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Healthcare professionals frequently have the unenviable task of communicating 'bad news' to patients and their relatives. The disclosure of such news can be particularly difficult to parents of sick children. Evidently, the disclosure of this news can be both distressing and taxing for the healthcare professionals involved, challenging their communication and therapeutic skills. While doctors are primarily responsible for undertaking the disclosure of bad news, it is evident that nurses support this process. However there is a dearth of evidence which has explored specifically, and in depth, how nurses, particularly children's nurses, engage in and support this encounter. Drawing upon the involvement of eighteen children's nurses, caring for children and their parents in a variety of care settings including oncology, accident and emergency, intensive care and hospice, this study offers a grounded theory explaining how children's nurses contribute to the breaking of bad news to parents and relatives of sick children. With Trepidation has emerged as the core category in this grounded theory study. This category, which has three main properties: Being Troubled & Burdened, Sustaining Inner Control, and Gaining Strength, suggests that being involved in supporting the disclosure of bad news is a demanding and sometimes harrowing experience. A basic social process is presented which depicts behaviours and responses which can be located within one of six stages evident within the process of supporting the disclosure of bad news. For most children's nurses, involvement in breaking bad news, will always have a degree of trepidation yet the grounded theory presented explains how, with increasing exposure, experience, access to resources, support and enhanced self-awareness, the nurse can gain sufficient knowledge, skills and strength that the sense of trepidation associated with being involved in bad news can lessen considerably. The theory presented here has resonance with transactional theory of stress and coping (Lazarus & Folkman 1984) emotional labour (Smith 1992) and suggests significant implications for nurse-patient/parent and nurse-doctor relations. It is asserted that knowledge of With Trepidation should increase children's nurses awareness about the potential, yet challenge, of the contribution they can have in supporting the disclosure of bad news. With Trepidation can be used by children's nurses to guide and reflect upon their interactions, in positively participating in the disclosure of bad news, recognising the unique contribution that children's nurses can have in offering a valuable and meaningful involvement during such a difficult healthcare encounter.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the relationship between 'core' and 'periphery' in the context of a South Italian town clled Grottaminarda. It focusses on the way in which the people deal, in their everyday lives, with the process of integration into an economy and culture which extends far beyond the boundaries of the local community to national and supra-national levels. My contention is that integration has brought people face to face with images and stereotypes of backwardness and modernity. Consequently these images have become an important part of their identity; of the way they place themselves and perceive themselves as being placed in the social world. In this situation, people's self-positionings are a matter of struggle. Chapter One assesses the way in which the relationship between core and periphery has been approached in theory, and in the context of South Italy. The two approaches which have dominated - 'dependency theory' and 'action theory' are regarded as inadequate. The former is too mechanistic and economistic; the latter focusses too heavily on the interpersonal level and on the political arena. A new approach is suggested which shifts the analysis to the level of representation and identity. Living on the periphery is not just a matter of economic exploitation or political domination but is also a matter of the symbolic appropriations of a dominant culture. Chapters Two and Three provide an historical account of the relationship between core and periphery both in South Italy generally (in Chapter Two) and at Grottaminarda in particular (in Chapter Three). In Chapter Two, particular attention is drawn to the classification of the South as backward. In Chapter Three an attempt is made to show at what point the complex of images of backwardness involved in this classification became part of the everyday life of local people. Chapters Four and Five provide a basic picture of the geographical, demographic and economic chracteristics of the community. The former suggests that the putatively objective and neutral categories used to describe these basic facts about the town should not be taken for granted, but rather questioned in much the same way as the stereotypes of the South with which the thesis is concerned. In Chapter Five, it is shown that the contemporary local economy is characterised by continued precariousness together with an increased dependency on wider economic spheres. The next four chapters (Six to Nine) are the ethnographic 'backbone' of the thesis. The purpose of each is to describe the way in which the core images of backwardness and modernity have become part of people's everyday relationships. Each focusses on a particular set of relationships: the family and the life cycle; class and status; politics; and identity, and looks at the way in which people struggle for position in the core classification in the context of these relationships. The penultimate chapter before the conclusions is an attempt to characterise this struggle through the interpretation of the town's involvement in a national television quiz programme. Every aspect of the event is revealing of the nature of core-periphery relations and of the way in which they are reproduced through images of backwardness and modernity. It is also extremely revealing of the subordinate position of Grottesi within this relationship. The thesis concludes by emphasising that any attempt to suggest that local people construct their own identity, must be tempered with the recognition that the odds are stacked against them: their own 'strategic emplacements' are made in the context of a classification that has already placed them in a subordinate position.

The first chapter studies mutual funds. I model intraquarter trading and use a genetic algorithm to estimate the trade pattern that is most consistent with the fund's daily reported returns. I validate the model empirically on a sample of institutional trades from Ancerno and I confirm that the method more accurately predicts daily holdings when compared to existing naive assumptions. Further, my method is substantially more accurate in classifying a fund's tendency to supply liquidity, and this increased precision has important implications for identifying superior performing funds. Specifically, a long-short strategy based on the model's liquidity provision measures earns significant abnormal returns, while a similar strategy that relies on quarterly holdings does not exhibit any outperformance. The second chapter studies investment research. We find evidence that crowdsourced investment research facilitates informed trading by retail investors and improves firm liquidity. Specifically, retail order imbalances are strongly correlated with the sentiment of Seeking Alpha articles, and the ability of retail order imbalances to predict returns is roughly twice as large on research article days. In addition, firms with exogenous reductions in Seeking Alpha coverage experience increases in bid-ask spreads and price impact, with the effect being stronger for firms with high retail ownership. Our findings suggest that technological innovations have helped democratize access to investment research with important implications for firm liquidity.

Biological processes are often far too complex to predict. For those phenomenon that still evade understanding, it is helpful to visualize a black box—a system with clear inputs and outputs, but an unknowable, labyrinthine set of interior mechanisms to produce this transformation. To determine what happened, controlled experiments are often run on a culture of cells or tissues using a multi-well plate format. This structure is relatively simple and can be applied in most laboratory environments. This paper discusses newly built technologies that take this definition of an experiment and adapt it to detect genotypes as well as phenotypes; promisingly, these technologies are highly multiplexible by using a modified version of Fluoresecnt in situ Sequencing (FISSEQ).

This dissertation examines the growth potential of the U.S. maple syrup industry from a vari ety of ecologic, socio-economic, and public policy perspectives. It outlines the number of tappable trees by state, taking into account the species- sugar maple (Acer saccharum) and red maple (Acer rubrum)- ownership category, and the density and accessibility of the trees. Vermont taps the highest percentage of its available trees (3%) and thus leads the nation in syrup produ ction. States with the most significant growth potential include Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania. Production could also expand to fill local markets for syrup in states such as Illinois and Missouri. The extent to which the industry develops is based largely on l andowner attitudes, socio-economic factors, and supply/demand dynamics that dictate profitability. I performed multinomial logistic regression using survey data to explain the characteristic s that influence a landowners' desire to utilize their maple trees for syru p production- these include residing in New England, gender, and education. Since many large landowners are concerned about the effect of tapping maple trees on sawtimber value , I developed a Net Present Value (NPV) calculator that allows foresters and landowners to determine if it is more profitable to utilize maple trees for syrup or sawtimber production. The main determinants include tree size and growth, stumpage payments, lease payments, property taxes, discount rate, and the time horizon of the investment period. Our changing climate has caused much speculation that maples will migrate northward and be replaced with oaks and hickories by the end of the century. Thus, I utilized FIA data to explore recent trends in maple and oak/hickory abundance for 26 states over the past several decades and found that shade -tolerant sugar and red maples have been infiltrating the understories of oak/hickory forests throughout the eastern U.S. Finally, I examine the role of public policies in the development of the U.S. maple industry. In particular, I discuss differences in policies for tapping on public land, property taxation, government resources devoted to the maple industry in research, extension, and promotion, and the effect of the Quebec Federation's quota and pricing system on market expansion.

Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is an attractive technique for diagnostic radiology due to its short scanning time and 3-dimensional (3D) voxel-based reconstructions. The introduction of graphical computing (GPU) techniques have accelerated the reconstruction and acquisition of these 3D volumes. Clinical analysis of 2-dimensional (2D) image slices or 3D volumes can be tedious without computer- aided segmentation techniques for identification of anatomically-pertinent structures. Research has been conducted in the area of automatic airway surface extraction (from CBCT) which was implemented using traditional programming (CPU) methods. This study focuses on GPU processing and segmentation techniques specific to the area of CBCT craniofacial scans. The outcome is a fully automatic upper airway seg- mentation method on a GPU using NVIDIA's Common Unified Device Architecture (CUDA).

In the early 1970's a new processing technique to produce metallic alloys was developed by Benjamin and co-workers. This novel technique, called Mechanical Alloying (MA), involves the repeated welding, working hardening, and fracture of metallic powders to form an alloy. The research presented in this thesis describes the use of the MA process to form polymer blends. Until recently there has been no published work discussing the possibility of using this technique with polymers. This research lays the ground work for using the MA process to produce polymer blends by comparing this technique to conventional polymer processing techniques. The MA process was used to form blends of polypropylene (PP) and a liquid crystalline polymer (LCP). Samples were prepared and then characterized using thermal analysis via differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Mechanical testing, Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction (XRD) were performed on the materials. Scanning electron micrographs (SEM) of fracture surfaces are also presented. The results suggest that the solid state mechanical alloying process is a viable technique to form polymer blends.