Critical phenomena in globally coupled excitable elements

Critical phenomena in globally coupled excitable elements are studied by focusing on a saddle-node bifurcation at the collective level. Critical exponents that characterize divergent fluctuations of interspike intervals near the bifurcation are calculated theoretically. The calculated values appear to be in good agreement with those determined by numerical experiments. The relevance of our results to jamming transitions is also mentioned.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

The Child Feeding Guide:A digital health intervention for reducing controlling child feeding practices and maternal anxiety over time

Fussy eating and food refusal are common in young children. These behaviours can contribute to anxiety or concern in parents and caregivers, who have called for credible support to help them navigate the challenges of feeding young children. Given recent increases in technology, and use of the Internet as a trusted source of parenting support, the Child Feeding Guide digital health intervention was created to provide evidence-based support to parents and caregivers to help them to feed children and establish healthy eating habits from the early years. An evaluation was conducted with 25 mothers (with a child aged 6 months to 4 years) who used the Child Feeding Guide website/app over 4 weeks. Mothers provided information about their feeding practices and anxiety levels at baseline, and again 4 weeks later, and answered questions regarding the acceptability and use of the digital support resource. Significant decreases were seen in maternal anxiety and in maternal use of pressure to eat and restriction of food from children for weight reasons. Mothers reported that the Child Feeding Guide was easy to use, that they valued its credibility and reassurances, and that its content helped them to better understand their child’s eating behaviour. These promising findings suggest that naturalistic use of a digital health intervention could contribute to reductions in mothers’ use of controlling feeding practices and levels of anxiety. Such findings are important for supporting the development of healthy eating habits in young children and are likely to be relevant to health and childcare professionals

Globalization & the Law: An Introduction

The focus of this special issue of the Alberta Law Review is globalization and the law. The purpose of this special issue is to look at ways that law is participating, and can participate, in the process of globalization. Given the social and political regulatory power of law- both domestic and international - there is no doubt that law can and should have a lot to say about how the process of globalization develops

Dynamics of bootstrap percolation

Bootstrap percolation transition may be first order or second order, or it may have a mixed character where a first order drop in the order parameter is preceded by critical fluctuations. Recent studies have indicated that the mixed transition is characterized by power law avalanches, while the continuous transition is characterized by truncated avalanches in a related sequential bootstrap process. We explain this behavior on the basis of a through analytical and numerical study of the avalanche distributions on a Bethe lattice.Comment: Proceedings of the International Workshop and Conference on Statistical Physics Approaches to Multidisciplinary Problems, IIT Guwahati, India, 7-13 January 200

Bayes linear kinematics in the analysis of failure rates and failure time distributions

Collections of related Poisson or binomial counts arise, for example, from a number of different failures in similar machines or neighbouring time periods. A conventional Bayesian analysis requires a rather indirect prior specification and intensive numerical methods for posterior evaluations. An alternative approach using Bayes linear kinematics in which simple conjugate specifications for individual counts are linked through a Bayes linear belief structure is presented. Intensive numerical methods are not required. The use of transformations of the binomial and Poisson parameters is proposed. The approach is illustrated in two examples, one involving a Poisson count of failures, the other involving a binomial count in an analysis of failure times

The impact of COVID-19 on opioid use in those awaiting hip and knee arthroplasty : A retrospective cohort study

Peer reviewedPostprin

Systematic perturbation approach for a dynamical scaling law in a kinetically constrained spin model

The dynamical behaviours of a kinetically constrained spin model (Fredrickson-Andersen model) on a Bethe lattice are investigated by a perturbation analysis that provides exact final states above the nonergodic transition point. It is observed that the time-dependent solutions of the derived dynamical systems obtained by the perturbation analysis become systematically closer to the results obtained by Monte Carlo simulations as the order of a perturbation series is increased. This systematic perturbation analysis also clarifies the existence of a dynamical scaling law, which provides a implication for a universal relation between a size scale and a time scale near the nonergodic transition.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures, v2; results have been refined, v3; A figure has been modified, v4; results have been more refine