bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Meaning of spirituality: implications for nursing practice
Authors: McSherry Wilfred , Cash Keith , Ross Linda 
Published: November 2004

Background.  This research outlines some preliminary findings emerging from a grounded theory investigation into the ‘meaning of spirituality’. These initial results raise some important questions about the terminology and language that nurses use regarding the term spirituality. It seems that many of the policy directives and statutory guidelines make two major assumptions regarding ‘spirituality’. Firstly, patients and nurses are aware and understand the concept, and secondly, patients may require their spiritual needs to be met. These preliminary findings suggest that a dichotomy is emerging between professional assumption and patient expectation regarding the meaning of spirituality.Aim.  The study had one broad research aim, to gain a deeper insight into how patients, nurses, and people from the major world religions understand the concept of ‘spirituality’.Design.  A qualitative research design was used involving a grounded theory method of inquiry. It was felt that this qualitative method would aid the investigation of this subjective dimension of peoples’ existence, enabling existing theoretical constructs and arguments to be tested.Methods.  The constant comparative method was used throughout the data collection and analysis. Analysis was undertaken at two levels, ‘overview analysis’ and ‘line‐by‐line analysis’. This enabled the creation of categories and central themes.Results.  Constant comparative analysis resulted in the formation of several categories and central themes. Two categories presented and discussed in detail are ‘definitions of spirituality’, and ‘diverse perceptions of spirituality’.Conclusion.  It would seem that there is now an urgent need for nursing to evaluate and perhaps adjust its vision regarding what constitutes spirituality. Such an approach may serve to reduce the gap between policy and public expectation.Relevance to clinical practice.  It seems that there may be no ‘precise’ terminology associated with the language used to define spirituality, raising possible implications for nursing practice and nurse education.
An exploration of the factors that influence the implementation of evidence into practice
Authors: Rycroft‐Malone Jo , Harvey Gill , Seers Kate , Kitson Alison , McCormack Brendan , Titchen Angie 
Published: November 2004

Background.  The challenges of implementing evidence‐based practice are complex and varied. Against this background a framework has been developed to represent the multiple factors that may influence the implementation of evidence into practice. It is proposed that successful implementation is dependent upon the nature of the evidence being used, the quality of context, and, the type of facilitation required to enable the change process. This study sets out to scrutinize the elements of the framework through empirical enquiry.Aims and objectives.  The aim of the study was to address the following questions:  • What factors do practitioners identify as the most important in enabling implementation of evidence into practice?

• What are the factors practitioners identify that mediate the implementation of evidence into practice?

• Do the concepts of evidence, context and facilitation constitute the key elements of a framework for getting evidence into practice?Design and methods.  The study was conducted in two phases. Phase 1: Exploratory focus groups (n = 2) were conducted to inform the development of an interview guide. This was used with individual key informants in case study sites. Phase 2: Two sites with on‐going or recent implementation projects were studied. Within sites semi‐structured interviews were conducted (n = 17).Results.  A number of key issues in relation to the implementation of evidence into practice emerged including: the nature and role of evidence, relevance and fit with organizational and practice issues, multi‐professional relationships and collaboration, role of the project lead and resources.Conclusions.  The results are discussed with reference to the wider literature and in relation to the on‐going development of the framework. Crucially the growing body of evidence reveals that a focus on individual approaches to implementing evidence‐based practice, such as skilling‐up practitioners to appraise research evidence, will be ineffective by themselves.Relevance to clinical practice.  Key elements that require attention in implementing evidence into practice are presented and may provide a useful checklist for future implementation and evaluation projects.
The Practice of Participatory Planning at Mapoon Aboriginal Settlement: Towards Community Control, Ownership and Autonomy
Authors: MORAN MARK F. 
Published: November 2004

AbstractThe practice of participatory planning in discrete Indigenous settlements has been established since the early 1990s. In addition to technical and economic goals, participatory planning also seeks community development outcomes, including community control, ownership and autonomy. This paper presents an evaluation of one such planning project, conducted at Mapoon in 1995. The Plan successfully improved physical infrastructure and housing, but had mixed success in terms of community development. Despite various efforts to follow participatory processes, the Plan was essentially a passing event, community control progressively diminished after its completion, and outcomes fell short of notions of ownership and autonomy. This suggests some misunderstandings between the practice of participatory planning and the workings of governance.
Gender and Life Course in the Narratives of Melbourne's High‐rise Housing Developers
Authors: FINCHER RUTH 
Published: November 2004

AbstractSocially constructed ideas about the life course, sometimes encompassing gender relations, have long informed the views of those within the housing development industry about who should be housed where in the city, living what sorts of lives. Drawing on the findings of a recent study of developers’ narratives about the construction of expensive, high‐rise housing in central Melbourne, a relatively new form of dwelling even in this part of the metropolitan area, several themes are found to characterise the taken‐for‐granted ways in which these city‐builders view the gendered life courses of housing consumers. Developers’ narratives oppose the suburban ‘home’ to the high‐rise ‘lifestyle’, consider central city high‐rise residences as appropriate only for people without families, and see women, separately from the couples they make up with men, only as potential victims requiring the security that high‐rise apartment living is said to provide. These narratives reiterate the characteristics of an essentialised ‘empty nester’, or ‘young professional’ housing consumer, who is envisaged to occupy the new housing and is defined according to life course stage and gender. The developers’ partial and narrow accounts of the likely consumers of this high‐rise housing is one factor amongst many that explains the building of precincts of high‐rise housing that have limited facilities for children and for pursuits other than consumption of the individual ‘lifestyle’.
Is Sydney a Divided City Ethnically?
Authors: POULSEN MICHAEL , JOHNSTON RON , FORREST JAMES 
Published: November 2004

AbstractRecent claims that Sydney's ethnic residential concentrations are a permanent feature and that the city is rapidly turning into a city bifurcated along an ethnic divide cannot be sustained by the evidence. An understanding of multicultural policies as they operate in Australia, and of segregation as essentially a transitory phenomenon there, suggests that social bifurcation is unlikely to occur. Immigrant concentrations in the poor suburbs are nothing new, and do not imply the entrapment of ethnic groups. While immigrant residential concentrations are increasing in size, commensurate with the influx of large numbers of migrants from non‐English speaking backgrounds over the past 30 years, the evidence suggests that claims of bifurcation are a product of the usage of birthplace data, the aggregation of ethnic groups into just two groups and a failure to take account of the degree of mixing. Evidence from both birthplace and ancestry data using different levels of ethnic aggregation and more appropriate analyses shows that Sydney is dominated by an intermixing of different ethnic groups with each other and with the host society, and not by high levels of ethnic segregation. Ancestry data from the 2001 Census show the spatial assimilation into the host society of the grandchildren, but less so the children, of immigrants in Sydney with similar rates for both the white non‐Anglo‐Celtic and the Asian populations.
Accounting Choice, Home Bias, and U.S. Investment in Non‐U.S. Firms
Authors: BRADSHAW MARK T. , BUSHEE BRIAN J. , MILLER GREGORY S. 
Published: November 2004

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the relation between accounting choice and U.S. institutional investor ownership in non‐U.S. firms. We predict that U.S. investors exhibit home bias in their preference for accounting methods conforming to U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) because such methods are more familiar, reduce information processing costs, and are perceived as higher quality. We find that firms exhibiting higher levels (changes) of U.S. GAAP conformity have greater levels (changes) of U.S. institutional ownership. Lead‐lag regressions suggest that increases in U.S. GAAP conformity precede increases in U.S. investment, but changes in U.S. institutional holdings do not precede changes in accounting methods. We also find that the positive relation between U.S. GAAP conformity and U.S. investment holds regardless of a firm's visibility to U.S. investors (e.g., American Depositary Receipt listing, stock index membership, analyst following, firm size). However, we find that U.S. GAAP conformity has a significantly greater impact among firms already visible to U.S. investors.
How Informed Are Actively Trading Institutional Investors? Evidence from Their Trading Behavior before a Break in a String of Consecutive Earnings Increases
Authors: KE BIN , PETRONI KATHY 
Published: November 2004

ABSTRACTWe examine whether transient institutional investors (i.e., institutions that trade actively to maximize short‐term profits) have information that allows them to predict a break in a string of consecutive quarterly earnings increases and thereby avoid the economically significant negative stock price response associated with the break announcement. We show that transient institutions predict the break at least one quarter in advance of the break quarter. We also provide evidence that is consistent with transient institutions obtaining information regarding the impending break from private communications with management.
Globalization, Governance, and the Future of Public Administration: Can We Make Sense Out of the Fog of Rhetoric Surrounding the Terminology?
Authors: Klingner Donald E. 
Published: November 2004

Books reviewed in this article:Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern WorldJoseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its DiscontentsMiles Kahler and David Lake, eds., Governance in a Global EconomyJoseph Nye, Jr. and John Donahue, eds., Governance in a Globalizing World
Using Parallel Strategies to Promote Change: Forest Policymaking under George W. Bush
Authors: Vaughn Jacqueline , Cortner Hanna 
Published: November 2004

AbstractThis study of policy change examines the parallel strategies the administration of President George W. Bush has used to substantially alter the direction of forest policy during his first term. Using the Healthy Forests Initiative as a case study, this analysis explains how, by framing the problem of wildfires and forest health in terms of process and pointing blame at environmental groups misusing appeal procedures, the administration was able to emphasize process, rather than the content of existing forest policy. It also provided a reasonable explanation for the president to take a lead in seeking both legislative as well as regulatory change. We contend that the use of two parallel policymaking paths—legislative and administrative—enabled the president to pursue policy change more rapidly, and, from a strategic standpoint, more effectively, than by relying upon the legislative process alone. We offer that the Bush administration's approach to changing forest policy represents a redirection that is likely to serve as a template for further environmental policy change.
A System‐of‐Systems Perspective for Public Policy Decisions
Authors: DeLaurentis Dan , Callaway Robert K. “CAB” 
Published: November 2004

AbstractProblems of increasing complexity are facing decision makers within government and industry, and the key characteristic of these problems is that they are of system‐of‐systems type. With multiple, heterogeneous, distributed systems involved (including policies and economies as well as technologies), effective analysis for decision‐support quickly becomes unmanageable within the “stovepipe” context that still characterizes many organizations in the research and development community. There is not a process/field of study in place that can enable us to systematically solve these types of problems, exemplified by the Next Generation Transportation System. While indeed numerous tools are available to help, they cannot be used effectively because the people who build and understand the tools all speak different languages. Much confusion still remains about words and phrases for system‐of‐systems type problems, let alone the best modeling approaches for dealing with them. While pockets of organizational restructuring may address this challenge for particular projects, there is a lack of systematic thinking at the basic level about how to address the challenges. This paper recommends that intellectual, financial, and institutional resources be invested for the purpose of initiating and nurturing a field of study that will enable us to better address this important type of problem. The future of transportation serves as a motivating example of a multidomain, system‐of‐systems problem of critical importance to the nation and in need of effective decision‐support. The analogy of creating better maps and “navigation aids” for decision makers will be employed, emphasizing that, when navigating a minefield, knowing where not to go is the key factor in successfully traversing the terrain (i.e., making wise decisions).
Characterization of the Nodularin Synthetase Gene Cluster and Proposed Theory of the Evolution of Cyanobacterial Hepatotoxins
Authors: Moffitt Michelle C. , Neilan Brett A. 
Published: November 2004

ABSTRACT

Nodularia spumigena
is a bloom-forming cyanobacterium which produces the hepatotoxin nodularin. The complete gene cluster encoding the enzymatic machinery required for the biosynthesis of nodularin in
N. spumigena
strain NSOR10 was sequenced and characterized. The 48-kb gene cluster consists of nine open reading frames (ORFs),
ndaA
to
ndaI
, which are transcribed from a bidirectional regulatory promoter region and encode nonribosomal peptide synthetase modules, polyketide synthase modules, and tailoring enzymes. The ORFs flanking the
nda
gene cluster in the genome of
N. spumigena
strain NSOR10 were identified, and one of them was found to encode a protein with homology to previously characterized transposases. Putative transposases are also associated with the structurally related microcystin synthetase (
mcy
) gene clusters derived from three cyanobacterial strains, indicating a possible mechanism for the distribution of these biosynthetic gene clusters between various cyanobacterial genera. We propose an alternative hypothesis for hepatotoxin evolution in cyanobacteria based on the results of comparative and phylogenetic analyses of the
nda
and
mcy
gene clusters. These analyses suggested that nodularin synthetase evolved from a microcystin synthetase progenitor. The identification of the nodularin biosynthetic gene cluster and evolution of hepatotoxicity in cyanobacteria reported in this study may be valuable for future studies on toxic cyanobacterial bloom formation. In addition, an appreciation of the natural evolution of nonribosomal biosynthetic pathways will be vital for future combinatorial engineering and rational design of novel metabolites and pharmaceuticals.
Dynamics of a Pasture Soil Microbial Community after Deposition of Cattle Urine Amended with [13C]Urea
Authors: Petersen Søren O. , Roslev Peter , Bol Roland 
Published: November 2004

ABSTRACTWithin grazed pastures, urine patches are hot spots of nitrogen turnover, since dietary N surpluses are excreted mainly as urea in the urine. This short-term experiment investigated13C uptake in microbial lipids after simulated deposition of cattle urine at 10.0 and 17.1 g of urea C m−2. Confined field plots without or with cattle urine amendment were sampled after 4 and 14 days, and soil from 0- to 5-cm and 10- to 20-cm depths was analyzed for content and composition of phospholipid fatty acids (PLFAs) and for the distribution of urea-derived13C among individual PLFAs. Carbon dioxide emissions were quantified, and the contributions derived from urea were assessed. Initial changes in PLFA composition were greater at the lower level of urea, as revealed by a principal-component analysis. At the higher urea level, osmotic stress was indicated by the dynamics of cyclopropane fatty acids and branched-chain fatty acids. Incorporation of13C from [13C]urea was low but significant, and the largest amounts of urea-derived C were found in common fatty acids (i.e., 16:0, 16:1ω7c, and 18:1ω7) that would be consistent with growth of typical NH4+-oxidizing (Nitrosomonas) and NO2−-oxidizing (Nitrobacter) bacteria. Surprisingly, a 20‰ depletion of13C in the cyclopropane fatty acid cy17:0 was observed after 4 days, which was replaced by a 10 to 20‰ depletion of that in cy19:0 after 14 days. Possible reasons for this pattern are discussed. Autotrophic nitrifiers could not be implicated in urea hydrolysis to any large extent, but PLFA dynamics and the incorporation of urea-derived13C in PLFAs indicated a response of nitrifiers which differed between the two urea concentrations.
Inactivation of an ABC Transporter Gene,
mcyH
, Results in Loss of Microcystin Production in the Cyanobacterium
Microcystis aeruginosa
PCC 7806
Authors: Pearson Leanne A. , Hisbergues Michael , Börner Thomas , Dittmann Elke , Neilan Brett A. 
Published: November 2004

ABSTRACT

The cyanobacterium
Microcystis aeruginosa
is widely known for its production of the potent hepatotoxin microcystin. Microcystin is synthesized nonribosomally by the thiotemplate function of a large, modular enzyme complex encoded within the 55-kb microcystin synthetase (
mcy
) gene cluster. Also encoded within the
mcy
gene cluster is a putative ATP binding cassette (ABC) transporter, McyH. This study details the bioinformatic and mutational analyses of McyH and offers functional predictions for the hypothetical protein. The transporter is putatively comprised of two homodimers, each with an N-terminal hydrophobic domain and a C-terminal ATPase. Phylogenetically, McyH was found to cluster with members of the ABC-A
1
subgroup of ABC ATPases, suggesting an export function for the protein. Two
mcyH
null mutant (Δ
mcyH
) strains were constructed by partial deletion of the
mcyH
gene. Microcystin production was completely absent in these strains. While the
mcyH
deletion had no apparent effect on the transcription of other
mcy
genes, the complete microcystin biosynthesis enzyme complex could not be detected in Δ
mcyH
mutant strains. Finally, expression levels of McyH in the wild type and in Δ
mcyA
, Δ
mcyB
, and Δ
mcyH
mutants were investigated by using immunoblotting with an anti-McyH antibody. Expression of McyH was found to be reduced in Δ
mcyA
and Δ
mcyB
mutants and completely absent in the Δ
mcyH
mutant. By virtue of its association with the
mcy
gene cluster and the bioinformatic and experimental data presented in this study, we predict that McyH functions as a microcystin exporter and is, in addition, intimately associated with the microcystin biosynthesis pathway.
Fatty Acid Production from Amino Acids and α-Keto Acids by
Brevibacterium linens
BL2
Authors: Ganesan Balasubramanian , Seefeldt Kimberly , Weimer Bart C. 
Published: November 2004

ABSTRACT

Low concentrations of branched-chain fatty acids, such as isobutyric and isovaleric acids, develop during the ripening of hard cheeses and contribute to the beneficial flavor profile. Catabolism of amino acids, such as branched-chain amino acids, by bacteria via aminotransferase reactions and α-keto acids is one mechanism to generate these flavorful compounds; however, metabolism of α-keto acids to flavor-associated compounds is controversial. The objective of this study was to determine the ability of
Brevibacterium linens
BL2 to produce fatty acids from amino acids and α-keto acids and determine the occurrence of the likely genes in the draft genome sequence. BL2 catabolized amino acids to fatty acids only under carbohydrate starvation conditions. The primary fatty acid end products from leucine were isovaleric acid, acetic acid, and propionic acid. In contrast, logarithmic-phase cells of BL2 produced fatty acids from α-keto acids only. BL2 also converted α-keto acids to branched-chain fatty acids after carbohydrate starvation was achieved. At least 100 genes are potentially involved in five different metabolic pathways. The genome of
B. linens
ATCC 9174 contained these genes for production and degradation of fatty acids. These data indicate that brevibacteria have the ability to produce fatty acids from amino and α-keto acids and that carbon metabolism is important in regulating this event.
Air- and Dustborne Mycoflora in Houses Free of Water Damage and Fungal Growth
Authors: Horner W. Elliott , Worthan Anthony G. , Morey Philip R. 
Published: November 2004

ABSTRACT
Typically, studies on indoor fungal growth in buildings focus on structures with known or suspected water damage, moisture, and/or indoor fungal growth problems. Reference information on types of culturable fungi and total fungal levels are generally not available for buildings without these problems. This study assessed 50 detached single-family homes in metropolitan Atlanta, Ga., to establish a baseline of “normal and typical” types and concentrations of airborne and dustborne fungi in urban homes which were predetermined not to have noteworthy moisture problems or indoor fungal growth. Each home was visually examined, and samples of indoor and outdoor air and of indoor settled dust were taken in winter and summer. The results showed that rankings by prevalence and abundance of the types of airborne and dustborne fungi did not differ from winter to summer, nor did these rankings differ when air samples taken indoors were compared with those taken outdoors. Water indicator fungi were essentially absent from both air and dust samples. The air and dust data sets were also examined specifically for the proportions of colonies from ecological groupings such as leaf surface fungi and soil fungi. In the analysis of dust for culturable fungal colonies, leaf surface fungi constituted a considerable portion (>20%) of the total colonies in at least 85% of the samples. Thus, replicate dust samples with less than 20% of colonies from leaf surface fungi are unlikely to be from buildings free of moisture or mold growth problems.