The use of a standardized script by novice instructors to facilitate team debriefings improves acquisition of knowledge and team leader behavioral performance during subsequent simulated cardiopulmonary arrests. Implementation of debriefing scripts in resuscitation courses may help to improve learning outcomes and standardize delivery of debriefing, particularly for novice instructors.
Geography is currently in the midst of reinterpreting the ‘rural’. There are calls within tourism studies, rural geography and cultural geography for further investigation into the new meanings represented in rural places, their emergent rural identities, and the need to take postmodernism and the construction of the rural more seriously. This paper presents a critical interpretation of the format, content and signs used to represent, commodify and promote as countryside a landscape adjacent to the eastern coast of Lake Huron in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Following a brief review of the place promotion literature and the postmodern cultural context of contemporary tourism, the socio‐semiotic approach employed in the analysis is explained. Using 210 pieces of printed place promotional material, gathered at tourist information booths along a provincially designated tourist route, the slogans, logos (icons), and place myths used to differentiate the rural from the urban are identified, and their role in constructing, commodifying and marketing a symbolic countryside is made clear. It is argued that the tourist landscape signified in the promotional material is a symbolic cultural landscape that draws upon dominant Anglo‐American ideals of the countryside to give identity to the material landscape. The advertising discourse is thus a symbolic space where an imaginary, mythical countryside is situated; here the ‘rural’ is commodified and sustained by ‘uneasy pleasures’: the tensions created between a consumer's willing suspension of disbelief and their knowledge of an advertiser's persuasive intentions. These signs of the ‘post‐rural’ constitute a ‘rural’ that is a transferable brand name—a free‐floating signifier—used to give meaning, value and character to any place commodity in need of a marketable identity.
Following the first recorded introduction of the Old World screwworm fly (OWS), Chrysomya bezziana Villeneuve (Diptera: Calliphoridae), into the Mesopotamia valley in Iraq in September 1996, cases of livestock myiasis caused by OWS developed a distinctly seasonal pattern. The annual cycle of clinical OWS cases is explained here on the basis of environmental variables that affect the different life-cycle stages of C. bezziana. This analysis suggests that low temperatures restricted pupal development during the winter, whereas the dispersal of adult flies was constrained by hot/dry summer conditions. A restricted number of OWS foci persisted throughout the year. In these foci, pupal development was fastest during the autumn months. In autumn, rapid multiplication, lasting several OWS generations, allowed subsequent adult fly dispersal across the valley floor during the winter. Hence, the monthly incidence of clinical OWS cases in livestock peaked during December-January and was lowest during July-August. In addition to temperature and humidity, vegetation cover played a role in OWS distribution. Hence the majority of OWS cases were clustered in the medium density type of vegetation [normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) values of 0.2-0.4] along the main watercourses in the marshy Mesopotamia valley. Although sheep were the host most commonly infested by C. bezziana, local sheep density was not found to be a major factor in disease spread. Satellite imagery and the application of Geographical Information System (GIS) tools were found to be valuable in understanding the distribution of OWS in relation to vegetation and watercourses. The presence of screwworm in Iraq, at the perimeter of the intercontinental OWS distribution, may give rise to major seasonal flare-ups.
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