Machine of death tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die. Prepare to have your tears jerked, your spine tingled, your funny bone tickled, your mind blown, your pulse quickened, or your heart warmed. Or better yet, simply prepare to be surprised. Because even when people do have perfect knowledge of the future, there's no telling exactly how things will turn out.

In November 1960, bolstered by anti-Communist ideologies, John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev brandished nuclear diplomacy in an attempt to force the United States to abandon Berlin, setting the stage for a major nuclear confrontation over the fate of West Berlin. From Berkeley to Berlin explores how the United States had the wherewithal to stand up to Khrushchev's attempts to expand Soviet influence around the globe. The story begins when a South Dakotan, Ernest Lawrence, the grandson of Norwegian immigrants, created a laboratory on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. The "Rad Lab" attracted some of the finest talent in America to pursue careers in nuclear physics. When it was discovered that Nazi Germany had the means to build an atomic bomb, Lawrence threw all his energy into waking up the American government to act. Ten years later, when Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union became a nuclear power, Lawrence drove his students to take on the challenge to deter a Communist despot's military ambitions. Their journey was not easy: they had to overcome ridicule over three successive failures, which led to calls to see them, and their laboratory, shut down. At the Nobska Conference in 1956, the Rad Lab physicists took up the daunting challenge to provide the Navy with a warhead for Polaris. The success of the Polaris missile, which could be carried by submarines, was a critical step in establishing nuclear deterrent capability and helped Kennedy stare down Khrushchev during the Berlin Crisis of 1961. Six months after the height of the Berlin Crisis, Kennedy thought about how close the country had come to destruction, and he flew out to Berkeley to meet and thank a small group of Rad Lab physicists for helping the country avert a nuclear war.

Medical residents at a hospital in Maryland are responsible for completing discharge paperwork for patients destined for an affiliated transitional care unit (TCU). The hospital to TCU discharge process is complicated because patients are discharged from the hospital and subsequently readmitted to the TCU while maintaining continuity of care. New medical residents at times find it challenging to navigate this hospital's discharge to TCU process. The purpose of this Doctor of Nursing project was to evaluate the perceived usefulness of a proposed discharge checklist. Invitations were sent to all medical residents on a current roation at the hospital n=18. The residents were asked to review a new discharge to TCU checklist that was designed for the project and then respond to a 6-item questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were utilized for data analysis. After reviewing the checklist, 17 residents completed the questionnaire. Fifteen participants indicated that the checklist would have been beneficial for them at the time they completed their first discharge to the TCU. All 17 participants agreed the checklist would be beneficial for future residents at the hospital. The project found that new residents at the hospital initially struggle with the discharge from hospital to the affiliated TCU process and that checklists can assist the residents in completing the required documents. A discharge checklist can eliminate the need to edit discharge paperwork, improve patient outcomes, improve patient throughput in the hospital, decrease readmission rates, save healthcare dollars, and improve quality ratings.

Script of a play first performed on 11 December 2013 by Pendulum Theatre at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, as part of the Open Platform Scheme.

I find it so much easier, to put my feelings into Verse, there's so much going wrong now, in this troubled messed up world, wars and strife and loss of life, for reasons I can`t see, and of course, I understand, if you don`t agree with me, but even so, I wrote them, to give myself voice, so take the time, to read my rhyme, in that I will rejoice

This is my second book of, thoughts in rhyme, I really hope you like it, I've tried to lighten this one up little, with a couple of light-hearted poems, but the thing is, you feel the strongestabout the things and people, who`s actions affected you ,the most, and I write what I feel