Comparison of Allen Carr's Easyway programme with a specialist behavioural and pharmacological smoking cessation support service: a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: A combination of behavioural and pharmacological support is judged to be the optimal approach for assisting smoking cessation. Allen Carr's Easyway (ACE) is a single-session pharmacotherapy-free programme that has been in operation internationally for 38 years. We compared the effectiveness of ACE with specialist behavioural and pharmacological support delivered to the national standard in England. DESIGN: A two-arm, parallel-group, single-blind, randomized controlled trial. SETTING: London, UK, between February 2017 and May 2018. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 620 participants (310 in ACE and 310 in the combined behavioural and pharmacological support condition) were included in the analysis. Adult (≥ 18 years) smokers wanting to quit were randomized in a 1 : 1 ratio. Mean age for the total sample was 40.8 years, with 53.4% being male. Participant baseline characteristics (ethnicity, educational level, number of previous quit attempts, nicotine dependence) were evenly balanced between treatment groups. INTERVENTION AND COMPARATOR: The intervention was the ACE method of stopping smoking. This centres on a 4.5-6-hour session of group-based support, alongside subsequent text messages and top-up sessions if needed. It aims to make it easy to stop smoking by convincing smokers that smoking provides no benefits for them. The comparator was a specialist stop smoking service (SSS) providing behavioural and pharmacological support in accordance with national standards. MEASUREMENTS: The primary outcome was self-reported continuous abstinence for 26 weeks from the quit/quit re-set date verified by exhaled breath carbon monoxide measurement < 10 parts per million (p.p.m.). Primary analysis was by intention to treat. Secondary outcomes were: use of pharmacotherapy, adverse events and continuous abstinence up to 4 and 12 weeks. FINDINGS: A total of 468 participants attended treatment (255 ACE versus 213 SSS, P < 0.05). Of those who did attend treatment, 100 completed 6-month measures (23.7% ACE versus 20.7% SSS). Continuous abstinence to 26 weeks was 19.4% (60 of 310) in the ACE intervention and 14.8% (46 of 310) in the SSS intervention [risk difference for ACE versus SSS 4.5% (95% confidence interval (CI) = -1.4 to 10.4%, odds ratio (OR) = 1.38)]. The Bayes factor for superiority of the ACE condition was 1.24. CONCLUSION: There was no clear evidence of a difference in the efficacies of the Allen Carr's Easyway (ACE) and specialist smoking cessation support involving behavioural support and pharmacotherapy

Neutrino Dark Energy and Moduli Stabilization in a BPS Braneworld Scenario

A braneworld model for neutrino Dark Energy (DE) is presented. We consider a five dimensional two-branes set up with a bulk scalar field motivated by supergravity. Its low-energy effective theory is derived with a moduli space approximation (MSA). The position of the two branes are parametrized by two scalar degrees of freedom (moduli). After detuning the brane tensions a classical potential for the moduli is generated. This potential is unstable for dS branes and we suggest to consider as a stabilizing contribution the Casimir energy of bulk fields. In particular we add a massive spinor (neutrino) field in the bulk and then evaluate the Casimir contribution of the bulk neutrino with the help of zeta function regularization techniques. We construct an explicit form of the 4D neutrino mass as function of the two moduli. To recover the correct DE scale for the moduli potential the usual cosmological constant fine-tuning is necessary, but, once accepted, this model suggests a stronger connection between DE and neutrino physics.Comment: 26 pages, 1 EPS figur

Cosmological Constraints on Dissipative Models of Inflation

(Abridged) We study dissipative inflation in the regime where the dissipative term takes a specific form, \Gamma=\Gamma(\phi), analyzing two models in the weak and strong dissipative regimes with a SUSY breaking potential. After developing intuition about the predictions from these models through analytic approximations, we compute the predicted cosmological observables through full numerical evolution of the equations of motion, relating the mass scale and scale of dissipation to the characteristic amplitude and shape of the primordial power spectrum. We then use Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques to constrain a subset of the models with cosmological data from the cosmic microwave background (WMAP three-year data) and large scale structure (SDSS Luminous Red Galaxy power spectrum). We find that the posterior distributions of the dissipative parameters are highly non-Gaussian and their allowed ranges agree well with the expectations obtained using analytic approximations. In the weak regime, only the mass scale is tightly constrained; conversely, in the strong regime, only the dissipative coefficient is tightly constrained. A lower limit is seen on the inflation scale: a sub-Planckian inflaton is disfavoured by the data. In both weak and strong regimes, we reconstruct the limits on the primordial power spectrum and show that these models prefer a {\it red} spectrum, with no significant running of the index. We calculate the reheat temperature and show that the gravitino problem can be overcome with large dissipation, which in turn leads to large levels of non-Gaussianity: if dissipative inflation is to evade the gravitino problem, the predicted level of non-Gaussianity might be seen by the Planck satellite.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, Accepted by JCAP without text changes, References adde

Current helicity of active regions as a tracer of large-scale solar magnetic helicity

We demonstrate that the current helicity observed in solar active regions traces the magnetic helicity of the large-scale dynamo generated field. We use an advanced 2D mean-field dynamo model with dynamo saturation based on the evolution of the magnetic helicity and algebraic quenching. For comparison, we also studied a more basic 2D mean-field dynamo model with simple algebraic alpha quenching only. Using these numerical models we obtained butterfly diagrams both for the small-scale current helicity and also for the large-scale magnetic helicity, and compared them with the butterfly diagram for the current helicity in active regions obtained from observations. This comparison shows that the current helicity of active regions, as estimated by $-{\bf A \cdot B}$ evaluated at the depth from which the active region arises, resembles the observational data much better than the small-scale current helicity calculated directly from the helicity evolution equation. Here ${\bf B}$ and ${\bf A}$ are respectively the dynamo generated mean magnetic field and its vector potential. A theoretical interpretation of these results is given.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, revised versio

Testing models of inflation with CMB non-gaussianity

Two different predictions for the primordial curvature fluctuation bispectrum are compared through their effects on the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature fluctuations. The first has a local form described by a single parameter f_{NL}. The second is based on a prediction from the warm inflationary scenario, with a different dependence on wavenumber and a parameter f_{WI}. New expressions are obtained for the angular bispectra of the temperature fluctuations and for the estimators used to determine $f_{NL}$ and f_{WI}. The standard deviation of the estimators in an ideal experiment is roughly 5 times larger for f_{WI} than for f_{NL}. Using 3 year WMAP data gives limits -375<f_{WI}<36.8, but there is a possibility of detecting a signal for f_{WI} from the Planck satellite.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures in ReVTe

Safe Open-Nested Transactions Through Ownership

Researchers in transactional memory (TM) have proposed open nesting asa methodology for increasing the concurrency of a program. The ideais to ignore certain "low-level" memory operations of anopen-nested transaction when detecting conflicts for its parenttransaction, and instead perform abstract concurrency control for the"high-level" operation that nested transaction represents. Tosupport this methodology, TM systems use an open-nested commitmechanism that commits all changes performed by an open-nestedtransaction directly to memory, thereby avoiding low-levelconflicts. Unfortunately, because the TM runtime is unaware of thedifferent levels of memory, an unconstrained use of open-nestedcommits can lead to anomalous program behavior.In this paper, we describe a framework of ownership-awaretransactional memory which incorporates the notion of modules into theTM system and requires that transactions and data be associated withspecific transactional modules or Xmodules. We propose a newownership-aware commit mechanism, a hybrid between anopen-nested and closed-nested commit which commits a piece of datadifferently depending on whether the current Xmodule owns the data ornot. Moreover, we give a set of precise constraints on interactionsand sharing of data among the Xmodules based on familiar notions ofabstraction. We prove that ownership-aware TM has has cleanmemory-level semantics and can guarantee serializability bymodules, which is an adaptation of multilevel serializability fromdatabases to TM. In addition, we describe how a programmer canspecify Xmodules and ownership in a Java-like language. Our typesystem can enforce most of the constraints required by ownership-awareTM statically, and can enforce the remaining constraints dynamically.Finally, we prove that if transactions in the process of aborting obeyrestrictions on their memory footprint, the OAT model is free fromsemantic deadlock

Conception and preliminary evaluation of an optical fibre sensor for simultaneous measurement of pressure and temperature

peer-reviewedThis paper presents a novel concept of simultaneously measuring pressure and temperature using a silica optical fibre extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometric (EFPI) pressure sensor incorporating a fibre Bragg grating (FBG), which is constructed entirely from fusedsilica. The novel device is used to simultaneously provide accurate pressure and temperature readings at the point of measurement. Furthermore, the FBG temperature measurement is used to eliminate the temperature cross-sensitivity of the EFPI pressure sensorPUBLISHEDpeer reviewe

Solar Grand Minima and random fluctuations in dynamo parameters

We consider to what extent the long-term dynamics of cyclic solar activity in the form of Grand Minima can be associated with random fluctuations of the parameters governing the solar dynamo. We consider fluctuations of the alpha-coefficient in the conventional Parker migratory dynamo, and also in slightly more sophisticated dynamo models, and demonstrate that they can mimic the gross features of the phenomenon of the occurrence of Grand Minima over a suitable parameter range. The temporal distribution of these Grand Minima appears chaotic, with a more or less exponential waiting time distribution, typical of Poisson processes. In contrast however, the available reconstruction of Grand Minima statistics based on cosmogenic isotope data demonstrates substantial deviations from this exponential law. We were unable to reproduce the non-Poissonic tail of the waiting time distribution either in the framework of a simple alpha-quenched Parker model, or in its straightforward generalization, nor in simple models with feedback on the differential rotation. We suggest that the disagreement may only be apparent and is plausibly related to the limited observational data, and that the observations and results of numerical modeling can be consistent and represent physically similar dynamo regimes.Comment: Solar Physics, in prin

Gravitating defects of codimension-two

Thin gravitating defects with conical singularities in higher codimensions and with generalized Israel matching conditions are known to be inconsistent for generic energy-momentum. A way to remove this inconsistency is proposed and is realized for an axially symmetric gravitating codimension-two defect in six dimensional Einstein gravity. By varying with respect to the brane embedding fields, alternative matching conditions are derived, which are generalizations of the Nambu-Goto equations of motion of the defect, consistent with bulk gravity. For a maximally symmetric defect the standard picture is recovered. The four-dimensional perfect fluid cosmology coincides with conventional FRW in the case of radiation, but for dust it has rho^{4/3} instead of rho. A four-dimensional black hole solution is presented having the Schwarzschild form with a short-distance correction r^{-2}.Comment: Minor changes, to appear in Classical and Quantum Gravit