Response bias in job satisfaction surveys: English general practitioners

Job satisfaction may affect the propensity to respond to job satisfaction surveys, so that estimates of average satisfaction and the effects of determinants of satisfaction may be biased. We examine response bias using data from a postal job satisfaction survey of family doctors. We link all the sampled doctors to an administrative database and so have information on the characteristics of responders and non-responders. Allowing for selection increases the estimate of mean job satisfaction in 2005 and the estimated change in mean job satisfaction between 2004 and 2005. Estimates of the determinants of job satisfaction are generally insensitive to response bias.Job satisfaction. Response bias. Sample selection. Family practitioners.

Heroin addiction: the past and future

Substance misuse, in particular heroin addiction contributes to health and social problems. Although effective medical treatment was available, earlier efforts confined the treatment of heroin addicts to in-house rehabilitation which required them to be estranged from the community and their families for 2 years. The in-house rehabilitative programme, implemented for at least three decades has produced low abstinence rates. On the other hand, being ‘away’ meant that many heroin addicts faced employment problems and family relationship difficulties upon completing the in-house rehabilitation. However, recently, the concerted efforts by various government and non-government organisations, and the acknowledgement that heroin addiction is a medical illness has resulted in a revamp to approaching treatment of heroin addiction. At present, methadone substitution programmes have been offered as part of treatment programme for heroin addicts in Malaysia. This new programme has been shown to be effective in treating heroin addiction and would need support and cooperation from all groups involved

Weighing matrices and spherical codes

Mutually unbiased weighing matrices (MUWM) are closely related to an antipodal spherical code with 4 angles. In the present paper, we clarify the relationship between MUWM and the spherical sets, and give the complete solution about the maximum size of a set of MUWM of weight 4 for any order. Moreover we describe some natural generalization of a set of MUWM from the viewpoint of spherical codes, and determine several maximum sizes of the generalized sets. They include an affirmative answer of the problem of Best, Kharaghani, and Ramp.Comment: Title is changed from "Association schemes related to weighing matrices

Novel results in STM, ARPES, HREELS, Nernst, neutron, Raman, and isotope substitution experiments and their relation to bosonic modes and charge inhomogeneity, from perspective of negative-Ueff boson-fermion modelling of HTSC

This paper seeks to synthesize much recent work on the HTSC materials around the latest STM results from Davis and coworkers. The conductance diffuse scattering results in particular are used as point of entry to discuss bosonic modes, both of condensed and uncondensed form. The bosonic mode picture is essential to understanding an ever growing range of observations within the HTSC field. The work is expounded within the context of the negative-U, boson-fermion modelling long advocated by the author. This general approach is presently seeing much theoretical development, into which I have looked to couple many of the experimental advances. While the formal theory is not yet sufficiently detailed to cover adequately all the experimental complexities presented by the real cuprate systems, it is clear that it affords very appreciable support to the line taken. An attempt is made throughout to say why and how it is that these events are tied so very closely to this particular set of materials.Comment: 36 pages pdf with 3 figures and 1 table included, Submitted to J. Phys. Cond. Mat

Theory of non-Fermi liquid and pairing in electron-doped cuprates

We apply the spin-fermion model to study the normal state and pairing instability in electron-doped cuprates near the antiferromagnetic QCP. Peculiar frequency dependencies of the normal state properties are shown to emerge from the self-consistent equations on the fermionic and bosonic self-energies, and are in agreement with experimentally observed ones. We argue that the pairing instability is in the $d_{x^{2}-y^{2}}$ channel, as in hole-doped cuprates, but theoretical $T_{c}$ is much lower than in the hole-doped case. For the same hopping integrals and the interaction strength as in hole-doped materials, we obtain $T_{c}\sim10$K at the end point of the antiferromagnetic phase. We argue that a strong reduction of $T_{c}$ in electron-doped cuprates compared to hole-doped ones is due to critical role of the Fermi surface curvature for electron-doped materials. The $d_{x^{2}-y^{2}}$-pairing gap $\Delta(\mathbf{k},\omega)$ is strongly non-monotonic along the Fermi surface. The position of the gap maxima, however, does not coincide with the hot spots, as the non-monotonic $d_{x^{2}-y^{2}}$ gap persists even at doping when the hot spots merge on the Brillouin zone diagonals.Comment: 16 page

Morphological responses of forage sorghums to salinity and irrigation frequency

Water stress occurs when the demand for water exceeds the available amount during a certain period or when poor quality water restricts its use. In particular, water stress is associated with low availability of water, as well as osmotic effects associated with salinity. The response of forage sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] varieties to salinity and irrigation frequency were studied from December 2007 to December 2009. Two forage sorghum varieties (Speedfeed and KFS4) were grown under salinity levels of 0, 5, 10 and 15 dS m-1 and irrigated when the leaf water potential reached -1.0 (control), -1.5 and -2.0 MPa. Irrigation frequency and salinity were found to affect the morphology and growth of the forage sorghum. Maximum number of leaves was produced in non-saline soil (13.5 leaves plant-1) with normal irrigation (12.4 leaves plant-1). Low soil water and high salinity reduced the number of leaves as well as the number of tillers produced. Leaf area of plants were also reduced in response to salinity and decreasing soil water availability, while the suppressive effect was magnified under the combined effect of the two factors. Significant differences in stem diameter were found between the frequently and the least frequently watered plants, and stem diameter decreased with increasing salinity. Leaf firing increased with increasing salinity reaching 59.9% in the extreme salinity treatment of 15 dS m-1, and it increased with increasing water stress reaching 48.6% in the extreme water stress treatment of -2 MPa. Under stress condition, the KFS4 variety had a better performance in terms of morphological and growth parameters compared to Speedfeed variety. The threshold concentration was found to vary with variety. However, in control treatment, Speedfeed variety had greater leaf area, plant heights, number of leaf and number of tiller.Key words: Salinity, irrigation frequency, morphologic parameters, forage sorghum

PlaNet - Photo Geolocation with Convolutional Neural Networks

Is it possible to build a system to determine the location where a photo was taken using just its pixels? In general, the problem seems exceptionally difficult: it is trivial to construct situations where no location can be inferred. Yet images often contain informative cues such as landmarks, weather patterns, vegetation, road markings, and architectural details, which in combination may allow one to determine an approximate location and occasionally an exact location. Websites such as GeoGuessr and View from your Window suggest that humans are relatively good at integrating these cues to geolocate images, especially en-masse. In computer vision, the photo geolocation problem is usually approached using image retrieval methods. In contrast, we pose the problem as one of classification by subdividing the surface of the earth into thousands of multi-scale geographic cells, and train a deep network using millions of geotagged images. While previous approaches only recognize landmarks or perform approximate matching using global image descriptors, our model is able to use and integrate multiple visible cues. We show that the resulting model, called PlaNet, outperforms previous approaches and even attains superhuman levels of accuracy in some cases. Moreover, we extend our model to photo albums by combining it with a long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture. By learning to exploit temporal coherence to geolocate uncertain photos, we demonstrate that this model achieves a 50% performance improvement over the single-image model

L-Convex Polyominoes are Recognizable in Real Time by 2D Cellular Automata

A polyomino is said to be L-convex if any two of its cells are connected by a 4-connected inner path that changes direction at most once. The 2-dimensional language representing such polyominoes has been recently proved to be recognizable by tiling systems by S. Brocchi, A. Frosini, R. Pinzani and S. Rinaldi. In an attempt to compare recognition power of tiling systems and cellular automata, we have proved that this language can be recognized by 2-dimensional cellular automata working on the von Neumann neighborhood in real time. Although the construction uses a characterization of L-convex polyominoes that is similar to the one used for tiling systems, the real time constraint which has no equivalent in terms of tilings requires the use of techniques that are specific to cellular automata

Socially responsible joint venture, brand misconduct and recovery communication: Implications for relationship quality

There is little doubt that in the past several decades, an increasing number of organisations are seeking out strategic alliances, joint ventures, and an increasing number of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in order to gain competitive advantage and enable the organisations to achieve objectives that would not have been possible without the alliance (Das & Teng, 2000; Lacey, Kennett-Hensel, & Manolis, 2014; Nowell & Harrison, 2011; Tjemkes & Furrer, 2010). Increasingly corporations and non-profit organisations or charities are using those relationships and joint projects as critical institutional positioning for achieving mutual goals (Shumate & O'Connor, 2010). These organisations are building ‘ethical brand identifications’ based on the collaborative work they are doing. In fact, as a result of the 2008 economic crash, many companies have increasingly pursued and developed structured ethics programs because those companies engaging in socially responsible activities can gain strength, power, and importance in the global marketplace (Kreng & May-Yao, 2011 945; Uccello, 2009). These CSR initiatives meant to demonstrate a system that values a culture of ethics and support, fulfilling missions, and acting as models for society (Kreng & May-Yao, 2011). Yet despite growing amounts of research analysing relationship quality, corporate social responsibility, crisis communication, and brand misconduct, little research has analysed differences among types of misconduct – for example a transgression where the organisation has broken the law or a transgression where the behaviours are ethically questionable – the relative impact of brand misconduct on corporate and charitable partners in joint venture, nor the effects that response strategies may play in managing the relationships between consumers and these ‘irresponsible’ organisations. In the following section, we describe the literature on CSR joint initiatives and brand misconduct before introducing the relationship marketing dialogue. We then highlight areas of conceptual overlap between relationship marketing, brand misconduct, and crisis response