Sacred vocation program follow up evaluation at the Baylor healthcare system

Background: The Sacred Vocation Program (SVP) (Amick B, Karff S., 2003) helps workers find meaning, spirituality, and see their job as a sacred vocation. The SVP is based on Participatory Action Research (PAR) (Minkler & Wallerstein, 1997; Parker & Wall, 1998). This study aims to evaluate the SVP implemented at the Baylor Healthcare System, Dallas-Fort Worth. ^ Methods: The study design is a qualitative design. We used data from study participants who have participated in focus groups. During these focus groups specific questions and probes regarding the effectiveness of the SVP have been asked. We analyzed the focus groups and derived themes. ^ Results: Results of this study demonstrate SVP helps graduates feel valued and important. The SVP has improved meaningful work for employees and improved a sense of belonging for participants. The program has also increased participant spirituality. The coping techniques developed during a SVP class helps participants deal with stressful situations. The SVP faces challenges of implementation fidelity, poor communication, program viability in tough economic times and implementation of phase II. Another sustainability challenge for SVP is the perception of the program being a religious one versus a spiritual program. ^ Conclusion: Several aspects of the SVP work. The phase I of SVP is successful in improving meaningful work and a sense of belonging for participants. The coping techniques help participants deal with difficult work situations. The SVP can increase effectiveness through improvements in implementation fidelity, communication and leadership commitment. ^

Implementing and evaluating a Web -based close call reporting system at an urban hospital

Medical errors and close calls are pervasive in health care. It is hypothesized that the causes of close calls are the same as for medical errors; therefore learning about close calls can help prevent errors and increase patient safety. Yet despite efforts to encourage close call reporting, close calls as well as medical errors are under-reported in health care. The purpose of this dissertation was to implement and evaluate a web-based anonymous close call reporting system in three units at an urban hospital. ^ The study participants were physicians, nurses and medical technicians (N = 187) who care for patients in the Medical Intermediate Care Unit, the Surgical Intermediate Care Unit, and the Coronary Catheterization Laboratory in the hospital. We provided educational information to the participants on how to use the system and e-mailed and delivered paper reminders to report to the participants throughout the 19-month project. We surveyed the participants at the beginning and at the end of the study to assess their attitudes and beliefs regarding incident reporting. We found that the majority of the health care providers in our study are supportive of incident reporting in general but in practice very few had actually reported an error or a close call, semi-structured interview 20 weeks after we made the close call reporting system available. The purpose of the interviews was to further assess the participants' attitudes regarding incident reporting and the reporting system. Our findings suggest that the health care providers are supportive of medical error reporting in general, but are not convinced of the benefit of reporting close calls. Barriers to close call reporting cited include lack of time, heavy workloads, preferring to take care of close calls "on the spot", and not seeing the benefits of close call reporting. Consequently only two = close calls were reported via the system by two separate caregivers during the project. ^ The findings suggest that future efforts to increase close call reporting must address barriers to reporting, especially the belief among care givers that it is not worth taking time from their already busy schedules to report close calls. ^

Respiration rates and electron transport system activities of copepod species obtained during Maria S. Merian cruise MSM17/3

Respiration rates and electron transport system (ETS) activities were measured in dominant copepod species from the northern Benguela upwelling system in January-February 2011 to assess the accuracy of the ETS assay in predicting in vivo respiration rates. Individual respiration rates varied from 0.06 to 1.60 µL O2/h/ind, while ETS activities converted to oxygen consumption ranged from 0.14 to 4.46 µL O2/h/ind. ETS activities were significantly correlated with respiration rates (r**2 = 0.79, p = 0.0001). R:ETS ratios were lowest in slow-moving Eucalanidae (0.11) and highest in diapausing Calanoides carinatus copepodids CV (0.76) while fast-moving copepods showed intermediate R:ETS (0.23-0.37). 82% of the variance of respiration rates could be explained by differences in dry mass, temperature and the activity level of different copepod species. Three regression equations were derived to calculate respiration rates for diapausing, slow- and fast-moving copepods, respectively, based on parameters such as body mass and temperature. Thus, knowledge about the activity level and behavioral characteristics of copepod species can significantly increase the predictive accuracy of metabolic models, which will help to better understand and quantify the impact of copepods on nutrient and carbon fluxes in marine ecosystems.

Applying Problem-Based Project-Organized Learning in a traditional system

Nowadays, PBL is considered a suitable methodology for engineering education. But making the most of this methodology requires some features, such as multidisciplinary, illstructured teamwork and autonomous research that sometimes are not easy to achieve. In fact, traditional university systems, including curricula, teaching methodologies, assessment and regulation, do not help the implementation of these features. Firstly, we look through the main differences found between a traditional system and the Aalborg model, considered a reference point in PBL. Then, this work is aimed at detecting the main obstacles that a standing traditional system presents to PBL implementation. A multifaceted PBL experience, covering three different disciplines, brings us to analyse these difficulties, order them according to its importance and decide which should be the first changes. Finally, we propose a straightforward introduction of generic competences in the curricula aimed at supporting the use of Problem-Based Project-Organized Learning

A system for automatically generating documentation for (C)LP programs

We describe lpdoc, a tool which generates documentation manuals automatically from one or more logic program source files, written in ISO-Prolog, Ciao, and other (C)LP languages. It is particularly useful for documenting library modules, for which it automatically generates a rich description of the module interface. However, it can also be used quite successfully to document full applications. A fundamental advantage of using lpdoc is that it helps maintaining a true correspondence between the program and its documentation, and also identifying precisely to what version of the program a given printed manual corresponds. The quality of the documentation generated can be greatly enhanced by including within the program text assertions (declarations with types, modes, etc.) for the predicates in the program, and machine-readable comments. One of the main novelties of lpdoc is that these assertions and comments are written using the Ciao system assertion language, which is also the language of communication between the compiler and the user and between the components of the compiler. This allows a significant synergy among specification, documentation, optimization, etc. A simple compatibility library allows conventional (C)LP systems to ignore these assertions and comments and treat normally programs documented in this way. The documentation can be generated in many formats including texinfo, dvi, ps, pdf, info, html/css, Unix nroff/man, Windows help, etc., and can include bibliographic citations and images. lpdoc can also generate “man” pages (Unix man page format), nicely formatted plain ascii “readme” files, installation scripts useful when the manuals are included in software distributions, brief descriptions in html/css or info formats suitable for inclusion in on-line indices of manuals, and even complete WWW and info sites containing on-line catalogs of documents and software distributions. The lpdoc manual, all other Ciao system manuals, and parts of this paper are generated by lpdoc.

The ciao prolog system

Ciao is a public domain, next generation multi-paradigm programming environment with a unique set of features: Ciao offers a complete Prolog system, supporting ISO-Prolog, but its novel modular design allows both restricting and extending the language. As a result, it allows working with fully declarative subsets of Prolog and also to extend these subsets (or ISO-Prolog) both syntactically and semantically. Most importantly, these restrictions and extensions can be activated separately on each program module so that several extensions can coexist in the same application for different modules. Ciao also supports (through such extensions) programming with functions, higher-order (with predicate abstractions), constraints, and objects, as well as feature terms (records), persistence, several control rules (breadth-first search, iterative deepening, ...), concurrency (threads/engines), a good base for distributed execution (agents), and parallel execution. Libraries also support WWW programming, sockets, external interfaces (C, Java, TclTk, relational databases, etc.), etc. Ciao offers support for programming in the large with a robust module/object system, module-based separate/incremental compilation (automatically -no need for makefiles), an assertion language for declaring (optional) program properties (including types and modes, but also determinacy, non-failure, cost, etc.), automatic static inference and static/dynamic checking of such assertions, etc. Ciao also offers support for programming in the small producing small executables (including only those builtins used by the program) and support for writing scripts in Prolog. The Ciao programming environment includes a classical top-level and a rich emacs interface with an embeddable source-level debugger and a number of execution visualization tools. The Ciao compiler (which can be run outside the top level shell) generates several forms of architecture-independent and stand-alone executables, which run with speed, efficiency and executable size which are very competive with other commercial and academic Prolog/CLP systems. Library modules can be compiled into compact bytecode or C source files, and linked statically, dynamically, or autoloaded. The novel modular design of Ciao enables, in addition to modular program development, effective global program analysis and static debugging and optimization via source to source program transformation. These tasks are performed by the Ciao preprocessor ( ciaopp, distributed separately). The Ciao programming environment also includes lpdoc, an automatic documentation generator for LP/CLP programs. It processes Prolog files adorned with (Ciao) assertions and machine-readable comments and generates manuals in many formats including postscript, pdf, texinfo, info, HTML, man, etc. , as well as on-line help, ascii README files, entries for indices of manuals (info, WWW, ...), and maintains WWW distribution sites.

Unsupervised system to classify SO2 pollutant concentrations in Salamanca, Mexico

Salamanca is cataloged as one of the most polluted cities in Mexico. In order to observe the behavior and clarify the influence of wind parameters on the Sulphur Dioxide (SO2) concentrations a Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) Neural Network have been implemented at three monitoring locations for the period from January 1 to December 31, 2006. The maximum and minimum daily values of SO2 concentrations measured during the year of 2006 were correlated with the wind parameters of the same period. The main advantages of the SOM Neural Network is that it allows to integrate data from different sensors and provide readily interpretation results. Especially, it is powerful mapping and classification tool, which others information in an easier way and facilitates the task of establishing an order of priority between the distinguished groups of concentrations depending on their need for further research or remediation actions in subsequent management steps. For each monitoring location, SOM classifications were evaluated with respect to pollution levels established by Health Authorities. The classification system can help to establish a better air quality monitoring methodology that is essential for assessing the effectiveness of imposed pollution controls, strategies, and facilitate the pollutants reduction.

Social and content hybrid image recommender system for mobile social networks

One of the advantages of social networks is the possibility to socialize and personalize the content created or shared by the users. In mobile social networks, where the devices have limited capabilities in terms of screen size and computing power, Multimedia Recommender Systems help to present the most relevant content to the users, depending on their tastes, relationships and profile. Previous recommender systems are not able to cope with the uncertainty of automated tagging and are knowledge domain dependant. In addition, the instantiation of a recommender in this domain should cope with problems arising from the collaborative filtering inherent nature (cold start, banana problem, large number of users to run, etc.). The solution presented in this paper addresses the abovementioned problems by proposing a hybrid image recommender system, which combines collaborative filtering (social techniques) with content-based techniques, leaving the user the liberty to give these processes a personal weight. It takes into account aesthetics and the formal characteristics of the images to overcome the problems of current techniques, improving the performance of existing systems to create a mobile social networks recommender with a high degree of adaptation to any kind of user.

Novel system for bite-force sensing and monitoring based on magnetic eear field communication

Intraoral devices for bite-force sensing have several applications in odontology and maxillofacial surgery, as bite-force measurements provide additional information to help understand the characteristics of bruxism disorders and can also be of help for the evaluation of post-surgical evolution and for comparison of alternative treatments. A new system for measuring human bite forces is proposed in this work. This system has future applications for the monitoring of bruxism events and as a complement for its conventional diagnosis. Bruxism is a pathology consisting of grinding or tight clenching of the upper and lower teeth, which leads to several problems such as lesions to the teeth, headaches, orofacial pain and important disorders of the temporomandibular joint. The prototype uses a magnetic field communication scheme similar to low-frequency radio frequency identification (RFID) technology (NFC). The reader generates a low-frequency magnetic field that is used as the information carrier and powers the sensor. The system is notable because it uses an intra-mouth passive sensor and an external interrogator, which remotely records and processes information regarding a patient?s dental activity. This permits a quantitative assessment of bite-force, without requiring intra-mouth batteries, and can provide supplementary information to polysomnographic recordings, current most adequate early diagnostic method, so as to initiate corrective actions before irreversible dental wear appears. In addition to describing the system?s operational principles and the manufacture of personalized prototypes, this report will also demonstrate the feasibility of the system and results from the first in vitro and in vivo trials.

Agent-based modeling and simulation for the design of the future european Air Traffic Management system: the experience of CASSIOPEIA

The SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) program is an ambitious re-search and development initiative to design the future European air traffic man-agement (ATM) system. The study of the behavior of ATM systems using agent-based modeling and simulation tools can help the development of new methods to improve their performance. This paper presents an overview of existing agent-based approaches in air transportation (paying special attention to the challenges that exist for the design of future ATM systems) and, subsequently, describes a new agent-based approach that we proposed in the CASSIOPEIA project, which was developed according to the goals of the SESAR program. In our approach, we use agent models for different ATM stakeholders, and, in contrast to previous work, our solution models new collaborative decision processes for flow traffic management, it uses an intermediate level of abstraction (useful for simulations at larger scales), and was designed to be a practical tool (open and reusable) for the development of different ATM studies. It was successfully applied in three stud-ies related to the design of future ATM systems in Europe.

An agent-based approach for the design of the future european air traffic management system

This paper describes an agent-based approach for the simulation of air traffic management (ATM) in Europe that was designed to help analyze proposals for future ATM systems. This approach is able to represent new collaborative deci-sion processes for flow traffic management, it uses an intermediate level of ab-straction (useful for simulations at larger scales), and was designed to be a practi-cal tool (open and reusable) for the development of different ATM studies. It was successfully applied in three studies related to the design of future ATM systems in Europe.

Building a decision support system with a knowledge modeling tool

Knowledge modeling tools are software tools that follow a modeling approach to help developers in building a knowledge-based system. The purpose of this article is to show the advantages of using this type of tools in the development of complex knowledge-based decision support systems. In order to do so, the article describes the development of a system called SAIDA in the domain of hydrology with the help of the KSM modeling tool. SAIDA operates on real-time receiving data recorded by sensors (rainfall, water levels, flows, etc.). It follows a multi-agent architecture to interpret the data, predict the future behavior and recommend control actions. The system includes an advanced knowledge based architecture with multiple symbolic representation. KSM was especially useful to design and implement the complex knowledge based architecture in an efficient way.

A Propose-and-revise System for Real-time Traffic Management

The aim of this paper is to describe an intelligent system for the problem of real time road traffic control. The purpose of the system is to help traffic engineers in the selection of the state of traffic control devices on real time, using data recorded by traffic detectors on motorways. The system follows an advanced knowledge-based approach that implements an abstract generic problem solving method, called propose-and-revise, which was proposed in Artificial Intelligence, within the knowledge engineering field, as a standard cognitive structure oriented to solve configuration design problems. The paper presents the knowledge model of such a system together with the strategy of inference and describes how it was applied for the case of the M-40 urban ring for the city of Madrid.

Distribution of the coal flow in the mill-duct system of the As Pontes Power Plant using CFD modeling

The efficiency of a Power Plant is affected by the distribution of the pulverized coal within the furnace. The coal, which is pulverized in the mills, is transported and distributed by the primary gas through the mill-ducts to the interior of the furnace. This is done with a double function: dry and enter the coal by different levels for optimizing the combustion in the sense that a complete combustion occurs with homogeneous heat fluxes to the walls. The mill-duct systems of a real Power Plant are very complex and they are not yet well understood. In particular, experimental data concerning the mass flows of coal to the different levels are very difficult to measure. CFD modeling can help to determine them. An Eulerian/Lagrangian approach is used due to the low solid–gas volume ratio.

Advanced system of planning and organization of classes at the university

This document is the result of a process of web development to create a tool that will allow to Cracow University of Technology consult, create and manage timetables. The technologies chosen for this purpose are Apache Tomcat Server, My SQL Community Server, JDBC driver, Java Servlets and JSPs for the server side. The client part counts on Javascript, jQuery, AJAX and CSS technologies to perform the dynamism. The document will justify the choice of these technologies and will explain some development tools that help in the integration and development of all this elements: specifically, NetBeans IDE and MySQL workbench have been used as helpful tools. After explaining all the elements involved in the development of the web application, the architecture and the code developed are explained through UML diagrams. Some implementation details related to security are also deeper explained through sequence diagrams. As the source code of the application is provided, an installation manual has been developed to run the project. In addition, as the platform is intended to be a beta that will be grown, some unimplemented ideas for future development are also exposed. Finally, some annexes with important files and scripts related to the initiation of the platform are attached. This project started through an existing tool that needed to be expanded. The main purpose of the project along its development has focused on setting the roots for a whole new platform that will replace the existing one. For this goal, it has been needed to make a deep inspection on the existing web technologies: a web server and a SQL database had to be chosen. Although the alternatives were a lot, Java technology for the server was finally selected because of the big community backwards, the easiness of modelling the language through UML diagrams and the fact of being free license software. Apache Tomcat is the open source server that can use Java Servlet and JSP technology. Related to the SQL database, MySQL Community Server is the most popular open-source SQL Server, with a big community after and quite a lot of tools to manage the server. JDBC is the driver needed to put in contact Java and MySQL. Once we chose the technologies that would be part of the platform, the development process started. After a detailed explanation of the development environment installation, we used UML use case diagrams to set the main tasks of the platform; UML class diagrams served to establish the existing relations between the classes generated; the architecture of the platform was represented through UML deployment diagrams; and Enhanced entity–relationship (EER) model were used to define the tables of the database and their relationships. Apart from the previous diagrams, some implementation issues were explained to make a better understanding of the developed code - UML sequence diagrams helped to explain this. Once the whole platform was properly defined and developed, the performance of the application has been shown: it has been proved that with the current state of the code, the platform covers the use cases that were set as the main target. Nevertheless, some requisites needed for the proper working of the platform have been specified. As the project is aimed to be grown, some ideas that could not be added to this beta have been explained in order not to be missed for future development. Finally, some annexes containing important configuration issues for the platform have been added after proper explanation, as well as an installation guide that will let a new developer get the project ready. In addition to this document some other files related to the project are provided: - Javadoc. The Javadoc containing the information of every Java class created is necessary for a better understanding of the source code. - database_model.mwb. This file contains the model of the database for MySQL Workbench. This model allows, among other things, generate the MySQL script for the creation of the tables. - ScheduleManager.war. The WAR file that will allow loading the developed application into Tomcat Server without using NetBeans. - ScheduleManager.zip. The source code exported from NetBeans project containing all Java packages, JSPs, Javascript files and CSS files that are part of the platform. - config.properties. The configuration file to properly get the names and credentials to use the database, also explained in Annex II. Example of config.properties file. - db_init_script.sql. The SQL query to initiate the database explained in Annex III. SQL statements for MySQL initialization. RESUMEN. Este proyecto tiene como punto de partida la necesidad de evolución de una herramienta web existente. El propósito principal del proyecto durante su desarrollo se ha centrado en establecer las bases de una completamente nueva plataforma que reemplazará a la existente. Para lograr esto, ha sido necesario realizar una profunda inspección en las tecnologías web existentes: un servidor web y una base de datos SQL debían ser elegidos. Aunque existen muchas alternativas, la tecnología Java ha resultado ser elegida debido a la gran comunidad de desarrolladores que tiene detrás, además de la facilidad que proporciona este lenguaje a la hora de modelarlo usando diagramas UML. Tampoco hay que olvidar que es una tecnología de uso libre de licencia. Apache Tomcat es el servidor de código libre que permite emplear Java Servlets y JSPs para hacer uso de la tecnología de Java. Respecto a la base de datos SQL, el servidor más popular de código libre es MySQL, y cuenta también con una gran comunidad detrás y buenas herramientas de modelado, creación y gestión de la bases de datos. JDBC es el driver que va a permitir comunicar las aplicaciones Java con MySQL. Tras elegir las tecnologías que formarían parte de esta nueva plataforma, el proceso de desarrollo tiene comienzo. Tras una extensa explicación de la instalación del entorno de desarrollo, se han usado diagramas de caso de UML para establecer cuáles son los objetivos principales de la plataforma; los diagramas de clases nos permiten realizar una organización del código java desarrollado de modo que sean fácilmente entendibles las relaciones entre las diferentes clases. La arquitectura de la plataforma queda definida a través de diagramas de despliegue. Por último, diagramas EER van a definir las relaciones entre las tablas creadas en la base de datos. Aparte de estos diagramas, algunos detalles de implementación se van a justificar para tener una mejor comprensión del código desarrollado. Diagramas de secuencia ayudarán en estas explicaciones. Una vez que toda la plataforma haya quedad debidamente definida y desarrollada, se va a realizar una demostración de la misma: se demostrará cómo los objetivos generales han sido alcanzados con el desarrollo actual del proyecto. No obstante, algunos requisitos han sido aclarados para que la plataforma trabaje adecuadamente. Como la intención del proyecto es crecer (no es una versión final), algunas ideas que se han podido llevar acabo han quedado descritas de manera que no se pierdan. Por último, algunos anexos que contienen información importante acerca de la plataforma se han añadido tras la correspondiente explicación de su utilidad, así como una guía de instalación que va a permitir a un nuevo desarrollador tener el proyecto preparado. Junto a este documento, ficheros conteniendo el proyecto desarrollado quedan adjuntos. Estos ficheros son: - Documentación Javadoc. Contiene la información de las clases Java que han sido creadas. - database_model.mwb. Este fichero contiene el modelo de la base de datos para MySQL Workbench. Esto permite, entre otras cosas, generar el script de iniciación de la base de datos para la creación de las tablas. - ScheduleManager.war. El fichero WAR que permite desplegar la plataforma en un servidor Apache Tomcat. - ScheduleManager.zip. El código fuente exportado directamente del proyecto de Netbeans. Contiene todos los paquetes de Java generados, ficheros JSPs, Javascript y CSS que forman parte de la plataforma. - config.properties. Ejemplo del fichero de configuración que permite obtener los nombres de la base de datos - db_init_script.sql. Las consultas SQL necesarias para la creación de la base de datos.