Disability in young people and adults after head injury: 12-14 year follow up of a prospective cohort

Background: There is a need to establish how long term outcome evolves after head injury (HI) and factors related to this, to inform opportunities for intervention. Objective: To determine late outcome in adults 12-14 years after hospital admission for HI and to examine relationships between injury, early and late factors and disability. Methods: A prospective cohort with HI, whose outcome was reported previously at 1 and 5-7 years after injury were followed up after 12-14 years. Participants were assessed using structured and validated measures of disability (Glasgow Outcome Scale-Extended), psychological well-being, alcohol use and health status. Results: Of 219 survivors followed-up at 5-7 years, 34 (15.5%) had died by 12-14 years. Disability remained common in survivors at 12-14 years (51%), as found at one and 5-7 years (53%). For those disabled at 1 year, outcome was dismal, with 80% dead or disabled at 12-14 years. Older age at injury, a premorbid history of brain illness or physical disability and post-injury low self-esteem and stress were associated with disability at 12-14 years. Disability changed between 5-7 and 12-14 years in 55% of survivors, improving in 23%. Late changes in disability between 5-7 and 12-14 years were associated with self-perceptions of locus of control as being 'powerful others' at 5-7 years. Conclusions: Disability is common 12-14 years after hospital admission with a head injury. For some there is a dynamic process of change in disability over time that is associated with self-perceptions of control that could be a target for intervention based research

Innovative Stormwater Treatment Technologies: Best Management Practices Manual

Urban stormwater carries a number of pathogens, nutrients, heavy metals, sediment, and other contaminants as surface runoff flows over land. The increase in impervious or paved surfaces associated with development in urban areas reduces the natural infiltration of precipitation into the ground. With impervious cover, precipitation collects and carries contaminants before draining into nearby surface waters. Stormwater runoff from paved surfaces in developed areas can degrade downstream waters with both contaminants and increased volumes of water. This publication aims to make information on innovative stormwater treatment technologies more available to New Hampshire’s urban planners, developers, and communities. Traditional runoff management techniques such as detention basins and infiltration swales may be preferable, but are not always practical for treating urban stormwater. Lack of space for natural solutions is often a problem in existing developed areas, making innovative treatment technologies an attractive alternative. Mostly designed for subsurface installation, urban “retrofits” use less space than conventional methods to treat stormwater. This manual provides information on the innovative stormwater “retrofit” technologies currently available for use in developed areas in New Hampshire

Relationship between resistivity and specific heat in a canonical non-magnetic heavy fermion alloy system: UPt_5-xAu_x

UPt_(5-x)Au_x alloys form in a single crystal structure, cubic AuBe_5-type, over a wide range of concentrations from x = 0 to at least x = 2.5. All investigated alloys, with an exception for x = 2.5, were non-magnetic. Their electronic specific heat coefficient $\gamma$ varies from about 60 (x = 2) to about 700 mJ/mol K^2 (x = 1). The electrical resistivity for all alloys has a Fermi-liquid-like temperature variation, \rho = \rho_o + AT^2, in the limit of T -> 0 K. The coefficient A is strongly enhanced in the heavy-fermion regime in comparison with normal and transition metals. It changes from about 0.01 (x = 0) to over 2 micro-ohm cm/K^2 (x = 1). A/\gamma^2, which has been postulated to have a universal value for heavy-fermions, varies from about 10^-6 (x = 0, 0.5) to 10^-5 micro-ohm cm (mol K/mJ)^2 (x > 1.1), thus from a value typical of transition metals to that found for some other heavy-fermion metals. This ratio is unaffected, or only weakly affected, by chemical or crystallographic disorder. It correlates with the paramagnetic Curie-Weiss temperature of the high temperature magnetic susceptibility.Comment: 5 pages, 5 eps figures, RevTe

Optical constants of uranium plasma Final report

Thermodynamic and optical properties of uranium plasma in proposed gaseous core nuclear rocket

Solid state image sensor research, phase I

Solid state image sensor in infrared and visible region

The asymptotic quasi-stationary states of the two-dimensional magnetically confined plasma and of the planetary atmosphere

We derive the differential equation governing the asymptotic quasi-stationary states of the two dimensional plasma immersed in a strong confining magnetic field and of the planetary atmosphere. These two systems are related by the property that there is an intrinsic constant length: the Larmor radius and respectively the Rossby radius and a condensate of the vorticity field in the unperturbed state related to the cyclotronic gyration and respectively to the Coriolis frequency. Although the closest physical model is the Charney-Hasegawa-Mima (CHM) equation, our model is more general and is related to the system consisting of a discrete set of point-like vortices interacting in plane by a short range potential. A field-theoretical formalism is developed for describing the continuous version of this system. The action functional can be written in the Bogomolnyi form (emphasizing the role of Self-Duality of the asymptotic states) but the minimum energy is no more topological and the asymptotic structures appear to be non-stationary, which is a major difference with respect to traditional topological vortex solutions. Versions of this field theory are discussed and we find arguments in favor of a particular form of the equation. We comment upon the significant difference between the CHM fluid/plasma and the Euler fluid and respectively the Abelian-Higgs vortex models.Comment: Latex 126 pages, 7 eps figures included. Discussion on various forms of the equatio

British digital game studies

This paper provides a short and potted recent history of digital games research in Great Britain. We begin this story in 2001. Though a substantial amount of research and writing on digital games was taking in Britain since at least the 1980s, for us the turn of the new millennium makes a logical starting point for our recent history. This is because this was not only the year that Aarseth (2001) marked as 'year one' for 'computer game research', but it was also the year that the first major international conference on digital games took place in the UK (in Bristol), and the first time a major British government grant was awarded to undertake research on digital gaming. The paper then charts the significant role Britain played in hosting major early international gatherings of (now leading) games researchers, such as those in Bristol and also Manchester. As well as the important crop of early British authored (text)books that helped shape the direction of this new emerging discipline. What we then see is a significant growth in British digital games studies focused around a number of key events, research clusters, and publications, and the development of a particular framing of digital games within a wider social, cultural, and political context. It is this, we would suggest, which has given British digital game studies its particular flavour and also its important global role in pushing forward research, theory, and key debates