Impact-Induced Delaminations in Thermoset and Thermoplastic Composites

Laminated fiber-reinforced composites are engineering materials with many desirable properties including high stiffness and strength. However, the lack of fiber reinforcement in the through-thickness direction makes composite laminates vulnerable to foreign object impact loading. Transverse impact loading can lead to a variety of damages including matrix cracking, delamination and fiber breakage. Delaminations can reduce the strength of a laminate, especially the compressive strength after impact. Impact loading typically causes multiple delaminations that vary in size and shape by depth location. The fracture behavior of impact damages has been a topic of extensive research [1]. Recently significant advances have been made in the area of nondestructive evaluation (NDE) of impact damages in composites. For example, ultrasound is used to map out the details of impact-induced delaminations with ply-by-ply resolution [2].</p

Vertex importance extension of betweenness centrality algorithm

Variety of real-life structures can be simplified by a graph. Such simplification emphasizes the structure represented by vertices connected via edges. A common method for the analysis of the vertices importance in a network is betweenness centrality. The centrality is computed using the information about the shortest paths that exist in a graph. This approach puts the importance on the edges that connect the vertices. However, not all vertices are equal. Some of them might be more important than others or have more significant influence on the behavior of the network. Therefore, we introduce the modification of the betweenness centrality algorithm that takes into account the vertex importance. This approach allows the further refinement of the betweenness centrality score to fulfill the needs of the network better. We show this idea on an example of the real traffic network. We test the performance of the algorithm on the traffic network data from the city of Bratislava, Slovakia to prove that the inclusion of the modification does not hinder the original algorithm much. We also provide a visualization of the traffic network of the city of Ostrava, the Czech Republic to show the effect of the vertex importance adjustment. The algorithm was parallelized by MPI (http://www.mpi-forum.org/) and was tested on the supercomputer Salomon (https://docs.it4i.cz/) at IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, the Czech Republic.808726

Direct-to-consumer genetic testing

This is the final version. Available on open access from BMJ Publishing Group via the DOI in this recor

Household Transmission of Rotavirus in a Community with Rotavirus Vaccination in Quininde, Ecuador

Background: We studied the transmission of rotavirus infection in households in peri-urban Ecuador in the vaccination era. Methods: Stool samples were collected from household contacts of child rotavirus cases, diarrhea controls and healthy controls following presentation of the index child to health facilities. Rotavirus infection status of contacts was determined by RT-qPCR. We examined factors associated with transmissibility (index-case characteristics) and susceptibility (householdcontact characteristics). Results: Amongst cases, diarrhea controls and healthy control household contacts, infection attack rates (iAR) were 55%, 8% and 2%, (n = 137, 130, 137) respectively. iARs were higher from index cases with vomiting, and amongst siblings. Disease ARs were higher when the index child was ,18 months and had vomiting, with household contact ,10 years and those sharing a room with the index case being more susceptible. We found no evidence of asymptomatic infections leading to disease transmission. Conclusion: Transmission rates of rotavirus are high in households with an infected child, while background infections are rare. We have identified factors associated with transmission (vomiting/young age of index case) and susceptibility (young age/sharing a room/being a sibling of the index case). Vaccination may lead to indirect benefits by averting episodes or reducing symptoms in vaccinees

Thinking dispositions for teaching : enabling and supporting resilience in context

Preparing pre-teachers for an increasingly challenging teaching profession is a complex work and requires teacher educators to engage in the careful design of both programmes and professional learning opportunities. This chapter explores how an explicit focus on thinking dispositions that enable effective teaching are developed in a Master of Teaching (Secondary) programme. This programme, delivered on-site at a secondary school, included carefully constructed teaching opportunities to support development of thinking dispositions. Ways of thinking and the impact they have on feelings, actions and beliefs will be examined along with how the implementation of our thinking dispositions framework supports the development of resilience in challenging teaching and learning contexts

Owning an overweight or underweight body: distinguishing the physical, experienced and virtual body

Our bodies are the most intimately familiar objects we encounter in our perceptual environment. Virtual reality provides a unique method to allow us to experience having a very different body from our own, thereby providing a valuable method to explore the plasticity of body representation. In this paper, we show that women can experience ownership over a whole virtual body that is considerably smaller or larger than their physical body. In order to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying body ownership, we use an embodiment questionnaire, and introduce two new behavioral response measures: an affordance estimation task (indirect measure of body size) and a body size estimation task (direct measure of body size). Interestingly, after viewing the virtual body from first person perspective, both the affordance and the body size estimation tasks indicate a change in the perception of the size of the participant’s experienced body. The change is biased by the size of the virtual body (overweight or underweight). Another novel aspect of our study is that we distinguish between the physical, experienced and virtual bodies, by asking participants to provide affordance and body size estimations for each of the three bodies separately. This methodological point is important for virtual reality experiments investigating body ownership of a virtual body, because it offers a better understanding of which cues (e.g. visual, proprioceptive, memory, or a combination thereof) influence body perception, and whether the impact of these cues can vary between different setups

A review of patients who suddenly deteriorate in the presence of paramedics

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The report of the Ministerial Review of Trauma and Emergency Services in Victoria, Australia, recommended that paramedics be permitted to divert to the closest hospital in incidences of life threatening situations prior to and during transport. An audit of patients that suddenly deteriorated in paramedic care was recommended by the Ministerial Review. The objective of the study was to identify the number and outcome of patients who suddenly deteriorated in the presence of paramedics.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A retrospective cohort study of trauma patients who suddenly deteriorated in the presence of paramedics during 2002. As there was no standard definition, sudden deterioration was defined using a predetermined set of physiological criteria. Patient care record data of patients who suddenly deteriorated were compared with the State Trauma Registry to determine those who sustained hospital defined major trauma. Patient care records where hospital bypass was undertaken were identified and analysed. Ethics committee approval was obtained.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>There were 2,893 patients that suddenly deteriorated according to predefined criteria. 2,687 (5.1% of the total trauma patients for 2002) were suitable for further analysis. The majority of patients had a sudden decrease in BP (n = 2,463) with 4.3% having hospital defined major trauma. For patients with a sudden decrease in conscious state or a total GCS score of less than 13 (n = 77), 37.7% had hospital defined major trauma; and a sudden increase/decrease in pulse rate and sudden decrease in BP (n = 65), 26.2% had hospital defined major trauma. Only 28 documented incidents of hospital bypass were identified.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This study suggests that the incidents of patients suddenly deteriorating in the presence of paramedics are low and the incidence of hospital bypass is not well documented.</p

Child feces disposal practices in rural Orissa: a cross sectional study.

BACKGROUND: An estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide lack access to improved sanitation facilities. While large-scale programs in some countries have increased latrine coverage, they sometimes fail to ensure optimal latrine use, including the safe disposal of child feces, a significant source of exposure to fecal pathogens. We undertook a cross-sectional study to explore fecal disposal practices among children in rural Orissa, India in villages where the Government of India's Total Sanitation Campaign had been implemented at least three years prior to the study. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We conducted surveys with heads of 136 households with 145 children under 5 years of age in 20 villages. We describe defecation and feces disposal practices and explore associations between safe disposal and risk factors. Respondents reported that children commonly defecated on the ground, either inside the household (57.5%) for pre-ambulatory children or around the compound (55.2%) for ambulatory children. Twenty percent of pre-ambulatory children used potties and nappies; the same percentage of ambulatory children defecated in a latrine. While 78.6% of study children came from 106 households with a latrine, less than a quarter (22.8%) reported using them for disposal of child feces. Most child feces were deposited with other household waste, both for pre-ambulatory (67.5%) and ambulatory (58.1%) children. After restricting the analysis to households owning a latrine, the use of a nappy or potty was associated with safe disposal of feces (OR 6.72, 95%CI 1.02-44.38) though due to small sample size the regression could not adjust for confounders. CONCLUSIONS: In the area surveyed, the Total Sanitation Campaign has not led to high levels of safe disposal of child feces. Further research is needed to identify the actual scope of this potential gap in programming, the health risk presented and interventions to minimize any adverse effect

Updating known distribution models for forecasting climate change impact on endangered species

To plan endangered species conservation and to design adequate management programmes, it is necessary to predict their distributional response to climate change, especially under the current situation of rapid change. However, these predictions are customarily done by relating de novo the distribution of the species with climatic conditions with no regard of previously available knowledge about the factors affecting the species distribution. We propose to take advantage of known species distribution models, but proceeding to update them with the variables yielded by climatic models before projecting them to the future. To exemplify our proposal, the availability of suitable habitat across Spain for the endangered Bonelli’s Eagle (Aquila fasciata) was modelled by updating a pre-existing model based on current climate and topography to a combination of different general circulation models and Special Report on Emissions Scenarios. Our results suggested that the main threat for this endangered species would not be climate change, since all forecasting models show that its distribution will be maintained and increased in mainland Spain for all the XXI century. We remark on the importance of linking conservation biology with distribution modelling by updating existing models, frequently available for endangered species, considering all the known factors conditioning the species’ distribution, instead of building new models that are based on climate change variables only.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and FEDER (project CGL2009-11316/BOS

Academic Performance and Behavioral Patterns

Identifying the factors that influence academic performance is an essential part of educational research. Previous studies have documented the importance of personality traits, class attendance, and social network structure. Because most of these analyses were based on a single behavioral aspect and/or small sample sizes, there is currently no quantification of the interplay of these factors. Here, we study the academic performance among a cohort of 538 undergraduate students forming a single, densely connected social network. Our work is based on data collected using smartphones, which the students used as their primary phones for two years. The availability of multi-channel data from a single population allows us to directly compare the explanatory power of individual and social characteristics. We find that the most informative indicators of performance are based on social ties and that network indicators result in better model performance than individual characteristics (including both personality and class attendance). We confirm earlier findings that class attendance is the most important predictor among individual characteristics. Finally, our results suggest the presence of strong homophily and/or peer effects among university students