Connecting the realms of urban form, density and microclimate

Av doktorgradsstudenter på norske universiteter, er det en fjerdedel som ikke fullfører innen normert tid. Det er lite forskning på hvorfor det er slik i Norge. Å øke gjennomstrømningen vil være nyttig for stipendiaten og har samfunnsøkonomisk gevinst. Denne studien har sett på faktorer som kan virke inn på engasjement og utbrenthet hos norske doktorgradsstudenter. Økt engasjement og mindre utbrenthet kan bidra til at flere fullfører innen normert tid og at færre hopper av doktorgraden. Først gjennomførte vi en kvalitativ studie hvor vi intervjuet 9 doktorgradsstudenter fra UiT Norges arktiske universitet. Vi spurte om hva de anså som stressfaktorer og ressurser i arbeidet deres. I tråd med internasjonal forskning opplevde studentene at sosial støtte fra veileder og forskningsgruppe var viktige ressurser. I tillegg var motivasjon og autonomi viktig for informantene våre. Jobb-familie-konflikt og liten tro på egen faglighet var stressorer i doktorgraden. Videre utførte vi en kvantitativ studie med et større utvalg fra til sammen fem universiteter (N = 256). For å finne krav og ressurser i arbeidet, benyttet vi jobbkrav-ressursmodellen. Våre funn var i tråd med modellen, som predikerer at høye krav gir mer utbrenthet, mens mye ressurser gir økt engasjement og mindre utbrenthet. De kvantitative resultatene bekreftet at sosial støtte og veiledning var viktige ressurser. Av krav var jobb-familie-konflikt fortsatt sentral, mens arbeidsintensitet framkom som en ny type krav. Et annet nytt funn, var at opplevd kompetanse delvis medierte effekten fra ressurser til engasjement, og den svekket i tillegg forholdet mellom krav og utbrenthet. Gjennom å styrke ressursene hos doktorgradsstudenter kan jobbengasjement øke og utbrenthet minske. Dette kan føre til økt produktivitet og mindre ønske om å slutte i jobben. Dette vil ha ekstra effekt hvis det også rettes fokus mot å styrke opplevd kompetanse hos stipendiaten. Disse tiltakene kan bidra til at flere fullfører doktorgraden innen normert tid og at færre dropper ut. Nøkkelord: norske doktorgradsstudenter, phd, jobbkrav-ressursmodellen, stress, utbrenthet, engasjement

Industrial manufacture of sugar-free chocolates: applicability of alternative sweeteners and carbohydrate polymers as raw materials in product development

Chocolate is dense suspension of solid particles comprising 60-70% sugar and non-fat cocoa solids. Until recently, it was rarely produced as a sugar-free product due to the multi-functional properties of sweetness, bulkiness and textural characteristics that sugar offers to products. Today's consumers are concerned about the high sugar levels, calories and cariogenicity effects in confectionery products, hence increasing popularity of 'light' and 'sugar-free' products. Development of sugar-free chocolates is most challenging since all sugar needs to be replaced. In-depth understanding of the applicability of alternative sweeteners and carbohydrate polymers as ingredients in sugar-free chocolate manufacture would therefore have significant industrial applications

The welfare agenda of the populist radical right in Western Europe:Combining welfare chauvinism, producerism and populism

Recent scholarship on the populist radical right tends to imprecisely describe the welfare agenda of this party family with reference to its key ideological characteristics of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. We propose an alternative analytical framework that considers the multidimensionality of welfare state positions and the “deservingness criteria” that underlie ideas about welfare entitlement. Applying this framework to a sample of four European populist radical right parties, we conclude that three interrelated frames inform their welfare agenda. These parties, we argue, advocate social closure not only on the basis of the deservingness criterion of identity (welfare chauvinism), but also on criteria of control, attitude, and reciprocity (welfare producerism) and on an antagonism between the people and the establishment (welfare populism). Understanding the welfare agenda of the populist radical right requires us to move beyond welfare chauvinism and to reconsider the concept of welfare producerism and its interaction with welfare chauvinism

Femto-Containers: DevOps on Microcontrollers with Lightweight Virtualization & Isolation for IoT Software Modules

Development, deployment and maintenance of networked software has been revolutionized by DevOps,which have become essential to boost system software quality and to enable agile evolution.Meanwhile the Internet of Things (IoT) connects more and more devices which are not covered by DevOps tools:low-power, microcontroller-based devices.In this paper, we contribute to bridge this gap by designing Femto-Containers,a new architecture which enables containerization, virtualizationand secure deployment of software modules embedded on microcontrollers over low-power networks.As proof-of-concept, we implemented and evaluated Femto-Containers on popular microcontroller architectures (Arm Cortex-M, ESP32 and RISC-V), using eBPF virtualization, and RIOT, a common operating system in this space.We show that Femto-Containers can virtualize and isolate multiple software modules, executed concurrently, with very small memory footprint overhead (below 10%) and very small startup time (tens of microseconds) compared to native code execution.We show that Femto-Containers can satisfy the constraints of bothlow-level debug logic inserted in a hot code path, and high-level business logic coded in a variety of common programming languages.Compared to prior work, Femto-Containers thus offer an attractive trade-off in terms of memory footprint, energy consumption, agility and security

In vitro activity of bedaquiline against rapidly growing nontuberculous mycobacteria

Bedaquiline (BDQ) has been proven to be effective in the treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. We hypothesized that BDQ could be a potential agent to treat nontuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) infection. The objective of this study was to evaluate the in vitro activity of BDQ against rapidly growing mycobacteria by assessing the minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimal bactericidal concentration (MBC) against 18 NTM strains. For MIC determination we performed the resazurin microtitre assay broth dilution, and for the MBC the c.f.u. was determined. BDQ exhibited a strong inhibitory effect against most NTM tested; however, for some NTM strains the MBC was significantly higher than the MIC. A new finding is that Mycobacterium flavescens has a mutation in the gene atpE associated with natural resistance to BDQ. These preliminary promising results demonstrate that BDQ could be potentially useful for the treatment of NTM

Minimal Virtual Machines on IoT Microcontrollers: The Case of Berkeley Packet Filters with rBPF

to be published in the proceedings of IFIP/IEEE PEMWN 2020International audienceVirtual machines (VM) are widely used to host and isolate software modules. However, extremely small memory and low-energy budgets have so far prevented wide use of VMs on typical microcontrollerbased IoT devices. In this paper, we explore the potential of two minimal VM approaches on such lowpower hardware. We design rBPF, a register-based VM based on extended Berkeley Packet Filters (eBPF). We compare it with a stack-based VM based on We-bAssembly (Wasm) adapted for embedded systems. We implement prototypes of each VM, hosted in the IoT operating system RIOT. We perform measurements on commercial off-the-shelf IoT hardware. Unsurprisingly, we observe that both Wasm and rBPF virtual machines yield execution time and memory overhead, compared to not using a VM. We show however that this execution time overhead is tolerable for low-throughput, lowenergy IoT devices. We further show that, while using a VM based on Wasm entails doubling the memory budget for a simple networked IoT application using a 6LoWPAN/CoAP stack, using a VM based on rBPF requires only negligible memory overhead (less than 10% more memory). rBPF is thus a promising approach to host small software modules, isolated from OS software, and updatable on-demand, over low-power networks

Five-year mortality and related prognostic factors after inpatient stroke rehabilitation : A European multi-centre study

Objective: To determine 5-year mortality and its association with baseline characteristics and functional status 6 months post-stroke for patients who received inpatient rehabilitation. Design: A prospective rehabilitation-based cohort study. Subjects: A total of 532 consecutive stroke patients from 4 European rehabilitation centres. Methods: Predictors were recorded on admission. Barthel Index was assessed at 6 months (BI6mths) and patients were followed for 5 years post-stroke. Survival probability was computed using Kaplan-Meier analysis and compared across 3 BI6mths-classes (0-60, 65-90, 95-100) (log-rank test). Significant independent predictors were determined using multivariate Cox regression analysis (hazard ratio (HR)). Results: Five-year cumulative risk of death was 29.12% (95% confidence interval (CI): 22.86-35.38). Age (HR = 1.06, 95% CI: 1.04-1.09), cognitive impairment (HR = 1.77, 95% CI: 1.21-2.57), diabetes mellitus (HR = 1.68, 95% CI: 1.16- 2.41) and atrial fibrillation (HR = 1.52, 95% CI: 1.08-2.14) were independent predictors of increased mortality. Hyperlipidaemia (HR = 0.66, 95% CI: 0.46-0.94), and higher BI6mths (HR = 0.98, 95% CI: 0.97-0.99) were independent predictors of decreased mortality. Five-year survival probability was 0.85 (95% CI: 0.80-0.89) for patients in BI6mthsclass: 95-100, 0.72 (95% CI: 0.63-0.79) in BI6mths-class: 65-90 and 0.50 (95% CI: 0.40-0.60) in BI6mths-class: 0-60 (p < 0.0001). Conclusion: Nearly one-third of rehabilitation patients died during the first 5 years following stroke. Functional status at 6 months was a powerful predictor of long-term mortality. Maximum functional independence at 6 months post-stroke should be promoted through medical interventions and rehabilitation. Future studies are recommended to evaluate the direct effect of rehabilitation on long-term survival

Quantum-Resistant Security for Software Updates on Low-power Networked Embedded Devices

As the Internet of Things (IoT) rolls out today to devices whose lifetime may well exceed a decade, conservative threat models should consider attackers with access to quantum computing power. The SUIT standard (specified by the IETF) defines a security architecture for IoT software updates, standardizing the metadata and the cryptographic tools-namely, digital signatures and hash functions-that guarantee the legitimacy of software updates. While the performance of SUIT has previously been evaluated in the pre-quantum context, it has not yet been studied in a post-quantum context. Taking the open-source implementation of SUIT available in RIOT as a case study, we overview post-quantum considerations, and quantum-resistant digital signatures in particular, focusing on lowpower, microcontroller-based IoT devices which have stringent resource constraints in terms of memory, CPU, and energy consumption. We benchmark a selection of proposed post-quantum signature schemes (LMS, Falcon, and Dilithium) and compare them with current pre-quantum signature schemes (Ed25519 and ECDSA). Our benchmarks are carried out on a variety of IoT hardware including ARM Cortex-M, RISC-V, and Espressif (ESP32), which form the bulk of modern 32-bit microcontroller architectures. We interpret our benchmark results in the context of SUIT, and estimate the real-world impact of post-quantum alternatives for a range of typical software update categories. CCS CONCEPTS • Computer systems organization → Embedded systems