Contemplating Mindfulness at Work: An Integrative Review

Mindfulness research activity is surging within organizational science. Emerging evidence across multiple fields suggests that mindfulness is fundamentally connected to many aspects of workplace functioning, but this knowledge base has not been systematically integrated to date. This review coalesces the burgeoning body of mindfulness scholarship into a framework to guide mainstream management research investigating a broad range of constructs. The framework identifies how mindfulness influences attention, with downstream effects on functional domains of cognition, emotion, behavior, and physiology. Ultimately, these domains impact key workplace outcomes, including performance, relationships, and well-being. Consideration of the evidence on mindfulness at work stimulates important questions and challenges key assumptions within management science, generating an agenda for future research

A case study in adaptable and reusable infrastructure at the Keck Observatory Archive: VO interfaces, moving targets, and more

The Keck Observatory Archive (KOA) (https://koa.ipac.caltech.edu) curates all observations acquired at the W. M. Keck Observatory (WMKO) since it began operations in 1994, including data from eight active instruments and two decommissioned instruments. The archive is a collaboration between WMKO and the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI). Since its inception in 2004, the science information system used at KOA has adopted an architectural approach that emphasizes software re-use and adaptability. This paper describes how KOA is currently leveraging and extending open source software components to develop new services and to support delivery of a complete set of instrument metadata, which will enable more sophisticated and extensive queries than currently possible. In August 2015, KOA deployed a program interface to discover public data from all instruments equipped with an imaging mode. The interface complies with version 2 of the Simple Imaging Access Protocol (SIAP), under development by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA), which defines a standard mechanism for discovering images through spatial queries. The heart of the KOA service is an R-tree-based, database-indexing mechanism prototyped by the Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) and further developed by the Montage Image Mosaic project, designed to provide fast access to large imaging data sets as a first step in creating wide-area image mosaics (such as mosaics of subsets of the 4.7 million images of the SDSS DR9 release). The KOA service uses the results of the spatial R-tree search to create an SQLite data database for further relational filtering. The service uses a JSON configuration file to describe the association between instrument parameters and the service query parameters, and to make it applicable beyond the Keck instruments. The images generated at the Keck telescope usually do not encode the image footprints as WCS fields in the FITS file headers. Because SIAP searches are spatial, much of the effort in developing the program interface involved processing the instrument and telescope parameters to understand how accurately we can derive the WCS information for each instrument. This knowledge is now being fed back into the KOA databases as part of a program to include complete metadata information for all imaging observations. The R-tree program was itself extended to support temporal (in addition to spatial) indexing, in response to requests from the planetary science community for a search engine to discover observations of Solar System objects. With this 3D-indexing scheme, the service performs very fast time and spatial matches between the target ephemerides, obtained from the JPL SPICE service. Our experiments indicate these matches can be more than 100 times faster than when separating temporal and spatial searches. Images of the tracks of the moving targets, overlaid with the image footprints, are computed with a new command-line visualization tool, mViewer, released with the Montage distribution. The service is currently in test and will be released in late summer 2016

Quantum fields during black hole formation: how good an approximation is the Unruh state?

We study the quantum effects of a test Klein-Gordon field in a Vaidya space-time consisting of a collapsing null shell that forms a Schwazschild black hole, by explicitly obtaining, in a (1 + 1)-dimensional model, the Wightman function, the renormalised stress-energy tensor, and by analysing particle detector rates along stationary orbits in the exterior black hole region, and make a comparison with the folklore that the Unruh state is the state that emerges from black hole formation. In the causal future of the shell, we find a negative ingoing flux at the horizon that agrees precisely with the Unruh state calculation, and is the source of black hole radiation, while in the future null infinity we find that the radiation flux output in the Unruh state is an upper bound for the positive outgoing flux in the collapsing null shell spacetime. This indicates that back-reaction estimates based on Unruh state calculations over-estimate the energy output carried by so-called pre-Hawking radiation. The value of the output predicted by the Unruh state is however approached exponentially fast. Finally, we find that at late times, stationary observers in the exterior black hole region in the collapsing shell spacetime detect the local Hawking temperature, which is also well characterised by the Unruh state, coming from right-movers. Early-time discrepancies between the detector rates for the Unruh state and for the state in the collapsing shell spacetime are explored numerically

Comment on "The extent of forest in dryland biomes"

Bastin et al (Reports, 12 May 2017, p. 635) infer forest as more globally extensive than previously estimated using tree cover data. However, their forest definition does not reflect ecosystem function or biotic composition. These structural and climatic definitions inflate forest estimates across the tropics and undermine conservation goals, leading to inappropriate management policies and practices in tropical grassy ecosystems

Routinely reported ejection fraction and mortality in clinical practice: where does the nadir of risk lie?

Aims: We investigated the relationship between clinically assessed left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) and survival in a large, heterogeneous clinical cohort. Methods and results: Physician-reported LVEF on 403 977 echocardiograms from 203 135 patients were linked to all-cause mortality using electronic health records (1998–2018) from US regional healthcare system. Cox proportional hazards regression was used for analyses while adjusting for many patient characteristics including age, sex, and relevant comorbidities. A dataset including 45 531 echocardiograms and 35 976 patients from New Zealand was used to provide independent validation of analyses. During follow-up of the US cohort, 46 258 (23%) patients who had undergone 108 578 (27%) echocardiograms died. Overall, adjusted hazard ratios (HR) for mortality showed a u-shaped relationship for LVEF with a nadir of risk at an LVEF of 60–65%, a HR of 1.71 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.64–1.77] when ≥70% and a HR of 1.73 (95% CI 1.66–1.80) at LVEF of 35–40%. Similar relationships with a nadir at 60–65% were observed in the validation dataset as well as for each age group and both sexes. The results were similar after further adjustments for conditions associated with an elevated LVEF, including mitral regurgitation, increased wall thickness, and anaemia and when restricted to patients reported to have heart failure at the time of the echocardiogram. Conclusion: Deviation of LVEF from 60% to 65% is associated with poorer survival regardless of age, sex, or other relevant comorbidities such as heart failure. These results may herald the recognition of a new phenotype characterized by supra-normal LVEF

The s ---> d gamma decay in and beyond the Standard Model

The New Physics sensitivity of the s ---> d gamma transition and its accessibility through hadronic processes are thoroughly investigated. Firstly, the Standard Model predictions for the direct CP-violating observables in radiative K decays are systematically improved. Besides, the magnetic contribution to epsilon prime is estimated and found subleading, even in the presence of New Physics, and a new strategy to resolve its electroweak versus QCD penguin fraction is identified. Secondly, the signatures of a series of New Physics scenarios, characterized as model-independently as possible in terms of their underlying dynamics, are investigated by combining the information from all the FCNC transitions in the s ---> d sector.Comment: 54 pages, 14 eps figure

Challenges and Future Directions in Quantifying Terrestrial Evapotranspiration

Abstract: Terrestrial evapotranspiration is the second‐largest component of the land water cycle, linking the water, energy, and carbon cycles and influencing the productivity and health of ecosystems. The dynamics of ET across a spectrum of spatiotemporal scales and their controls remain an active focus of research across different science disciplines. Here, we provide an overview of the current state of ET science across in situ measurements, partitioning of ET, and remote sensing, and discuss how different approaches complement one another based on their advantages and shortcomings. We aim to facilitate collaboration among a cross‐disciplinary group of ET scientists to overcome the challenges identified in this paper and ultimately advance our integrated understanding of ET

Reply to Comment on "The UK consensus position on the treatment of pancreatic cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic".

Funder: DH | National Institute for Health Research (NIHR); doi: https://doi.org/10.13039/501100000272Funder: Cancer Research UK (CRUK); doi: https://doi.org/10.13039/50110000028