Search results

The purpose of this paper is to consider the logical specification, and automated verification, of high‐level robotic behaviours.

The paper uses temporal logic as a formal language for providing abstractions of foraging robot behaviour, and successively extends this to multiple robots, items of food for the robots to collect, and constraints on the real‐time behaviour of robots. For each of these scenarios, proofs of relevant properties are carried out in a fully automated way. In addition to automated deductive proofs in propositional temporal logic, the possibility of having arbitrary numbers of robots involved is considered, thus allowing representations of robot swarms. This leads towards the use of first‐order temporal logics (FOTLs).

The proofs of many properties are achieved using automatic deductive temporal provers for the propositional and FOTLs.

Many details of the problem, such as location of the robots, avoidance, etc. are abstracted away.

Large robot swarms are beyond the current capability of propositional temporal provers. Whilst representing and proving properties of arbitrarily large swarms using FOTLs is feasible, the representation of infinite numbers of pieces of food is outside of the decidable fragment of FOTL targeted, and practically, the provers struggle with even small numbers of pieces of food.

The work described in this paper is novel in that it applies automatic temporal theorem provers to proving properties of robotic behaviour.

In lieu of a cure, the idea that dementia might be preventable through risk-factor moderation has latterly gained popularity. Prevention research is an evolving field that will likely undergo significant shifts in the near future. This paper aims to engage with that future as it is imagined in the present.

This study explores the futures envisaged by dementia prevention researchers in the UK, based on interviews with six practitioners at the forefront of the field.

Participants foresaw a pivot away from “dementia prevention” toward “brain health”, and advocated for blended policy, community and lifestyle interventions. They were excited by the prospects for a lifecourse dementia hypothesis to inform new interventions but uncomfortable with the ethics of early intervention.

These findings complicate simplistic depictions of prevention researchers as pursuing responsibilised lifestyle approaches.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

This study aimed to look at parents' perceptions of a number of different toy prototypes that represented physical impairments and predictors of these perceptions.

A correlational survey design was used. Parents of children aged 4–10 years who identified their child as having a disability (n = 160) and not as having a disability (n = 166) took part. They rated a number of prototypes for likelihood that their child would enjoy playing with them and completed measures of their responses toward children with disabilities and of their own and their child's direct contact with people with disabilities.

It was found that, among parents of children who did not declare that their child had a disability, the more open the parents were toward disability, the more contact the children had with other children with disabilities and the more likely they were to consider that their child would like to play with a toy prototype representing a physical impairment. This pattern of results was not found among parents who identified their child as having a disability, where instead positive friendship intentions of parents mediated this association.

These findings have implications for theories informing the positive benefits of disability representation.

These findings indicate different paths through which parents might be moved to purchase toys that represent physical impairments for their children.

These findings suggest that representative toys might be associated with an open dialogue around the topic of disability.

This is the first study of the responses of parents to toys that represent physical impairments known to the authors.

This paper describes the current guidance in the Police and Criminal Evidence (NI) Order and associated codes of practice as they relate to the detention and questioning of juveniles and vulnerable adults. The provision of appropriate adults services is described with reference to a recent research study and recommendations made in the Criminal Justice Review, commissioned as part of the Good Friday Agreement.

THE Woolwich Borough Council have made the retirement of Dr. Baker from the post of Borough Librarian the opportunity of adopting the reactionary policy of dividing the Woolwich library system into three independent parts. They do not propose to fill Dr. Baker's post, and have made three members of the staff librarians‐in‐charge of the Woolwich, Eltham, and Plumstead libraries. Within recent years West Ham and Lewisham have adopted a similar policy; while an opposite course has been taken by Southwark and Westminster. It is obvious that an already limited income will be even more inadequate when it is administered in three separate parts. A small temporary advantage may accrue to certain localities of the borough, but the library service of the borough as a whole is bound to suffer. There is plenty of evidence that the greatest library service can be given to a district when the libraries form one organic whole. So much for the present; now for the future. Woolwich is growing rapidly in some localities, and when the inevitable library extension is required, what is going to happen ? Each of the older districts is going to be mulcted of a part of its already far from adequate share in order to finance still another separate administration. Instead of the Borough library service under one administration becoming increasingly efficient with the growth of the district, it is going to remain a series of small and comparatively ineffective units. Then there is another aspect of the question which touches us even more closely professionally. If library systems are going to be divided in this way, men and women are not going to be found willing to go through the long and special training necessary for an administrative librarian, because the position of “librarian‐in‐charge” is no return for such training. In this way, if this policy is going to spread, a much more serious blow still will be struck at the library efficiency of the country.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how nurses make decisions to ration care or leave it undone within a clinical environment that is controlled by systems level cost containment. The authors wanted to find out what professional, personal and organisational factors contribute to that decision-making process. This work follows previous international research that explored missed nursing care using Kalisch and Williams’ MISSCARE survey.

The authors drew on the care elements used by Kalisch and Williams, asking nurses to tell us how they decided what care to leave out, the conduits for which could include delaying care during a shift, delegating care to another health professional on the same shift, handing care over to staff on the next shift or leaving care undone.

The findings suggest that nurses do not readily consider their accountability when deciding what care to leave or delay, instead their priorities focus on the patient and the organisation, the outcomes for which are frequently achieved by completing work after a shift.

The actions of nurses implicitly rationing care is largely hidden from view, the consequences for which potentially have far reaching effects to the nurses and the patients. This paper raised awareness to hidden issues facing nurses within a cycle of implicitly rationing care, caught between wanting to provide care to their patients, meeting the organisation’s directives and ensuring professional safety. Rethinking how care is measured to reflect its unpredictable nature is essential.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the literature regarding work intensification that is being experienced by nurses, to examine the effects this is having on their capacity to complete care. The authors contend that nurses’ inability to provide all the care patients require, has negative implications on their professional responsibility.

The authors used institutional ethnography to review the discourse in the literature. This approach supports inquiry through the review of text in order to uncover activities that remain institutionally accepted but unquestioned and hidden.

What the authors found was that the quality and risk management forms an important part of lean thinking, with the organisational culture influencing outcomes; however, the professional cost to nurses has not been fully explored.

The text uncovered inconsistency between what organisations accepted as successful cost savings, and what nurses were experiencing in their attempts to achieve the care in the face of reduced time and human resources. Nurses’ attempts at completing care were done at the risk of their own professional accountability.

Nurses are working in lean and stressful environments and are struggling to complete care within reduced resource allocations. This leads to care rationing, which negatively impacts on nurses’ professional practice, and quality of care provision.

This approach is a departure from the standard qualitative review because the focus is on the textual relationships between what is being advocated by organisations directing cost reduction and what is actioned by the nurses working at the coalface. The discordant standpoints between these two juxtapositions are identified.