Assessment of the Mankato Area\u27s young Adult Population\u27s Knowledge of Mall Video Mining for Marketing Research

The most modern form of gathering marketing information is not as new as many people believe. The trepidation of Big Brother’s cameras watching down on us puts a chill down most peoples’ backs. In numerous mall stores, cameras are located in each store and are examining you. Most believe that the cameras are positioned for the purpose of shoplifting and crime, but the truth is many are also used for the purpose of marketing. Video mining as it is known has emerged as the latest method of conducting market research. The stores that are participating in this study are diligently watching an assortment of things. Marketing analysts watch what a customer has picked up, what they have looked at, the amount purchased, colors that attract them, their facial expressions, and many other forms of movement. This information is gathered and recorded, then shot across the nation via computer to a company such as Shopper Trak that views and analyzes clips of customers shopping. Shopper Trak presently has 40,000 cameras in various stores across the nation. Most customers have little knowledge of this marketing tactic or that there are no laws prohibiting this action. Do stores and business’s have an ethical duty to reveal their practices to their customers? Is it legal for them to use the personal information or preferences of their customers to exploit them without their knowledge or consent? Finally, where is the line drawn on what is considered personal, private information

Relationship of Patient Self-Administered COPD Assessment Test to Physician Standard Assessment of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in a Family Medicine Residency Training Program

Assessing the global impact of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) on a patient’s life can be difficult to perform in the clinical setting due to time constraints and workflow challenges. The primary objective of this study was to compare disease impact ratings between patient selfadministered COPD Assessment Test (CAT) and physician standard office assessment. This prospective study was conducted at a family medicine residency clinic in northeast Tennessee. The study included two study groups: 1) adult patients seen at the clinic during the 3-month study period with an active diagnosis of COPD, and 2) their physicians. Physicians’ assessment of the impact of COPD on their patients’ daily lives was compared to patients’ self-administered CAT assessments. Physician assessment of COPD impact and patient ssessment of CAT categories significantly differed (χ2 =11.0, P=0.012). There was very poor agreement between patient and physician ratings (κ=0.003), with 42.9% of physician ratings underestimating the impact, 28.6% overestimating the impact, and 28.6% orrectly estimating the impact COPD had on their patients’ lives. These findings support the use of validated assessment tools to help providers understand the symptom burden for patients with COPD

Investment in sensory structures, testis size, and wing coloration in males of a diurnal moth species: trade-offs or correlated growth?

For dioecious animals, reproductive success typically involves an exchange between the sexes of signals that provide information about mate location and quality. Typically, the elaborate, secondary sexual ornaments of males signal their quality, while females may signal their location and receptivity. In theory, the receptor structures that receive the latter signals may also become elaborate or enlarged in a way that ultimately functions to enhance mating success through improved mate location. The large, elaborate antennae of many male moths are one such sensory structure, and eye size may also be important in diurnal moths. Investment in these traits may be costly, resulting in trade-offs among different traits associated with mate location. For polyandrous species, such trade-offs may also include traits associated with paternity success, such as larger testes. Conversely, we would not expect this to be the case for monandrous species, where sperm competition is unlikely. We investigated these ideas by evaluating the relationship between investment in sensory structures (antennae, eye), testis, and a putative warning signal (orange hindwing patch) in field-caught males of the monandrous diurnal painted apple moth Teia anartoides (Lepidoptera: Lymantriidae) in southeastern Australia. As predicted for a monandrous species, we found no evidence that male moths with larger sensory structures had reduced investment in testis size. However, contrary to expectation, investment in sensory structures was correlated: males with relatively larger antennae also had relatively larger eyes. Intriguingly, also, the size of male orange hindwing patches was positively correlated with testis size

High power Nb-doped Lifelong₄ Li-ion battery cathodes; pilot-scale synthesis and electrochemical properties

High power, phase-pure Nb-doped LiFePO₄ (LFP) nanoparticles are synthesised using a pilot-scale continuous hydrothermal flow synthesis process (production rate of 6 kg per day) in the range 0.01–2.00 at% Nb with respect to total transition metal content. EDS analysis suggests that Nb is homogeneously distributed throughout the structure. The addition of fructose as a reagent in the hydrothermal flow process, followed by a post synthesis heat-treatment, affords a continuous graphitic carbon coating on the particle surfaces. Electrochemical testing reveals that cycling performance improves with increasing dopant concentration, up to a maximum of 1.0 at% Nb, for which point a specific capacity of 110 mAh g⁻¹ is obtained at 10 C (6 min for the charge or discharge). This is an excellent result for a high power cathode LFP based material, particularly when considering the synthesis was performed on a large pilot-scale apparatus

Conditional quantum operation of two exchange-coupled single-donor spin qubits in a MOS-compatible silicon device

Silicon nanoelectronic devices can host single-qubit quantum logic operations with fidelity better than 99.9%. For the spins of an electron bound to a single donor atom, introduced in the silicon by ion implantation, the quantum information can be stored for nearly 1 second. However, manufacturing a scalable quantum processor with this method is considered challenging, because of the exponential sensitivity of the exchange interaction that mediates the coupling between the qubits. Here we demonstrate the conditional, coherent control of an electron spin qubit in an exchange-coupled pair of $^{31}$P donors implanted in silicon. The coupling strength, $J = 32.06 \pm 0.06$ MHz, is measured spectroscopically with unprecedented precision. Since the coupling is weaker than the electron-nuclear hyperfine coupling $A \approx 90$ MHz which detunes the two electrons, a native two-qubit Controlled-Rotation gate can be obtained via a simple electron spin resonance pulse. This scheme is insensitive to the precise value of $J$, which makes it suitable for the scale-up of donor-based quantum computers in silicon that exploit the Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor fabrication protocols commonly used in the classical electronics industry.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, plus Supplementary Information. v2 contains additional references, and a simpler explanation of two-qubit CROT gates for donors in silico

Childhood characteristics and participation in Scottish Mental Survey 1947 6-Day Sample Follow-ups: Implications for participation in aging studies

Given the ‘graying’ of especially the populations of most western nations, studies of factors contributing to well-being in later life are important and common, and it is important to their accuracy that they be based on samples representative of the populations in the relevant age groups. There is general awareness that several characteristics such as sex, socioeconomic status, cognitive ability and personality are associated with study participation, but many researchers assume that this reflects life circumstances at time of recruitment rather than inherent individual characteristics that shape those circumstances throughout people’s lives. The Scottish Mental Survey 1947 6-Day Sample Follow-Up Study offered an unusual opportunity to test this assumption, as follow-up study participation data were available both in young adulthood and at age 77. Participation at age 77 was dramatically restricted relative to that in young adulthood. Cognitive abilities and a composite of conscientiousness-related variables independent of cognitive ability assessed in childhood predicted participation at young ages, but much more strongly at older ages. Evidence was available that these results were not specific to the recruiting and assessment methods used in this study. This suggests that participation in studies of aging is a function not just of contemporaneous circumstances but also of early-life cognitive and personality characteristics that have shaped those circumstances.

The social cognition of medical knowledge, with special reference to childhood epilepsy

This paper arose out of an engagement in medical communication courses at a Gulf university. It deploys a theoretical framework derived from a (critical) sociocognitive approach to discourse analysis in order to investigate three aspects of medical discourse relating to childhood epilepsy: the cognitive processes that are entailed in relating different types of medical knowledge to their communicative context; the types of medical knowledge that are constituted in the three different text types analysed; and the relationship between these different types of medical knowledge and the discursive features of each text type. The paper argues that there is a cognitive dimension to the human experience of understanding and talking about one specialized from of medical knowledge. It recommends that texts be studied in medical communication courses not just in terms of their discrete formal features but also critically, in terms of the knowledge which they produce, transmit and reproduce