Gender differences in working at home and time use patterns: evidence from Australia

Despite a wealth of research on working at home, few studies have examined the effects of working at home in relation to its regularity and fewer still have used time use studies to do so. Using data from the 2006 Australian Time Use Survey this article investigates the association between working at home, gender and time use, in relation to amount of time spent in paid work, unpaid work and recreational labour, as well as multi-tasking, fragmentation of time and scheduling flexibility. It examines time use patterns according to whether employees do no work at home or whether they work at home rarely, occasionally or regularly. Results show there is an association between working at home and time in paid and unpaid work and that this differs by the regularity of working at home and gender. Working at home does not create more time for recreational labour, although it may help women juggle work and family. © 2015, © The Author(s) 2015

The Feasibility of a Telehealth Exercise Program Aimed at Increasing Cardiorespiratory Fitness for People After Stroke

Background: Accessing suitable fitness programs post-stroke is difficult for many. The feasibility of telehealth delivery has not been previously reported.Objectives: To assess the feasibility of, and level of satisfaction with home-based telehealth-supervised aerobic exercise training post-stroke.Methods: Twenty-one ambulant participants (?3 months post-stroke) participated in a home-based telehealth-supervised aerobic exercise program (3 d/week, moderate-vigorous intensity, 8-weeks) and provided feedback via questionnaire postintervention. Session details, technical issues, and adverse events were also recorded.Results: Feasibility was high (83% of volunteers met telehealth eligibility criteria, 85% of sessions were conducted by telehealth, and 95% of participants rated usability favourably). Ninety-five percent enjoyed telehealth exercise sessions and would recommend them to others. The preferred telehealth exercise program parameters were: frequency 3 d/week, duration 20-30 min/session, program length 6-12 weeks.Conclusion: The telehealth delivery of exercise sessions to people after stroke appear

Deforming glassy polystyrene: Influence of pressure, thermal history, and deformation mode on yielding and hardening

The toughness of a polymer glass is determined by the interplay of yielding, strain softening, and strain hardening. Molecular-dynamics simulations of a typical polymer glass, atactic polystyrene, under the influence of active deformation have been carried out to enlighten these processes. It is observed that the dominant interaction for the yield peak is of interchain nature and for the strain hardening of intrachain nature. A connection is made with the microscopic cage-to-cage motion. It is found that the deformation does not lead to complete erasure of the thermal history but that differences persist at large length scales. Also we find that the strain-hardening modulus increases with increasing external pressure. This new observation cannot be explained by current theories such as the one based on the entanglement picture and the inclusion of this effect will lead to an improvement in constitutive modeling

Healthy Body Healthy Mind: Trialling an exercise intervention for reducing depression in youth with major depressive disorder

Introduction: Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) has high prevalence among adolescents and young adults but evidence of any effective treatments is limited. Exercise as an effective treatment for adults has some support but studies in younger populations are lacking. MDD is associated with inflammation and exercise may contribute to reductions in inflammatory marker levels. Therefore the aim of this study was to investigate the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of brief motivational interviewing (MI) plus 12-weeks exercise training as a treatment for MDD in youth. Methods: Youth (15-25 years) with MDD were recruited to participate in a prospective trial investigating exercise as treatment for MDD. Twenty-six participants were screened (telephone then clinical psychology diagnosis) and 13 (9 females) were eligible (MDD from SCID, no psychotic illness, not pregnant, no physical barriers to exercise, not suicidal, no major eating disorder) to participate. Participants completed assessments at baseline and after 12 weeks training, which included questionnaires: the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II); blood samples for analysis of inflammatory biomarkers; and fitness measures: VO2max, YMCA bench press test, and a seated horizontal leg press endurance test. Prior to commencing the training program, participants engaged in a motivational interview with a psychologist to enhance engagement with the program. IL-6 was measured by ELISA. The exercise program consisted of small group trainer-led supervised exercise (resistance and endurance) training 3 times a week (1h per session) for 12 weeks, and encouragement to do at least 30min of physical activity on other days. Paired t-tests were used to determine changes from baseline and correlations used to explore relationships between changes in depression scores, training attendance and fitness levels. Results: 12 participants (mean±SD, aged 20.7±1.7 y) completed 12-week assessments; one withdrew due to family issues. Attendance at training averaged 66±25% of sessions; 3 participants completed less than 40% of training sessions. At baseline all participants met the criteria for MDD; at 12 weeks only 2 still met the criteria; depression severity (BDI-II) decreased (p\u3c0.001) from 32±9 to12±10. Aerobic fitness levels did not change with training. YMCA bench press repetitions increased (p\u3c0.001) from 20±11 to 27±11. IL-6 decreased (p\u3c0.05) from 1.39±0.78 to 0.73±0.80 pg.mL-1. Changes in depression symptom scores were significantly correlated (p\u3c0.05) with attendance (r=0.32), improvements in bench press endurance (r=0.65) and changes in IL-6 (r=0.34). Changes in IL-6 were also correlated with attendance (r=0.60) Conclusion: Exercise training is a feasible and potentially effective intervention for MDD in youth and reductions in depression severity are associated with reductions in IL-6

Plastic Deformation of 2D Crumpled Wires

When a single long piece of elastic wire is injected trough channels into a confining two-dimensional cavity, a complex structure of hierarchical loops is formed. In the limit of maximum packing density, these structures are described by several scaling laws. In this paper it is investigated this packing process but using plastic wires which give origin to completely irreversible structures of different morphology. In particular, it is studied experimentally the plastic deformation from circular to oblate configurations of crumpled wires, obtained by the application of an axial strain. Among other things, it is shown that in spite of plasticity, irreversibility, and very large deformations, scaling is still observed.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure

Relationship between body composition, inflammation and lung function in overweight and obese asthma

Background: The obese-asthma phenotype is not well defined. The aim of this study was to examine both mechanical and inflammatory influences, by comparing lung function with body composition and airway inflammation in overweight and obese asthma. Methods: Overweight and obese (BMI 28-40 kg/m2) adults with asthma (n = 44) completed lung function assessment and underwent full-body dual energy x-ray absorptiometry. Venous blood samples and induced sputum were analysed for inflammatory markers. Results: In females, android and thoracic fat tissue and total body lean tissue were inversely correlated with expiratory reserve volume (ERV). Conversely in males, fat tissue was not correlated with lung function, however there was a positive association between android and thoracic lean tissue and ERV. Lower body (gynoid and leg) lean tissue was positively associated with sputum %neutrophils in females, while leptin was positively associated with android and thoracic fat tissue in males. Conclusions: This study suggests that both body composition and inflammation independently affect lung function, with distinct differences between males and females. Lean tissue exacerbates the obese-asthma phenotype in females and the mechanism responsible for this finding warrants further investigation

Optimal Packings of Superballs

Dense hard-particle packings are intimately related to the structure of low-temperature phases of matter and are useful models of heterogeneous materials and granular media. Most studies of the densest packings in three dimensions have considered spherical shapes, and it is only more recently that nonspherical shapes (e.g., ellipsoids) have been investigated. Superballs (whose shapes are defined by |x1|^2p + |x2|^2p + |x3|^2p <= 1) provide a versatile family of convex particles (p >= 0.5) with both cubic- and octahedral-like shapes as well as concave particles (0 < p < 0.5) with octahedral-like shapes. In this paper, we provide analytical constructions for the densest known superball packings for all convex and concave cases. The candidate maximally dense packings are certain families of Bravais lattice packings. The maximal packing density as a function of p is nonanalytic at the sphere-point (p = 1) and increases dramatically as p moves away from unity. The packing characteristics determined by the broken rotational symmetry of superballs are similar to but richer than their two-dimensional "superdisk" counterparts, and are distinctly different from that of ellipsoid packings. Our candidate optimal superball packings provide a starting point to quantify the equilibrium phase behavior of superball systems, which should deepen our understanding of the statistical thermodynamics of nonspherical-particle systems.Comment: 28 pages, 16 figure

"Engaging with birth stories in pregnancy: a hermeneutic phenomenological study of women's experiences across two generations"

BACKGROUND: The birth story has been widely understood as a crucial source of knowledge about childbirth. What has not been reported is the effect that birth stories may have on primigravid women's understandings of birth. Findings are presented from a qualitative study exploring how two generations of women came to understand birth in the milieu of other's stories. The prior assumption was that birth stories must surely have a positive or negative influence on listeners, steering them towards either medical or midwifery-led models of care. METHODS: A Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenological approach was used. Twenty UK participants were purposively selected and interviewed. Findings from the initial sample of 10 women who were pregnant in 2012 indicated that virtual media was a primary source of birth stories. This led to recruitment of a second sample of 10 women who gave birth in the 1970s-1980s, to determine whether they were more able to translate information into knowledge via stories told through personal contact and not through virtual technologies RESULTS: Findings revealed the experience of 'being-in-the-world' of birth and of stories in that world. From a Heideggerian perspective, the birth story was constructed through 'idle talk' (the taken for granted assumptions of things, which come into being through language). Both oral stories and those told through technology were described as the 'modern birth story'. The first theme 'Stories are difficult like that', examines the birth story as problematic and considers how stories shape meaning. The second 'It's a generational thing', considers how women from two generations came to understand what their experience might be. The third 'Birth in the twilight of certainty,' examines women's experience of Being in a system of birth as constructed, portrayed and sustained in the stories being shared. CONCLUSIONS: The women pregnant in 2012 framed their expectations in the language of choice, whilst the women who birthed in the 1970s-1980s framed their experience in the language of safety. For both, however, the world of birth was the same; saturated with, and only legitimised by the birth of a healthy baby. Rather than creating meaningful understanding, the 'idle talk' of birth made both cohorts fearful of leaving the relative comfort of the 'system', and of claiming an alternative birth

No peaks without valleys: The stable mass transfer channel for gravitational-wave sources in light of the neutron star-black hole mass gap

Gravitational-wave (GW) detections are starting to reveal features in the mass distribution of double compact objects. The lower end of the black hole (BH) mass distribution is especially interesting as few formation channels contribute here and because it is more robust against variations in the cosmic star formation than the high mass end. In this work we explore the stable mass transfer channel for the formation of GW sources with a focus on the low-mass end of the mass distribution. We conduct an extensive exploration of the uncertain physical processes that impact this channel. We note that, for fiducial assumptions, this channel reproduces the peak at $\sim9 \mathrm{M_{\odot}}$ in the GW-observed binary BH mass distribution remarkably well, and predicts a cutoff mass that coincides with the upper edge of the purported neutron star BH mass gap. The peak and cutoff mass are a consequence of unique properties of this channel, namely (1) the requirement of stability during the mass transfer phases, and (2) the complex way in which the final compact object masses scale with the initial mass. We provide an analytical expression for the cutoff in the primary component mass and show that this adequately matches our numerical results. Our results imply that selection effects resulting from the formation channel alone can provide an explanation for the purported neutron star--BH mass gap in GW detections. This provides an alternative to the commonly adopted view that the gap emerges during BH formation.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ associated code is available at https://github.com/LiekeVanSon/LowMBH_and_StableChanne