Disability in young people and adults one year after head injury: prospective cohort study

OBJECTIVE: To determine the frequency of disability in young people and adults admitted to hospital with a head injury and to estimate the annual incidence in the community. DESIGN: Prospective, hospital based cohort study, with one year follow up of sample stratified by coma score. SETTING: Five acute hospitals in Glasgow. SUBJECTS: 2962 patients (aged 14 years or more) with head injury; 549 (71%) of the 769 patients selected for follow up participated. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Glasgow outcome scale and problem orientated questionnaire. RESULTS: Survival with moderate or severe disability was common after mild head injury (47%, 95% confidence interval 42% to 52%) and similar to that after moderate (45%, 35% to 56%) or severe injury (48%, 36% to 60%). By extrapolation from the population identified (90% of whom had mild injuries), it was estimated that annually in Glasgow (population 909 498) 1400 young people and adults are still disabled one year after head injury. CONCLUSION: The incidence of disability in young people and adults admitted with a head injury is higher than expected. This reflects the high rate of sequelae previously unrecognised in the large number of patients admitted to hospital with an apparently mild head injury

Pulse detonation propulsion: challenges, current status, and future perspective

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pecs.2004.05.001The paper is focused on recent accomplishments in basic and applied research on pulse detonation engines (PDE) and various PDE design concepts. Current understanding of gas and sprary detonations, thermodynamic grounds for detonation-based propulsion, principles of practical implementation of the detonation-based thermodynamic cycle, and various operational constraints of PDEs are discussed

Approaches to Bayesian occupancy modelling for habitat quality assessment

Bayesian ‘occupancy’ models (BOM) are a powerful tool that have recently been adapted to deal with ‘opportunistic’ species data (i.e. biological records). Individual species trends from any models can be aggregated to produce habitat indicators; here this is demonstrated for BOMs and Frescalo (Hill, 2012) using two examples. Example one demonstrates the production of habitat-specific trends using NPMS indicator species and subsets of 1 x 1 km grid cells predicted to contain the habitat of interest from Land Cover Mapping. Decisions around whether to include subsets of habitat-containing cells, or all cells within a political boundary, will be important for trend interpretation: habitat subsets of cells may lead to biases depending on true habitat change over time. Example two compares BOMs to the Frescalo method, as well as investigating the impacts of decisions for indicator production (e.g. weighting or not weighting by a species national frequency) on the trends produced. In this example weighted trends for 18 Sphagnum species typical of blanket bog were much more similar than unweighted trends. In the case of contradictory habitat (or species) trends it will not normally be possible to know which model is correct (at least in the absence of an unbiased dataset to which to refer). Given that BOMs, as currently used, may contain significant bias, a prudent approach would be to compare the outputs of several methods before making decisions

Solar sail capture trajectories at Mercury

Mercury is an ideal environment for future planetary exploration by solar sail since it has proved difficult to reach with conventional propulsion and hence remains largely unexplored. In addition, its proximity to the Sun provides a solar sail acceleration of order ten times the sail characteristic acceleration at 1 AU. Conventional capture techniques are shown to be unsuitable for solar sails and a new method is presented. It is shown that capture is bound by upper and lower limits on the orbital elements of the approach orbit and that failure to be within limits results in a catastrophic collision with the planet. These limits are presented for a range of capture inclinations and sail characteristic accelerations. It is found that sail hyperbolic excess velocity is a critical parameter during capture at Mercury, with only a narrow allowed band in order to avoid collision with the planet. The new capture methodis demonstrated for a Mercury sample return mission

Towards Activity Context using Software Sensors

Service-Oriented Computing delivers the promise of configuring and reconfiguring software systems to address user's needs in a dynamic way. Context-aware computing promises to capture the user's needs and hence the requirements they have on systems. The marriage of both can deliver ad-hoc software solutions relevant to the user in the most current fashion. However, here it is a key to gather information on the users' activity (that is what they are doing). Traditionally any context sensing was conducted with hardware sensors. However, software can also play the same role and in some situations will be more useful to sense the activity of the user. Furthermore they can make use of the fact that Service-oriented systems exchange information through standard protocols. In this paper we discuss our proposed approach to sense the activity of the user making use of software

Supersymmetry with a Chargino NLSP and Gravitino LSP

We demonstrate that the lightest chargino can be lighter than the lightest neutralino in supersymmetric models with Dirac gaugino masses as well as within a curious parameter region of the MSSM. Given also a light gravitino, such as from low scale supersymmetry breaking, this mass hierarchy leads to an unusual signal where every superpartner cascades down to a chargino that decays into an on-shell W and a gravitino, possibly with a macroscopic chargino track. We clearly identify the region of parameters where this signal can occur. We find it is generic in the context of the R-symmetric supersymmetric standard model, whereas it essentially only occurs in the MSSM when sign(M1) is not equal to sign(M2) = sign(\mu) and tan(beta) is small. We briefly comment on the search strategies for this signal at the LHC.Comment: 27 pages and 16 figure

Asymptotic Density of Eigenvalue Clusters for the Perturbed Landau Hamiltonian

We consider the Landau Hamiltonian (i.e. the 2D Schroedinger operator with constant magnetic field) perturbed by an electric potential V which decays sufficiently fast at infinity. The spectrum of the perturbed Hamiltonian consists of clusters of eigenvalues which accumulate to the Landau levels. Applying a suitable version of the anti-Wick quantization, we investigate the asymptotic distribution of the eigenvalues within a given cluster as the number of the cluster tends to infinity. We obtain an explicit description of the asymptotic density of the eigenvalues in terms of the Radon transform of the perturbation potential V.Comment: 30 pages. The explicit dependence on B and V in Theorem 1.6 (i) - (ii) indicated. Typos corrected. To appear in Communications in Mathematical Physic

Anisotropic optical response of the diamond (111)-2x1 surface

The optical properties of the 2$\times$1 reconstruction of the diamond (111) surface are investigated. The electronic structure and optical properties of the surface are studied using a microscopic tight-binding approach. We calculate the dielectric response describing the surface region and investigate the origin of the electronic transitions involving surface and bulk states. A large anisotropy in the surface dielectric response appears as a consequence of the asymmetric reconstruction on the surface plane, which gives rise to the zigzag Pandey chains. The results are presented in terms of the reflectance anisotropy and electron energy loss spectra. While our results are in good agreement with available experimental data, additional experiments are proposed in order to unambiguously determine the surface electronic structure of this interesting surface.Comment: REVTEX manuscript with 6 postscript figures, all included in uu file. Also available at http://www.phy.ohiou.edu/~ulloa/ulloa.html Submitted to Phys. Rev.

From thermal rectifiers to thermoelectric devices

We discuss thermal rectification and thermoelectric energy conversion from the perspective of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and dynamical systems theory. After preliminary considerations on the dynamical foundations of the phenomenological Fourier law in classical and quantum mechanics, we illustrate ways to control the phononic heat flow and design thermal diodes. Finally, we consider the coupled transport of heat and charge and discuss several general mechanisms for optimizing the figure of merit of thermoelectric efficiency.Comment: 42 pages, 22 figures, review paper, to appear in the Springer Lecture Notes in Physics volume "Thermal transport in low dimensions: from statistical physics to nanoscale heat transfer" (S. Lepri ed.