Ethical climate in a Belgian psychiatric inpatient setting: relation with burnout and engagement in psychiatric nurses

Research suggests a relation between the ethical climate – that is, the organisational conditions and practices that affect the way ethical issues with regard to patient care are discussed and decided - and job satisfaction of nurses. Yet no study to date has investigated the relationship between ethical climate and job satisfaction in psychiatric nurses. This study aimed to address this critical gap in our knowledge by investigating the relationships among ethical climate and features of both burnout and engagement based on the Job Demands-Resources Model (JD - R model) in a large cross-sectional study of 265 nurses working in a large psychiatric inpatient hospital in Flanders, Belgium. Correlational and multiple hierarchical regression analyses were used to investigate the relationship between ethical climate, burnout and engagement. In addition, based on the JD-R model, we also investigated whether engagement mediated the relationship between ethical climate on the one hand and job satisfaction and turnover intention on the other and whether ethical climate moderated the relationship between emotional burden and burnout. Results showed that a positive ethical climate was related to lower levels of emotional exhaustion and distancing and higher levels of engagement and job satisfaction. Furthermore, although ethical climate did not buffer against the effects of emotional burden on burnout, higher levels of engagement explained in part the relationship between ethical climate and job satisfaction

A Practical Fast Acting Control Scheme For Fuzzy Logic-Based Voltage Stabilization Control

This paper presents a simplified control model for stabilizing a load voltage using a switched reactor in parallel with a fixed capacitor of static VAR compensator. Two IGBT’s are used to control the reactance of the switched reactor. A uniform pulse width modulation is used for controlling the two switches. The compensator has a simple control circuit and structure. A complete modeling and numerical simulation for the proposed systems is presented. A high speed Digital Signal Processor is used for implementing proportional-integral (PI) and fuzzy load voltage controllers. Experimental results indicate the superiority of fuzzy logic control over the conventional proportional-integral control method. Simulation results are reported and proved to be in good agreement with the relevant experimental results

Niche complementarity and facilitation drive positive diversity effects on biomass production in experimental benthic diatom biofilms

Up to now, relatively few diversity-production experiments have been performed using microorganisms. Benthic diatom communities from estuarine intertidal mudflats are especially interesting for this purpose as they are relatively species poor and are thus more easy to simulate in laboratory conditions. We studied the effect of diversity on biomass production during microcosm experiments with diatoms assembled in combinations of up to eight species. Our results demonstrate a highly positive effect of biodiversity on production, with transgressive overyielding occurring in more than half of the combinations. These strong positive diversity effects could largely be attributed to positive complementarity effects (covering both niche complementarity and facilitation), although negative selection effects effects at higher diversities. We found a significant positive relation between functional diversity and the net biodiversity effects, indicating niche complementarity. In addition, we provide one of the first mechanistic evidences for facilitation by which biodiversity can enhance ecosystem functioning. This was demonstrated by the improved growth of Cylindrotheca closterium after addition of spent medium obtained from other diatom species. The stimulated growth of C. closterium was explained by a shift to mixotrophic growth with a down-regulation of the photosynthetic apparatus

Physiological and transcriptomic evidence for a close coupling between chloroplast ontogeny and cell cycle progression in the pennate diatom Seminavis robusta

Despite the growing interest in diatom genomics, detailed time series of gene expression in relation to key cellular processes are still lacking. Here, we investigated the relationships between the cell cycle and chloroplast development in the pennate diatom Seminavis robusta. This diatom possesses two chloroplasts with a well-orchestrated developmental cycle, common to many pennate diatoms. By assessing the effects of induced cell cycle arrest with microscopy and flow cytometry, we found that division and reorganization of the chloroplasts are initiated only after S-phase progression. Next, we quantified the expression of the S. robusta FtsZ homolog to address the division status of chloroplasts during synchronized growth and monitored microscopically their dynamics in relation to nuclear division and silicon deposition. We show that chloroplasts divide and relocate during the S/G2 phase, after which a girdle band is deposited to accommodate cell growth. Synchronized cultures of two genotypes were subsequently used for a cDNA-amplified fragment length polymorphism-based genome-wide transcript profiling, in which 917 reproducibly modulated transcripts were identified. We observed that genes involved in pigment biosynthesis and coding for light-harvesting proteins were up-regulated during G2/M phase and cell separation. Light and cell cycle progression were both found to affect fucoxanthin-chlorophyll a/c-binding protein expression and accumulation of fucoxanthin cell content. Because chloroplasts elongate at the stage of cytokinesis, cell cycle-modulated photosynthetic gene expression and synthesis of pigments in concert with cell division might balance chloroplast growth, which confirms that chloroplast biogenesis in S. robusta is tightly regulated