Background: As the population grows older and hard-to-heal wounds are more likely to affect the elderly and frail, it has become a growing global problem. It involves high costs, is resource consuming and suffering for the patient due to long treatment times. About 1–2 percent of the population in well-developed countries suffer from a hard-to-heal wound at some point during their lifetime. Aim: The aim of this study was to highlight nurses' knowledge and experiences of caring for patients with hard-to-heal wounds. Method: A literature review was conducted and data was collected from twelve scientific articles with both qualitative and quantitative methods. Fribergs three-step model was used to analyze the twelve articles. Results: The result presents three main themes and seven subthemes that describes nurses' knowledge and experiences of hard-to-heal wounds. Nurses' knowledge of wound care and hard-to-heal wounds is inadequate and further education is needed. Varying emotions were felt by the nurses, such as happiness, satisfaction, frustration and disempowerment.  Conclusion: More knowledge, training and experience in wound care and hard-to-heal wounds is needed to help nurses feel more confident to provide appropriate wound care.

Current computer systems fill the demand of operating systems and applications for ever greater amounts of random access memory by paging the least recently used data to the hard disk drive. This paging process is called "virtual memory," to indicate that the hard disk drive is used to create the illusion that the computer has more random access memory than it actually has. Unfortunately, the fastest hard disk drives are over five orders of magnitude slower than the DRAM they are emulating. When the demand for memory increases to the point that processes are being continually saved to disk and then retrieved again, a process called "thrashing" occurs, and the performance of the entire computer system plummets. This thesis sought to find alternatives for home and small business computer users to the hard disk drive for virtual memory which would not suffer from the same long delays. Virtual memory is especially important for older computers, which often are limited by their motherboards, their processors and their power supplies to a relatively small amount of random access memory. Thus, this thesis was focused on improving the performance of older computers by replacing the hard disk drive with faster technologies for the virtual memory. Of the different technologies considered, flash memory was selected because of its low power requirements, its ready availability, its relatively low cost and its significantly faster random access times. Two devices were evaluated on a system with a 512MB of RAM, a Pentium 4 processor and a SATA hard disk drive. Theoretical models and a simulator were developed, and physical performance measurements were taken. Flash memory was not shown to be significantly faster than the hard disk drive in virtual memory applications.

As of 2007, approximately 2 to 3 million children and adolescents in the United States had been identified as deaf or hard of hearing. These children are affected by all of the same health issues as hearing children, but are presented with an added challenge of communication with hearing nurses who are not always prepared with ways to understand and communicate with them. As a result, deaf and hard of hearing children are at a greater risk for misguided treatment of health disorders, especially the undertreatment of pain. It is imperative that nurses understand ways to best interpret nonverbal communication from these children and to effectively respond to these children nonverbally. Current research has neglected discovering and discussing ways to improve communication with deaf, hard of hearing and nonverbal children, focusing instead on improving verbal communication between nurses and parents, thereby leaving children as passive participants in their own health care. The results of this integrated literature review present simple and effective strategies nurses can implement into daily practice to facilitate communication nonverbally with deaf and hard of hearing children. The use of appropriate technology and assessment tools, better understanding and enhanced use of facial expressions, eye gaze, touch, presence, and personal space were examined. The writing of this review is an effort to encourage nurses and nursing educators to integrate culturally competent care of deaf and hard of hearing children into everyday nursing practice and into a nursing educational curriculum.

This study aimed to evaluate the physical and mechanical properties of red oak (Quercus spp.), white oak (Quercus spp.), hard maple (Acer saccharum) and yellow-poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) and compare them to values from past publications. Mechanical testing was conducted on small, clear, defectree specimens from red oak, white oak, hard maple and yellow-poplar following the standard ASTM D143. Percentage of latewood, moisture content, specific gravity, modulus of elasticity (MOE), modulus of rupture (MOR), compression parallel and perpendicular to the grain and Janka hardness were determined. Results indicated that mechanical properties for red oak, white oak, hard maple and yellow poplar have not changed substantially because the average values remain in a range that is very close to the ones published in past studies. Thus, values from the Wood Handbook can still be used for engineering purposes.

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