A study of project management knowledge and sustainable outcomes in Thailand’s reproductive health projects

In Thailand, numerous reproductive health projects funded by both national and international agencies have been established in an attempt to mitigate reproductive health problems. Solving problems on reproductive health projects that only have temporary funding requires effective project management that hopefully leads to better long-term desired outcomes. This paper identifies the association between collaborative reproductive health (CRH) project management and sustainable outcomes. The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) is employed to benchmark project management practices on four CRH projects in Thailand. The research methodology presented in this paper comprises of content analysis and questionnaire survey. It is evident that limited use of certain project management knowledge areas (PMKAs) affects CRH project implementation and success. The association between the use of PMKAs and sustainable outcomes on these projects is also presented. Scope, integration and quality management were found to be the most influential PMKAs for sustainable outcomes on CRH projects. Nevertheless, the projects showed a shortage of project management processes for PMKAs that were required to attain the outcomes.Jantanee Dumrak, Bassam Baroudi, Stephen Pulle

Searching for Faint Comoving Companions to the α Centauri system in the VVV Survey Infrared Images

This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. © 2017 Crown Copyright. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.The VVV survey has observed the southern disk of the Milky Way in the near infrared, covering 240 deg$^{2}$ in the $ZYJHK_S$ filters. We search the VVV Survey images in a $\sim$19 deg$^{2}$ field around $\alpha$ Centauri, the nearest stellar system to the Sun, to look for possible overlooked companions that the baseline in time of VVV would be able to uncover. The photometric depth of our search reaches $Y\sim$19.3 mag, $J\sim$19 mag, and $K_S\sim$17 mag. This search has yielded no new companions in $\alpha$ Centauri system, setting an upper mass limit for any unseen companion well into the brown dwarf/planetary mass regime. The apparent magnitude limits were turned into effective temperature limits, and the presence of companion objects with effective temperatures warmer than 325K can be ruled out using different state-of-the-art atmospheric models. These limits were transformed into mass limits using evolutionary models, companions with masses above 11 M$_{Jup}$ were discarded, extending the constraints recently provided in the literature up to projected distances of dPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Gibbs attractor: a chaotic nearly Hamiltonian system, driven by external harmonic force

A chaotic autonomous Hamiltonian systems, perturbed by small damping and small external force, harmonically dependent on time, can acquire a strange attractor with properties similar to that of the canonical distribution - the Gibbs attractor. The evolution of the energy in such systems can be described as the energy diffusion. For the nonlinear Pullen - Edmonds oscillator with two degrees of freedom the properties of the Gibbs attractor and their dependence on parameters of the perturbation are studied both analytically and numerically.Comment: 8 pages RevTeX, 3 figure

Non-Abelian Excitations of the Quark-Gluon Plasma

We present new, non-abelian, solutions to the equations of motion which describe the collective excitations of a quark-gluon plasma at high temperature. These solutions correspond to spatially uniform color oscillations.Comment: 8 pages LaTex, 1 figure (not included; available upon request), Saclay preprint T94/0

Prediction of Gravel Beach Storm Profiles Under Bimodal Sea-States

Presently our understanding of gravel beach response under wave attack is limited and approaches to predict gravel beach response rely on formulae and models based on a few physical modelling studies. Field and laboratory studies (Hawkes, Coates, and Jones (1998)) indicate the importance of complex wave spectra (combining swell and wind sea) in the design of gravel beach recharge schemes. The objective of the study was to develop a data-set and a new parametric model, Shingle-B, to analyse the generic profile response of shingle beaches under bimodal wave conditions in order to increase confidence in beach cross section design. A mobile bed flume study was therefore carried out at HR Wallingford. This paper describes both the design and the results of the 2D physical model study

The globular cluster system of the nearest Seyfert II galaxy Circinus

Context. The globular cluster (GC) system of Circinus galaxy has not been probed previously partly because of the location of the galaxy at - 3.8$^\circ$ Galactic latitude which suffers severely from interstellar extinction, stellar crowding, and Galactic foreground contamination. However, the deep near-infrared (NIR) photometry by the VISTA Variables in the Via L\'actea Extended Survey (VVVX) in combination with the precise astrometry of Gaia EDR3 allow us to map GCs in this region. Aims. Our long-term goal is to study and characterise the distributions of GCs and Ultra-compact dwarfs of Circinus galaxy which is the nearest Seyfert II galaxy. Here we conduct the first pilot search for GCs in this galaxy. Methods. We use NIR VVVX photometry in combination with Gaia EDR3 astrometric features such as astrometric excess noise and BP/RP excess factor to build the first homogeneous catalogue of GCs in Circinus galaxy. A robust combination of selection criteria allows us to effectively clean interlopers from our sample. Results. We report the detection of$\sim$ 70 GC candidates in this galaxy at a 3 $\sigma$ confidence level. They show a bimodal colour distribution with the blue peak at (G-Ks)$_0$ = 0.985$\pm$0.127 mag with a dispersion of 0.211$\pm$0.091 mag and the red peak at (G-Ks)$_0$ = 1.625$\pm$0.177 mag with a dispersion of 0.482$\pm$0.114 mag. A GC specific frequency (S$_N$) of 1.3$\pm$0.2 was derived for the galaxy, and we estimated a total population of 120$\pm$40 GCs. Based on the projected radial distribution it appears that Circinus has a different distribution of GC candidates than MW and M31. Conclusions. We demonstrate that Circinus galaxy hosts a sizeable number of cluster candidates. This result is the first leap towards understanding the evolution of old stellar clusters in this galaxy.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figure

Experimental ionization of atomic hydrogen with few-cycle pulses

We present the first experimental data on strong-field ionization of atomic hydrogen by few-cycle laser pulses. We obtain quantitative agreement at the 10% level between the data and an {\it ab initio} simulation over a wide range of laser intensities and electron energies

Gravel beach profile response allowing for bimodal sea-states

The south coast of the UK is identified as a location where significant wave swell components are present within the regional wave climate. During the winters of 2006 and 2014, several sites along the south coast of the UK were subject to significant damages where flood events were recorded. These sea–states were characterised by having a double–peaked wave spectra, observing a connection between wave spectrum shape and beach response. A 2D physical model study was carried out to investigate the effect of gravel beach profile response under wave spectra characterised by swell and wind wave periods in various combinations. The physical model results have shown the effect of bimodal wave spectrum on the beach crest erosion and have been compared with the parametric model of SHINGLE and the numerical model XBeach-G. Based on this 2D physical model study a new parametric model, Shingle–B, has been derived and an online tool has been developed and made available on the website for the National Network of Regional Coastal Monitoring Programmes of England. This new tool has been validated with two sites in the South of England where field data of both waves and profiles was available

Influence of orbital symmetry on diffraction imaging with rescattering electron wave packets

Citation: Pullen, M. G., Wolter, B., Le, A. T., Baudisch, M., Sclafani, M., Pires, H., . . . Biegert, J. (2016). Influence of orbital symmetry on diffraction imaging with rescattering electron wave packets. Nature Communications, 7, 6. doi:10.1038/ncomms11922The ability to directly follow and time-resolve the rearrangement of the nuclei within molecules is a frontier of science that requires atomic spatial and few-femtosecond temporal resolutions. While laser-induced electron diffraction can meet these requirements, it was recently concluded that molecules with particular orbital symmetries (such as pi(g)) cannot be imaged using purely backscattering electron wave packets without molecular alignment. Here, we demonstrate, in direct contradiction to these findings, that the orientation and shape of molecular orbitals presents no impediment for retrieving molecular structure with adequate sampling of the momentum transfer space. We overcome previous issues by showcasing retrieval of the structure of randomly oriented O-2 and C2H2 molecules, with pi(g) and pi(u) symmetries, respectively, and where their ionization probabilities do not maximize along their molecular axes. While this removes a serious bottleneck for laser-induced diffraction imaging, we find unexpectedly strong backscattering contributions from low-Z atoms

Effect of pitchfork bifurcations on the spectral statistics of Hamiltonian systems

We present a quantitative semiclassical treatment of the effects of bifurcations on the spectral rigidity and the spectral form factor of a Hamiltonian quantum system defined by two coupled quartic oscillators, which on the classical level exhibits mixed phase space dynamics. We show that the signature of a pitchfork bifurcation is two-fold: Beside the known effect of an enhanced periodic orbit contribution due to its peculiar $\hbar$-dependence at the bifurcation, we demonstrate that the orbit pair born {\em at} the bifurcation gives rise to distinct deviations from universality slightly {\em above} the bifurcation. This requires a semiclassical treatment beyond the so-called diagonal approximation. Our semiclassical predictions for both the coarse-grained density of states and the spectral rigidity, are in excellent agreement with corresponding quantum-mechanical results.Comment: LaTex, 25 pp., 14 Figures (26 *.eps files); final version 3, to be published in Journal of Physics