Evaluation of the Specialist Community Public Health Nursing Peripatetic Assessment Model

The Health Visitor Implementation Plan 2011-15: a call to action, called for an additional 4200 health visitors to be trained by 2015. To accommodate larger numbers of students, specialist community public health nursing (SCPHN) programmes across the UK have undergone significant transformation in terms of practice supervision. Somerset Partnership NHS Trust introduced a peripatetic assessment model involving practice teachers and practice mentors. This differed from traditional one-to-one approaches of supervision to one-to-three. Practice teachers mostly supervised students through close collaboration with mentors who worked directly with students on a daily basis. Using a mixed methods approach, the evaluation aimed to assess the effectiveness of the new model from the perspective of SCPHN students, mentors, practice teachers (PTs) and managers. Data was collected through an anonymous online survey and individual interviews or focus groups. Overall, participants were positive about the peripatetic model’s impact on student learning and practice experience, in addition to the general up-skilling of the wider health visiting workforce and possible implications of continuation into the future. Any concerns raised focused on adequate preparation and support for mentors and the need for clear communication and role differentiation between practice teachers and mentors

Discussion: What Have We Learned from the New Suite of Risk Management Programs of the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008?

New revenue-based support programs in the 2008 Farm Bill represent a fundamental shift in farm programs and risk management decision-making. However, complexity, uncertainty, economics, and, arguably, an incomplete analysis of the new Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) program all contributed to low enrollment in the new program in 2009. An effective analysis of ACRE should consider farm programs as part of an integrated risk management portfolio, including crop insurance, marketing, and other risk management tools as opposed to a separate lottery program. Improving this integration could be one of the most significant consequences of the 2008 Farm Bill.farm bill, commodity programs, risk management, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Agricultural Finance, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use, Political Economy, Public Economics, Risk and Uncertainty, Q18,

Computationally convenient forms for conic section equations

Three dimensional vector forms of selected section relationships applied to n-body trajectory simulation based on virtual mass concep

Ayudar a los alumnos a aprender cómo aprender. La opinión de un profesor-investigador

Four basic questions are approached in this paper: 1. What we know about how people learn. 2. How we can help students learn to learn. 3. What the obstacles are to helping students learn. 4. What the expectations are for the empowerment of people. The answers, based on the author's experience and on research done at Cornell University refer widely to significant learning, to heuristic learning and to the conceptual maps

Updating the Farm Bill Safety Net in an Expanding Sea of Risk

Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, H10,

Pressure on charged domain walls and additional imprint mechanism in ferroelectrics

The impact of free charges on the local pressure on a charged ferroelectric domain wall produced by an electric field has been analyzed. A general formula for the local pressure on a charged domain wall is derived considering full or partial compensation of bound polarization charges by free charges. It is shown that the compensation can lead to a very strong reduction of the pressure imposed on the wall from the electric field. In some cases this pressure can be governed by small nonlinear effects. It is concluded that the free charge compensation of bound polarization charges can lead to substantial reduction of the domain wall mobility even in the case when the mobility of free charge carriers is high. This mobility reduction gives rise to an additional imprint mechanism which may play essential role in switching properties of ferroelectric materials. The effect of the pressure reduction on the compensated charged domain walls is illustrated for the case of 180-degree ferroelectric domain walls and of 90-degree ferroelectric domain walls with the head-to-head configuration of the spontaneous polarization vectors.Comment: subm. to PRB. This verion is extended by appendi

Influence of the particle shape on the equilibrium morphologies of supracolloidal magnetic filaments

We investigate the equilibrium morphologies of linear and ring-shaped magnetic filaments made from crosslinked ferromagnetic spherical or ellipsoidal colloidal particles. Using Langevin dynamics simulations, we calculate the radius of gyration and total magnetic moment of a single filament at zero field and different temperatures, analyzing the influence of the particles shape, the strength of their magnetic moment and the filament length. Our results show that, among such parameters, the shape of the particles has the strongest qualitative impact on the equilibrium behavior of the filaments

Radius Dependent Luminosity Evolution of Blue Galaxies in GOODS-N

We examine the radius-luminosity (R-L) relation for blue galaxies in the Team Keck Redshift Survey (TKRS) of GOODS-N. We compare with a volume-limited, Sloan Digital Sky Survey sample and find that the R-L relation has evolved to lower surface brightness since z=1. Based on the detection limits of GOODS this can not be explained by incompleteness in low surface-brightness galaxies. Number density arguments rule out a pure radius evolution. It can be explained by a radius dependent decline in B-band luminosity with time. Assuming a linear shift in M_B with z, we use a maximum likelihood method to quantify the evolution. Under these assumptions, large (R_{1/2} > 5 kpc), and intermediate sized (3 < R_{1/2} < 5 kpc) galaxies, have experienced Delta M_B =1.53 (-0.10,+0.13) and 1.65 (-0.18, +0.08) magnitudes of dimming since z=1. A simple exponential decline in star formation with an e-folding time of 3 Gyr can result in this amount of dimming. Meanwhile, small galaxies, or some subset thereof, have experienced more evolution, 2.55 (+/- 0.38) magnitudes. This factor of ten decline in luminosity can be explained by sub-samples of starbursting dwarf systems that fade rapidly, coupled with a decline in burst strength or frequency. Samples of bursting, luminous, blue, compact galaxies at intermediate redshifts have been identified by various previous studies. If there has been some growth in galaxy size with time, these measurements are upper limits on luminosity fading.Comment: 34 Total pages, 15 Written pages, 19 pages of Data Table, 13 Figures, accepted for publication in Ap