Preventing hot beverage scald injuries to young children

The focus of the research proposal was two-fold: to analyse the emphasis placed on hot beverage scald injuries to under five year olds in current public education material for parents and caregivers; and to make practical recommendations in regard to more effective educational messages and preventative behaviour. We anticipated that there would be a lack of emphasis on hot beverage scald prevention in public education material when compared to the emphasis placed on preventing other scald hazards

Hamilton Parents Centre 1957-2003: A sociological history

This is a "sociological history" of Hamilton Parents Centre and as such presents the stories' of Hamilton Parents Centre organised both chronologically and thematically. These stories are broadly of two kinds: those represented in words and pictures in the archive materials made available to us by Hamilton Parents Centre, and those shared with us this year in individual and group interviews by (mostly) women who in the past were or at present are involved with Parents Centre (and in some instances with the Federation of New Zealand Parents Centres). This sociological history is also a case study, and we believe it is a "normal" or "typical" case'. Hamilton Parents Centre can be regarded as a single entity, one of a number of such specific entities (the other Parents Centres) and more generally one of a much larger number of entities, voluntary community-based social service and advocacy organisations . We argue that Hamilton has, over the life of Hamilton Parents Centre, been reasonably representative of New Zealand communities, of urban New Zealand which is and has for a long while been the demographically predominant New Zealand. We also take the view that Hamilton Parents Centre stands for a particular kind of organisation of great importance to the history and development of the human services sector here in New Zealand: community-based, staffed largely by volunteers (but not necessarily thereby amateurs), largely self-funded, identifying new or neglected needs, developing new services, welcoming and being assisted by appropriate professionals but not unduly beholden to them, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) criticising the status quo-- but a too extensive description here of this sector would anticipate the stories we have to tell

The electrical response matrix of a regular 2n-gon

Consider a unit-resistive plate in the shape of a regular polygon with 2n sides, in which even-numbered sides are wired to electrodes and odd-numbered sides are insulated. The response matrix, or Dirichlet-to-Neumann map, allows one to compute the currents flowing through the electrodes when they are held at specified voltages. We show that the entries of the response matrix of the regular 2n-gon are given by the differences of cotangents of evenly spaced angles, and we describe some connections with the limiting distributions of certain random spanning forests.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures; v2 adds more background informatio

A Product Twistor Space

∗Research supported in part by NSF grant INT-9903302.In previous work a hyperbolic twistor space over a paraquaternionic Kähler manifold was defined, the fibre being the hyperboloid model of the hyperbolic plane with constant curvature −1. Two almost complex structures were defined on this twistor space and their properties studied. In the present paper we consider a twistor space over a paraquaternionic Kähler manifold with fibre given by the hyperboloid of 1-sheet, the anti-de-Sitter plane with constant curvature −1. This twistor space admits two natural almost product structures, more precisely almost para-Hermitian structures, which form the objects of our study

Parametric Instability in Long Optical Cavities and Suppression by Dynamic Transverse Mode Frequency Modulation

Three mode parametric instability has been predicted in Advanced gravitational wave detectors. Here we present the first observation of this phenomenon in a large scale suspended optical cavity designed to be comparable to those of advanced gravitational wave detectors. Our results show that previous modelling assumptions that transverse optical modes are stable in frequency except for frequency drifts on a thermal deformation time scale is unlikely to be valid for suspended mass optical cavities. We demonstrate that mirror figure errors cause a dependence of transverse mode offset frequency on spot position. Combined with low frequency residual motion of suspended mirrors, this leads to transverse mode frequency modulation which suppresses the effective parametric gain. We show that this gain suppression mechanism can be enhanced by laser spot dithering or fast thermal modulation. Using Advanced LIGO test mass data and thermal modelling we show that gain suppression factors of 10-20 could be achieved for individual modes, sufficient to greatly ameliorate the parametric instability problem

Changing face of paragonimiasis

[Extract] Paragonimus (lung fluke) species cause paragonimiasis, one of the neglected tropical diseases that many people might not be familiar with. Around 50 species have been named, some of which will prove not to be valid. Different species are known from Africa, the Americas, and Asia (especially Eastern and Southern Asia). As with many other trematodes, the life cycle is complex: cercariae develop in a freshwater snail, metacercariae develop in freshwater (sometimes brackish water) crabs or crayfish and adults develop in the lungs of mammals that eat crabs or crayfish. Typically, two adult worms live together in a cyst in the lungs and pass eggs out into bronchioles. Paragonimiasis is a zoonosis. Natural mammal hosts include members of the cat family, dog family, rodents, monkeys, marsupials (in the Americas), and more. Only a few species of Paragonimus infect humans. Some of these occupy cysts in human lungs, the usual site in their natural animal hosts, but other species end up in atypical sites such as the brain, where they can cause serious disease