Stakeholder perceptions of marine plastic waste management in the United Kingdom

Plastic pollution is a significant threat to the marine environment. Although scientific interest in the environmental impacts of plastic pollution has grown rapidly over the last decade, there has been a relative lag in public, industry and government interest. The recent BBC Blue Planet II documentary has, however, provoked a national increase in awareness to the problems of plastic pollution in the United Kingdom (UK), and has inspired the government to introduce taxation policy changes aiming to reduce consumption. It is therefore necessary to better understand the diverse range of opinions that surround the ocean plastic waste problem, economic policy solutions and consumption responsibilities. We employ a Q-methodological study to address key stakeholder viewpoints from ENGO, government agency, retailer, marine science and citizen representatives in the UK. We find four distinct emergent discourses surrounding this topic, labelled: a) Socio-cultural visibility and responsibility, b) Dragons of inaction – disempowerment and defeatism, c) Value-action gap, d) Refuting retailer responsibility. We also identify a clear consensus that current and proposed government policy is not radical enough – the focus needs to move beyond single-product taxes and levies on disposal items (e.g bags, coffee cups), to a deeper reflection about public awareness raising and education, defining waste responsibilities more clearly, and working to change the habits and unsustainable practices of consumers in the face of public apathy and a resistant retail environment

Efficiency Testing of an Electronic Speed Controller

This project required the development of a rig that could experimentally determine the efficiency of an Electronic Speed Controller (ESC). The selected design focuses on measuring the losses due to heat from the device and comparing this to its input power. The selected design is a flow rig that utilizes the heat equation q=ṁcpΔT. The rig provides a steady state measurement of the ESC heat output by passing a known mass flow rate of air across the ESC and measuring the temperature difference. It uses a flowmeter to determine ṁ, thermocouples to determine ΔT, and a table lookup to determine cp. After testing with a known heat source of a DC-powered silicon heater, It was found that at a flowrate of 30 L/min, the rig is able to capture greater than 90% of the heat emitted from a range of 2.5 to 10 Watts. This rig is recommended for use in testing the heat losses of an Electronic Speed Controller as well as any other small form factor, constant heat-emitting devices

Knowledge and Practice of Exclusive Breast Feeding Among Mothers Attending Infant Welfare Clinic in a Tertiary Health Institution

The practice of exclusive breastfeeding has been found out to be essential in reducing infant mortality. This practice has been documented to not only be beneficial to the child but also the mother and the society at large. This study was conducted to assess knowledge and practice of exclusive breastfeeding among women attending infant welfare clinic in a tertiary hospital in Nigeria. This study adopted descriptive research design. In all 200 mothers participated in the study. Self administered self structured questionnaire whose validity and reliability has been previously established was the instrument used for data collection. The process of collection took 4 weeks. Data collected was analysed using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) version 16.Results of the study should good knowledge of exclusive breastfeeding among women and good practice of exclusive breastfeeding. However not all women that practice exclusive breastfeeding, practice it for at least 6 months.  Husbands were found out to influence the practice and duration of exclusive breastfeeding among women. Although women in this study demonstrated good knowledge and practice of exclusive breast feeding, there is still need to reinforce teaching especially during ante natal clinic to improve the practice of exclusive breastfeeding. Conscious effort should also be made on the part of policy makers to put in place policies that will encourage women to practice exclusive breastfeeding because of the various inherent benefits for the child, mother and the society at large. Keywords: Knowledge, Practice, Exclusive Breastfeedin

Prediction of progression in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis using CT scans atbaseline: A quantum particle swarm optimization - Random forest approach

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a fatal lung disease characterized by an unpredictable progressive declinein lung function. Natural history of IPF is unknown and the prediction of disease progression at the time ofdiagnosis is notoriously difficult. High resolution computed tomography (HRCT) has been used for the diagnosisof IPF, but not generally for monitoring purpose. The objective of this work is to develop a novel predictivemodel for the radiological progression pattern at voxel-wise level using only baseline HRCT scans. Mainly, thereare two challenges: (a) obtaining a data set of features for region of interest (ROI) on baseline HRCT scans andtheir follow-up status; and (b) simultaneously selecting important features from high-dimensional space, andoptimizing the prediction performance. We resolved the first challenge by implementing a study design andhaving an expert radiologist contour ROIs at baseline scans, depending on its progression status in follow-upvisits. For the second challenge, we integrated the feature selection with prediction by developing an algorithmusing a wrapper method that combines quantum particle swarm optimization to select a small number of featureswith random forest to classify early patterns of progression. We applied our proposed algorithm to analyzeanonymized HRCT images from 50 IPF subjects from a multi-center clinical trial. We showed that it yields aparsimonious model with 81.8% sensitivity, 82.2% specificity and an overall accuracy rate of 82.1% at the ROIlevel. These results are superior to other popular feature selections and classification methods, in that ourmethod produces higher accuracy in prediction of progression and more balanced sensitivity and specificity witha smaller number of selected features. Our work is the first approach to show that it is possible to use onlybaseline HRCT scans to predict progressive ROIs at 6 months to 1year follow-ups using artificial intelligence

Fidelity of optimally controlled quantum gates with randomly coupled multiparticle environments

This work studies the feasibility of optimal control of high-fidelity quantum gates in a model of interacting two-level particles. One particle (the qubit) serves as the quantum information processor, whose evolution is controlled by a time-dependent external field. The other particles are not directly controlled and serve as an effective environment, coupling to which is the source of decoherence. The control objective is to generate target one-qubit gates in the presence of strong environmentally-induced decoherence and under physically motivated restrictions on the control field. It is found that interactions among the environmental particles have a negligible effect on the gate fidelity and require no additional adjustment of the control field. Another interesting result is that optimally controlled quantum gates are remarkably robust to random variations in qubit-environment and inter-environment coupling strengths. These findings demonstrate the utility of optimal control for management of quantum-information systems in a very precise and specific manner, especially when the dynamics complexity is exacerbated by inherently uncertain environmental coupling.Comment: tMOP LaTeX, 9 pages, 3 figures; Special issue of the Journal of Modern Optics: 37th Winter Colloquium on the Physics of Quantum Electronics, 2-6 January 200

Trends and economic drivers for United States naloxone pricing, January T 2006 to February 2017

Anecdotal evidence indicates that naloxone prices have risen in recent years, but limited research has examined the magnitude of these increases and potential causes. We contribute nationally representative evidence to help answer each of these questions, including wholesale pricing data from a proprietary drug sales database span- ning January 2006 to February 2017. We find that all formulations of naloxone increased in price since 2006 except for Narcan Nasal Spray. These cumulative increases totaled 2281% for the 0.4 MG single-dose products, 244% for the 2 MG single-dose products, 3797% for the 4 MG multi-dose products, and 469% for the 0.4 MG Evzio auto-injector. We believe that increased demand for naloxone from the opioid epidemic may explain the more gradual price increases for the 0.4 MG single-dose and 4 MG multi-dose products prior to 2012. On the other hand, we believe that the sudden, sustained prices increases occurring for all of the products since 2012 may be the result of a drug shortage for the 0.4 MG single-dose products and the fact that each naloxone product has historically been sold by only a single competitor