Multiple-Carrier-Lifetime Model for Carrier Dynamics in InGaN/GaN LEDs with Non-Uniform Carrier Distribution

We introduce a multiple-carrier-lifetime model (MCLM) for light-emitting diodes (LEDs) with non-uniform carrier distribution, such as in multiple-quantum-well (MQW) structures. By employing the MCLM, we successfully explain the modulation response of V-pit engineered MQW LEDs, which exhibit an S21 roll-off slower than -20 dB/decade. Using the proposed model and employing a gradient descent method, we extract effective recombination and escape lifetimes by averaging the carrier behavior across the quantum wells. Our results reveal slower effective carrier recombination and escape in MQW LEDs compared with LEDs emitting from a single QW, indicating the advantages of lower carrier density achieved through V-pit engineering. Notably, the effective carrier recombination time is more than one order of magnitude lower than the effective escape lifetime, suggesting that most carriers in the quantum wells recombine, while the escape process remains weak. To ensure the reliability and robustness of the MCLM, we subject it to a comprehensive three-fold validation process. This work confirms the positive impact of spreading carriers into several QWs through V-pit engineering. In addition, the MCLM is applicable to other LEDs with non-uniform carrier distribution, such as micro-LEDs with significant surface recombination and non-uniform lateral carrier profiles.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figure

Ensuring the Reproductive Rights of Women with Intellectual Disability

Background: Women with intellectual disability experience disparities in sexual and reproductive health care services.Methods: To explore perceptions of caring for persons with disability, including individuals with intellectual disability, we conducted open-ended individual interviews with 20 practising physicians and three video-based focus group interviews with an additional 22 practising physicians, which reached data saturation. Interviews were transcribed verbatim. We used conventional content analysis methods to analyse transcripts.Result: Physicians indicated that intellectual disability can pose challenges to providing sexual and reproductive health care. Observations coalesced around four themes: (1) communication; (2) routine preventive care; (3) contraception and sterilisation; and (4) conception and parenthood. Observations raised concerns about equity of access to reproductive care for women with intellectual disability.Conclusions: In our sample of physicians, we found attitudes that might compromise reproductive care for women with intellectual disability, suggesting that gaps remain in ensuring reproductive rights of women with intellectual disability

Improving the development, monitoring and reporting of stroke rehabilitation research: consensus-based core recommendations from the Stroke Recovery and Rehabilitation Roundtable (SRRR)

Recent reviews have demonstrated that the quality of stroke rehabilitation research has continued to improve over the last four decades but despite this progress there are still many barriers in moving the field forward. Rigorous development, monitoring and complete reporting of interventions in stroke trials are essential in providing rehabilitation evidence that is robust, meaningful and implementable. An international partnership of stroke rehabilitation experts committed to develop consensus-based core recommendations with a remit of addressing the issues identified as limiting stroke rehabilitation research in the areas of developing, monitoring and reporting stroke rehabilitation interventions. Work exploring each of the three areas took place via multiple teleconferences and a two-day meeting in Philadelphia in May 2016. A total of 15 recommendations were made. To validate the need for the recommendations the group reviewed all stroke rehabilitation trials published in 2015 (n=182 papers). Our review highlighted that the majority of publications did not clearly describe how interventions were developed or monitored during the trial. In particular, under-reporting of the theoretical rationale for the intervention and the components of the intervention calls into question many interventions that have been evaluated for efficacy. More trials were found to have addressed the reporting of interventions recommendations than those related to development or monitoring. Nonetheless the majority of reporting recommendations were still not adequately described. To progress the field of stroke rehabilitation research and to ensure stroke patients receive optimal evidence based clinical care we urge the research community to endorse and adopt our recommendations

Cluster K Mycobacteriophages: Insights into the Evolutionary Origins of Mycobacteriophage TM4

Five newly isolated mycobacteriophages –Angelica, CrimD, Adephagia, Anaya, and Pixie – have similar genomic architectures to mycobacteriophage TM4, a previously characterized phage that is widely used in mycobacterial genetics. The nucleotide sequence similarities warrant grouping these into Cluster K, with subdivision into three subclusters: K1, K2, and K3. Although the overall genome architectures of these phages are similar, TM4 appears to have lost at least two segments of its genome, a central region containing the integration apparatus, and a segment at the right end. This suggests that TM4 is a recent derivative of a temperate parent, resolving a long-standing conundrum about its biology, in that it was reportedly recovered from a lysogenic strain of Mycobacterium avium, but it is not capable of forming lysogens in any mycobacterial host. Like TM4, all of the Cluster K phages infect both fast- and slow-growing mycobacteria, and all of them – with the exception of TM4 – form stable lysogens in both Mycobacterium smegmatis and Mycobacterium tuberculosis; immunity assays show that all five of these phages share the same immune specificity. TM4 infects these lysogens suggesting that it was either derived from a heteroimmune temperate parent or that it has acquired a virulent phenotype. We have also characterized a widely-used conditionally replicating derivative of TM4 and identified mutations conferring the temperature-sensitive phenotype. All of the Cluster K phages contain a series of well conserved 13 bp repeats associated with the translation initiation sites of a subset of the genes; approximately one half of these contain an additional sequence feature composed of imperfectly conserved 17 bp inverted repeats separated by a variable spacer. The K1 phages integrate into the host tmRNA and the Cluster K phages represent potential new tools for the genetics of M. tuberculosis and related species

Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary and Cultural Practices

Elizabeth Petrino is a contributing author, “‘Language of the Eye’: Communication and Sentimental Benevolence in Lydia Sigourney’s Poems and Essays about the Deaf , pp. 69-88. Book description: Sentimentalism emerged in eighteenth-century Europe as a moral philosophy founded on the belief that individuals are able to form relationships and communities because they can, by an effort of the imagination, understand one another’s feelings. American authors of both sexes who accepted these views cultivated readers’ sympathy with others in order to promote self-improvement, motivate action to relieve suffering, reinforce social unity, and build national identity. Entwined with domesticity and imperialism and finding expression in literature and in public and private rituals, sentimentalism became America’s dominant ideology by the early nineteenth century. Sentimental writings and practices had political uses, some reformist and some repressive. They played major roles in the formation of bourgeois consciousness. The first new collection of scholarly essays on American sentimentalism since 1999, this volume brings together ten recent studies, eight published here for the first time. The Introduction assesses the current state of sentimentalism studies; the Afterword reflects on sentimentalism as a liberal discourse central to contemporary political thought as well as literary studies. Other contributors, exploring topics characteristic of the field today, examine nineteenth-century authors’ treatments of education, grief, social inequalities, intimate relationships, and community.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/english-books/1061/thumbnail.jp

Ensuring the Reproductive Rights of Women with Intellectual Disability

Background: Women with intellectual disability experience disparities in sexual and reproductive health care services.Methods: To explore perceptions of caring for persons with disability, including individuals with intellectual disability, we conducted open-ended individual interviews with 20 practising physicians and three video-based focus group interviews with an additional 22 practising physicians, which reached data saturation. Interviews were transcribed verbatim. We used conventional content analysis methods to analyse transcripts.Result: Physicians indicated that intellectual disability can pose challenges to providing sexual and reproductive health care. Observations coalesced around four themes: (1) communication; (2) routine preventive care; (3) contraception and sterilisation; and (4) conception and parenthood. Observations raised concerns about equity of access to reproductive care for women with intellectual disability.Conclusions: In our sample of physicians, we found attitudes that might compromise reproductive care for women with intellectual disability, suggesting that gaps remain in ensuring reproductive rights of women with intellectual disability