Education and the World's Most Rapid Fertility Decline in Iran

A first analysis of the Iran 2006 census results shows a sensationally low fertility level of 1.9 for the whole country and only 1.5 for the Tehran area (which has about 8 million people). The lowest total fertility rate of 1.3 was recorded for Gilan and Mazandaran provinces. In a recent study, Abbasi-Shavazi and McDonald (2006) emphasized the likely role of greatly improved female education in this trend. However, this hypothesis has not been thoroughly tested and they have not yet provided any formal analysis on this important factor. In the conclusions they express the expectation that fertility in Iran would continue to fall well below replacement level. This paper follows up on the Abbasi-Shavazi and McDonald (2006) paper in two important ways: 1) It presents fertility estimates based on the 2006 census which indicate a substantial further fertility decline; and 2) it presents reconstructions (back to 1970) and projections (to 2030) of the population of Iran by age, sex and level of educational attainment. It decomposes quantitatively to what extent this precipitous fertility decline can be attributed to the rapidly increasing educational attainment of women, and draws more general conclusions for theories of fertility decline

Survival of the d-wave superconducting state near the edge of antiferromagnetism in the cuprate phase diagram

In the cuprate superconductor $YBa_2Cu_3O_{6+x}$, hole doping in the $CuO_2$ layers is controlled by both oxygen content and the degree of oxygen-ordering. At the composition $\rm YBa_2Cu_3O_{6.35}$, the ordering can occur at room temperature, thereby tuning the hole doping so that the superconducting critical temperature gradually rises from zero to 20 K. Here we exploit this to study the c-axis penetration depth as a function of temperature and doping. The temperature dependence shows the d-wave superconductor surviving to very low doping, with no sign of another ordered phase interfering with the nodal quasiparticles. The only apparent doping dependence is a smooth decline of superfluid density as Tc decreases.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

The health care utilisation and out-of-pocket expenditure associated with Australian stroke survivors aged 55 and over.

OBJECTIVE: Stroke is a major cause of mortality and disability worldwide. People with stroke have a number of options available to treat post-stroke related symptoms and challenges. The aim of this study was to assess the use of healthcare services, self-care practices and out-of-pocket expenses associated with post-stroke healthcare. METHODS: We retrospectively analysed data collected between April and October 2017 from a survey of 576 participants aged 55 to 96 from the 45 and Up Study, NSW (Australia), who had earlier reported a clinical diagnosis of stroke. Participants were asked about their use of health care services, including conventional medicine practitioners and medications, complementary medicine practitioners, practices and products and the respective associated out-of-pocket expenditure for each. RESULTS: Amongst the total of 576 individuals who participated in the study, 39% consulted a doctor, 18% consulted an allied health practitioner, and 8% consulted a complementary medicine practitioner in the previous year for their stroke. Participants' average combined out-of-pocket expenditure for post-stroke related healthcare was AU$386.4 per annum. Extrapolated to all Australians with stroke, aged 55 years and over, the total out-of-pocket expenditure for post-stroke related healthcare is estimated to be AU$42 million per annum. CONCLUSIONS: Post-stroke individuals used a wide range of health services and various self-care practices for stroke rehabilitation. Such healthcare utilisation is associated with significant annual out-of-pocket expenditure. Given the socioeconomic burden of stroke, further research is required to identify the barriers and facilitators of self-care among patients with stroke and explore the cost-effectiveness of the wide range of treatments(s) utilised for post-stroke care

Laser phase modulation approaches towards ensemble quantum computing

Selective control of decoherence is demonstrated for a multilevel system by generalizing the instantaneous phase of any chirped pulse as individual terms of a Taylor series expansion. In the case of a simple two-level system, all odd terms in the series lead to population inversion while the even terms lead to self-induced transparency. These results also hold for multiphoton transitions that do not have any lower-order photon resonance or any intermediate virtual state dynamics within the laser pulse-width. Such results form the basis of a robustly implementable CNOT gate.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, PRL (accepted

Laboratory study on inclined desalination discharges in perpendicular cross-flow

To mitigate the ecological impact of dense effluents discharged from diffusers, understanding the influence of ambient currents and discharge characteristics on desalination outfall performance is crucial. For this purpose, a series of laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) experimental tests were conducted to address the combined effects of the flowing current strength and nozzle inclination in the discharge region for dense jets issuing into a plane perpendicular to the cross-flows. Various nozzle discharge angles (30°, 45°, and 60°) and cross-flow Froude numbers (urF=[Formula presented]) are studied to assess 3D jet trajectory and concentration distribution. Empirical equations describing the dilution and geometrical characteristics of the jets are also derived. The findings indicate that deploying the 60° jet can achieve dilutions of over 50 % and 20 % compared to the 30° and 45° jets, respectively, due to its longer trajectory and greater expansion. Thus, the previously reported insensitivity of dilution to the nozzle angles in the range of 40°-70° for stationary ambient water is questioned herein when dealing with flowing currents. Moreover, the 60° jet is more sensitive to the changes in urF compared to the two other shallower angles. The presented outcomes provide valuable insights for safeguarding coastal water bodies through the efficient design of inclined dense outfall discharges

Quasiparticle-quasiparticle Scattering in High Tc Superconductors

The quasiparticle lifetime and the related transport relaxation times are the fundamental quantities which must be known in order to obtain a description of the transport properties of the high T_c superconductors. Studies of these quantities have been undertaken previously for the d-wave, high T_c superconductors for the case of temperature-independent elastic impurity scattering. However, much less is known about the temperature-dependent inelastic scattering. Here we give a detailed description of the characteristics of the temperature-dependent quasiparticle-quasiparticle scattering in d-wave superconductors, and find that this process gives a natural explanation of the rapid variation with temperature of the electrical transport relaxation rate.Comment: 4 page

Sequencing and Welding of Molecular Single-Crystal Optical Waveguides

Molecular crystals are promising anisotropic optical transducing media for next-generation optoelectronic microdevices that will be capable of secure transduction of information and impervious to external electromagnetic interference. However, their full potential has not been explored yet due to their poor processability, low mechanical compliance, pronounced brittleness and high proneness to cracking that often result in irrecoverable damage. These issues are detrimental to their ability to transduce light. Here, a novel strategy is presented based on 3D epitaxial crystal growth of organic/inorganic crystals based on charge-assisted hydrogen bonds that can be used to efficiently weld broken molecular single-crystalline optical waveguides and restore their light-transducing capability. This approach can also be applied to prepare asymmetric multidomain crystalline heterostructures starting from isostructural molecular tectons, resulting in novel opto/electro/mechanical functionalities in the hybrid materials. It also removes an important obstacle toward wider application of molecular crystals in the next-generation optoelectronics

Fermi-Liquid Interactions in d-Wave Superconductor

This article develops a quantitative quasiparticle model of the low-temperature properties of d-wave superconductors which incorporates both Fermi-liquid effects and band-structure effects. The Fermi-liquid interaction effects are found to be classifiable into strong and negligible renormalizaton effects, for symmetric and antisymmetric combinations of the energies of $k\uparrow$ and $-k\downarrow$ quasiparticles, respectively. A particularly important conclusion is that the leading clean-limit temperature-dependent correction to the superfluid density is not renormalized by Fermi-liquid interactions, but is subject to a Fermi velocity (or mass) renormalization effect. This leads to difficulties in accounting for the penetration depth measurements with physically acceptable parameters, and hence reopens the question of the quantitative validity of the quasiparticle picture.Comment: 4 page

Antiferromagnetism from phase disordering of a d-wave superconductor

The unbinding of vortex defects in the superconducting condensate with d-wave symmetry at T=0 is shown to lead to the insulator with incommensurate spin-density-wave order. The transition is similar to the spontaneous generation of the "chiral" mass in the three dimensional quantum electrodynamics, at which the global chiral symmetry one can define in the superconducting state is spontaneously broken. Other symmetry related states and possible relations to recent experiments on uderdoped cuprates are briefly discussed.Comment: RevTex, 4 pages, one ps figure; comments on confinement in the SDW added, references updated; final versio