A Study of the Effects of Relative Humidity on Small Particle Adhesion to Surfaces

Ambient dust ranging in size from less than one micron up to 140 microns was used as test particles. Relative humidities of 33% to 100% were used to condition test surfaces after loading with the test particles. A 20 psi nitrogen blowoff was used as the removal mechanism to test for particle adhesion. Particles were counted before and after blowoff to determine retention characteristics. Particle adhesion increased drastically as relative humidity increased above 50%. The greatest adhesion changes occurred within the first hour of conditioning time. Data are presented for total particle adhesion, for particles 10 microns and larger, and 50 microns and larger

An examination of the impacts of volunteering and community contribution at a community festival through the lens of the Five Ways to Wellbeing

The aim of this study was to examine the perceptions, motivations and wellbeing impacts for volunteers and contributors to Broadstairs Folk Week. The study utilised questionnaires with a mix of quantitative and qualitative measures, within a single cohort (n = 152). Analysis was conducted using IBM SPSS 24 to produce descriptive statistics, and cross-tabulations were used to interrogate key variables. NVivo 11 software was used to analyse qualitative comments. A thematic analysis (thematic development) approach further identified codes and themes that fitted well with the Five Ways to Wellbeing (Aked, J., Marks, N., Cordon, C. and Thompson, S. (2008). Five ways to wellbeing: a report presented to the Foresight Project on communicating the evidence base for improving people's well-being, New Economics Foundation. Retrieved from https://b.3cdn.net/nefoundation/8984c5089d5c2285ee_t4m6bhqq5.pdf). Findings demonstrate that older-adult festival volunteers had a higher sense of subjective wellbeing prior to the festival than might ordinarily be expected in a similar group. Participants reported their sense of wellbeing increased during the festival. The Five Ways to Wellbeing model is suggested as a useful way to frame the results, linking a sense of 'connection' and 'giving' as participant motivators. This paper argues that festival volunteers derive personal benefits, including sense of connection and reciprocity, and access to resources with potential health and wellbeing benefits. This may be beneficial to the public health agenda of community development, reducing isolation and supporting healthy ageing. The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42413-021-00154-2. [Abstract copyright: © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.

Shake-Modified Resonant Autoionization In Magnesium

Anomalous features in the resonantly excited 2p autoionization spectrum of Mg are attributed to overlapping shake transitions of the excited bound (spectator) electron. Universal features of the shake spectrum are displayed and related to the post-collision interaction

Integrated engineering environments for large complex products

An introduction is given to the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, along with a brief explanation of the main focus towards large made-to-order products. Three key areas of research at the Centre, which have evolved as a result of collaboration with industrial partners from various sectors of industry, are identified as (1) decision support and optimisation, (2) design for lifecycle, and (3) design integration and co-ordination. A summary of the unique features of large made-to-order products is then presented, which includes the need for integration and co-ordination technologies. Thus, an overview of the existing integration and co-ordination technologies is presented followed by a brief explanation of research in these areas at the Engineering Design Centre. A more detailed description is then presented regarding the co-ordination aspect of research being conducted at the Engineering Design Centre, in collaboration with the CAD Centre at the University of Strathclyde. Concurrent Engineering is acknowledged as a strategy for improving the design process, however design coordination is viewed as a principal requirement for its successful implementation. That is, design co-ordination is proposed as being the key to a mechanism that is able to maximise and realise any potential opportunity of concurrency. Thus, an agentoriented approach to co-ordination is presented, which incorporates various types of agents responsible for managing their respective activities. The co-ordinated approach, which is implemented within the Design Co-ordination System, includes features such as resource management and monitoring, dynamic scheduling, activity direction, task enactment, and information management. An application of the Design Co-ordination System, in conjunction with a robust concept exploration tool, shows that the computational design analysis involved in evaluating many design concepts can be performed more efficiently through a co-ordinated approach

Methodology for the comparative assessment of the Satellite Power System (SPS) and alternative technologies

The energy systems concerned are the satellite power system, several coal technologies, geothermal energy, fission, fusion, terrestrial solar systems, and ocean thermal energy conversion. Guidelines are suggested for the characterization of these systems, side-by-side analysis, alternative futures analysis, and integration and aggregation of data. A description of the methods for assessing the technical, economic, environmental, societal, and institutional issues surrounding the development of the selected energy technologies is presented

Introduction to the themed issue - Corporate power : agency, communication, influence and social policy

This paper introduces this themed issue of Critical Social Policy on the question of corporate power. Corporate power is recognized as an important agent in social policy making and delivery. However, to date there has been comparatively little attention to the crucial role that lobbying and corporate 'spin' play in helping to shape policy making contexts. This special issue of Critical Social Policy is concerned to bring such issues to the mainstream of social policy analysis. It is argued here that the rise of spin and public relations is a key feature of neoliberalism in the past two decades. These have worked to reshape policy making, resulting in pronounced changes in the content and process of policy making and it is argued that these have tended to marginalize or undermine democratic processes

Education in Time: Cohort Differences in Educational Attainment in African-American Twins

OBJECTIVES:Educational opportunities for African-Americans expanded throughout the 20(th) century. Twin pairs are an informative population in which to examine changes in educational attainment because each twin has the same parents and childhood socioeconomic status. We hypothesized that correlation in educational attainment of older twin pairs would be higher compared to younger twin pairs reflecting changes in educational access over time and potentially reflecting a "ceiling effect" associated with Jim Crow laws and discrimination. METHODOLOGY AND PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:We used data from 211 same-sex twin pairs (98 identical, 113 fraternal) in the Carolina African-American Twin Study of Aging who were identified through birth records. Participants completed an in-person interview. The twins were predominantly female (61%), with a mean age of 50 years (SD = 0.5). We found that older age groups had a stronger intra-twin correlation of attained educational level. Further analysis across strata revealed a trend across zygosity, with identical twins demonstrating more similar educational attainment levels than did their fraternal twin counterparts, suggesting a genetic influence. DISCUSSION:These findings suggest that as educational opportunities broadened in the 20th century, African-Americans gained access to educational opportunities that better matched their individual abilities

Monitoring herpetofauna in a managed forest landscape: effects of habitat types and census techniques

We surveyed the herpetofaunal (amphibian and reptile) communities inhabiting five types of habitat on a managed landscape. We conducted monthly surveys during 1997 in four replicate plots of each habitat type using several different methods of collection. Communities of the two wetland habitats (bottomland wetlands and isolated upland wetlands) were clearly dissimilar from the three terrestrial communities (recent clearcut, pine plantation, and mixed pine–hardwood forest). Among the three terrestrial habitats, the total herpetofaunal communities were dissimilar (P\u3c0.10), although neither faunal constituent group alone (amphibians and squamate reptiles) varied significantly with regard to habitat. Three survey techniques used in the terrestrial habitats were not equally effective in that they resulted in the collection of different subsets of the total herpetofauna. The drift fence technique revealed the presence of more species and individuals in every habitat and was the only one to detect species dissimilarity among habitats. Nonetheless, coverboards contributed to measures of abundance and revealed species not detected by other techniques. We suggest that a combination of census techniques be used when surveying and monitoring herpetofaunal communities in order to maximize the detection of species

Affective symptoms and risk of progression to mild cognitive impairment or dementia in subjective cognitive decline: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Aims: To systematically review the literature on outcomes for individuals with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) with concurrent affective symptoms. To conduct a meta-analysis to establish whether either higher depressive symptoms or higher levels of anxiety increased the risk of progression SCD to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or dementia. / Methods: Five databases were searched from inception to February 2021 for longitudinal studies of older adults with SCD, reporting depressive and anxiety symptoms at baseline and risk of MCI or dementia at follow-up. Data were extracted and pooled using a random-effects meta-analysis. / Results: Twelve studies were identified. Pooled effect sizes indicated higher depressive symptoms did not increase risk of clinical progression to either MCI (RR = 0.98; 95% CI: 0.75 – 1.26) or dementia (RR = 0.69; 95% CI: 0.27 – 1.79). However, presence of anxiety or SCD-related worry did significantly increase risk of progression from subjective to objective cognitive impairment by 40% (RR = 1.40; 95% CI:1.20 – 1.63). / Conclusions: Affective symptoms in the form of anxiety, but not depressive symptoms, increase the risk of progression to objective cognitive impairment in individuals with SCD. Further research should focus on establishing whether psychological interventions aimed at reducing anxiety and worry also reduce the risk of clinical progression

Simulating chemistry efficiently on fault-tolerant quantum computers

Quantum computers can in principle simulate quantum physics exponentially faster than their classical counterparts, but some technical hurdles remain. Here we consider methods to make proposed chemical simulation algorithms computationally fast on fault-tolerant quantum computers in the circuit model. Fault tolerance constrains the choice of available gates, so that arbitrary gates required for a simulation algorithm must be constructed from sequences of fundamental operations. We examine techniques for constructing arbitrary gates which perform substantially faster than circuits based on the conventional Solovay-Kitaev algorithm [C.M. Dawson and M.A. Nielsen, \emph{Quantum Inf. Comput.}, \textbf{6}:81, 2006]. For a given approximation error $\epsilon$, arbitrary single-qubit gates can be produced fault-tolerantly and using a limited set of gates in time which is $O(\log \epsilon)$ or $O(\log \log \epsilon)$; with sufficient parallel preparation of ancillas, constant average depth is possible using a method we call programmable ancilla rotations. Moreover, we construct and analyze efficient implementations of first- and second-quantized simulation algorithms using the fault-tolerant arbitrary gates and other techniques, such as implementing various subroutines in constant time. A specific example we analyze is the ground-state energy calculation for Lithium hydride.Comment: 33 pages, 18 figure