Weekly reports for R.V. Polarstern expedition PS103 (2016-12-16 - 2017-02-03, Cape Town - Punta Arenas), German and English version

Priming is arguably one of the key phenomena in contemporary social psychology. Recent retractions and failed replication attempts have led to a division in the field between proponents and skeptics and have reinforced the importance of confirming certain priming effects through replication. In this study, we describe the results of 2 preregistered replication attempts of 1 experiment by Förster and Denzler (2012). In both experiments, participants first processed letters either globally or locally, then were tested using a typicality rating task. Bayes factor hypothesis tests were conducted for both experiments: Experiment 1(N = 100) yielded an indecisive Bayes factor of 1.38, indicating that the in-lab data are 1.38 times more likely to have occurred under the null hypothesis than under the alternative. Experiment 2 (N = 908) yielded a Bayes factor of 10.84, indicating strong support for the null hypothesis that global priming does not affect participants' mean typicality ratings. The failure to replicate this priming effect challenges existing support for the GLOMOsys model

Fragmentation Function and Hadronic Production of the Heavy Supersymmetric Hadrons

The light top-squark \sto may be the lightest squark and its lifetime may be `long enough' in a kind of SUSY models which have not been ruled out yet experimentally, so colorless `supersymmetric hadrons (superhadrons)' (\sto \bar{q}) ($q$ is a quark except $t$-quark) may be formed as long as the light top-squark \sto can be produced. Fragmentation function of \sto to heavy `supersymmetric hadrons (superhadrons)' (\sto \bar{Q}) ($\bar{Q}=\bar{c}$ or $\bar{b}$) and the hadronic production of the superhadrons are investigated quantitatively. The fragmentation function is calculated precisely. Due to the difference in spin of the SUSY component, the asymptotic behavior of the fragmentation function is different from those of the existent ones. The fragmentation function is also applied to compute the production of heavy superhadrons at hadronic colliders Tevatron and LHC under the so-called fragmentation approach. The resultant cross-section for the heavy superhadrons is too small to observe at Tevatron, but great enough at LHC, even when all the relevant parameters in the SUSY models are taken within the favored region for the heavy superhadrons. The production of `light superhadrons' (\sto \bar{q}) ($q=u, d, s$) is also roughly estimated. It is pointed out that the production cross-sections of the light superhadrons (\sto \bar{q}) may be much greater than those of the heavy superhadrons, so that even at Tevatron the light superhadrons may be produced in great quantities.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure

The Proton Spin and Flavor Structure in the Chiral Quark Model

After a pedagogical review of the simple constituent quark model and deep inelastic sum rules, we describe how a quark sea as produced by the emission of internal Goldstone bosons by the valence quarks can account for the observed features of proton spin and flavor structures. Some issues concerning the strange quark content of the nucleon are also discussed.Comment: 59 pages with table of contents, Lecture delivered at the Schladming Winter School (March 1997), to be published by Springer-Verlag under the title "Computing Particle Properties" (eds. C. B. Lang and H. Gausterer

Predicting management development and learning behaviour in New Zealand SMEs

Despite concern on the part of policy makers to raise managerial capability in SMEs, there is little evidence on the key drivers of owner-manager participation in management development programmes. The authors argue that such participation is poorly understood. The paper develops a predictive model of the drivers of participation in sources of learning by owner-managers. It tests a theoretical model, based on the small firm as a learning organization, which posits that participation is driven by owner-managers\u27 learning orientation and the extent of their belief in self-improvement. The implications of the results are discussed in light of the provision of management development programmes. <br /

Interstellar MHD Turbulence and Star Formation

This chapter reviews the nature of turbulence in the Galactic interstellar medium (ISM) and its connections to the star formation (SF) process. The ISM is turbulent, magnetized, self-gravitating, and is subject to heating and cooling processes that control its thermodynamic behavior. The turbulence in the warm and hot ionized components of the ISM appears to be trans- or subsonic, and thus to behave nearly incompressibly. However, the neutral warm and cold components are highly compressible, as a consequence of both thermal instability in the atomic gas and of moderately-to-strongly supersonic motions in the roughly isothermal cold atomic and molecular components. Within this context, we discuss: i) the production and statistical distribution of turbulent density fluctuations in both isothermal and polytropic media; ii) the nature of the clumps produced by thermal instability, noting that, contrary to classical ideas, they in general accrete mass from their environment; iii) the density-magnetic field correlation (or lack thereof) in turbulent density fluctuations, as a consequence of the superposition of the different wave modes in the turbulent flow; iv) the evolution of the mass-to-magnetic flux ratio (MFR) in density fluctuations as they are built up by dynamic compressions; v) the formation of cold, dense clouds aided by thermal instability; vi) the expectation that star-forming molecular clouds are likely to be undergoing global gravitational contraction, rather than being near equilibrium, and vii) the regulation of the star formation rate (SFR) in such gravitationally contracting clouds by stellar feedback which, rather than keeping the clouds from collapsing, evaporates and diperses them while they collapse.Comment: 43 pages. Invited chapter for the book "Magnetic Fields in Diffuse Media", edited by Elisabete de Gouveia dal Pino and Alex Lazarian. Revised as per referee's recommendation

Neonatal intervention

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68335/2/10.1177_027112148300300105.pd

Association between SGLT2 inhibitor treatment and diabetic ketoacidosis and mortality in people with type 2 diabetes admitted to hospital with COVID-19

   Objective  To determine the association between prescription of SGLT2 inhibitors and diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) incidence or mortality in people with type 2 diabetes hospitalized with COVID-19.  Research Design and Methods  This was a retrospective cohort study based on secondary analysis of data from a large nationwide audit from a network of 40 centres in United Kingdom with data collection up to December 2020 that was originally designed to describe risk factors associated with adverse outcomes among people with diabetes who were admitted to hospital with COVID-19.. The primary outcome for this analysis was DKA on or during hospital admission. The secondary outcome was mortality. Crude, age-sex adjusted and multivariable logistic regression models, were used to generate odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals for people prescribed SGLT2 inhibitor compared to those not prescribed SGLT2 inhibitor.   Results  The original national audit included 3067 people with type 2 diabetes who were admitted to hospital with COVID-19, of whom 230 (7.5%) were prescribed SGLT2 inhibitors prior to hospital admission. Mean (SD) age of the overall cohort was 72 years, 62.3% were men and 34.9% were prescribed insulin. Overall, 2.8% of the total population had DKA and 35.6% people died. The adjusted odds of DKA were not significantly different between those prescribed SGLT2 inhibitors and those not (OR 0.56, 0.16-1.97). The adjusted odds of mortality associated with SGLT2 inhibitors were similar in the total study population (OR 1.13, 0.78-1.63 ), in the sub-group prescribed insulin (OR 1.02, 0.59-1.77), and in the sub-group that developed DKA (OR 0.21, 0.01-8.76).  Conclusions We demonstrate a low risk of DKA and high mortality rate in people with type 2 diabetes admitted to hospital with COVID-19 and limited power but no evidence of increased risk of DKA or in-hospital mortality associated with prescription of SGLT2 inhibitors. </p

The bard−uˉbar{d} - \bar{u} asymmetry of the proton in a Pion Cloud Model approach

We study the $bar{d} - \bar{u}$ asymmetry of the proton in a model approach in which hadronic fluctuations of the nucleon are generated through gluon splitting and recombination mechanisms. Within this framework, it is shown that the asymmetry of the proton is consistently described by including only nucleon fluctuations to $|\pi N>$ and $|\pi \Delta>$ bound states. Predictions of the model closely agree with the recent experimental data of the E866/NuSea Collaboration.Comment: Final version. To appear in Phys. Rev.

Disparities between plant community responses to nitrogen deposition and critical loads in UK semi-natural habitats

Empirical critical loads are widely used to quantify and manage the ecological impacts of reactive nitrogen (N) deposition. Critical load values aim to identify a level of N deposition below which significant harmful effects do not occur according to present knowledge. Critical loads have been primarily based on experiments, but these are few in number and have well-known limitations, so there is a strong imperative to test and validate values with other forms of evidence. We assembled data on the spatial variability in vegetation communities in the United Kingdom and used Threshold Indicator Taxa Analyses (TITAN) to investigate linkages between species changes and modelled current and cumulative N deposition. Our analyses focused on five datasets: acid grasslands, alpine habitats, coastal fixed dunes, dune slacks and wet grasslands. In four of these habitats there was evidence for a significant decline in the cover of at least one species (a ‘species-loss change-point’) occurring below the critical load, and often at very low levels of N deposition. In all of the habitats there was evidence for clustering of many individual species-loss change-points, implying a community change-point analogous to an ecological threshold. Three of these community change-points occurred below the critical load and the remaining two overlapped with the critical load range. Studies using similar approaches are now increasingly common, with similar results. Across 19 similar analyses there has been evidence for plant species loss change-points below the critical load in 18 analyses, and community-level species loss change-points below the critical load in 13 analyses. None of these analyses has shown community change-points above the critical load. Field data increasingly suggest that many European critical loads are too high to confidently prevent loss of sensitive species