Dakota Technologies (United States)

The aim of this study's phase 1 was to determine the current wellness levels of RNs in rural America settings, including barriers to maintain and recommendations for wellness. Nurses are experiencing more anxiety and burnout currently than prepandemic. A review of literature revealed a gap in describing nurses' wellness and strategies to maintain wellness in rural American healthcare settings. The Integrative Health and Wellness Assessment (IHWA) V2 2022 holistically measured participants' wellness. The survey was deployed in 2023 to 6989 clinical nurses, nurse leaders, and advanced practice nurses. The IHWA V2 2022 mean was 134.72. Significant findings included age, years of experience, and role. Barriers of insufficient time, work environment, and family responsibilities were identified. Recommendations involved the work environment, stress management, and healthy boundaries with suggestions to implement in rural settings. Study findings can assist leaders to implement interventions that positively impact nurse wellness in rural settings. Interventions promoting wellness are essential for nurses to meet these same needs of their patients.

Nurses play an important role in pandemic and disaster response, often at a personal cost to their overall well-being. Interviews with 19 frontline COVID-19 nurses helped illuminate priority focus areas involving nurses in the planning process, providing clear communication and offering mental health services. These recommendations align with and reinforce conclusions and recommendations from The Future of Nursing 2020-2030 Report.

Preparation of nursing students has traditionally occurred in academic settings where faculty develop programs of study. Practice settings often find themselves investing in significant education and support as the new-graduate nurse transitions into the RN role. A gap in preparation exists between academic and practice expectations for the generalist RN role. Collaboration among academic and practice partners in the development of a core clinical curriculum, along with supporting content and learning activities, provides enriched clinical experiences that enhance readiness for the practicing role. The Culture of Caring (COC) Model guides academic and practice partners as a teaching-learning framework for the preparation of nursing students. The COC clinical curriculum bundles together supporting resources that include a handbook, workbook, faculty pocket guide, calendar, and nursing student cards used to foster the clinical experience.

This paper presents the design and implementation of a process for an exploratory study that identifies a set of principles for designed-in security and privacy for smart city projects from among Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) - Smart and Secure Cities and Communities Challenge (SC3) participants. The study was conducted based on information from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) GCTC Action Clusters database and interactions with the project teams. A research process was developed and implemented, comprising the following three steps: (1) Investigate project descriptions created by the project leads on the NIST GCTC database and other public sources; (2) Gather additional input from volunteer GCTC collaborators; and (3) Identify a set of governing principles commonly shared by examples of GCTC projects. Based on the outcomes of this process, a set of common principles has been identified that enable designed-in security and privacy considerations among the projects: specific technology usage, implementation of a cybersecurity management process and framework, and cybersecurity expertise and public-private partnerships. Characteristics of planning and implementation of security and privacy considerations from four example GCTC projects are described and analyzed in detail to illustrate the process.

Light field cameras are an emerging imaging device for acquiring 3-D information of a scene by capturing a field of light rays traveling in space. As light field cameras become portable, hand-held, and affordable, their potential as a 3-D measurement instrument is growing in many applications, including 3-D evidence imaging in crime scene investigations. We evaluated the lateral resolution of commercially available light field cameras, which is one of the fundamental specifications of imaging instruments. For the evaluation of the camera's lateral resolution, we imaged Siemens stars under various imaging configurations and experimental conditions, including changes in distance between the camera and the resolution target plate, illumination, zoom level, location of the Siemens star in the camera's field-of-view, and cameras of the same model. The analysis results from a full factorial experiment showed that (i) when a lower zoom level of the camera was used, the lateral resolution tended not to be affected by distance; however, when a higher zoom level was used, it tended to decrease significantly with respect to the distance, (ii) the center region of the camera's field-of-view provided a better lateral resolution than the peripheral regions, (iii) a higher zoom level yielded a higher lateral resolution, (iv) the two cameras of the same model used in the study did not show a significant difference in the lateral resolution, and (v) changes in illumination did not affect the lateral resolution of the cameras.

This paper presents an overview of the Video Instance Search benchmark which was run over a period of 6 years (2010-2015) as part of the TREC Video Retrieval (TRECVID) workshop series. The main contributions of the paper include i) an examination of the evolving design of the evaluation framework and its components (system tasks, data, measures); ii) an analysis of the influence of topic characteristics (such as rigid/non rigid, planar/non-planar, stationary/mobile on performance; iii) a high-level overview of results and best-performing approaches. The Instance Search (INS) benchmark worked with a variety of large collections of data including Sound & Vision, Flickr, BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Rushes for the first 3 pilot years and with the small world of the BBC Eastenders series for the last 3 years.

The determination of the relative isotopic abundance by secondary ion mass spectrometry of 236U in uranium-containing material is complicated by the presence of 235U1H+ ions at the same nominal mass as the uranium isotopic peak. The net intensity of the 236U signal is usually determined by a peak-stripping procedure, whereby the 235U1H+ contribution is obtained by applying the 238U1H+/238U+ ratio to the 235U+ signal. The subtraction of one signal from another has consequences for the uncertainty of the final 236U abundance determination that may be especially significant when the amount of sample is limited, as is the case with small uranium particles that are of great interest for nuclear safeguards. We have developed a model based on Poisson counting statistics to determine the effects of various parameters on the uncertainty of the 236U abundance, including uranium enrichment level, hydride-to-parent ratio, uranium mass consumed during analysis, single versus multichannel counting, and sample substrate composition. The model predictions have been successfully tested against experimental measurements of uranium oxide particles of both 3% and 90% enrichment in 235U.

Agency has been conceptualized as a drive toward mastery, control, and effective self-management. Such an agentic approach to life and its challenges may be life-prolonging, a hypothesis not previously investigated. In four studies, individual differences in agency were assessed in terms of the frequency with which agency-related words (e.g., "achieve," "fix," and "control") were mentioned in archived interviews or speeches (N = 210). Higher levels of linguistic agency predicted longer life-spans among prominent physicists (study 1: n = 60, β = .30, t = 2.30, p = .025), historians (study 2: n = 69, β = .29, t = 2.47, p = .016), psychologists (study 3: n = 45, β = .32, t = 2.35, p = .024), and American presidents (study 4: n = 36, β = .75, t = 2.74, p = .010) when adjusting for birth year. Considered from another angle, life-span longevity averaged 8 years longer at a high (+1 standard deviation) relative to low (-1 standard deviation) level of the linguistic agency continuum, a marked difference. Follow-up analyses indicated that these results could not be attributed to covarying levels of positive emotion, negative emotion, or social connection, as quantified in terms of other linguistic categories. The investigation provides unique support for agentic perspectives on health, and several potential mechanisms are discussed.

Caring for a spouse with dementia is a source of chronic stress and is associated with a heightened prevalence of self-reported sleep problems. Styles and strategies for coping with stress have been associated with objective measures of sleep in non-caregiver populations. The current study evaluated relationships between caregiver coping style and sleep disturbance using in-home polysomnography. Sixty spousal caregivers (mean [standard deviation] age = 73.31 [7.05] years; 81.7% female) completed the Brief Cope, the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, and three nights of in-home polysomnography. Participants were categorized into two groups based on the presence or absence of clinically significant low sleep efficiency (<80%). A factor analysis of the Brief Cope yielded higher-order factors that included approach coping and avoidant coping (explained variance, 27.2% and 16.9%, respectively). Coping factors were entered into a binary logistic regression predicting sleep efficiency group while controlling for sleep apnea, medication use, and depression, as measured by the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression. In fully adjusted models, for each unit increase on the avoidant coping factor, participants were 3.4 times more likely to be classified in the low sleep efficiency group (B = 1.224, χ2(1) = 4.967, p = .026, exp(B) = 3.401, 95% confidence interval = 1.159-9.981). Approach coping was unrelated to sleep efficiency in both adjusted and unadjusted models. These findings highlight the importance of coping among caregivers and indicate that avoidant coping may be a modifiable predictor of sleep disturbance in conditions of chronic stress.

The need for very large fingerprint benchmarks to test the efficacy of emerging commercial technologies for fingerprint minutia detection, matching, compression, and retrieval is well recognized. It is driving more intensive use of networked parallel processing clusters. This report demonstrated the feasibility of a parallel fingerprint matching hosted in the NIST Data Flow System Version II middleware layer, and identified specific hardware and software constraints that cause performance problems when introducing parallelism. The starting point consisted in a standalone matcher that takes two fingerprint images as an input and provides a matching score by using the well-known Bozorth fingerprint matcher. The publicly available NIST Special Database 14 and tools were used for matching and in order to handle fingerprint images and perform the minutia detection and print matching. Scalability to about 100 compute cores was shown using conventional gigabit Ethernet connectivity.