Fully Coherent X-ray Pulses from a Regenerative Amplifier Free Electron Laser

We propose and analyze a novel regenerative amplifier free electron laser (FEL) to produce fully coherent x-ray pulses. The method makes use of narrow-bandwidth Bragg crystals to form an x-ray feedback loop around a relatively short undulator. Self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) from the leading electron bunch in a bunch train is spectrally filtered by the Bragg reflectors and is brought back to the beginning of the undulator to interact repeatedly with subsequent bunches in the bunch train. The FEL interaction with these short bunches not only amplifies the radiation intensity but also broadens its spectrum, allowing for effective transmission of the x-rays outside the crystal bandwidth. The spectral brightness of these x-ray pulses is about two to three orders of magnitude higher than that from a single-pass SASE FEL.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

The Bangor Gambling Task: Characterising the performance of survivors of traumatic brain injury

The Bangor Gambling Task (BGT, Bowman & Turnbull, 2004) is a simple test of emotion-based decision-making, with contingencies varying across five blocks of 20 trials. This is the first study to characterise BGT performance in survivors of traumatic brain injury (TBI) relative to healthy controls. The study also aimed to explore sub-groups (cluster analysis), and identify predictors of task performance (multiple regression). Thirty survivors of TBI and 39 controls completed the BGT and measures of premorbid IQ, working memory, and executive function. Results showed that survivors of TBI made more gamble choices than controls (total BGT score), although the groups did not significantly differ when using a cut-off score for ‘impaired’ performance. Unexpectedly, the groups did not significantly differ in their performance across the blocks, however, the cluster analysis revealed three subgroups (with survivors of TBI and controls represented in each cluster). Findings also indicated that age and group were significant predictors of overall BGT performance, but not gender, premorbid IQ, or working memory and executive function. In conclusion, the study findings are consistent with an individual differences account of emotion-based decision-making, and a number of issues need to be addressed prior to recommending the clinical use of the BGT

Treebank-based acquisition of a Chinese lexical-functional grammar

Scaling wide-coverage, constraint-based grammars such as Lexical-Functional Grammars (LFG) (Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982; Bresnan, 2001) or Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammars (HPSG) (Pollard and Sag, 1994) from fragments to naturally occurring unrestricted text is knowledge-intensive, time-consuming and (often prohibitively) expensive. A number of researchers have recently presented methods to automatically acquire wide-coverage, probabilistic constraint-based grammatical resources from treebanks (Cahill et al., 2002, Cahill et al., 2003; Cahill et al., 2004; Miyao et al., 2003; Miyao et al., 2004; Hockenmaier and Steedman, 2002; Hockenmaier, 2003), addressing the knowledge acquisition bottleneck in constraint-based grammar development. Research to date has concentrated on English and German. In this paper we report on an experiment to induce wide-coverage, probabilistic LFG grammatical and lexical resources for Chinese from the Penn Chinese Treebank (CTB) (Xue et al., 2002) based on an automatic f-structure annotation algorithm. Currently 96.751% of the CTB trees receive a single, covering and connected f-structure, 0.112% do not receive an f-structure due to feature clashes, while 3.137% are associated with multiple f-structure fragments. From the f-structure-annotated CTB we extract a total of 12975 lexical entries with 20 distinct subcategorisation frame types. Of these 3436 are verbal entries with a total of 11 different frame types. We extract a number of PCFG-based LFG approximations. Currently our best automatically induced grammars achieve an f-score of 81.57% against the trees in unseen articles 301-325; 86.06% f-score (all grammatical functions) and 73.98% (preds-only) against the dependencies derived from the f-structures automatically generated for the original trees in 301-325 and 82.79% (all grammatical functions) and 67.74% (preds-only) against the dependencies derived from the manually annotated gold-standard f-structures for 50 trees randomly selected from articles 301-325

Parenthood and severe mental illness: Relationships with recovery

Objective Parenting is an important life domain for many people, but little research examines the parenting experience and its role in recovery for those with a severe mental illness. The current study provides preliminary evidence of how these concepts are related in a sample of individuals living with severe mental illness attending a community mental health center. We also explored potential differences between mothers and fathers, which could help better tailor services to meet the needs of parents with severe mental illness. Methods Data were obtained during baseline interviews for a study testing an intervention designed to increase shared decision-making in psychiatric treatment. Participants (N = 167) were administered measures of patient activation, recovery, autonomy preference, hope, and trust in providers. We compared parents and non-parents and compared mothers and fathers using chi-square, t-tests, and, where appropriate, analysis of covariance. Results Parents had a significantly higher level of trust in their psychiatric care provider than non-parents. Contrary to hypotheses, parents were less active in their treatment and preferred less information-seeking autonomy than did non-parents, but did not differ on other recovery-related indices. No differences on recovery-related indices were detected between mothers and fathers. Secondary analyses revealed parents with minor children had more hope than parents of older children. Conclusions and Implications for Practice Although parents may have higher levels of trust in their physicians, our preliminary findings suggest that parents with severe mental illness may benefit from increased efforts to help them be more active and interested in information about their illnesses

A promising Start? The Local Network Fund for Children and Young People: Interim Findings from the National Evaluation

This is a summary of the interim evaluation report of the National Evaluation of the Local Network Fund (LNF) for Children and Young People. It is based on data gathered during the first phase of the evaluation (between October 2002 to December 2003). A final report of the National Evaluation will be available early in 2005. A consortium of research organisations, led by the University of Hull and including BMRB Social Research, The University of York and the University of Sheffield were commissioned in August 2002 by the-then Children and Young People’s Unit (CYPU) to carry out the evaluation

The Relationship Between Professional Burnout and Quality and Safety in Healthcare: A Meta-Analysis

BACKGROUND: Healthcare provider burnout is considered a factor in quality of care, yet little is known about the consistency and magnitude of this relationship. This meta-analysis examined relationships between provider burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment) and the quality (perceived quality, patient satisfaction) and safety of healthcare. METHODS: Publications were identified through targeted literature searches in Ovid MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Web of Science, CINAHL, and ProQuest Dissertations & Theses through March of 2015. Two coders extracted data to calculate effect sizes and potential moderators. We calculated Pearson's r for all independent relationships between burnout and quality measures, using a random effects model. Data were assessed for potential impact of study rigor, outliers, and publication bias. RESULTS: Eighty-two studies including 210,669 healthcare providers were included. Statistically significant negative relationships emerged between burnout and quality (r = -0.26, 95 % CI [-0.29, -0.23]) and safety (r = -0.23, 95 % CI [-0.28, -0.17]). In both cases, the negative relationship implied that greater burnout among healthcare providers was associated with poorer-quality healthcare and reduced safety for patients. Moderators for the quality relationship included dimension of burnout, unit of analysis, and quality data source. Moderators for the relationship between burnout and safety were safety indicator type, population, and country. Rigor of the study was not a significant moderator. DISCUSSION: This is the first study to systematically, quantitatively analyze the links between healthcare provider burnout and healthcare quality and safety across disciplines. Provider burnout shows consistent negative relationships with perceived quality (including patient satisfaction), quality indicators, and perceptions of safety. Though the effects are small to medium, the findings highlight the importance of effective burnout interventions for healthcare providers. Moderator analyses suggest contextual factors to consider for future study

The V&A, The Destruction of the Country House and the Creation of ‘English Heritage’

This paper considers the role played by the VA and the exhibition The Destruction of the Country House in the political activities and increasing prominence of the ‘heritage lobby’ in England in the 1970s. It argues that the VA had a significant role in shaping the discourse and advancing the public awareness and political efficacy of the heritage movement, and that it assisted in reinforcing the association of, and perhaps even conflating, English heritage with the country house. The paper also reflects on changing attitudes and policy relating to heritage in England since the late twentieth century, drawing on a range of relevant critical literature and theoretical approaches

Who Says White Men Can’t Dance?:Deconstructing Racial Stereotypes in “Windowlicker”

This paper offers a critical textual and socio-cultural analysis of the music video for ‘Windowlicker’ (1999), a track by the avant-garde UK electronic music producer Aphex Twin (real name Richard James). Conceived and directed by James’ long-time collaborator Chris Cunningham, the film is a dark parody of Hip Hop music video clichés. Infinitely more subtle and complex than a mere spoof, the video inverts and deconstructs racial stereotypes, and in doing so makes them visible, no longer implicit. The video arguably challenges the notion that whiteness is ‘an unmarked norm’ (Dyer et al.) and illustrates Frankenberg’s (2001) contention that ‘whiteness is in a continual state of being dressed and undressed, of marking and cloaking.’ The dissonance between the visual registers of the film and the distinctly ‘white’ Techno soundtrack is echoed and amplified by the symbolic content of the video. The film’s white protagonist is endowed with all the positive, enviable (and therefore fearsome) attributes of black masculinity. He is sexually potent, can dance like Michael Jackson and displays ‘ghetto-fabulous’ conspicuous consumption. He signifies blackness and ‘signifies’ like a black man (Gates, 1983), with subversive flash trickery. The ‘real’ black men in the video, in contrast, are rendered ‘white’; wannabe nerds with no style who can’t dance and can’t get laid. There is much pleasure to be had in unpicking the complex, layered semiotics of the film, but what can we learn from doing so, and what can we deduce of James and Cunningham’s intent in its creation? Does the deconstruction of racial categories allow for a more progressive and nuanced reconstruction of models of culture and ethnicity, or is it a reactionary work, which ridicules black popular culture and grants the putative (white, male) viewer a symbolic vengeance? Does it pose a challenge to racist conventions or is it itself racist