‘Food Was My Medicine, My Medicine to Recovery And Healing’ - A Phenomenological Study of Posttraumatic Growth through Positive Nutrition

The purpose of this study is to provide an in-depth account of the subjective experiences of adults who felt that positive nutrition played an essential role in their growth following their highly stressful life event(s), with a distinctive focus on exploring the embodied experience of posttraumatic growth within this group. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted amongst seven female participants and analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Three superordinate themes and nine subordinate themes emerged: (i) discovering the nutritional sanctuary through an embodied healing from foods, enjoying positive emotions and spiritual nourishment (ii) experiencing metamorphosis in the body through physical transformation, embodiment and discovering the ‘new body’, and finally (iii) through an eudaimonic journey manifesting in the form of deepened relationships, heightened personal growth and an acceptance of self. This study is the first of its kind to use positive nutrition to explore growth after trauma. The findings concluded that growth was seen to be processed through the body and posttraumatic growth attained via the embodied route of positive nutrition. Some elements of posttraumatic growth outcomes were found to be more prominent in participants who experienced a body related trauma, in comparison to those who underwent a non-body related trauma and vice versa

On Level Quantization for the Noncommutative Chern-Simons Theory

We show that the coefficient of the three-dimensional Chern-Simons action on the noncommutative plane must be quantized. Similar considerations apply in other dimensions as well.Comment: 6 pages, Latex, no figure

Microfluidic systems for in situ formation of nylon 6,6 membranes.

A microfluidics based, localised formation of nylon 6,6 membranes has been undertaken. The study demonstrates the feasibility of maintaining stable aqueous/organic interfaces for xylene within simple linear flow channels. Glass fabricated structures were used with adipoyl chloride and hexamethylenediamine in the organic and aqueous phases, respectively, in order to achieve nylon 6,6 interfacial polymerisation. Localised membrane formation was investigated in flow channels of different geometries over a wide range of flow rates (500–4000 μl/min), with Reynolds numbers ranging from 8.4 to 67.2. The results demonstrate that interfacial polymerisation occurs consistently over a wide range of flow rates and of flow entry angles for dual aqueous/organic solvent input. However, creation of uniform planar film structures required careful optimisation, and these were best achieved at 2000 μl/min with a flow entry angle of 45°. The resulting membranes had thicknesses in the range between 100 and 300 μm. Computational modelling of the aqueous/organic flow was performed in order to characterise flow stability and wall shear-stress patterns. The flow arrangement establishes a principle for the fabrication of micromembrane structures designed for low sample volume separation, where the forming reaction is a facile and rapid interfacial process

Comparison of DCT, SVD and BFOA based multimodal biometric watermarking systems

AbstractDigital image watermarking is a major domain for hiding the biometric information, in which the watermark data are made to be concealed inside a host image imposing imperceptible change in the picture. Due to the advance in digital image watermarking, the majority of research aims to make a reliable improvement in robustness to prevent the attack. The reversible invisible watermarking scheme is used for fingerprint and iris multimodal biometric system. A novel approach is used for fusing different biometric modalities. Individual unique modalities of fingerprint and iris biometric are extracted and fused using different fusion techniques. The performance of different fusion techniques is evaluated and the Discrete Wavelet Transform fusion method is identified as the best. Then the best fused biometric template is watermarked into a cover image. The various watermarking techniques such as the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm (BFOA) are implemented to the fused biometric feature image. Performance of watermarking systems is compared using different metrics. It is found that the watermarked images are found robust over different attacks and they are able to reverse the biometric template for Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm (BFOA) watermarking technique

A Comparison between different Optimization Techniques for CNC End Milling Process

AbstractDifferent kind of statistical optimization techniques are available for optimizing the different parameters of a CNC end milling process. In this paper a comparison is done between five different techniques such as principal components analysis, utility theory, Grey relational analysis, technique of order preference by similarity to ideal solution and their hybrid variants. The Taguchi optimization principle is common to all the methods which are presented in the paper. The experiments were carried out and the different response features such as surface roughness (Ra, Rz and Rq) and material removal rate (MRR) were measured and the different optimization techniques were applied. Three different surface roughness values are used for the analysis and they act as indices of surface quality whereas MRR acts as index of productivity. Hence the optimization is carried out such that the resulting optimized parameters will lead to a compromise between the productivity and the surface quality. The aim of the work is to carry out multi objective optimization on a single process and compare the results

Flux dependent 1.5 MeV self-ion beam induced sputtering from Gold nanostructured thin films

We discuss four important aspects of 1.5 MeV Au2+ ion-induced flux dependent sputtering from gold nanostrcutures (of an average size 7.6 nm and height 6.9 nm) that are deposited on silicon substrates: (a) Au sputtering yield at the ion flux of 6.3x10^12 ions cm-2 s-1 is found to be 312 atoms/ion which is about five times the sputtering yield reported earlier under identical irradiation conditions at a lower beam flux of 10^9 ions cm-2 s-1, (b) the sputtered yield increases with increasing flux at lower fluence and reduces at higher fluence (1.0x10^15 ions cm-2) for nanostructured thin films while the sputtering yield increases with increasing flux and fluence for thick films (27.5 nm Au deposited on Si) (c) Size distribution of sputtered particles has been found to vary with the incident beam flux showing a bimodal distribution at higher flux and (d) the decay exponent obtained from the size distributions of sputtered particles showed an inverse power law dependence ranging from 1.5 to 2.5 as a function of incident beam flux. The exponent values have been compared with existing theoretical models to understand the underlying mechanism. The role of wafer temperature associated with the beam flux has been invoked for a qualitative understanding of the sputtering results in both the nanostructured thin films and thick films.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figures, 1 table To be Appeared in J. Phys. D: Appl. Phy

Unimpeded permeation of water through helium-leak-tight graphene-based membranes

Permeation through nanometer pores is important in the design of materials for filtration and separation techniques and because of unusual fundamental behavior arising at the molecular scale. We found that submicron-thick membranes made from graphene oxide can be completely impermeable to liquids, vapors and gases, including helium, but allow unimpeded permeation of water (H2O permeates through the membranes at least 10^10 times faster than He). We attribute these seemingly incompatible observations to a low-friction flow of a monolayer of water through two dimensional capillaries formed by closely spaced graphene sheets. Diffusion of other molecules is blocked by reversible narrowing of the capillaries in low humidity and/or by their clogging with water

Color Skyrmions in the Quark-Gluon Plasma

We consider the general formulation of nonabelian fluid dynamics based on symmetry considerations. We point out that, quite generally, this admits solitonic excitations which are the color analog of skyrmions. Some general properties of the solitons are discussed.Comment: LaTeX, 13 pages, references adde