FASTtrack Pharmaceutical Compounding and Dispensing

FASTtrack: Pharmaceutical Compounding and Dispensing focuses on what you really need to know in order to pass exams. Concise, bulleted information, key points, tips and an all-important self-assessment section which includes MCQs, case studies, sample essay questions and worked examples. Based on the successful textbook, Pharmaceutical Compounding and Dispensing, this FASTtrack book has been designed to assist the student compounder in understanding the key dosage forms encountered within extemporaneous dispensing. For this new second edition all the references to modern texts (for example, the BNF) have been updated, as well as labelling to reflect changes since the publication of the first edition. Some worked examples have been changed owing to the availability of pharmaceutical ingredients. Free access to online videos demonstrating various dispensing procedures is included. Are your exams coming up? Are you drowning in textbooks and lecture notes and wondering where to begin? Take the FASTtrack route to successful study for your examinations. FASTtrack provides the ultimate lecture notes and is a must-have for all pharmacy students wanting to study and test themselves for forthcoming exams.

Performance management in the United States and France:four case studies in the retail and airline industries

The profusion of performance measurement models suggested by Management Accounting literature in the 1990’s is one illustration of the substantial changes in Management Accounting teaching materials since the publication of “Relevance Lost” in 1987. At the same time, in the general context of increasing competition and globalisation it is widely thought that national cultural differences are tending to disappear, meaning that management techniques used in large companies, including performance measurement and management instruments (PMS), tend to be the same, irrespective of the company nationality or location. North American management practice is traditionally described as a contractually based model, mainly focused on financial performance information and measures (FPMs), more shareholder-focused than French companies. Within France, literature historically defined performance as being broadly multidimensional, driven by the idea that there are no universal rules of management and that efficient management takes into account local culture and traditions. As opposed to their North American brethren, French companies are pressured more by the financial institutions that fund them rather than by capital markets. Therefore, they pay greater attention to the long-term because they are not subject to quarterly capital market objectives. Hence, management in France should rely more on long-term qualitative information, less financial, and more multidimensional data to assess performance than their North American counterparts. The objective of this research is to investigate whether large French and US companies’ practices have changed in the way the textbooks have changed with regards to performance measurement and management, or whether cultural differences are still driving differences in performance measurement and management between them. The research findings support the idea that large US and French companies share the same PMS features, influenced by ‘universal’ PM models.

'In reality it's almost impossible':CLT-oriented curriculum change

Curriculum innovation is challenging and, as several commentators have reported, moves to introduce communicative language teaching in many contexts internationally have resulted in mixed outcomes, or even failure. In an effort to shed some light on this complex problem, this article focuses on curriculum change through the introduction of new communicative textbooks in an engineering college (kosen) in Japan. First, three key factors that inhibit change are considered and then other factors that specifically hindered change in the kosen environment are identified. A study investigating the attitudes and classroom practices of four Japanese teachers of English highlighted a culture of pedagogical uncertainty and lack of professional support. Suggestions for supporting teachers to implement curriculum change more effectively, both in Japan and elsewhere, are drawn out.

What can practitioner perceptions tell us about our subject?

Part of the challenge of fostering learning is to open up learner minds to new possibilities or ways of thinking but is what we are encouraging learners to think really that different from the current practitioner conceptions? Having been uncomfortable with the focus of textbooks for the teaching of the core concept, the nature of a program, in the teaching of object-­oriented programming, we sought to discover how practitioner’s conceived the concept. Our findings provide a framework for understanding the different ways of conceiving the concept and the features that distinguish these conceptions. How could these conceptions and their critical features influence the focus in teaching especially in relation to computational thinking?

How do practitioners understand? Practitioner perceptions of an object-oriented programming.

In the computer science community, there is considerable debate about the appropriate sequence for introducing object-oriented concepts to novice programmers. Research into novice programming has struggled to identify the critical aspects that would provide a consistently successful approach to teaching introductory object-oriented programming. Starting from the premise that the conceptions of a task determine the type of output from the task, assisting novice programmers to become aware of what the required output should be, may lay a foundation for improving learning. This study adopted a phenomenographic approach. Thirty one practitioners were interviewed about the ways in which they experience object-oriented programming and categories of description and critical aspects were identified. These critical aspects were then used to examine the spaces of learning provided in twenty introductory textbooks. The study uncovered critical aspects that related to the way that practitioners expressed their understanding of an object-oriented program and the influences on their approach to designing programs. The study of the textbooks revealed a large variability in the cover of these critical aspects.

Exploiting heterogeneous scientific literature networks to combat ranking bias:evidence from the computational linguistics area

It is important to help researchers find valuable papers from a large literature collection. To this end, many graph-based ranking algorithms have been proposed. However, most of these algorithms suffer from the problem of ranking bias. Ranking bias hurts the usefulness of a ranking algorithm because it returns a ranking list with an undesirable time distribution. This paper is a focused study on how to alleviate ranking bias by leveraging the heterogeneous network structure of the literature collection. We propose a new graph-based ranking algorithm, MutualRank, that integrates mutual reinforcement relationships among networks of papers, researchers, and venues to achieve a more synthetic, accurate, and less-biased ranking than previous methods. MutualRank provides a unified model that involves both intra- and inter-network information for ranking papers, researchers, and venues simultaneously. We use the ACL Anthology Network as the benchmark data set and construct the gold standard from computer linguistics course websites of well-known universities and two well-known textbooks. The experimental results show that MutualRank greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors, including PageRank, HITS, CoRank, Future Rank, and P-Rank, in ranking papers in both improving ranking effectiveness and alleviating ranking bias. Rankings of researchers and venues by MutualRank are also quite reasonable.