AMBIGUITIES IN ADSORBATE SITE ASSIGNMENT FROM VIBRATIONAL FREQUENCIES - A TLEED STRUCTURAL STUDY OF (2X1)CO-PD(110)

The structure of the (2 X 1)CO-Pd(110) surface phase has been determined by LEED intensity analysis. The CO molecule is found to be adsorbed in an atop site, tilted by 11-degrees +/- 4-degrees with respect to the surface normal, with a C-O bond length of 1.16 +/- 0.04 angstrom. Interestingly, the C-O vibrational frequency for this system (2003 cm-1) is virtually identical to the frequency observed for the (2 X 1)CO-Ni(110) surface phase (1998 cm-1) which a previous LEED study has shown involves bridge bound CO molecules. The result indicates that care must be taken in assigning site symmetries on the basis of C-O stretching frequencies alone.

Is the multiracial congregation an answer to the problem of race? Comparative perspectives from South Africa and the USAF

This paper uses a comparative perspective to analyze how multiracial congregations may contribute to racial reconciliation in South Africa. Drawing on the large-scale study of multiracial congregations in the USA by Emerson et al., it examines how they help transform antagonistic identities and make religious contributions to wider reconciliation processes. It compares the American research to an ethnographic study of a congregation in Cape Town, identifying cross-national patterns and South African distinctives, such as discourses about restitution, AIDS, inequality and women. The extent that multiracial congregations can contribute to reconciliation in South Africa is linked to the content of their worship and discourses, but especially to their ability to dismantle racially aligned power structures. © Koninklijke Brill NV, 2008.

Tackling the problem of blood culture contamination in the intensive care unit using an educational intervention

Blood culture contamination (BCC) has been associated with unnecessary antibiotic use, additional laboratory tests and increased length of hospital stay thus incurring significant extra hospital costs. We set out to assess the impact of a staff educational intervention programme on decreasing intensive care unit (ICU) BCC rates to <3% (American Society for Microbiology standard). BCC rates during the pre-intervention period (January 2006-May 2011) were compared with the intervention period (June 2011-December 2012) using run chart and regression analysis. Monthly ICU BCC rates during the intervention period were reduced to a mean of 3·7%, compared to 9·5% during the baseline period (P < 0·001) with an estimated potential annual cost savings of about £250 100. The approach used was simple in design, flexible in delivery and efficient in outcomes, and may encourage its translation into clinical practice in different healthcare settings.

"Should I prioritize medical problem solving or attentive listening?": the dilemmas and challenges that medical students experience when learning to conduct consultations

Objective: Communication skills can be trained alongside clinical reasoning, history taking or clinical examination skills. This is advocated as a solution to the low transfer of communication skills. Still, students have to integrate the knowledge/skills acquired during different curriculum parts in patient consultations at some point. How do medical students experience these integrated consultations within a simulated environment and in real practice when dealing with responsibility?

Methods: Six focus groups were conducted with (pre-)/clerkship students.

Results: Students were motivated to practice integrated consultations with simulated patients and felt like 'real physicians'. However, their focus on medical problem solving drew attention away from improving their communication skills. Responsibility for real patients triggered students' identity development. This identity formation guided the development of an own consultation style, a process that was hampered by conflicting demands of role models.

Conclusion: Practicing complete consultations results in the dilemma of prioritizing medical problem solving above attention for patient communication. Integrated consultation training advances this dilemma to the pre-clerkship period. During clerkships this dilemma is heightened because real patients trigger empathy and responsibility, which invites students to define their role as doctor.

Practice Implications: When training integrated consultations, educators should pay attention to students' learning priorities and support the development of students' professional identity.

‘The Problem of the Future in Nineteenth-Century Spain’

This article examines the problems and paradoxes in the representation of the future in three nineteenth-century Spanish works: El futuro Madrid (1868) by Fernández de los Ríos, ‘Madrid en el siglo xxi’ (1847) by Neira de Mosquera, and Ni en la vida ni en la muerte by Juan Bautista Amorós (Silverio Lanza). While these texts demonstrate Spain’s participation in the general movement towards using the future as a setting for literary works, they do not corroborate the theory that the nineteenth century was a time of optimism and belief in the doctrine of Progress. Concepts derived from discussions of the future in the history of ideas, such as historia magistra vitae, are shown to be relevant to discussion of these futuristic fictions, in sometimes unexpected ways.

Query Suggestions for Textual Problem Solution Repositories

Textual problem-solution repositories are available today in
various forms, most commonly as problem-solution pairs from community
question answering systems. Modern search engines that operate on
the web can suggest possible completions in real-time for users as they
type in queries. We study the problem of generating intelligent query
suggestions for users of customized search systems that enable querying
over problem-solution repositories. Due to the small scale and specialized
nature of such systems, we often do not have the luxury of depending on
query logs for finding query suggestions. We propose a retrieval model
for generating query suggestions for search on a set of problem solution
pairs. We harness the problem solution partition inherent in such
repositories to improve upon traditional query suggestion mechanisms
designed for systems that search over general textual corpora. We evaluate
our technique over real problem-solution datasets and illustrate that
our technique provides large and statistically significant

Old Town Glasgow: Squalor, Agitation and City Improvements

In 1862, Glasgow Corporation initiated the first of a series of three legislative acts which would become known collectively as the City Improvements Acts. Despite having some influence on the nature of the built fabric on the expanding city as a whole, the most extensive consequences of these acts was reserved for one specific area of the city, the remnants of the medieval Old Town. As the city had expanded towards all points of the compass in a regular, grid-iron structure throughout the nineteenth century, the Old Town remained singularly as a densely wrought fabric of medieval wynds, vennels, oblique passageways and accelerated tenementalisation. Here, as the rest of the city began to assume the form of an ordered entity, visible and classifiable, one could still find and addresses such as ‘Bridgegate, No. 29, backland, stair first left, three up, right lobby, door facing’ (quoted in Pacione, 1995).

Unsurprisingly, this place, where proximity to the midden (dung-heap) was considered an enviable position, was seen by the authorities as a major health hazard and a source not only of cholera, but also of the more alarming typhoid epidemic of 1842. Accordingly, the demolitions which occurred in the backlands of the Old Town under the first of the acts, the Glasgow Police Act of 1862, were justified on health and medical grounds. But disease was not the only social problem thought to issue from this district. Reports from social reformers including Fredrick Engels suggested that the decay of the area’s physical fabric could be extended to the moral profile of its inhabitants. This was in such a state of degeneracy that there were calls for a nearby military barracks to be relocated to more salubrious climes because troops were routinely coming into contact ‘with the most dissolute and profligate portion of the population’ (Peter Clonston, Lord Provost, June 1861). Perhaps more worrying for the city fathers, however, was that the barracks’ arsenal was seen as a potential source of arms for the militant and often illegal cotton workers’ unions and organisations who inhabited the Old Town as well as the districts to the east. In fact, the Old Town and East End had been the site of numerous working class actions and riots since 1787, including a strike of 60,000 workers in 1820, 100,000 in 1838, and the so-called Bread Riots of 1848 where shouts of ‘Vive La Revolution’ were reported in the Gallowgate.

The events in Paris in 1848 precipitated Baron Hausmann’s interventions into that city. The boulevards were in turn visited by members of Glasgow Corporation and ultimately, it can be argued, provided an example for Old Town Glasgow. This paper suggests that the city improvement acts carried a similarly complex and pervasive agenda, one which embodied not only health, class conflict and sexual morality but also the more local condition of sectarianism. And, like in Paris, these were played out spatially in a extensive reconfiguration of the urban fabric of the Old Town which, through the creation of new streets and a railway yard, not only made it more amenable to large scale military manoeuvres but also, opened up the area to capitalist accumulation. By the end of the works, the medieval heritage of the Old Town had been almost completely razed, the working class and Catholic East End had, through the insertion of the railway yard, been isolated from the city centre and approximately 70,000 people had been made homeless.