practitioner standards and scope of practice

Visual witness: a critical rereading of Graciela Iturbide’s photography

This article underlines the importance of Latin American photography at a time when the visual turn of Hispanism is increasingly evident. At the time of writing, Graciela Iturbide is one of the foremost living photographers in Latin America. This article reengages with Iturbide’s work using notions of photography as witness and drawing on photography scholar Ariella Azoulay’s structure of the civil contract of photography—in addition to concepts from other visual experts—to identify and underline the several fundamental elements to which Iturbide’s photography testifies. To achieve this result, this article studies her first solo visual narrative, Los que viven en la arena

A Reverse Hex Solver

We present Solrex,an automated solver for the game of Reverse Hex.Reverse Hex, also known as Rex, or Misere Hex, is the variant of the game of Hex in which the player who joins her two sides loses the game. Solrex performs a mini-max search of the state space using Scalable Parallel Depth First Proof Number Search, enhanced by the pruning of inferior moves and the early detection of certain winning strategies. Solrex is implemented on the same code base as the Hex program Solver, and can solve arbitrary positions on board sizes up to 6x6, with the hardest position taking less than four hours on four threads.Comment: Presented at Computers and Games 2016 Leiden, International Conference on Computers and Games. Springer International Publishing, 201

Electroweak boson production in heavy-ion collisions with CMS

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is fully equipped to measure leptonic decays of electroweak probes in the high multiplicity environment of nucleus-nucleus collisions. Electroweak boson production is an important benchmark process at hadron colliders. Precise measurements of W and Z production in heavy-ion collisions can help to constrain nuclear PDFs as well as serve as a standard candle of the initial state in PbPb collisions at the LHC energies. The inclusive and differential measurements of the Z boson yield in the muon and electron decay channel will be presented, establishing that no modification is observed with respect to pp collisions, scaled by the number of incoherent nucleon-nucleon collisions.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, for the 2013 Strangeness in Quark Matter Conference held in Birmingham, U.

Cancer in Ancient Human Populations: Methods and Practice in Bioarchaeology and Paleopathology

Best Undergraduate Writing in Anthropology Award, 2019-2020Despite its prevalence in contemporary public health, research on the paleopathology of cancer is still extremely limited. Successful methods have been employed to identify cancer in human remains which show a very small fraction of the existing archaeological record to contain signs of cancer. This current evidence would indicate that cancer was much rarer in antiquity than it is now, and this would suggest that cancer is a product of modern day environments and lifestyles. However, this conclusion is based upon very narrow research utilizing a methodology that is limited in its reach. Current methods rely solely on gross observation of skeletal material, which fails to account for the wide range of factors that influence the growth and development of carcinomas. This methodology is insufficient in providing a detailed history of the growth and development of cancer in human antiquity. This project aims to determine an interdisciplinary methodology for the study of ancient human cancers, incorporating approaches employed in bioarcheology, epidemiology, and more contemporary cancer genomics.No embargoAcademic Major: Anthropological SciencesAcademic Major: Englis

\u27Cause the Bible Told Me So

To The Editor: For years I have been entertained by letters calling attention to what the Bible has to say about homosexuality, masturbation, wine drinking, and kindred topics. Are these letter writers aware, I wonder, that the Old Testament condones smoking

Magic with Bizarre Poems

A strange collection of poems entitled Shadows in the Moonlight, was written and privately printed in Los Angeles in 1927 by T. page Wright, a Hollywood script writer. Wright was a skillful amateur magician who wrote the poems so that the book could be used for performing a feat of mental magic. Each of the 22 poems is so constructed that the nineteenth word is rose and the thirty-first word is love. The book originally sold in magic stores for five dollars, but is now extremely scarce

A Poem

Martin Gardner\u27s poem Good Sport

\u3cem\u3eWhen Your Number’s Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War\u3c/em\u3e by Desmond Morton [Review]

Review of Desmond Morton, When Your Number\u27s Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War. Toronto: Random House, 1993