Improving the role the nurse plays in health care delivery should be embodied in the performance improvement initiatives to successfully improve the quality of care that is delivered. The purpose of this evidence-based practice project was to collect performance improvement data and present it to staff who, in turn, used the information to improve practice and influence patient safety outcomes. The practice-focused question addressed what would occur if a tool that allowed frequent data trending was used to measure effectiveness of care and thereby influence key outcome measures. Duffy's quality caring model provided a framework for the study to support the need for the development of a dashboard for staff and to ensure that staff were informed as they developed interventions to improve patient outcomes. Publicly available data published by the Centers for Medicare/ Medicaid (CMS) for the Quality Star Report were explored to inform the project. Workgroups, comprised of volunteers from leadership and staff providing care at the bedside, were formed to implement practice changes based on the dashboard reports. By bringing the data to the attention of nurses within the organization, improvements were made in the overall score for safety of care from below national average (25th percentile of the reported 3,647 hospitals across the nation) to the same as national average (47th percentile) as reported by CMS. Through staff involvement, social change occurred as strategies were hardwired to improve categories of the Quality Star Report and ultimately patient care. The project showed that quality improvement tools can assist in empowering staff to understand the data needed to implement process improvement strategies.

No description available.

La formation des étoiles massives reste, à ce jour, encore mal connue à cause de l'extrême quantité d'énergie que ces étoiles dégagent, limitant en conséquence leurs masses théoriques et contredisant les observations de ce type d'étoile. Les observatoires du futur (en particulier l'observatoire spatial Herschel) vont tenter de répondre à cette problématique grâce notamment aux émissions moléculaires de l'eau. L'analyse précise et correcte de ces données, dans l'avenir, nécessite donc dès aujourd'hui un travail associant des observations et des modélisations des objets concernés. C'est dans ce but que cette thèse a consisté en l'élaboration d'une méthode de modélisation dite « globale » d'objets proto-stellaires massifs (proto-amas ou cœurs denses massifs). Celle-ci a permis une description physique et une étude chimique des multiples cœurs denses massifs étudiées, et a ouvert de nombreuses voies vers des aspects évolutifs. Elle a également donné des indices pour affiner le programme d'observation en temps garanti WISH des raies moléculaires de l'eau et confirmé le rôle clef de cette molécule pour la compréhension de la formation des étoiles massives.

<p>Optical lucky imaging polarimetry of HL Tau and XZ Tau in the Taurus-Auriga molecular cloud was carried out with the instrument PolCor at the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT). The results show that in both the V- and R-band HL Tau show centrosymmetric structures of the polarization angle in its northeastern outflow lobe (degree of polarization ~30%). A C-shaped structure is detected which is also present at near-IR wavelengths (Murakawa, 2008), and higher resolution optical images (Stapelfeldt, 1995). The position angle of the outflow is 47.5+-7.5 degrees, which coincides with previous measurements and the core polarization is observed to decrease with wavelength and a few scenarios are reviewed. Measuring the outflow witdh versus distance and wavelength shows that the longer wavelengths scatter deeper within the cavity wall of the outflow. In XZ Tau the binary is partially resolved, it is indicated by an elongated intensity distribution. The polarization of the parental cloud is detected in XZ Tau through the dichroic extinction of starlight. Lucky imaging at the NOT is a great way of increasing the resolution, shifting increases the sharpness by 0.1 asec and selection the sharpest frames can increase the seeing with 0.4 asec, perhaps more during better conditions.</p>

L'environnement spatial proche de la Terre est complexe et divers. La cinétique des ions joue un rôle clé pour comprendre la nature des phénomènes essentiels et les processus physiques prenant place dans le "Géospace". Au moyen de données à haute résolution enregistrées par les quatre satellites Cluster et les deux satellites Double Star, cette thèse étudie la cinétique des ions de faible énergie dans certaines couches frontières essentielles de la magnétosphère terrestre. Le rôle dominant joué par la cinétique des particules dans les formations de ces structures de plasma à petite échelle et les caractéristiques des processus de couplage à différentes échelles y sont résumés.

<p>Titel: Genusframställningen i Star Trek – en utopi eller dystopi</p><p>Författare: Gustav Ekholm och Torbjörn Karlsson</p><p>Handledare: Malin Nilsson</p><p>Examinator: Veronica Stoehrel</p><p>Typ av arbete: C-uppsats i Medie och Kommunikationsvetenskap, 10p HT-06</p><p>Plats: Högskolan i Halmstad</p><p>Syfte: Uppsatsen syfte är att fastställa huruvida åtta olika avsnitt ur tv-serien Star Trek belyser genusfrågor och utmanar avsnitten i så fall de rådande genusdiskurserna.</p><p>Metod: Den här uppsatsen fokuserar på åtta Star Trek avsnitt som producerades mellan 1960-talet och 2000-talet.</p><p> Metoden för analysen är en kritisk diskursanalys med utgång från Norman Fairclougs diskurskritiska modell.</p><p>Resultat: Uppsatsens slutsats är att Star Trek-serierna berör genusfrågor i olika utsträckning beroende på vilket årtal avsnitten är från. Det konstateras också att viktiga genusämnen, likt homosexualitet, tas upp men beroende på olika omständigheter saknas ofta ett djup i framställningen.</p><p>Nyckelord: Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, science fiction, genus, diskurs, diskursanalys, textanalys, makt, tv-serier, dominansförhållanden.</p>

The United States Environmental Protection Agency has used environmental information provision as a policy tool to take advantage of consumer preferences for products that meet higher environmental standards. Such environmental programs include a variety of policies ranging from eco-labeling programs to voluntary environmental agreements between governments and manufacturers. This study analyzes the effects of two such programs - the ENERGY STAR program, an eco-labeling program, and the Climate Leaders program, a voluntary environmental agreement program - on consumer preferences for a household appliance. The study estimates consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for the two programs and examines factors that motivate WTP. A particular interest for the ENERGY STAR program is in determining how the offer of a mail-in rebate affects these preferences. Data used for this study was collected from an online survey conducted in the United States during March and April, 2009. Conditional and random parameter logit models, with product attributes only and with demographic and other individual characteristics as interaction terms, are used to analyze the data. Findings from this study imply that consumers are willing to pay a premium equivalent to a significant portion of the purchase prices for the products approved by either program. Also, it is found that consumers who are more concerned about environmental issues, such as global climate change, and who have confidence in the effects of collective action, are more likely to engage in the purchase of such environmentally friendly products. These results should help government agencies and manufacturers evaluate the effectiveness of environmental information provision programs.

No description available.

High data rate applications are the trend in today's wireless technology. W-CDMA standard was designed to support such high data rates of up to 3.84 Mcps. The main purpose of this research was to analyze the feasibility of a fixed-point implementation of the W-CDMA downlink receiver algorithm on a general-purpose digital signal processor (StarCore SC140 by Motorola). The very large instruction word architecture of SC140 core is utilized to generate optimal implementation, to meet the real time timing requirements of the algorithm. The other main aim of this work was to study and evaluate the performance of the W-CDMA downlink structure with incorporated space-time transmit diversity. The effect of the channel estimation algorithm used was extensively studied too.

We construct a deformation quantization on an infinite-dimensional symplectic space of regular connections on an SU(2)-bundle over a Riemannian surface of genus g ≥ 2. The construction is based on the normal form thoerem representing the space of connections as a fibration over a finite-dimensional moduli space of flat connections whose fibre is a cotangent bundle of the infinite-dimensional gauge group. We study the reduction with respect to the gauge groupe both for classical and quantum cases and show that our quantization commutes with reduction.