Cancer during Adolescence: Negative and Positive Consequences Reported Three and Four Years after Diagnosis

Persons diagnosed with cancer during adolescence have reported negative and positive cancer-related consequences two years after diagnosis. The overall aim was to longitudinally describe negative and positive cancer-related consequences reported by the same persons three and four years after diagnosis. A secondary aim was to explore whether reports of using vs. not using certain coping strategies shortly after diagnosis are related to reporting or not reporting certain consequences four years after diagnosis. Thirty-two participants answered questions about coping strategies shortly after diagnosis and negative and positive consequences three and four years after diagnosis. Answers about consequences were analysed with content analysis, potential relations between coping strategies and consequences were analysed by Fisher's exact test. The great majority reported negative and positive consequences three and four years after diagnosis and the findings indicate stability over time with regard to perceived consequences during the extended phase of survival. Findings reveal a potential relation between seeking information shortly after diagnosis and reporting a more positive view of life four years after diagnosis and not using fighting spirit shortly after diagnosis and not reporting good self-esteem and good relations four years after diagnosis. It is concluded that concomitant negative and positive cancer-related consequences appear stable over time in the extended phase of survival and that dialectical forces of negative and positive as well as distress and growth often go hand-in-hand after a trauma such as cancer during adolescence

A new statistical method for design and analyses of component tolerance

Tolerancing conducted by design engineers to meet customers' needs is a prerequisite for producing highquality products. Engineers use handbooks to conduct tolerancing. While use of statistical methods for tolerancing is not something new, engineers often use known distributions, including the normal distribution. Yet, if the statistical distribution of the given variable is unknown, a new statistical method will be employed to design tolerance. In this paper, we use generalized lambda distribution for design and analyses component tolerance. We use percentile method (PM) to estimate the distribution parameters. The findings indicated that, when the distribution of the component data is unknown, the proposed method can be used to expedite the design of component tolerance. Moreover, in the case of assembled sets, more extensive tolerance for each component with the same target performance can be utilized

Fabrication process optimization of hemp fibre-reinforced polypropylene composites

Natural fibre-reinforced composites have attracted great research and economic interests because of their outstanding 'green' characteristics compared with glass fibre-reinforced composites. It is very important to understand the processing effect on the natural fibre-reinforced composites mechanical properties because of the natural fibre degradation characteristics. Optimizing the fabrication process, especially the compounding process, is effective to achieve the optimal properties of the composites. In this research a natural fibre, noil hemp fibre, was applied to reinforce polypropylene with internal mixing process. The influence of compounding parameters, such as mixing temperature, mixing time and rotor speed, on the mechanical properties (tensile strength, flexural strength and impact strength) of the noil hemp fibre/polypropylene composites was investigated using orthogonal method and the evidence of thermogravimetric analysis test of fibre and the observation of fibre dispersion in resin. The range analysis and variance of analysis demonstrated that the mixing temperature has significant effect on the three mechanical properties, mixing time has minor influence on the tensile and flexural strengths, and rotor speed mainly affects the impact strength. The thermogravimetric analysis test of noil hemp fibre and the fibre dispersion in resin show that a combination of low mixing temperature, short mixing time and high rotor speed of compounding process is helpful to achieve certain fibre dispersion without serious thermal degradation of fibre. Noil hemp fibre/polypropylene composites with the best comprehensive mechanical properties could be obtained at 165 degree C for 12 min with rotor speed 50 r/min