Effect of environment in fatigue of copper crystals Final technical report

Effects of surfaces and environment on nucleation and growth of fatigue cracks in coppe

Seeking a second medical opinion: composition, reasons and perceived outcomes in Israel.

Background: Seeking a second-opinion (SO) is a common clinical practice that can optimize treatment and reduce unnecessary procedures and risks. We aim to characterize the composition of the population of SO seekers, their reasons for seeking a SO and choosing a specific physician, and their perceived outcomes following the SO. Methods: A cross-sectional national telephone survey, using a representative sample of the general Israeli population (n = 848, response rate = 62%). SO utilization was defined as seeking an additional clinical opinion from a specialist within the same specialty, for the same medical concern. We describe the characteristics of respondents who obtained SOs, their reasons for doing so and their perceived outcomes: (1) Satisfaction with the SO; (2) Experiencing health improvement after receiving a SO; (3) A difference in the diagnosis or treatment suggested in the first opinions and the second opinions; (4) Preference of the SO over the first one. Results: Most of the respondents who sought a SO (n = 344) were above 60 years old, secular, living with a partner, perceived their income to be above average and their health status to be not so good. For the patients who utilized SOs, orthopedic surgeons were sought out more than any other medical professional.Reasons for seeking a SO included doubts about diagnosis or treatment (38%), search for a sub-specialty expert (19%) and dissatisfaction with communication (19%). SO seekers most frequently chose a specific specialist based on a recommendation from a friend or a relative (33%). About half of the SO seekers also searched for information on the internet. Most of the respondents who sought a SO mentioned that they were satisfied with it (84%), felt health improvement (77%), mentioned that there was a difference between the diagnosis or treatment between the first opinion and the SO (56%) and preferred the SO over the first one (91%). Conclusions: Clinical uncertainty or dissatisfaction with patient-physician communication were the main reasons for seeking a SO. Policy makers should be aware that many patients choose a physician for a SO based on recommendations made outside the medical system. We recommend creating mechanisms that help patients in the complicated process of seeking a SO, suggest specialists who are suitable for the specific medical problem of the patient, and provide tools to reconcile discrepant opinions

Enhancing Social Skills in Adolescents with High Functioning Autism using Motor-based Role-play Intervention

The purpose of this pilot study was to collect pilot data evaluating whether a motor-based role-play intervention using a canine animal assistant can enhance social skill use in two adolescents with HFA. A single subject ABA design across two participants was used. The intervention consisted of four 1-hour sessions over 4 weeks. The quality of social interaction was measured by the Evaluation of Social Interaction (ESI) administered at baseline and the 3-month probe. Frequency of targeted social skill use was measured during baseline, intervention, and probe phases. Participant 1 experienced statistically significant increases in both ESI scores (p = .012, t = -5.488) from baseline to the 3-month probe. Participant 2 also experienced a statistically significant increase in ESI scores from baseline to probe (p = .002, t = -10.167), but he was unable to fully maintain these gains at the 3-month probe. This pilot study’s findings suggest that the intervention produced positive effects in both participants and warrant further investigation

Measuring and Modeling Flow Rates in Tidal Creeks: A Case Study from the Central Coast of South Carolina

The purpose of this study was to collect site- and condition-specific hydrology data to better understand the water flow dynamics of tidal creeks and terrestrial runoff from surrounding watersheds. In this paper, we developed mathematical models of tidal creek flow (discharge) in relation to time during a tidal cycle and also estimated terrestrial runoff volume from design storms to compare to tidal creek volumes. Currently, limited data are available about how discharge in tidal creeks behaves as a function of stage or the time of tide (i.e., rising or falling tide) for estuaries in the southeastern United States, so this information fills an existing knowledge gap. Ultimately, findings from this study will be used to inform managers about numeric nutrient criteria (nitrogen-N and phosphorus-P) when it is combined with biological response (e.g., phytoplankton assemblages) data from a concurrent study. We studied four tidal creek sites, two in the Ashepoo-Combahee-Edisto (ACE) Basin and two in the Charleston Harbor system. We used ArcGIS to delineate two different watersheds for each study site, to classify the surrounding land cover using the NOAA Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP) data, and to analyze the soils using the NRCS Soil Survey Geographic database (SSURGO). The size of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Elevation Derivatives for National Application (EDNA) watersheds varied from 778 to 2,582 ha; smaller geographic watersheds were delineated for all sites (except Wimbee) for stormwater modeling purposes. The two sites in Charleston Harbor were within the first-order Horlbeck Creek and the second-order Bulls Creek areas. The ACE Basin sites were within the third-order Big Bay Creek and the fourth-order Wimbee Creek areas. We measured the stage and discharge in each creek with an acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) unit for multiple tide conditions over a 2-year period (2015–2016) with the goal of encompassing as large of a range of tide stage and discharge data measurements as possible. The Stormwater Runoff Modeling System (SWARM) was also used to estimate the potential water entering the creeks from the land surface; this volume was very small relative to the tide water volume except for the more-developed Bulls Creek watershed. The results show that the peak discharge occurred on the ebb tide and that the duration of the flood tide spanned a longer period of time; both of these observations are consistent with traits associated with an ebb-dominated tidal creek system. The tidal inflow and outflow (flood and ebb tides, respectively) showed an asymmetrical pattern with respect to stage and discharge; peak discharge during the flood (rising) tide occurred at a higher stage than for the peak discharge during the ebb (falling) tide. This is not an unexpected result, as the water on an ebb tide is moving down gradient funneled through the creek channel toward the coast. Furthermore, water moving with the rising flood tide must overcome frictional losses due to the marsh bank and vegetation; i.e., the peak discharge can only happen when the water has risen above these impediments. We infer from the flow dynamics data that faster water velocities during ebb tide imply that more erosive energy could transport a larger mass of suspended solids and associated nutrients (e.g., orthophosphate) from the estuary to the coastal ocean. However, the discharge and runoff modeling indicate that land-based flux was important in the developed Bulls Creek watershed, but not at the larger and less-developed Big Bay Creek watershed. At Big Bay Creek, the relatively large tidal discharge volume compared to the smaller potential runoff generated within the watershed indicates that the creek could potentially dilute terrestrial runoff contaminants. Smaller, more-urbanized tidal wetland systems may not benefit from such dilution effects and thus are vulnerable to increased runoff from adjacent developed landscapes

A novel method to scale up fungal endophyte isolations

This record contains the Author’s Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Biocontrol Science and Technology 2015, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09583157.2015.1033382. Manuscript will be openly accessible in March 2016

Web-Based Collaborative Care for Type 2 Diabetes: A pilot randomized trial

OBJECTIVE—To test Web-based care management of glycemic control using a shared electronic medical record with patients who have type 2 diabetes

What’s Worth Talking About? Information Theory Reveals How Children Balance Informativeness and Ease of Production

Of all the things we could say, what determines what is worth saying? Greenfield’s principle of informativeness states that, right from the onset of language, humans selectively comment on whatever they find unexpected. We quantify this tendency using information theoretic measures, and test the counterintuitive prediction that children will produce words that are low frequency given the context because these will be most informative. Using corpora of child directed speech, we identified adjectives that varied in how informative (i.e., unexpected) they were given the noun they modified. Three-year-olds (N=31, replication N=13) heard an experimenter use these adjectives to describe pictures. The children’s task was then to describe the pictures to another person. As the information content of the experimenter’s adjective increased, so did children’s tendency to comment on the feature that adjective had encoded. Furthermore, our analyses suggest that children balance this informativeness with a competing drive to ease production

How polymer additives reduce the pour point of hydrocarbon solvents containing wax crystals

We have investigated how four different pour point depressant (PPD) polymers affect the pour point transition in mixtures of a single pure wax in a solvent. We used either n-eicosane (C20), CH3(CH2)18CH3, n-tetracosane (C24), CH3(CH2)22CH3 or n-hexatriacontane (C36), CH3(CH2)34CH3 as the wax component with either n-heptane or toluene as the solvent component. For all wax–solvent combinations, the measured variation of wax solubility with temperature is well predicted by ideal solution theory. The variation of pour point temperature as a function of the overall wax concentration is quantitatively modelled using the idea that, for each overall wax concentration, the pour point occurs at a temperature at which a critical volume fraction ϕ* of wax crystals has precipitated. Close to the pour point temperature, extraction and examination of the wax crystals show they consist of polydisperse, irregularly-shaped platelets with axial ratios (h/d, where h is the plate thickness and d is the plate long dimension) in the range 0.005–0.05. It is found that the measured ϕ* values corresponding to the pour point transitions are weakly correlated with the wax crystal axial ratios (h/d) for all wax–solvent–PPD polymer combinations. These results indicate that the pour point transition occurs at a volume fraction larger than the value at which the volumes of rotation of the platelet crystals overlap, i.e., 2.5(h/d) < ϕ* < 11(h/d). PPD polymers work, in part, by increasing the wax crystal axial ratio (h/d), thereby increasing ϕ* and reducing the pour point temperature. Since the PPD's ability to modify the wax crystal shape relies on its adsorption to the crystal-solution surface, it is anticipated and observed experimentally that optimum PPD efficacy is correlated with the difference between the wax and the polymer solubility boundary temperatures. This finding and the mechanistic insight gained here provide the basis for a simple and rapid screening test to identify candidate species likely to be effective PPDs for particular wax systems