Shaping the future for primary care education and training project. Integrated health and social care: the perspectives of people using services: a mixed methods analysis

The aim of this study was to explore service users' perspectives concerning integrated health & social care, and to identify the perceived strengths and weaknesses associated with the current workforce and services provided. The findings will be used to inform the education and training of the health and social care workforce in the North West of Englan

Optimal Encodings for Range Min-Max and Top-k

In this paper we consider various encoding problems for range queries on arrays. In these problems, the goal is that the encoding occupies the information theoretic minimum space required to answer a particular set of range queries. Given an array $A[1..n]$ a range top-$k$ query on an arbitrary range $[i,j] \subseteq [1,n]$ asks us to return the ordered set of indices $\{l_1 ,...,l_k \}$ such that $A[l_m]$ is the $m$-th largest element in $A[i..j]$. We present optimal encodings for range top-$k$ queries, as well as for a new problem which we call range min-max, in which the goal is to return the indices of both the minimum and maximum element in a range

Behaviour change at work: Empowering energy efficiency in the workplace through user-centred design

Copyright @ 2011 University of California eScholarship RepositoryCO2 emissions from non-domestic buildings - primarily workplaces - make up 18 percent of the UK's carbon footprint. A combination of technology advances and behavioural changes have the potential to make significant impact, but interventions have often been planned in ways which do not take into account the needs, levels of understanding and everyday behavioural contexts of building users - and hence do not achieve the hoped-for success.This paper provides a brief introduction to the Empower project, a current industrial-academic collaboration in the UK which is applying methods from user-centred design practice to understand diverse users' needs, priorities, mental models of energy and decision-making heuristics - as well as the affordances available to them - in a number of office buildings. We are developing and trialling a set of low-cost, simple software interventions tailored to multiple user groups with different degrees of agency over their energy use, which seek to influence more energy efficient behaviour at work in areas such as HVAC, lighting and equipment use. The project comprises an ethnographic research phase, a participatory design programme involving building users in the design of interventions, and iterative trials in a large office building in central London

A Tidally-Disrupted Asteroid Around the White Dwarf G29-38

The infrared excess around the white dwarf G29-38 can be explained by emission from an opaque flat ring of dust with an inner radius 0.14 of the radius of the Sun and an outer radius approximately equal to the Sun's. This ring lies within the Roche region of the white dwarf where an asteroid could have been tidally destroyed, producing a system reminiscent of Saturn's rings. Accretion onto the white dwarf from this circumstellar dust can explain the observed calcium abundance in the atmosphere of G29-38. Either as a bombardment by a series of asteroids or because of one large disruption, the total amount of matter accreted onto the white dwarf may have been comparable to the total mass of asteroids in the Solar System, or, equivalently, about 1% of the mass in the asteroid belt around the main sequence star zeta Lep.Comment: ApJ Letters, in pres