Utility in Willingness to Pay Space: A Tool to Address Confounding Random Scale Effects in Destination Choice to the Alps

We compare two approaches for estimating the distribution of consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) in discrete choice models. The usual procedure is to estimate the distribution of the utility coefficients and then derive the distribution of WTP, which is the ratio of coefficients. The alternative is to estimate the distribution of WTP directly. We apply both approaches to data on site choice in the Alps. We find that the alternative approach fits the data better, reduces the incidence of exceedingly large estimated WTP values, and provides the analyst with greater control in specifying and testing the distribution of WTP. © 2008 Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.

Social work education and political conflict: preparing students to address the needs of victims and survivors of the Troubles in Northern Ireland

This paper reports on the evaluation of a European PEACE III sponsored teaching and learning project that was designed to enable social work students to better understand the needs of victims and survivors of the conflict in Northern Ireland. The paper begins with an introduction to policy, practice and educational contexts before reviewing the literature on social work, conflict and trauma. It also summarises key, innovative pedagogical approaches used in the teaching, including the use of ground rules, teaching teams consisting of lecturer and service user dyads, learning exercises and case studies. The paper then explains the evaluation methodology. This involved two surveys which returned 144 student and 34 practice teacher questionnaires. The findings revealed that
students were generally committed to this form of teaching and engagement with victims and survivors of the conflict, although some students reported that their attitudes towards this subject had were not changed. Some students also discussed how the conflict had affected their lives and the lives of families and friends; it is argued that such biographical details are crucial in developing new pedagogical approaches in this area.
Practice teachers who supervised some of these students on placement reported general levels of satisfaction with preparedness to work with conflict related situations but were less convinced that organisations were so committed. The paper concludes with a discussion of the study limitations and a recommendation for more robust methods of teaching and evaluation in this area of social work education and practice.

Hybrid address spaces: A methodology for implementing scalable high-level programming models on non-coherent many-core architectures

This paper introduces hybrid address spaces as a fundamental design methodology for implementing scalable runtime systems on many-core architectures without hardware support for cache coherence. We use hybrid address spaces for an implementation of MapReduce, a programming model for large-scale data processing, and the implementation of a remote memory access (RMA) model. Both implementations are available on the Intel SCC and are portable to similar architectures. We present the design and implementation of HyMR, a MapReduce runtime system whereby different stages and the synchronization operations between them alternate between a distributed memory address space and a shared memory address space, to improve performance and scalability. We compare HyMR to a reference implementation and we find that HyMR improves performance by a factor of 1.71× over a set of representative MapReduce benchmarks. We also compare HyMR with Phoenix++, a state-of-art implementation for systems with hardware-managed cache coherence in terms of scalability and sustained to peak data processing bandwidth, where HyMR demon- strates improvements of a factor of 3.1× and 3.2× respectively. We further evaluate our hybrid remote memory access (HyRMA) programming model and assess its performance to be superior of that of message passing.

A systematic review of midwife led interventions to address post traumatic stress syndrome

Objective
to systematically identify interventions that midwives could introduce to address post-traumatic stress in women following childbirth.

Methods
a search strategy was developed and relevant papers were identified from databases including Cinahl, Cochrane Library, EMBASE, Maternity and Infant Care, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and Web of Science. Key search terms used were post-traumatic stress, post partum, intervention, controlled trial and review. Papers eligible for inclusion were primary studies and reviews of research published from 2002–2012, focusing on interventions which could be implemented by midwives for the prevention and/or management of PTSD. For primary studies, RCTs, controlled clinical trials, and cohort studies with a control group were eligible. Eligible reviews were those with a specified search strategy and inclusion/exclusion criteria. Methodological quality was assessed using recognised frameworks.

Findings
six primary studies and eight reviews were eligible for inclusion. The majority of included studies or reviews focused on debriefing and/or counselling interventions; however the results were not consistent due to significant variation in methodological quality and use of dissimilar interventions. Two of the reviews considered the general management of post partum PTSD and one broadly covered anxiety during pregnancy and the post partum, incorporating a section on PTSD. The majority of women reported that the opportunity to discuss their childbirth experience was subjectively beneficial.

Conclusions and implications for practice
no evidence-based midwifery interventions were identified from this systematic review that can be recommended for introduction into practice to address PTSD. It is recommended that future research in this area should incorporate standardised interventions with similar outcome measures to facilitate synthesis of results. Further research on interventions used in non-maternity populations is needed in order to confirm their usefulness in addressing post partum PTSD.

A systematic review of midwife-led interventions to address post partum post-traumatic stress

An Improvement of IP Address Lookup based on Rule Filter Analysis

Multi-bit trie is a popular approach performing the longest prefix matching for packet classification. However, it requires a long lookup time and inefficiently consumes memory space. This paper presents an in-depth study of different variations of multi-bit trie for IP address lookup. Our main aim is to study a method of data structure which reduces memory space. The proposed approach has been implemented using the label method in two approaches. Both methods present better results regarding lookup speed, update time and memory bit consumptions.

NEOShield: An European Project to Address Impact Hazard Mitigation Issues

The European Union NEOShield project is desribed.The primary aim of the project is to investigate in detail the three most promising mitigation techniques: the kinetic impactor, blast deflection, and the gravity tractor, and devise feasible demonstration missions.

An evaluation of a tiered interrelated intervention to address hazardous/ harmful drinking

In Northern Ireland, alcohol misuse impacts negatively on individual drinkers, families and communities. The ‘Alcohol and You Project’ in the South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust is a funded project providing a range of inter-related services with the Trust and alcohol/drug misuse charities. It includes a self-help interactive website, brief intervention drop in clinics and counseling services. Queen's University Belfast is evaluating the effectiveness of the project to reduce hazardous/ harmful drinking.