Singing and COPD: exploring the experiences of people attending a group activity

Aim/objective To understand the lived experiences of participants with COPD attending a singing group. Rationale The research into singing groups for people living with COPD suggests that participants find the groups enjoyable and report it to be beneficial with regards to improving symptoms. However, the quantitative data from a companion paper (Clift, Skingley, Meadows and Dickinson, 2022) are not consistent with these findings and further research is needed to understand the underpinning explanations from the participant perspective. Approach Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five participants who have been diagnosed with COPD, recruited from a singing group designed to support them with breathlessness. Participants were asked about their experiences of living with COPD as well as of the singing programme. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach was applied to the data gathered from these interviews. The Common Sense Model of illness representation was used to inform the analysis. Findings The study identified five explanatory themes: blame and the restrictive impact of COPD, changes in self-efficacy and a sense of control over COPD, positive social connections within the group, positive emotional and cognitive changes during and after the group, and the value of breathing techniques. Discussion and conclusion The participants reported stigma over their condition before the group and that COPD has a restrictive impact on their lives. Following attending the singing group, the participants experienced a change in their attitudes towards their condition, feeling a greater sense of confidence and control over their condition. The participants felt the factors involved in this change were the social connections both with their peers and the group leader, the positive emotional changes during and following the group and the impact of the breathing techniques they were taught. Future work should therefore aim to promote self-efficacy and self-management for participants

Polar orbit electrostatic charging of objects in shuttle wake

A survey of DMSP data has uncovered several cases where precipitating auroral electron fluxes are both sufficiently intense and energetic to charge spacecraft materials such as teflon to very large potentials in the absence of ambient ion currents. Analytical bounds are provided which show that these measured environments can cause surface potentials in excess of several hundred volts to develop on objects in the orbiter wake for particular vehicle orientations

On classification of Poisson vertex algebras

We describe a conjectural classification of Poisson vertex algebras of CFT type and of Poisson vertex algebras in one differential variable (= scalar Hamiltonian operators)

Three-dimensional calculation of shuttle charging in polar orbit

The charged particles environment in polar orbit can be of sufficient intensity to cause spacecraft charging. In order to gain a quantitative understanding of such effects, the Air Force is developing POLAR, a computer code which simulates in three dimensions the electrical interaction of large space vehicles with the polar ionospheric plasma. It models the physical processes of wake generation, ambient ion collection, precipitating auroral electron fluxes, and surface interactions, including secondary electron generation and backscattering, which lead to vehicle charging. These processes may be followed dynamically on a subsecond timescale so that the rapid passage through intense auroral arcs can be simulated. POLAR models the ambient plasma as isotropic Maxwellian electrons and ions (0+, H+), and allows for simultaneous precipitation of power-law, energetic Maxwellian, and accelerated Gaussian distributions of electrons. Magnetic field effects will be modeled in POLAR but are currently ignored

Synthetic Observations of Simulated Radio Galaxies I: Radio and X-ray Analysis

We present an extensive synthetic observational analysis of numerically- simulated radio galaxies designed to explore the effectiveness of conventional observational analyses at recovering physical source properties. These are the first numerical simulations with sufficient physical detail to allow such a study. The present paper focuses on extraction of magnetic field properties from nonthermal intensity information. Synchrotron and inverse-Compton intensities provided meaningful information about distributions and strengths of magnetic fields, although considerable care was called for. Correlations between radio and X-ray surface brightness correctly revealed useful dynamical relationships between particles and fields. Magnetic field strength estimates derived from the ratio of X-ray to radio intensity were mostly within about a factor of two of the RMS field strength along a given line of sight. When emissions along a given line of sight were dominated by regions close to the minimum energy/equipartition condition, the field strengths derived from the standard power-law-spectrum minimum energy calculation were also reasonably close to actual field strengths, except when spectral aging was evident. Otherwise, biases in the minimum- energy magnetic field estimation mirrored actual differences from equipartition. The ratio of the inverse-Compton magnetic field to the minimum-energy magnetic field provided a rough measure of the actual total energy in particles and fields in most instances, within an order of magnitude. This may provide a practical limit to the accuracy with which one may be able to establish the internal energy density or pressure of optically thin synchrotron sources.Comment: 43 pages, 14 figures; accepted for publication in ApJ, v601 n2 February 1, 200

Re-evaluation of cosmic ray cutoff terminology

The study of cosmic ray access to locations inside the geomagnetic field has evolved in a manner that has led to some misunderstanding and misapplication of the terminology originally developed to describe particle access. This paper presents what is believed to be a useful set of definitions for cosmic ray cutoff terminology for use in theoretical and experimental cosmic ray studies