A machine learning model was created to predict the electron spectrum generated by a GeV-class laser wakefield accelerator. The model was constructed from variational convolutional neural networks, which mapped the results of secondary laser and plasma diagnostics to the generated electron spectrum. An ensemble of trained networks was used to predict the electron spectrum and to provide an estimation of the uncertainty of that prediction. It is anticipated that this approach will be useful for inferring the electron spectrum prior to undergoing any process that can alter or destroy the beam. In addition, the model provides insight into the scaling of electron beam properties due to stochastic fluctuations in the laser energy and plasma electron density.

Many patients with severe mental illness are admission in hospital; but little is known about psychiatric re-hospitalization in this population. Our objective was to identify motives of psychiatric re-hospitalization in Dr. Rodriguez Lafora hospital. It is an observational, descriptive and retrospective study. We collected information about patients aged 18 to 64 who were hospitalized during the month of January of 2015 in the acute psychiatric hospitalization by Selene software. We reviewed psychiatric re-hospitalization for 6 months later and the results were analyzed by SPSS software. The percentage of inpatients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders was 29.4%, 13.7% bipolar disorders, 13.7% personality disorders, 11.8% depressive disorders, 9.8% alcohol use disorders, 3.9% schizoaffective disorders, 3.9% intellectual disabilities, 3.9% adjustment disorders with depressed mood, 3.9% obsessive-compulsive and related disorders, 2% substance-related and addictive disorders, 2% feeding and eating disorders and 2% adjustment disorders with mixed anxiety and depressed mood. The percentage of psychiatric re-hospitalization in patients with alcohol use disorders was 60%, 57.1% personality disorders, 50% obsessive-compulsive and related disorders, 50% schizoaffective disorders, 28.6% bipolar disorders, 26.7% schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders and 0% in the other inpatients. Why the percentage of psychiatric re-hospitalization is higher in patients diagnosed with personality disorder and alcohol use disorders? It would be important to establish an approach through more appropriate units as alcoholic detoxification unit and personality disorders unit.

Marine mollusk shells have been extensively used to provide radiocarbon (14C)-based chronologies in paleoenvironmental and archaeological studies, however uncertainties in age measurements are introduced because secondary factors such as vital effects and diet may influence 14C incorporation into these shells. Deep burrowing and deposit feeding mollusks, in particular, may incorporate “old” carbon resulting in apparently older ages than their contemporary environment. In this study, we present paired 14C and stable isotope (δ13C and δ18O) measurements for nine species of known-age bivalves having different feeding strategies and collected in six localities around the NE Atlantic. We exclude potential “old” carbon contamination in these known-age mollusk shells, acquire a better understanding of local ecology and provide an improved context for the environmental interpretation of 14C ages. Our results indicate that, in the NE Atlantic, marine mollusk-derived 14C ages provide a reliable basis for environmental and archaeological investigation, independently of vital effects and differences in microhabitats, feeding strategies and sample location—all of which are apparent from stable isotopes.

The profound influence of Thomas Donaldson and Thomas Dunfee’s integrative social contracts theory (ISCT) on the field of business ethics has been challenged by Andreas Scherer and Guido Palazzo’s Habermasian approach, which has achieved prominence of late with articles that expressly question the defensibility of ISCT’s hypernorms. This article builds on recent efforts by Donaldson and Scherer to bridge their accounts by providing discursive foundations to the hypernorms at the heart of the ISCT framework. Extending prior literature, we propose an ISCT* framework designed to retain ISCT’s practical virtue of managerial guidance while answering the demands of Scherer and Palazzo’s discursive account. By subscribing to a suitable portfolio of discursively justified hypernorms, we argue, companies unlock the valuable moral guidance of ISCT*, which says to treat these hypernorms as unequivocal outer bounds to the pursuit of business and as a starting point to tailor local norms through discursive stakeholder engagement.

Despite the rapid expansion of online educational resources for emergency medicine, barriers remain to their effective use by emergency physicians and trainees. This article expands on previous descriptions of techniques to aggregate online educational resources, outlining four strategies to help learners navigate, evaluate, and contribute online. These strategies include 1) cultivating digital mentors, 2) browsing the most popular free open access medical education (FOAM) websites, 3) using critical appraisal tools developed for FOAM, and 4) contributing new online content.

Objectives: This study examined whether children with distinct brain disorders show different profiles of strengths and weaknesses in executive functions, and differ from children without brain disorder. Methods: Participants were children with traumatic brain injury (N=82; 8–13 years of age), arterial ischemic stroke (N=36; 6–16 years of age), and brain tumor (N=74; 9–18 years of age), each with a corresponding matched comparison group consisting of children with orthopedic injury (N=61), asthma (N=15), and classmates without medical illness (N=68), respectively. Shifting, inhibition, and working memory were assessed, respectively, using three Test of Everyday Attention: Children’s Version (TEA-Ch) subtests: Creature Counting, Walk-Don’t-Walk, and Code Transmission. Comparison groups did not differ in TEA-Ch performance and were merged into a single control group. Profile analysis was used to examine group differences in TEA-Ch subtest scaled scores after controlling for maternal education and age. Results: As a whole, children with brain disorder performed more poorly than controls on measures of executive function. Relative to controls, the three brain injury groups showed significantly different profiles of executive functions. Importantly, post hoc tests revealed that performance on TEA-Ch subtests differed among the brain disorder groups. Conclusions: Results suggest that different childhood brain disorders result in distinct patterns of executive function deficits that differ from children without brain disorder. Implications for clinical practice and future research are discussed. (JINS, 2017, 23, 529–538)

Expert judgement is frequently used within general insurance. It tends to be a method of last resort and used where data is sparse, non-existent or non-applicable to the problem under consideration. Whilst such judgements can significantly influence the end results, their quality is highly variable. The use of the term “expert judgement” itself can lend a generous impression of credibility to what may be a little more than a guess. Despite the increased emphasis placed on the importance of robust expert judgements in regulation, actuarial research to date has focussed on the more technical or data-driven methods, with less emphasis on how to use and incorporate softer information or how best to elicit judgements from others in a way that reduces cognitive biases. This paper highlights the research that the Getting Better Judgement Working Party has conducted in this area. Specifically, it covers the variable quality of expert judgement, both within and outside the regulatory context, and presents methods that may be applied to improve its formation. The aim of this paper is to arm the insurance practitioner with tools to distinguish between low-quality and high-quality judgements and improve the robustness of judgements accordingly, particularly for highly material circumstances.

Since the publication of “A Compendium of Strategies to Prevent Healthcare-Associated Infections in Acute Care Hospitals” in 2008, prevention of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) has become a national priority. Despite improvements, preventable HAIs continue to occur. The 2014 updates to the Compendium were created to provide acute care hospitals with up-to-date, practical, expert guidance to assist in prioritizing and implementing their HAI prevention efforts. It is the product of a highly collaborative effort led by the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), the American Hospital Association (AHA), the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), and The Joint Commission, with major contributions from representatives of a number of organizations and societies with content expertise, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society (PIDS), the Society for Critical Care Medicine (SCCM), the Society for Hospital Medicine (SHM), and the Surgical Infection Society (SIS).

Since the publication of “A Compendium of Strategies to Prevent Healthcare-Associated Infections in Acute Care Hospitals” in 2008, prevention of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) has become a national priority. Despite improvements, preventable HAIs continue to occur. The 2014 updates to the Compendium were created to provide acute care hospitals with up-to-date, practical, expert guidance to assist in prioritizing and implementing their HAI prevention efforts. They are the product of a highly collaborative effort led by the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), the American Hospital Association (AHA), the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), and The Joint Commission, with major contributions from representatives of a number of organizations and societies with content expertise, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC), the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society (PIDS), the Society for Critical Care Medicine (SCCM), the Society for Hospital Medicine (SHM), and the Surgical Infection Society (SIS).

Since the publication of “A Compendium of Strategies to Prevent Healthcare-Associated Infections in Acute Care Hospitals” in 2008, prevention of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) has become a national priority. Despite improvements, preventable HAIs continue to occur. The 2014 updates to the Compendium were created to provide acute care hospitals with up-to-date, practical, expert guidance to assist in prioritizing and implementing their HAI prevention efforts. They are the product of a highly collaborative effort led by the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), the American Hospital Association (AHA), the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), and The Joint Commission, with major contributions from representatives of a number of organizations and societies with content expertise, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society (PIDS), the Society for Critical Care Medicine (SCCM), the Society for Hospital Medicine (SHM), and the Surgical Infection Society (SIS).

Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2014;35(8):967–977

Since the publication of “A Compendium of Strategies to Prevent Healthcare-Associated Infections in Acute Care Hospitals” in 2008, prevention of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) has become a national priority. Despite improvements, preventable HAIs continue to occur. The 2014 updates to the Compendium were created to provide acute care hospitals with up-to-date, practical, expert guidance to assist in prioritizing and implementing their HAI prevention efforts. It is the product of a highly collaborative effort led by the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), the American Hospital Association (AHA), the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), and The Joint Commission, with major contributions from representatives of a number of organizations and societies with content expertise, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society (PIDS), the Society for Critical Care Medicine (SCCM), the Society for Hospital Medicine (SHM), and the Surgical Infection Society (SIS).

Experiments were conducted to determine the effectiveness of controlling vortex breakdown in a confined cylindrical vessel using a small rotating disk, which was flush-mounted into the opposite endwall to the rotating endwall driving the primary recirculating flow. The results show that the control disk, with relatively little power input, can modify the azimuthal and axial flow significantly, changing the entire flow structure in the cylinder. Co-rotation was found to precipitate vortex breakdown onset whereas counter-rotation delays it. Furthermore, for the Reynolds-number range over which breakdown normally exists, co-rotation increases the bubble radial and axial dimensions, while shifting the bubble in the upstream direction. By contrast, counter-rotation tends to reduce the size of the bubble, or completely suppress it, while shifting the bubble in the downstream direction. These effects are amplified substantially by the use of larger control disks and higher rotation ratios. A series of numerical simulations close to the onset Reynolds number reveals that the control disk acts to generate a rotation-rate-invariant local positive or negative azimuthal vorticity source away from the immediate vicinity of the control disk but upstream of breakdown. Advection of this source along streamlines modifies the strength of the azimuthal vorticity ring, which effectively controls whether the flow reverses on the axis, and thus, in turn, whether vortex breakdown occurs. The vorticity source generated by the control disk scales approximately linearly with rotation ratio and cubically with disk diameter; this allows the observed variation of the critical Reynolds number to be approximately predicted.

The Millimetre Astronomy Legacy Team 90 GHz (MALT90) survey aims to characterise the physical and chemical evolution of high-mass star-forming clumps. Exploiting the unique broad frequency range and on-the-fly mapping capabilities of the Australia Telescope National Facility Mopra 22 m single-dish telescope1 , MALT90 has obtained 3′ × 3′ maps towards ~2 000 dense molecular clumps identified in the ATLASGAL 870 μm Galactic plane survey. The clumps were selected to host the early stages of high-mass star formation and to span the complete range in their evolutionary states (from prestellar, to protostellar, and on to $\mathrm{H\,{\scriptstyle {II}}}$ regions and photodissociation regions). Because MALT90 mapped 16 lines simultaneously with excellent spatial (38 arcsec) and spectral (0.11 km s−1) resolution, the data reveal a wealth of information about the clumps’ morphologies, chemistry, and kinematics. In this paper we outline the survey strategy, observing mode, data reduction procedure, and highlight some early science results. All MALT90 raw and processed data products are available to the community. With its unprecedented large sample of clumps, MALT90 is the largest survey of its type ever conducted and an excellent resource for identifying interesting candidates for high-resolution studies with ALMA.

Since the recent upgrades to the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF) Mopra telescope back-end and receiver system, it has risen from an under-subscribed facility to a sought-after instrument with heavy international competition to gain time. Furthermore, the introduction of the on-the-fly mapping capability in 2004 has made this technique one of Mopra's most popular observing modes. In addition, the recent upgrade of the NANTEN millimetre-wavelength telescope to the sub-millimetre NANTEN2 instrument, has provided a complementary, higher-frequency facility to Mopra. A two-day workshop was held at Swinburne University in June 2008 to disseminate the current state of ongoing large-scale mapping projects and associated spin-offs that the telescopes' upgrades have facilitated, and to decide upon future research directions. Here, we provide a summary of the result-oriented talks as a record of the state of Australian-access single-dish millimetre science in 2008.