Understanding the information dynamics of medication administration in residential aged care facilities (RACFs): A prerequisite for design of effective ICT systems

Medication information is a critical part of the information required to ensure residents' safety in the highly collaborative care context of RACFs. Studies report poor medication information as a barrier to improve medication management in RACFs. Research exploring medication work practices in aged care settings remains limited. This study aimed to identify contextual and work practice factors contributing to breakdowns in medication information exchange in RACFs in relation to the medication administration process. We employed non-participant observations and semi-structured interviews to explore information practices in three Australian RACFs. Findings identified inefficiencies due to lack of information timeliness, manual stock management, multiple data transcriptions, inadequate design of essential documents such as administration sheets and a reliance on manual auditing procedures. Technological solutions such as electronic medication administration records offer opportunities to overcome some of the identified problems. However these interventions need to be designed to align with the collaborative team based processes they intend to support.

With the best of intentions: A critical discourse analysis of HPE curriculum materials

Much of physical education curriculum in the developed world and specifically in Australia tends to be guided in principle by syllabus documents that represent, in varying degrees, some form of government education priorities. Through the use of critical discourse analysis we analyze one such syllabus example (an official syllabus document of one of the Australian States) to explore the relationships between the emancipatory/social justice expectations presented in the rubric of and introduction to the official syllabus document, and the language details of learning outcomes that indicate how the expectations might be satisfied. Given the complexity and multilevel pathways of message systems/ideologies we question the efficacy of such documents oriented around social justice principles to genuinely deliver more radical agendas which promote social change and encourage a preparedness to engage in social action leading to a betterment of society.

Neighborhood Shopkeepers in Contemporary South Korea: Household, Work, and Locality

This is an ethnographic study of the lived worlds of the keepers of small shops in a residential neighborhood in Seoul, South Korea. It outlines, discusses, and analyses the categories and conceptualizations of South Korean capitalism at the level of households, neighborhoods, and Korean society. These cultural categories were investigated through the neighborhood shopkeepers practices of work and reciprocal interaction as well as through the shopkeepers articulations of their lived experience. In South Korea, the keepers of small businesses have continued to be a large occupational category despite of societal and economic changes, occupying approximately one fourth of the population in active work force. In spite of that, these people, their livelihoods and their cultural and social worlds have rarely been in the focus of social science inquiry. The ethnographic field research for this study was conducted during a 14-month period between November 1998 and December 1999 and in three subsequent short visits to Korea and to the research neighborhood. The fieldwork was conducted during the aftermath of the Asian currency crisis, colloquially termed at the time as the IMF crisis, which highlighted the social and cultural circumstances of small businesskeeper in a specific way. The livelihoods of small-scale entrepreneurs became even more precarious than before; self-employment became an involuntary choice for many middle-class salaried employees who were laid off; and the cultural categories and concepts of society and economy South Korean capitalism were articulated more sharply than before. This study begins with an overview of the contemporary setting, the Korean society under the socially and economically painful outcomes of the economic crisis, and continues with an overview of relevant literature. After introducing the research area and the informants, I discuss the Korean notion of neighborhood, which incorporates both the notions of culturally valued Koreanness and deficiency in the sense of modernity and development. This study further analyses the ways in which the businesskeepers appropriate and reproduce the Korean ideas of men s and women s gender roles and spheres of work. As the appropriation of children s labor is conditional to intergenerational family trajectories which aim not to reproduce parents occupational status but to gain entry to salaried occupations via educational credentials, the work of a married couple is the most common organization of work in small businesses, to which the Korean ideas of family and kin continuity are not applied. While the lack of generational businesskeeping succession suggests that the proprietors mainly subscribe to the notions of familial status that emanate from the practices of the white-collar middle class, the cases of certain women shopkeepers show that their proprietorship and the ensuing economic standing in the family prompts and invites inversed interpretations and uses of common cultural notions of gender. After discussing and analyzing the concept of money and the cultural categorization of leisure and work, topics that emerged as very significant in the lived world of the shopkeepers, this study charts and analyses the categories of identification which the shopkeepers employ for their cultural and social locations and identities. Particular attention is paid to the idea of ordinary people (seomin), which shopkeepers are commonly considered to be most representative of, and which also sums up the ambivalence of neighborhood shopkeepers as a social category: they are not committed to familial reproduction and continuity of the business but aspire non-entrepreneurial careers for their children, while they occupy a significant position in the elaborations of culturally valued notions and ideologies defining Koreanness such as warmheartedness and sociability.

Residential Differentiation, Housing Policy and Urban Planning in the Transformation from State Socialism to a Market Economy: The Case of Tallinn

The thesis examines urban issues arising from the transformation from state socialism to a market economy. The main topics are residential differentiation, i.e., uneven spatial distribution of social groups across urban residential areas, and the effects of housing policy and town planning on urban development. The case study is development in Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, in the context of development of Central and Eastern European cities under and after socialism. The main body of the thesis consists of four separately published refereed articles. The research question that brings the articles together is how the residential (socio-spatial) pattern of cities developed during the state socialist period and how and why that pattern has changed since the transformation to a market economy began. The first article reviews the literature on residential differentiation in Budapest, Prague, Tallinn and Warsaw under state socialism from the viewpoint of the role of housing policy in the processes of residential differentiation at various stages of the socialist era. The paper shows how the socialist housing provision system produced socio-occupational residential differentiation directly and indirectly and it describes how the residential patterns of these cities developed. The second article is critical of oversimplified accounts of rapid reorganisation of the overall socio-spatial pattern of post-socialist cities and of claims that residential mobility has had a straightforward role in it. The Tallinn case study, consisting of an analysis of the distribution of socio-economic groups across eight city districts and over four housing types in 1999 as well as examining the role of residential mobility in differentiation during the 1990s, provides contrasting evidence. The third article analyses the role and effects of housing policies in Tallinn s residential differentiation. The focus is on contemporary post-privatisation housing-policy measures and their effects. The article shows that the Estonian housing policies do not even aim to reduce, prevent or slow down the harmful effects of the considerable income disparities that are manifest in housing inequality and residential differentiation. The fourth article examines the development of Tallinn s urban planning system 1991-2004 from the viewpoint of what means it has provided the city with to intervene in urban development and how the city has used these tools. The paper finds that despite some recent progress in planning, its role in guiding where and how the city actually developed has so far been limited. Tallinn s urban development is rather initiated and driven by private agents seeking profit from their investment in land. The thesis includes original empirical research in the three articles that analyse development since socialism. The second article employs quantitative data and methods, primarily index calculation, whereas the third and the fourth ones draw from a survey of policy documents combined with interviews with key informants. Keywords: residential differentiation, housing policy, urban planning, post-socialist transformation, Estonia, Tallinn

Transfers of Family Businesses to Non-Family Buyers - The Selling Business Family Perspective

This study focuses on business families and how they handle transitions such as business transfers. It also tries to shift the balance of research away from successions and towards business transfers as a key topic for family business researchers. In addition, it contributes to the family business research field by further highlighting the importance of the various different contributions in the family business from business family members other than the entrepreneurial founder. Based on interviews with both business family members and business brokers, it appears as important for business families who are selling their family business that it is managed in a similar way in the future regardless of the shift in ownership and management. It is also important that the employees can stay with the business. However, employees are seldom regarded as potential buyers of the family business; most preferably, from the point of view of business family members, this should be somebody who is similar to themselves. Business transfers can be lengthy processes, but once the family business is sold, previous owners most often want to leave the family business. This disengagement can be difficult for business family members if they have not managed to build up some other identity outside the family business environment. Money may compensate for the loss in the short run, but something else is needed in the long run, since the management of money is usually not perceived as that interesting. A family business transfer can have great influence on the members of the business family who is selling, and therefore it is suggested that personal due diligence could be of some help when planning the transfer. That tool can help business family members to analyse their own personal situation, but it may also make it easier to understand how the other business family members feel about the forthcoming change. Everyone is influenced in different ways during a family business transfer, and awareness of this fact may make it easier for the whole business family to adjust to their new environment.

The Biopolitics of Gender

This dissertation inquires into the relationship between gender and biopolitics. Biopolitics, according to Michel Foucault, is the mode of politics that is situated and exercised at the level of life. The dissertation claims that gender is a technology of biopower specific to the optimisation of the sexual reproduction of human life, deployed through the scientific and governmental problematisation of declining fertility rates in the mid-twentieth century. Just as Michel Foucault claimed that sexuality became a scientific and political discourse in the nineteenth century, gender has also since emerged in these fields. In this dissertation, gender is treated as neither a representation of sex nor a cultural construct or category of identity. Rather, a genealogy of gender as an apparatus of biopower in conducted. It demonstrates how scientific and theoretical developments in the twentieth century marshalled gender into the sex/sexuality apparatus as a new technology of liberal biopower. Gender, I argue, has become necessary for the Western liberal order to recapture and re-optimise the life-producing functions of sex that reproduce the very object of biopolitics: life. The concept of the life function is introduced to analyse the life-producing violence of the sex/sexuality/gender apparatus. To do this, the thesis rereads the work of Michel Foucault through Gilles Deleuze for a deeper grasp of the material strategies of biopower and how it produces categories of difference and divides population according to them. The work of Judith Butler, in turn, is used as a foil against which to rearticulate the question of how to examine gender genealogically and biopolitically. The dissertation then executes a genealogy of gender, tracing the changing rationalities of sex/sexuality/gender from early feminist thought, through mid-twentieth century sexological, feminist, and demographic research, to current EU policy. According to this genealogy, in the mid-twentieth century demographers perceived that sexuality/sex, which Foucault observed as the life-producing biopolitical apparatus, was no longer sufficiently disciplining human bodies to reproduce. The life function was escaping the grasp of biopower. The analysis demonstrates how gender theory was taken up as a means of reterritorialising the life function: nature would be disciplined to reproduce by controlling culture. The crucial theoretical and genealogical argument of the thesis, that gender is a discourse with biopolitical foundations and a technology of biopower, radically challenges the premises of gender theory and feminist politics, as well as the emancipatory potential often granted to the gender concept. The project asks what gender means, what biopolitical function it performs, and what is at stake for feminist politics when it engages with it. In so doing, it identifies biopolitics and the problem of life as possibly the most urgent arena for feminist politics today.

Determination of rational strategies for players in two-target games

This paper addresses some of the basic issues involved in the determination of rational strategies for players in two-target games. We show that unlike single-target games where the task of role assignment and selection of strategies is conceptually straightforward, in two-target games, many factors like the preference ordering of outcomes by players, the relative configuration of the target sets and secured outcome regions, the uncertainty about the parameters of the game, etc., also influence the rational selection of strategies by players. The importance of these issues is illustrated through appropriate examples.

Optimal blood glucose regulation of diabetic patients using single network adaptive critics

Diabetes is a long-term disease during which the body's production and use of insulin are impaired, causing glucose concentration level to increase in the bloodstream. Regulating blood glucose levels as close to normal as possible leads to a substantial decrease in long-term complications of diabetes. In this paper, an intelligent online feedback-treatment strategy is presented for the control of blood glucose levels in diabetic patients using single network adaptive critic (SNAC) neural networks (which is based on nonlinear optimal control theory). A recently developed mathematical model of the nonlinear dynamics of glucose and insulin interaction in the blood system has been revised and considered for synthesizing the neural network for feedback control. The idea is to replicate the function of pancreatic insulin, i.e. to have a fairly continuous measurement of blood glucose and a situation-dependent insulin injection to the body using an external device. Detailed studies are carried out to analyze the effectiveness of this adaptive critic-based feedback medication strategy. A comparison study with linear quadratic regulator (LQR) theory shows that the proposed nonlinear approach offers some important advantages such as quicker response, avoidance of hypoglycemia problems, etc. Robustness of the proposed approach is also demonstrated from a large number of simulations considering random initial conditions and parametric uncertainties. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Comparative-Study of Photonic Switching architectures

The basic photonic switching elements of practical importance are outlined. A detailed comparative study of photonic switching architectures is presented both for guided wave fabrics and free-space fabrics. The required equations for comparative study are obtained, after considering the parameters like bend losses, effects of waveguide crossings, etc. The potential areas of application of photonic switching are pointed out.

Present status of Gottigere Tank : Indicator of Decision maker’s apathy

Gottigere lake with a water spread area of about 14.98 ha is located in the Bellandur Lake catchment of the South Pennar River basin. In recent years, this lake catchment has been subjected to environmental stress mainly due to the rampant unplanned developmental activities in the catchment. The functional ability of the ecosystem is impaired due to structural changes in the ecosystem. This is evident from poor water quality, breeding of disease vectors, contamination of groundwater in the catchment, frequent flooding in the catchment due to topography alteration, decline in groundwater table, erosion in lake bed, etc. The development plans of the region (current as well as the proposed) ignore the integrated planning approaches considering all components of the ecosystem. Serious threats to the sustainability of the region due to lack of holistic approaches in aquatic resources management are land use changes (removal of vegetation cover, etc.), point and non-point sources of pollution impairing water quality, dumping of solid waste (building waste, etc.). Conservation of lake ecosystem is possible only when the physical and chemical integrity of its catchment is maintained. Alteration in the catchment either due to land use changes (leading to paved surface area from vegetation cover), alteration in topography, construction of roads in the immediate vicinity are detrimental to water yield in the catchment and hence, the sustenance of the lake. Open spaces in the form of lakes and parks aid as kidney and lung in an urban ecosystem, which maintain the health of the people residing in the locality. Identification of core buffer zones and conservation of buffer zones (500 to 1000 m from shore) is to be taken up on priority for conservation and sustainable management of Bangalore lakes. Bangalore is located over a ridge delineating four watersheds, viz. Hebbal, Koramangala, Challaghatta and Vrishabhavathi. Lakes and tanks are an integral part of natural drainage and help in retaining water during rainfall, which otherwise get drained off as flash floods. Each lake harvests rainwater from its catchment and surplus flows downstream spilling into the next lake in the chain. The topography of Bangalore has uniquely supported the creation of a large number of lakes. These lakes form chains, being a series of impoundments across streams. This emphasises the interconnectivity among Bangalore lakes, which has to be retained to prevent Bangalore from flooding or from water scarcity. The main source of replenishment of groundwater is the rainfall. The slope of the terrain allows most of the rainwater to flow as run-off. With the steep gradients available in the major valleys of Bangalore, the rainwater will flow out of the city within four to five hours. Only a small fraction of the rainwater infiltrates into the soil. The infiltration of water into the subsoil has declined with more and more buildings and paved road being constructed in the city. Thus the natural drainage of Bangalore is governed by flows from the central ridge to all lower contours and is connected with various tanks and ponds. There are no major rivers flowing in Bangalore and there is an urgent need to sustain these vital ecosystems through proper conservation and management measures. The proposed peripheral ring road connecting Hosur Road (NH 7) and Mysore Road (SH 17) at Gottigere lake falls within the buffer zone of the lake. This would alter the catchment integrity and hence water yield affecting flora, fauna and local people, and ultimately lead to the disappearance of Gottigere lake. Developmental activities in lake catchments, which has altered lake’s ecological integrity is in violation of the Indian Fisheries Act – 1857, the Indian Forest Act – 1927, Wildlife (Protection) Act – 1972, Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act – 1974, Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act – 1977, Forest (Conservation Act) – 1980, Environmental (Protection) Act – 1986, Wildlife (Protection) Amendment Act – 1991 and National Conservation Strategy and Policy Statement on Environment and Development – 1992. Considering 65% decline of waterbodies in Bangalore (during last three decades), decision makers should immediately take preventive measures to ensure that lake ecosystems are not affected. This report discusses the impacts due to the proposed infrastructure developmental activities in the vicinity of Gottigere tank.

A comparison of three methods for downscaling daily precipitation in the Punjab region

Many downscaling techniques have been developed in the past few years for projection of station-scale hydrological variables from large-scale atmospheric variables simulated by general circulation models (GCMs) to assess the hydrological impacts of climate change. This article compares the performances of three downscaling methods, viz. conditional random field (CRF), K-nearest neighbour (KNN) and support vector machine (SVM) methods in downscaling precipitation in the Punjab region of India, belonging to the monsoon regime. The CRF model is a recently developed method for downscaling hydrological variables in a probabilistic framework, while the SVM model is a popular machine learning tool useful in terms of its ability to generalize and capture nonlinear relationships between predictors and predictand. The KNN model is an analogue-type method that queries days similar to a given feature vector from the training data and classifies future days by random sampling from a weighted set of K closest training examples. The models are applied for downscaling monsoon (June to September) daily precipitation at six locations in Punjab. Model performances with respect to reproduction of various statistics such as dry and wet spell length distributions, daily rainfall distribution, and intersite correlations are examined. It is found that the CRF and KNN models perform slightly better than the SVM model in reproducing most daily rainfall statistics. These models are then used to project future precipitation at the six locations. Output from the Canadian global climate model (CGCM3) GCM for three scenarios, viz. A1B, A2, and B1 is used for projection of future precipitation. The projections show a change in probability density functions of daily rainfall amount and changes in the wet and dry spell distributions of daily precipitation. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Some characteristics of tropical lightning

An integrated and generalized account of the characteristics of lightning flashes observed in the tropics is presented, along with features of tropical lightning which differ from flashes at other latitudes. Several years of lightning recordings were made at two locations in India by using the electromagnetic radiation of the flash in a suitable radio band. The distances of thunder audibility, the number of thunders/hr, the peak flash rate, the flash duration, the time interval between flashes, the duration of flashing activity of a cloud, the number of cells in the lifetime of the cloud, etc. were all found to follow log-normal distributions. Fewer cells were observed to occur in temperate regions, and thunder was found to be associated with ground flashes only.

Vegetative phenology of tropical montane forests in the Nilgiris, South India

Spatial and temporal variation in foliar phenology plays a significant role in growth and reproduction of a plant species. Foliar phenology is strongly influenced by environmental factors such as rainfall. A study on phenology of tropical montane forests was undertaken in three different forest patches of the Nilgiri Mountains in peninsular India above 2000 meters ASL. Since August 2000, 500 trees belonging to 70 species of angiosperms were monitored for both vegetative and reproductive phenologies on a monthly basis. Climate data were collected from nearby weather stations. This paper reports results of the study from August 2000 - August 2003 on foliar phenology. Non-parametric correlations and multiple regressions were performed to analyse the influence of environmental factors such as rainfall, temperature and sunshine on foliar phenology. It was found that moisture related factors had a negative influence on the leaf initiation. Circular statistical analyses were performed to understand the seasonality in different phenophases of foliar phenology. Different phenophases of leafing were not significantly seasonal. Results are discussed and compared among three different forest patches on the Nilgiri plateau and also with other montane forest patches across the globe.

Extracting Three Dimensional Surface Model of Human Kidney from the Visible Human Data Set using Free Software

Three dimensional digital model of a representative human kidney is needed for a surgical simulator that is capable of simulating a laparoscopic surgery involving kidney. Buying a three dimensional computer model of a representative human kidney, or reconstructing a human kidney from an image sequence using commercial software, both involve (sometimes significant amount of) money. In this paper, author has shown that one can obtain a three dimensional surface model of human kidney by making use of images from the Visible Human Data Set and a few free software packages (ImageJ, ITK-SNAP, and MeshLab in particular). Images from the Visible Human Data Set, and the software packages used here, both do not cost anything. Hence, the practice of extracting the geometry of a representative human kidney for free, as illustrated in the present work, could be a free alternative to the use of expensive commercial software or to the purchase of a digital model.

Design of corona control rings for EHV/UHV line hardwares and substations

The components of EHV/UHV lines and substations can produce significant corona. To limit the consequent Radio Interference and Audible Noise on these systems, suitable corona control rings are employed. The shapes of these rings could vary from circular to rectangular with smooth bends. Many manufacturers seem to adopt trial and error method for arriving at the final design. As such neither the present testing standard nor the final design adopted consider the practical scenario like corona produced by deposition of dirt, bird droppings, etc. The present work aims to make a first step in addressing this practically important problem. This requires an accurate evaluation of the electric field and a reliable method for the evaluation of corona inception. Based on a thorough survey of pertinent literature, the critical avalanche criteria as applicable to large electrodes, has been adopted. Taking the rain drop on the surface as the biggest protrusion, conducting protrusions modeled as semi-ellipsoid is considered as representative for deposition of dust or the boundary of bird droppings etc. Through examples of 4 00 kV and 765 kV class toroidal corona rings, the proposed method is demonstrated. This work is believed to be useful to corona ring manufacturers for EHV/UHV systems.