Home About us Contact | |||
Recent Material (recent + material)
Selected Abstracts,The geriatric hospital felt like a backwater': aspects of older people's nursing in Britain, 1955,1980JOURNAL OF CLINICAL NURSING, Issue 19 2009Jane Brooks Aims and objectives., The aim of this article is to examine the experiences of ward-level nurses who cared for older people in general hospitals between 1955,1980. Background., There is very little published on the history of older adult nursing and no recent material from the United Kingdom. There are, however, the works of Cecily Hunter in Australia and Erica Roberts in Canada. It is the intention of this study to contribute to this important area of research. Design., This is an oral history project in which 20 nurses who had worked on older adults ward between 1955,1980 were interviewed. Methods., All the interviews were taped, transcribed and data-themed. Ethical clearance for the project was obtained from the University Ethics Committee and all participants were anonymised. Results., Many of the nurses found the experience very difficult, though there were exceptions. Several participants had worked on older adults ward during their training and then had never wanted to return. Most described a paucity of resources and longevity of staff on the wards. Conclusions., Using the sociological theory of Erving Goffman, this article introduces a novel method of understanding nursing history, although his ideas have been used in medical history. The value of his theories for this study is in the identification of nurses as being part of the same system as the patients themselves. Implications for contemporary policy, research and/or practice., For nurses to care effectively for their patients, nurses themselves must be valued. Subordination and regimentation tend to dehumanise the carers which, in turn, dehumanises the cared for. [source] Determining best complete subsets of specimens and characters for multivariate morphometric studies in the presence of large amounts of missing dataBIOLOGICAL JOURNAL OF THE LINNEAN SOCIETY, Issue 2 2006RICHARD E. STRAUSS Missing data are frequent in morphometric studies of both fossil and recent material. A common method of addressing the problem of missing data is to omit combinations of characters and specimens from subsequent analyses; however, omitting different subsets of characters and specimens can affect both the statistical robustness of the analyses and the resulting biological interpretations. We describe a method of examining all possible subsets of complete data and of scoring each subset by the ,condition' (ratio of first eigenvalue to second, or of second to first, depending on context) of the corresponding covariance or correlation matrix, and subsequently choosing the submatrix that either optimizes one of these criteria or matches the estimated condition of the original data matrix. We then describe an extension of this method that can be used to choose the ,best' characters and specimens for which some specified proportion of missing data can be estimated using standard imputation techniques such as the expectation-maximization algorithm or multiple imputation. The methods are illustrated with published and unpublished data sets on fossil and extant vertebrates. Although these problems and methods are discussed in the context of conventional morphometric data, they are applicable to many other kinds of data matrices. © 2006 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2006, 88, 309,328. [source] Consequences of the Serial Nature of Linguistic Input for Sentenial ComplexityCOGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 2 2005Daniel Grodner Abstract All other things being equal the parser favors attaching an ambiguous modifier to the most recent possible site. A plausible explanation is that locality preferences such as this arise in the service of minimizing memory costs,more distant sentential material is more difficult to reactivate than more recent material. Note that processing any sentence requires linking each new lexical item with material in the current parse. This often involves the construction of long-distance dependencies. Under a resource-limited view of language processing, lengthy integrations should induce difficulty even in unambiguous sentences. To date there has been little direct quantitative evidence in support of this perspective. This article presents 2 self-paced reading studies, which explore the hypothesis that dependency distance is a fundamental determinant of reading complexity in unambiguous constructions in English. The evidence suggests that the difficulty associated with integrating a new input item is heavily determined by the amount of lexical material intervening between the input item and the site of its target dependents. The patterns observed here are not straightforwardly accounted for within purely experience-based models of complexity. Instead, this work supports the role of a memory bottleneck in language comprehension. This constraint arises because hierarchical linguistic relations must be recovered from a linear input stream. [source] Retinopathy of prematurity in a Copenhagen high-risk sample 1997,98ACTA OPHTHALMOLOGICA, Issue 3 2000The allover surveillance for ROP appears more, more complete ABSTRACT. Purpose: From two recent materials to describe the present clinical status regarding retinopathy of prematurity in Denmark, and to outline trends over time. Methods: A) Results of regular ophthalmic surveillance of 201 clinically selected (higher risk of ROP than average) pre-term infants of birth year 1997,98 taken care of in the two greater Copenhagen tertiary neonatal units, in an intended prospective design. Gestational age range was 24,32 weeks at delivery; birth weights 490,2200 g. Median values 28 weeks and 1090 g. B) A brief account of the latest ROP-associated registrations of visual impairment in Danish children aged 0,17 years (n=138). Results: A) ROP was observed in 31.3% (n=201). Retinal cryotherapy was given to eleven ,own' cases and to two from elsewhere (n=13, gestational age at delivery 25,31 weeks). Five had cryotherapy twice. Four of the 13 were later registered for visual impairment. B) Comparing the first and the latest third of the registrations, visual impairment has dropped in frequency and severity over the period from 1981 till now. Conclusions: Compared to previous data the present clinical profile of ROP in Denmark indicates a relatively lower overall frequency of ROP and a decrease in eventual severe visual impairment. Undoubtedly, the continued refinement of neonatal care has been of relevance, but the definite decline in visual impairment further reflects a more complete ophthalmic surveillance, on a national basis. The advanced cases are generally detected in time and retinal ablation therapy offered. [source] |