Community nursing: nurses' effectiveness in supporting carers

This article outlines the results of a research project to evaluate the effectiveness of service support to informal carers. There are many ways in which community nurses can support carers, and carers frequently report the benefits of the service. The potential significance of the community nursing service in this role, however, is yet to be realised as nursing is still highly task-orientated, with priority given to specific medical interventions. As a result, some carers face difficulties in obtaining nursing support.     

Sexual Intimacy and Drug Use in TV Series

Content analysis shows alcohol as the only drug used more than twice per hour; intimate sex is presented or talked about nearly twice per hour, seldom between married partners.     

Parameter estimation validity and relationship robustness: A comparison of telephone and internet survey techniques

With the expansion of telecommunication and online technologies for the purpose of survey administration, the issue of measurement validity has come to the fore. The proliferation of automated audio services and computer-based survey techniques has been matched by a corresponding denigration of the quality of traditional phone survey data, most notably as an outcome of falling response rates. This trend, combined with the introduction of screening technologies and answering machines, represents a barrier to the proper execution of survey research. Whereas the question was once, “can technology-assisted surveys achieve the same level of validity as traditional phone surveys?”, the question now becomes, “what are the relative advantages and disadvantages of technology-assisted and phone surveys?” Each has its own challenges and opportunities, and this paper begins to explore these. The present study provides further insight into the validity of telephone and Internet survey data, and explores whether or not the robustness of relationships between variables varies by survey mode.     

An integrated circuit for reading out signals of silicon detectors

An integrated circuit (IC) for recording signals and studying characteristics of silicon detectors is designed and experimentally checked. The basic purpose of the IC is to use it in test setups with sources of ionizing radiation and on accelerators for studying silicon detectors of a new geometry (layout). The IC allows evaluation of the operation of the “silicon detector-readout electronics” system for relativistic particles and nuclei with a charge from Z = 1 to Z > 50. The results of designing the IC and its experimental characteristics are given.     

An efficient modulation/coding scheme for MFSK systems on bandwidthconstrained channels

The performance of a bandwidth-efficient multiple-tone modulation scheme for M-ary frequency-shift keying (MFSK) is presented. The use of balanced incomplete block (BIB) designs is proposed to form the signaling frames. On each symbol interval the modulator selects a group of elements from a BIB design and divides its energy into the orthogonal waveforms corresponding to these elements. The multiple-tone FSK scheme based on these block designs is shown to increase greatly the bandwidth efficiency of a conventional M-ary FSK system. An implicit diversity is incorporated in the modulation scheme. Thus, a performance improvement comparable to that obtained by using time or frequency diversity is shown on a Rayleigh fading channel and also on an interference channel with partial-band Gaussian noise. The multiple-tone scheme based on this design is compared to a multiple-tone scheme based on Hadamard matrices suggested by J.F. Pieper et al. (1978). It is shown that similar performance is achieved on a fading channel, while an advantage close to 4 dB is obtained for the proposed scheme on an AWGN (additive white Gaussian noise) channel     

Software engineering is not enough

Much of the software engineering literature admonishes that what practitioners are doing is not enough-that the state-of-the-practice is creating bad software. This article argues that what the literature offers as solutions is also not enough, that software development is a fundamentally technical problem for which management solutions are only partially effective. It describes a basic set of tools that developers can apply before, during, and after designing real software, often against unrealistic schedule and budgetary constraints.     

Wide temperature (-20°C-95°C) operation of an uncooled2.5-Gb/s 1300-nm DFB laser

This letter describes a 2.5-Gb/s 1300-nm distributed feedback laser that can operate in a wide temperature range of -20°C to 95°C. We present RF and DC characteristics of the device and the statistical distribution of threshold current and slope efficiency at high temperature. Finally, we demonstrate the device performance in a 2.5-Gb/s small-form-factor module up to 85°C