Do pharmacy practice standards effectively describe behaviour? Reviewing practice standards using a behavioural specificity framework

Background Guidelines and practice standards exist to communicate the conduct and behaviour expected of health care professionals and ensure consistent quality practice. It is important that they describe behaviours explicitly so they can be interpreted, enacted and measured with ease. The AACTT framework specifies behaviour in terms of the: Action to be performed, Actor who performs the action, Context where the action occurs, Target who the action is performed with/for and Time when the action is performed (AACTT). It provides the most up to date framework for specifying behaviours and is particularly relevant to complex behavioural problems that involve sequences of behaviours performed by different people. Behavioural specificity within pharmacy practice standards has not been explored. Aim To determine if behaviours described in the Professional Practice Standards for Australian Pharmacists specify Action, Actor, Context, Target and Time. Methods Two researchers independently reviewed the scope and structure of the practice standards and one extracted action statements (behaviours) verbatim. Through an iterative process, the researchers modified and developed the existing AACTT definitions to operationalise them for application to review of the action statements in the practice standards. The operational definitions, decision criteria and curated examples were combined in a codebook. The definitions were consistently applied through a directed content analysis approach to evaluate all extracted action statements by one researcher. For consistency 20% was independently checked for agreement by a second researcher. Results A novel codebook to apply AACTT criteria to evaluate practice standards was developed. Application of this codebook identified 768 independent behaviours. Of these, 300 (39%) described at least one discrete observable action, none specified an actor, 25 (3%) specified context, 131 (17%) specified target and 88 (11%) specified time. Conclusion(s) The behaviours detailed in practice standards for Australian pharmacists do not consistently specify behaviours in terms of Action, Actor, Context, Target and Time. Developers in the pharmacy profession, and beyond, should consider the behavioural specificity of their documents to improve interpretability, usability and adherence to the behaviours detailed. This also has implications for the development and evaluation of interventions to change such behaviours and improve quality of care.

Research on Dynamic Scheduling of Unbalanced Supply and Demand of the SROC Based on the Customers Priority Principle

The problem of imbalance between supply and demand in car-sharing scheduling has greatly restricted the development of car-sharing. This paper first analyzes the three supply and demand modes of car-sharing scheduling systems. Secondly, for the station-based with reservation one-way car-sharing problem (SROC), this article establishes a dynamic scheduling model under the principle of customer priority. The model introduces balance coefficients to predict the balance mode, and systematically rebalance the fleet networks in each period. In the case of meeting customer needs, the model objective function is to maximize the total profit and minimize the scheduling and loss costs. Then, in view of the diversity and uncertainty of scheduling schemes, a scheme information matrix is constructed. In the iterative process of genetic algorithm, individuals are selected and constructed according to the pheromone matrix, and evolution probability is proposed to control the balance between global search and local search of genetic algorithm. Finally, the data of Haikou City is used for simulation experiment.

FEM-Validated Optimal Design of Laminate Process Parameters Based on Improved Genetic Algorithm

In tape placement process, the laying angle and laying sequence of laminates have proven their significant effects on the mechanical properties of carbon fibre reinforced composite material, specifically, laminates. In order to optimise these process parameters, an optimisation algorithm is developed based on the principles of genetic algorithms for improving the precision of traditional genetic algorithms and resolving the premature phenomenon in the optimisation process. Taking multi-layer symmetrically laid carbon fibre laminates as the research object, this algorithm adopts binary coding to conduct the optimisation of process parameters and mechanical analysis with the laying angle as the design variable and the strength ratio R as the response variable. A case study was conducted and its results were validated by the finite element analyses. The results show that the stresses before and after optimisation are 116.0 MPa and 100.9 MPa, respectively, with a decrease of strength ratio by 13.02%. The results comparison indicates that, in the iterative process, the search range is reduced by determining the code and location of important genes, thereby reducing the computational workload by 21.03% in terms of time consumed. Through multiple calculations, it validates that “gene mutation” is an indispensable part of the genetic algorithm in the iterative process.

Uni-Cycle Genetic Algorithm as an Adaptation Engine for Wireless Channel Equalizers

A recently developed adaptive channel equalizer driven by a so-called Uni-Cycle Genetic Algorithm (UCGA) is examined in the paper. The authors consider different initialization strategies of the iterative process and compare UCGA against the reference Recursive Least Squares (RLS) algorithm in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) vs. Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) performance and convergence rate of an adaptive channel equalizer. The results display a reasonable performance gain of UCGA over RLS for most of wireless channel models studied in the paper. Additionally, UCGA is capable of boosting the equalizer convergence. Thus, it can be considered a promising candidate for the future adaptive wireless channel equalizer.

Side Tributary Distribution of Quasi-Uniform Iterative Binary Tree Networks for River Networks

Self-similarity and plane-filling are intrinsic structure properties of natural river networks. Statistical data indicates that most natural river networks are Tokunaga trees. Researchers have explored to use iterative binary tree networks (IBTNs) to simulate natural river networks. However, the characteristics of natural rivers such as Tokunaga self-similarity and plane-filling cannot be easily guaranteed by the configuration of the IBTN. In this paper, the generator series and a quasi-uniform iteration rule are specified for the generation of nonstochastic quasi-uniform iterative binary tree networks (QU-IBTNs). First, we demonstrate that QU-IBTNs definitely satisfy self-similarity. Second, we show that the constraint for a QU-IBTN to be a Tokunaga tree is that the exterior links must be replaced in the generator series with a neighboring generator that is larger than the interior links during the iterative process. Moreover, two natural river networks are examined to reveal the inherent consistency with QU-IBTN at low Horton-Strahler orders.

A Virtual Solution

The authors tell the story of how the VECTOR virtual coaching process was developed. They share some of the data and tell about the iterative process of working with virtual coaches to develop and refine the virtual coaching process to work better for coaches and coachees. They introduce each phase of the VECTOR process as well as the ACTIVATE acronym that defines the qualities virtual coaches should develop and foster in order to be successful in their work. This chapter acts as a preview to the chapters to follow – one for each phase of the VECTOR process and a full chapter devoted entirely to ACTIVATE.

Dense monocular Simultaneous Localization and Mapping by direct surfel optimization

This work presents a novel approach for monocular dense Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. The surface to be estimated is represented as a piecewise planar surface, defined as a group of surfels each having as parameters its position and normal. These parameters are then directly estimated from the raw camera pixels measurements, by a Gauss-Newton iterative process. The representation of the surface as a group of surfels has several advantages. It allows the recovery of robust and accurate pixel depths, without the need to use a computationally demanding depth regularization schema. This has the further advantage of avoiding the use of a physically unlikely surface smoothness prior. New surfels can be correctly initialized from the information present in nearby surfels, avoiding also the need to use an expensive initialization routine commonly needed in Gauss-Newton methods. The method was written in the GLSL shading language, allowing the usage of GPU thus achieving real-time. The method was tested against several datasets, showing both its depth and normal estimation correctness, and its scene reconstruction quality. The results presented here showcase the usefulness of the more physically grounded piecewise planar scene depth prior, instead of the more commonly pixel depth independence and smoothness prior.

Discrete N-fold Darboux transformation and infinite number of conservation laws of a four-component Toda lattice

In this paper, we investigate a four-component Toda lattice (TL), which may be used to model the wave propagation in lattices just like the famous TL. By means of the Lax pair and gauge transformation, we construct the [Formula: see text]-fold Darboux transformation (DT), which enables us to obtain multi-soliton or multi-solitary wave solution without complex iterative process. Through the obtained DT, [Formula: see text]-fold explicit exact solutions of the system and their figures with proper parameters are presented from which we find the [Formula: see text]-fold solution shows two-solitary wave structure, the amplitude and shape of the wave change with time. Finally, we derive an infinite number of conservation laws formulaically to illustrate the integrability of the system.