1,330,148 research outputs found
Promoting social inclusion? The impact of village services on the lives of older people living in rural England
Drawing on data from a qualitative study, this paper explores the impact of ‘village services’ on the lives of people aged 70 or more years living in rural England. Throughout the paper, the phrase ‘village services’ refers to six community-based services and activities provided to help meet the needs of older rural residents, namely lunch clubs, welfare rights information and advice services, befriending schemes and community warden support, in rural areas in three regions of England. It is argued that, in various ways, village services promote social inclusion by enhancing older rural residents' access to the resources, rights, goods and services that encourage social interaction and meaningful participation in community life. It is clear, however, that the overwhelming majority of users of village services are female, that older men are often reluctant to engage with the services on offer, and that the providers of village services need to find new and innovative ways of engaging with older men in rural areas. It is concluded that restricted revenue and capital resources means that the expansion of village services so that they may better meet the requirements of older rural men is unlikely
Oncoplastic conservative surgery for breast cancer: long-term outcomes of our first ten years experience
The main goal of oncoplastic breast surgery (OBS) is to optimize cosmetic outcomes and reduce patient morbidity, while still providing an oncologically-safe surgical outcome and extending the target population of conservative surgery. Although the growing number of reported experiences with oncoplastic surgery, few studies account for the long-term outcomes
Conservative Quantum Computing
Conservation laws limit the accuracy of physical implementations of
elementary quantum logic gates. If the computational basis is represented by a
component of spin and physical implementations obey the angular momentum
conservation law, any physically realizable unitary operators with size less
than n qubits cannot implement the controlled-NOT gate within the error
probability 1/(4n^2), where the size is defined as the total number of the
computational qubits and the ancilla qubits. An analogous limit for bosonic
ancillae is also obtained to show that the lower bound of the error probability
is inversely proportional to the average number of photons. Any set of
universal gates inevitably obeys a related limitation with error probability
O(1/n^2)$. To circumvent the above or related limitations yielded by
conservation laws, it is recommended that the computational basis should be
chosen as the one commuting with the additively conserved quantities.Comment: 5 pages, RevTex. Corrected to include a new statement that for
bosonic ancillae the lower bound of the error probability is inversely
proportional to the average number of photons, kindly suggested by Julio
Gea-Banacloch
Exactly Conservative Integrators
Traditional numerical discretizations of conservative systems generically
yield an artificial secular drift of any nonlinear invariants. In this work we
present an explicit nontraditional algorithm that exactly conserves these
invariants. We illustrate the general method by applying it to the three-wave
truncation of the Euler equations, the Lotka--Volterra predator--prey model,
and the Kepler problem. This method is discussed in the context of symplectic
(phase space conserving) integration methods as well as nonsymplectic
conservative methods. We comment on the application of our method to general
conservative systems.Comment: 30 pages, postscript (1.3MB). Submitted to SIAM J. Sci. Comput
Host-Parasite Co-evolution and Optimal Mutation Rates for Semi-conservative Quasispecies
In this paper, we extend a model of host-parasite co-evolution to incorporate
the semi-conservative nature of DNA replication for both the host and the
parasite. We find that the optimal mutation rate for the semi-conservative and
conservative hosts converge for realistic genome lengths, thus maintaining the
admirable agreement between theory and experiment found previously for the
conservative model and justifying the conservative approximation in some cases.
We demonstrate that, while the optimal mutation rate for a conservative and
semi-conservative parasite interacting with a given immune system is similar to
that of a conservative parasite, the properties away from this optimum differ
significantly. We suspect that this difference, coupled with the requirement
that a parasite optimize survival in a range of viable hosts, may help explain
why semi-conservative viruses are known to have significantly lower mutation
rates than their conservative counterparts
- …