Sharing with the land of the dancing lights.

In this article, the authors discuss some of their experiences with an innovative project that involved a group of faculty engaged in a collegial model of mentorship through the use of distance technology. In 2001, Aurora College in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, entered into contract with the Collaborative Nursing Program (CNP) in British Columbia to develop a four-year BSN program. The contract included a curriculum development and faculty mentoring package for each year of the new program.

Participatory inquiry with a colleague: an innovative faculty development process.

Clinical evaluation is central to the aims of nursing education; however, little has been written about the actual evaluative practices of nurse educators and the sources of influence on those practices. In this article, we describe our experience as co-investigators into the evaluation practices of one of us (J.A.

A feed-forward network for input that is both categorical and quantitative.

The data on which a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) is to be trained to approximate a continuous function may have inputs that are categorical rather than numeric or quantitative such as color, gender, race, etc. A categorical variable causes a discontinuous relationship between an input variable and the output. A MLP, with connection matrices that multiply input values and sigmoid functions that further transform values, represents a continuous mapping in all input variables.

Recent advances in petroleum microbiology.

Recent advances in molecular biology have extended our understanding of the metabolic processes related to microbial transformation of petroleum hydrocarbons. The physiological responses of microorganisms to the presence of hydrocarbons, including cell surface alterations and adaptive mechanisms for uptake and efflux of these substrates, have been characterized. New molecular techniques have enhanced our ability to investigate the dynamics of microbial communities in petroleum-impacted ecosystems.

A discrete fully recurrent network of max product units for associative memory and classification.

This paper defines the truncated normalized max product operation for the transformation of states of a network and provides a method for solving a set of equations based on this operation. The operation serves as the transformation for the set of fully connected units in a recurrent network that otherwise might consist of linear threshold units. Component values of the state vector and outputs of the units take on the values in the set [0, 0.

Nurses' experience of violence in Alberta and British Columbia hospitals.

This study examined responses to a survey on violence in the workplace from a sample of 8,780 registered nurses practising in 210 hospitals in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. Findings relate to the frequency of violence against nurses, reported as the number of times they experienced a violent incident in the workplace. Nearly half (46%) of those surveyed had experienced 1 or more types of violence in the last 5 shifts worked.

A proposed max-product threshold unit for classification of pattern vectors.

This paper proposes a max-product threshold unit (maptu) that can successfully perform dichotomous classifications of pattern vectors. Maptu, with weight vector, w, classifies a pattern vector, x, by comparing x max-prod w to 0.5.

Partial purification and characterization of pyruvate kinase from the plant fraction of soybean root nodules.

Pyruvate kinase (PK, EC 2.7.1.

Growing of a Fuzzy Recurrent Artificial Neural Network (FRANN) for pattern classification.

This paper describes a method for growing a recurrent neural network of fuzzy threshold units for the classification of feature vectors. Fuzzy networks seem natural for performing classification, since classification is concerned with set membership and objects generally belonging to sets of various degrees. A fuzzy unit in the architecture proposed here determines the degree to which the input vector lies in the fuzzy set associated with the fuzzy unit.

The backpropagation algorithm in J, a fast prototyping tool for researching neural networks.

This paper illustrates the use of a powerful language, called J, that is ideal for simulating neural networks. The use of J is demonstrated by its application to a gradient descent method for training a multilayer perceptron. It is also shown how the back-propagation algorithm can be easily generalized to multilayer networks without any increase in complexity and that the algorithm can be completely expressed in an array notation which is directly executable through J.

The effect of orientation on the clarity of Hermann grid illusory lines.

To test the hypothesis that Hermann grid illusory lines are most clear when the grid is presented at a 45 deg, each of 20 participants underwent 10 trials in each of two conditions ('make the lines least clear' and 'make the lines most clear') which were run using a method of adjustment. A matched-pairs t-test applied to the means of the two conditions was significant beyond the 0.01 level.

A perspective on clinical evaluation in nursing education.

Clinical evaluation in nursing education is an important activity with potentially serious implications for students, teachers, and the recipients of nursing care. The evaluation of student learning in the clinical area has been the focus of much effort and energy as educators struggle with issues arising from the subjective nature of clinical evaluation and the role of clinical instructors as both teachers and evaluators. In this paper, the objectivity-subjectivity debate is reviewed and the limits of evaluation practices based solely in positivism are discussed.

Investing or discounting self: are moral decisions shaped by conditions in the workplace?

Modern socioeconomic trends contribute to the complexity and diversity of ethical issues encountered in clinical nursing practice. Despite growing interest in ethical decision making among nurses, little is known about the contextual influences. The article describes an exploratory study of how nurses make ethical decisions and what factors hindered or helped them to act on their moral choices.

Impact of research on pediatric pain assessment and outcomes.

Purpose: Pediatric nurses from varied practice and educational backgrounds learned about research by doing a ward-based study. The aim of the study was to determine if regular assessment of children's pain would improve their pain management and postoperative progress.

Method: Children, ages 5 to 17 years (n = 36), measured their pain every 4 hours postoperatively using the Wong-Baker Faces Pain Rating Scale.

Knowledge of pragmatic conversational structure.

Knowledge of conversational pragmatic structure was examined by asking 53 female volunteers to rate the naturalness of three versions of an appointment-making conversation from a beauty salon. One version was the naturally occurring conversation. The other two were its two most frequent reconstructions created by a separate group of subjects asked to put the scrambled natural conversation "back together again.

A macro approach to the explanation of physician distribution in Canada.

Physician distribution is influenced by complex factors. It is generally argued that the probability of physician increase will be greater in areas that have more to offer in the way of social and economic advantages, This study examines the effects of selected demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental factors (e.g.

Empowerment strategies in nursing education: a foundation for population-focused clinical studies.

Building on the already substantial body of literature on education for population-focused practice, this article incorporates the teaching of empowerment strategies into this literature. These strategies provide a framework for teaching nursing students to promote the health of populations by shifting their focus of care to one that is compatible with principles of primary health care and health promotion within a context of health care reform. Since 1989, education for these shifts in practice has taken place within a clinical studies course on population-focused practice and has continued to evolve within an innovative nursing curriculum developed by The University of Victoria and its collaborative partners in nursing education in British Columbia, Canada.

Student nurses' conceptions of computer use in hospitals.

In this article, the author reports on a study that investigated the conceptions and attitudes of community college diploma nursing students toward the use of computers in hospitals. Data were collected during 35 audio-taped interviews, which were analyzed using the constant comparative method. Findings indicated that students had little understanding of how computers are used by nurses today and how they might be used in the future.

Ethical challenge in community health nursing.

Community health nurses frequently face situations involving ethical conflicts, but little research has been carried out in this area. This paper, based on a study of dilemmas defined by 30 practising community health nurses in urban and rural British Columbia, Canada, presents an analysis of the situations that contain the most serious ethical conflicts for nurses working in the community. Although issues related to client's rights, nurses' interactions with colleagues and the system, and nurses' rights were explored, nurses in the study reported that situations involving high-risk parenting provided the most serious ethical challenges.