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Quantitative echocardiographic evaluation is important for systemic right ventricles, but its asymmetric shape makes this challenging and time consuming when performed manually. Semi-automated software could make these quantitative measures easier to accomplish in the clinical setting. We hypothesized that semi-automated software would approximate manual measures of right ventricular size and function. Children with hypoplastic left heart who had echocardiograms were prospectively identified. These measurements were performed using manual and semi-automated techniques: end-diastolic and end-systolic area, fractional area change (FAC), dimensions (longitudinal, basal and mid-cavitary diameters), and tricuspid annular plane systolic excursion (TAPSE). Agreement between measures was evaluated. Sixty-three echocardiograms were analyzed. Intra- and inter-observer reliability was acceptable and similar between methods except that inter-observer reliability for the manual method was superior for TAPSE. Correlation between methods was high (r > 0.9, p

Advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) have been used by organizations to meet the needs of their patients. However, there is a lack of organizational structure in place for appropriate APRN supervision. Oftentimes, there are non-APRN supervisors who lack understanding of APRNs, leading to poorly defined roles, credentialing, understanding of scope of practice, and lack of shared governance. With an advanced practice nursing organizational leadership model, there is evidence for improved job satisfaction, retention, and accountability for APRNs. The proposed model includes use of a chief of advanced practice officer and APRN supervisors.

A heteroepitaxial GaN-on-sapphire template growth strategy is presented that eliminates wafer bow in the final structure at both room temperature and at high crystal growth temperatures. The technology is demonstrated here on 2″ and 4″ substrate sizes with GaN epitaxy thicknesses up to 150 µm with a sub-nm, epi-ready, final surface roughness. Wafer bow vs. temperature measurements for (a) 15 µm of GaN on 4″ 650 µm thick sapphire showing 280 µm bow shift, (b) 10 µm GaN film on 2″ 430µm thick sapphire showing 120 µm bow shift, and (c) and (d), 15 µm of FLAAT GaN on 2″ and 4″ sapphire, respectively, each showing less than 30 µm of bow shift. (© 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

Point defects in the GaN cause premature breakdown in GaN Schottky diodes at least to the same extent as dislocations do. The most likely cause is impact ionization of deep acceptors. A primary deep acceptor in MOCVD-grown GaN is C. Another is a Ga vacancy, which is likely to be the primary deep acceptor in HVPE-grown material. Lower net carrier concentrations, and therefore larger breakdown voltages, can be achieved in the HVPE material.

Hydride vapor phase epitaxy (HVPE) grown GaN was evaluated for high power Schottky diodes (SDs) because it contains much less carbon and grows much more rapidly than other typical growth methods. The results are encouraging for applications

Background and Purpose. Recent data indicates that approximately 46% of the time spent in physical therapist professional education consists of clinical experiences. The clinical instructor (CI) plays an instrumental role in providing effective clinical education. To improve the value and the consistency of clinical education, the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) developed a training course for clinical instructors (CIs) titled the Clinical Instructor Education and Credentialing Program (CIECP). Subsequently, several studies have quantitatively examined the types and effectiveness of teaching behaviors of CIs based on who took the CIECP. Despite this research, we have limited information about the daily interactions between CIs and students. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore and describe the roles and behaviors of experienced CIs as they conducted clinical education. Subjects. Purposive sampling was used to select 6 experienced, APTA-credentialed CIs who worked in various clinical settings. Methods. Semi-structured interviews were conducted. Results. The experienced CIs in this study described their primary role as helping students transition from formal (classroom) learning experiences to clinical practice. Three educational strategy themes emerged from the CIs' behaviors while transitioning students to clinical practice: incremental learning, reflection in practice, and creating a caring environment with students. Discussion and Conclusion. The results indicate that the experienced CIs exhibit teaching behaviors similar to those of competent and expert clinicians and, therefore, models of competent and expert clinicians may be applicable to understand the behaviors of experienced CIs. Key Words: Clinical instruction, Physical therapist, Teaching behaviors, APTA Clinical Instructor Education and Credentialing Program. BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE During the 2004-2005 academic years, clinical education averaged 41.5% of all hours accumulated during physical therapist education. In 2009-2010, the proportion of clinical education to total academic hours increased to 45%.? This upward trend suggests that the use of clinical education to train future physical therapists (PTs) will most likely continue to grow. Why is clinical education so important in training health care professionals? Clearly, clinical education offers students learning experiences not available in the classroom. Unlike the classroom, learning in the clinical setting is embedded in a complex social and physical environment that is highly demanding, unpredictable, and uncertain.2 Most prominently, the clinically embedded nature of clinical experiences provides students with authentic, student-centered learning- integrating theory with problem solving, facilitating professionalism, and enhancing clinical skills. Plack and Driscoll,3 discussing the importance of clinical experiences, write: Clinical internships and other clinical education experiences are what provide the real life experiences or contextual, social and interactive experiences that help us translate some of the abstract theories learned in the dassroom to actual clinical practice. (p162) For physical therapist students, meaningful practice emerges during clinical experience. Whereas classroom learning may simulate real-life clinical situations, Mostrom4 writes, "It is the clinical setting where theory, research, and text acquire contextual, relational, and personal meaning for health professional students."(p266) Specifically, the clinic provides the educational experience for transitioning physical therapist students to physical therapists. As Emery5 explains, clinical education provides a "vital extension of the academic program because students practice their newly learned psychomotor skills and assume a role that incorporates the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the physical therapy profession. …

In this paper, we present an overview of the current state-of-the-art in two-dimensional materials beyond graphene, and summarize device performance reported to-date. There is promise for these layered materials to be the foundation of a new area in low power and high frequency electronics, with early reports indicating 10s of gigahertz (GHz) operation without significant optimization of parasitic resistances or capacitances. In addition, we discuss the synthesis of transition metal dichalcogenides and the integration of as-grown material into heterostructures and electronic devices. Finally, we discuss the impact of surface preparation on the integration of dielectrics with MoS2 required to achieve GHz performance.

Although setting priorities is an important step in making public health policy, the benefit of using epidemiology to prioritize scarce public health resources has not been fully recognized. This situation is mostly due to the complexity of proposed models for setting priorities. We describe a public health priority setting model, Missouri Information for Community Assessment Priority Setting Model (Priority MICA), which uses epidemiologic measures available in most surveillance systems across the United States. Priority MICA uses data from birth and death certificates, hospital discharges, emergency departments, risk factors from the Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System, and eight epidemiologic measures to construct six priority criteria: size (the number of emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and deaths), severity (number of deaths of people younger than 65), urgency (trends in deaths and hospital morbidity), preventability (evidence-based score), community support (score of social support for preventive action), and racial-disparity (race comparison through death and morbidity rate ratio). Priority MICA is part of a Web-based interactive tool that makes available data from a wide variety of surveillance systems (http://www.dhss.mo.gov/MICA). The top 10 priority diseases determined by Priority MICA were compared to a more traditional method of ranking diseases by mortality rates. Using the additional criteria in Priority MICA identified four more priority diseases than were identified using just mortality while the ranking of the other six priority diseases differed between methods.

Solubility profiles of uranium dusts in the Irigaray uranium processing plant were determined by performing in vitro solubility tests on breathing zone air samples conducted in all process areas of the processing plant. The dissolution rate of the uranium on the air samples was then determined over the next 28 d in a simulant solution of the extracellular airway lining fluid (Gamble`s solution). Airborne uranium in the wet process areas of the processing plant was highly soluble, with 97% dissolving in a 0.3 half-time and 3% with a half-time of 15.6 d. The airbrone uranium dusts in the drum load out area were also soluble, with 97% dissolving with a T{sub {1/2}} of 0.25 d and the remainder with a T{sub {1/2}} of 20 d. Exhaust from the drier stack and areas of the processing plant that had only this airborne uranium was slightly more insoluble, with 46% dissolving with a T{sub {1/2}} of 0.4 and 53% with an 18 d half-time. These results compare well with x-ray diffraction analysis of the uranium samples and the bioassay program for the processing plant workers. 6 refs., 3 figs., 1 tab.

Switches are at the heart of all pulsed power and directed energy systems, which find utility in a number of applications. At present, those applications requiring the highest power levels tend to employ spark-gap switches, but these suffer from relatively high delay-times (~10-8 sec), significant jitter (variation in delay time), and large size. That said, optically-triggered GaN-based photoconductive semiconductor switches (PCSS) offer a suitably small form factor and are a cost-effective, versatile solution in which delay times and jitter can be extremely short. Furthermore, the optical control of the switch means that they are electrically isolated from the environment and from any other system circuitry, making them immune from electrical noise, eliminating the potential for inadvertent switch triggering. Our recent work shows great promise to extend high-voltage GaN-based extrinsic PCSS state-of-the-art performance in terms of subnanosecond response times, low on-resistance, high current carrying capacity and high blocking voltages. We discuss our recent results in this work.

With its wide bandgap and high critical field, GaN is a promising material for high power electronics. To date, most GaN films have been grown on foreign substrates such as sapphire or SiC. Lattice mismatch between the film and substrate leads to a large number of threading dislocations (∼109 −1010 cm−2). These defects are thought to lead to poor device performance such as premature breakdown. Device properties are generally improved by growth of low-doped (< 1016 cm−3) GaN layers on high conductivity freestanding hydride vapor phase epitaxy (HVPE) GaN substrates. However, these films still have a large number of dislocations ∼ 106 cm−2. Dislocations are randomly oriented in both hetero and homoepitaxial films leading to a wide variation of material quality and thus device performance across the wafer. Recently, a true bulk GaN substrate became available using an ammonothermal growth technique. These substrates have both a low resistivity and low threading dislocation density. Growth of low-doped films on these bulk substrates can potentially address the problems of uniformity and premature breakdown in GaN power Schottky diodes.

Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy patients often display shrinkage of the entorhinal cortex, which has been attributed to neuronal loss in medial entorhinal cortex layer III (MEC-III). MEC-III neuronal loss is reproduced in chronic epileptic rats after kainate-induced (KA) status epilepticus. Here we examined, in vitro , functional changes in superficial entorhinal cortex layers. Alterations in superficial layer circuitry were suggested by showing that presubiculum, parasubiculum and deep MEC stimulation evoked 100–300 Hz field potential transients and prolonged EPSPs (superimposed on IPSPs) in superficial MEC which were partially blocked by APV (in contrast to control) and fully blocked by CNQX. Contrary to controls, bicuculline (5 and 30 μM) had minor effects on evoked field potentials in KA rats. GAD65/67 in situ hybridization revealed preserved interneurons in MEC-III. In conclusion, hyperexcitability in superficial MEC neurons is not due to loss of GABAergic interneurons and probably results from alterations in synaptic connectivity within superficial MEC.

A high reliability and ow noise 680 nm optical head is described. This head enables a high data integrity, 14.8 GByte/Disk product (KODAK Optical Disk System 2000). The laser intensitynoise is measured to be -133 to -137 dB/Hz at the data frequencies. This allows phase margin forthe system to exceed 50%. The laser with drive electronics is shown to have a pulse lifetime of greater than 40,000 hours at exaggerated drive conditions.Keywords: Write-Once Optical Data Storage, Red Optical Head, Laser Intensity Noise, LaserReliability 1. INTRODUCTION We have achieved a high reliability and high data integrity 14.8 Gigabyte/Disk product by using a very low noise and high reliability 680 nm optical head. This product (KODAK OpticalDisk System 2000) is based on Kodak's proprietary write-once phase change recording layer.12. OPTICAL HEADThe layout of the red optical head is shown in Figure 1. The light source is a 30 mW, 680 nm laser diode from SDL, Inc. The beam is collimated with a Kodak precision glass molded lens witha focal length of 7.5 mm. A beam expander/partial polarization beamsplitter expands the beam by

CONVEX Computer Corp. has developed a language-indepen dent inter procedural optimizer that is now available to users of its C-series supercomputers. This paper documents the benefits of one particular feature of that optimizer, pointer target tracking. This paper surveys the st ructure of the interpro­ cedural optimizer and the goals of pointer target track­ ing. It describes the realitie s of scientific codes that had to be handled. and gives an overview of the algorithms used. It also provides detailed statistics on the oppor­ tunities for pointer tracking, the characteristics of pointer ranges, and the benefits to optimization of pointer tracking.