A framework guiding critical thinking through reflective journal documentation: A Middle Eastern experience

The purpose of this paper is to present a framework to guide critical thinking through reflective journaling, and describe how a group of 20 Middle Eastern nurses used reflective journaling to enhance their practice. Journal documentation was used during clinical practicum to foster the development of critical thinking in order to assist nurses when analysing and evaluating their clinical experiences. The findings from this study demonstrated that nurses accepted the framework for journal documentation because it provided structure for reflection, speculation, synthesis and metacognition of events experienced during clinical practice. Journaling gave nurses the opportunity to transfer thoughts onto paper and write down subjective and objective data, and created dialogue between the nurse educators and nurses. They were engaged in productive and positive activity to enhance their nursing practice. Nurses also commented that writing helped to develop their confidence in writing English.

Literacy models across nations : literacy and critical literacy in teacher training programs in India

The thrust towards constructivist learning and critical thinking in the National Curricular Framework (2005) of India implies shifts in pedagogical practices. In this context, drawing on grounded theory, focus group interviews were conducted with 40 preservice teachers to ascertain the contextual situation and the likely outcomes of applying critical literacy across the curriculum. Central themes that emerged in the discussion were: being teacher centred/ learner centred, and conformity/autonomy in teaching and learning. The paper argues that within the present Indian context, while there is scope for changes to pedagogy and learning styles, yet these must be adequately contextualised.

A modified quality control method for manufacturing process in mask industry

Masks are widely used in different industries, for example, traditional metal industry, hospitals or semiconductor industry. Quality is a critical issue in mask industry as it is related to public health and safety. Traditional quality practices for manufacturing process have some limitations in implementing them in mask industries. This paper aims to investigate the suitability of Six Sigma quality control method for the manufacturing process in the mask industry to provide high quality products, enhancing the process capacity, reducing the defects and the returned goods arising in a selected mask manufacturing company. This paper suggests that modifications necessary in Six Sigma method for effective implementation in mask industry.

Metadata aggregation : a critical component of research infrastructure for the future

The development of research data management infrastructure and services and making research data more discoverable and accessible to the research community is a key priority at the national, state and individual university level. This paper will discuss and reflect upon a collaborative project between Griffith University and the Queensland University of Technology to commission a Metadata Hub or Metadata Aggregation service based upon open source software components. It will describe the role that metadata aggregation services play in modern research infrastructure and argue that this role is a critical one.

A novel technique to demonstrate disturbed appetite profiles in haemodialysis patients

Background Malnutrition is common among dialysis patients and is associated with an adverse outcome. One cause of this is a persistent reduction in nutrient intake, suggesting an abnormality of appetite regulation. Methods We used a novel technique to describe the appetite profile in 46 haemodialysis (HD) patients and 40 healthy controls. The Electronic Appetite Rating System (EARS) employs a palmtop computer to collect hourly ratings of motivation to eat and mood. We collected data on hunger, desire to eat, fullness, and tiredness. HD subjects were monitored on the dialysis day and the interdialytic day. Controls were monitored for 1 or 2 days. Results Temporal profiles of motivation to eat for the controls were similar on both days. Temporal profiles of motivation to eat for the HD group were lower on the dialysis day. Mean HD scores were not significantly different from controls. Dietary records indicated that dialysis patients consumed less food than controls. Conclusions Our data indicate that the EARS can be used to monitor subjective appetite states continuously in a group of HD patients. A HD session reduces hunger and desire to eat. Patients feel more tired after dialysis. This does not correlate with their hunger score, but does correlate with their fullness rating. Nutrient intake is reduced, suggesting a resetting of appetite control for the HD group. The EARS may be useful for intervention studies.

The effects of pore architecture in silk fibroin scaffolds on the growth and differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells expressing BMP7

The pore architecture of scaffolds is known to play a critical role in tissue engineering as it provides the vital framework for seeded cells to organize into a functioning tissue. In this report we have investigated the effects of different concentrations of silk fibroin protein on three-dimensional (3D) scaffold pore microstructure. Four pore size ranges of silk fibroin scaffolds were made by the freeze drying technique, with the pore sizes ranging from 50 to 300 lm. The pore sizes of the scaffolds decreased as the concentration of fibroin protein increased. Human bone marrow mesenchymal stromal cells (BMSC) transfected with the BMP7 gene were cultured in these scaffolds. A cell viability colorimetric assay, alkaline phosphatase assay and reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction were performed to analyze the effect of pore size on cell growth, the secretion of extracellular matrix (ECM) and osteogenic differentiation. Cell migration in 3D scaffolds was confirmed by confocal microscopy. Calvarial defects in SCID mice were used to determine the bone forming ability of the silk fibroin scaffolds incorporating BMSC expressing BMP7. The results showed that BMSC expressing BMP7 preferred a pore size between 100 and 300 lm in silk fibroin protein fabricated scaffolds, with better cell proliferation and ECM production. Furthermore, in vivo transplantation of the silk fibroin scaffolds combined with BMSC expressing BMP7 induced new bone formation. This study has shown that an optimized pore architecture of silk fibroin scaffolds can modulate the bioactivity of BMP7-transfected BMSC in bone formation.

Resilience in critical infrastructures : the case of the Queensland electricity industry

The reliability of Critical Infrastructure is considered to be a fundamental expectation of modern societies. These large-scale socio-technical systems have always, due to their complex nature, been faced with threats challenging their ongoing functioning. However, increasing uncertainty in addition to the trend of infrastructure fragmentation has made reliable service provision not only a key organisational goal, but a major continuity challenge: especially given the highly interdependent network conditions that exist both regionally and globally. The notion of resilience as an adaptive capacity supporting infrastructure reliability under conditions of uncertainty and change has emerged as a critical capacity for systems of infrastructure and the organisations responsible for their reliable management. This study explores infrastructure reliability through the lens of resilience from an organisation and system perspective using two recognised resilience-enhancing management practices, High Reliability Theory (HRT) and Business Continuity Management (BCM) to better understand how this phenomenon manifests within a partially fragmented (corporatised) critical infrastructure industry – The Queensland Electricity Industry. The methodological approach involved a single case study design (industry) with embedded sub-units of analysis (organisations), utilising in-depth interviews and document analysis to illicit findings. Derived from detailed assessment of BCM and Reliability-Enhancing characteristics, findings suggest that the industry as a whole exhibits resilient functioning, however this was found to manifest at different levels across the industry and in different combinations. Whilst there were distinct differences in respect to resilient capabilities at the organisational level, differences were less marked at a systems (industry) level, with many common understandings carried over from the pre-corporatised operating environment. These Heritage Factors were central to understanding the systems level cohesion noted in the work. The findings of this study are intended to contribute to a body of knowledge encompassing resilience and high reliability in critical infrastructure industries. The research also has value from a practical perspective, as it suggests a range of opportunities to enhance resilient functioning under increasingly interdependent, networked conditions.

Tracking rail safety : incident and accident investigation in Australia

Scoping Project: Currently no national or structured learning framework available in Aus or NZ Current Project: Develop a national training program & capability framework for rail incident investigators - Establish the potential market demand - Define the curricula for a multi-level national training program - Explore training providers & delivery options

Analysis of distrubances in large interconnected power systems

World economies increasingly demand reliable and economical power supply and distribution. To achieve this aim the majority of power systems are becoming interconnected, with several power utilities supplying the one large network. One problem that occurs in a large interconnected power system is the regular occurrence of system disturbances which can result in the creation of intra-area oscillating modes. These modes can be regarded as the transient responses of the power system to excitation, which are generally characterised as decaying sinusoids. For a power system operating ideally these transient responses would ideally would have a “ring-down” time of 10-15 seconds. Sometimes equipment failures disturb the ideal operation of power systems and oscillating modes with ring-down times greater than 15 seconds arise. The larger settling times associated with such “poorly damped” modes cause substantial power flows between generation nodes, resulting in significant physical stresses on the power distribution system. If these modes are not just poorly damped but “negatively damped”, catastrophic failures of the system can occur. To ensure system stability and security of large power systems, the potentially dangerous oscillating modes generated from disturbances (such as equipment failure) must be quickly identified. The power utility must then apply appropriate damping control strategies. In power system monitoring there exist two facets of critical interest. The first is the estimation of modal parameters for a power system in normal, stable, operation. The second is the rapid detection of any substantial changes to this normal, stable operation (because of equipment breakdown for example). Most work to date has concentrated on the first of these two facets, i.e. on modal parameter estimation. Numerous modal parameter estimation techniques have been proposed and implemented, but all have limitations [1-13]. One of the key limitations of all existing parameter estimation methods is the fact that they require very long data records to provide accurate parameter estimates. This is a particularly significant problem after a sudden detrimental change in damping. One simply cannot afford to wait long enough to collect the large amounts of data required for existing parameter estimators. Motivated by this gap in the current body of knowledge and practice, the research reported in this thesis focuses heavily on rapid detection of changes (i.e. on the second facet mentioned above). This thesis reports on a number of new algorithms which can rapidly flag whether or not there has been a detrimental change to a stable operating system. It will be seen that the new algorithms enable sudden modal changes to be detected within quite short time frames (typically about 1 minute), using data from power systems in normal operation. The new methods reported in this thesis are summarised below. The Energy Based Detector (EBD): The rationale for this method is that the modal disturbance energy is greater for lightly damped modes than it is for heavily damped modes (because the latter decay more rapidly). Sudden changes in modal energy, then, imply sudden changes in modal damping. Because the method relies on data from power systems in normal operation, the modal disturbances are random. Accordingly, the disturbance energy is modelled as a random process (with the parameters of the model being determined from the power system under consideration). A threshold is then set based on the statistical model. The energy method is very simple to implement and is computationally efficient. It is, however, only able to determine whether or not a sudden modal deterioration has occurred; it cannot identify which mode has deteriorated. For this reason the method is particularly well suited to smaller interconnected power systems that involve only a single mode. Optimal Individual Mode Detector (OIMD): As discussed in the previous paragraph, the energy detector can only determine whether or not a change has occurred; it cannot flag which mode is responsible for the deterioration. The OIMD seeks to address this shortcoming. It uses optimal detection theory to test for sudden changes in individual modes. In practice, one can have an OIMD operating for all modes within a system, so that changes in any of the modes can be detected. Like the energy detector, the OIMD is based on a statistical model and a subsequently derived threshold test. The Kalman Innovation Detector (KID): This detector is an alternative to the OIMD. Unlike the OIMD, however, it does not explicitly monitor individual modes. Rather it relies on a key property of a Kalman filter, namely that the Kalman innovation (the difference between the estimated and observed outputs) is white as long as the Kalman filter model is valid. A Kalman filter model is set to represent a particular power system. If some event in the power system (such as equipment failure) causes a sudden change to the power system, the Kalman model will no longer be valid and the innovation will no longer be white. Furthermore, if there is a detrimental system change, the innovation spectrum will display strong peaks in the spectrum at frequency locations associated with changes. Hence the innovation spectrum can be monitored to both set-off an “alarm” when a change occurs and to identify which modal frequency has given rise to the change. The threshold for alarming is based on the simple Chi-Squared PDF for a normalised white noise spectrum [14, 15]. While the method can identify the mode which has deteriorated, it does not necessarily indicate whether there has been a frequency or damping change. The PPM discussed next can monitor frequency changes and so can provide some discrimination in this regard. The Polynomial Phase Method (PPM): In [16] the cubic phase (CP) function was introduced as a tool for revealing frequency related spectral changes. This thesis extends the cubic phase function to a generalised class of polynomial phase functions which can reveal frequency related spectral changes in power systems. A statistical analysis of the technique is performed. When applied to power system analysis, the PPM can provide knowledge of sudden shifts in frequency through both the new frequency estimate and the polynomial phase coefficient information. This knowledge can be then cross-referenced with other detection methods to provide improved detection benchmarks.

Industrial design in endoscopy : the development of a tissue and organ extractor

Throughout history, developments in medicine have aimed to improve patient quality of life, and reduce the trauma associated with surgical treatment. Surgical access to internal organs and bodily structures has been traditionally via large incisions. Endoscopic surgery presents a technique for surgical access via small (1 Omm) incisions by utilising a scope and camera for visualisation of the operative site. Endoscopy presents enormous benefits for patients in terms of lower post operative discomfort, and reduced recovery and hospitalisation time. Since the first gall bladder extraction operation was performed in France in 1987, endoscopic surgery has been embraced by the international medical community. With the adoption of the new technique, new problems never previously encountered in open surgery, were revealed. One such problem is that the removal of large tissue specimens and organs is restricted by the small incision size. Instruments have been developed to address this problem however none of the devices provide a totally satisfactory solution. They have a number of critical weaknesses: -The size of the access incision has to be enlarged, thereby compromising the entire endoscopic approach to surgery. - The physical quality of the specimen extracted is very poor and is not suitable to conduct the necessary post operative pathological examinations. -The safety of both the patient and the physician is jeopardised. The problem of tissue and organ extraction at endoscopy is investigated and addressed. In addition to background information covering endoscopic surgery, this thesis describes the entire approach to the design problem, and the steps taken before arriving at the final solution. This thesis contributes to the body of knowledge associated with the development of endoscopic surgical instruments. A new product capable of extracting large tissue specimens and organs in endoscopy is the final outcome of the research.

Coding speech signals at very low rates (below 1 kb/s) with high intelligibility

This thesis presents an original approach to parametric speech coding at rates below 1 kbitsjsec, primarily for speech storage applications. Essential processes considered in this research encompass efficient characterization of evolutionary configuration of vocal tract to follow phonemic features with high fidelity, representation of speech excitation using minimal parameters with minor degradation in naturalness of synthesized speech, and finally, quantization of resulting parameters at the nominated rates. For encoding speech spectral features, a new method relying on Temporal Decomposition (TD) is developed which efficiently compresses spectral information through interpolation between most steady points over time trajectories of spectral parameters using a new basis function. The compression ratio provided by the method is independent of the updating rate of the feature vectors, hence allows high resolution in tracking significant temporal variations of speech formants with no effect on the spectral data rate. Accordingly, regardless of the quantization technique employed, the method yields a high compression ratio without sacrificing speech intelligibility. Several new techniques for improving performance of the interpolation of spectral parameters through phonetically-based analysis are proposed and implemented in this research, comprising event approximated TD, near-optimal shaping event approximating functions, efficient speech parametrization for TD on the basis of an extensive investigation originally reported in this thesis, and a hierarchical error minimization algorithm for decomposition of feature parameters which significantly reduces the complexity of the interpolation process. Speech excitation in this work is characterized based on a novel Multi-Band Excitation paradigm which accurately determines the harmonic structure in the LPC (linear predictive coding) residual spectra, within individual bands, using the concept 11 of Instantaneous Frequency (IF) estimation in frequency domain. The model yields aneffective two-band approximation to excitation and computes pitch and voicing with high accuracy as well. New methods for interpolative coding of pitch and gain contours are also developed in this thesis. For pitch, relying on the correlation between phonetic evolution and pitch variations during voiced speech segments, TD is employed to interpolate the pitch contour between critical points introduced by event centroids. This compresses pitch contour in the ratio of about 1/10 with negligible error. To approximate gain contour, a set of uniformly-distributed Gaussian event-like functions is used which reduces the amount of gain information to about 1/6 with acceptable accuracy. The thesis also addresses a new quantization method applied to spectral features on the basis of statistical properties and spectral sensitivity of spectral parameters extracted from TD-based analysis. The experimental results show that good quality speech, comparable to that of conventional coders at rates over 2 kbits/sec, can be achieved at rates 650-990 bits/sec.