Wettability decay in an oil-contaminated waste-mineral mixture with dry-wet cycles

The dependency of soil particle wettability on soil water content implies that soils subjected to drying-wetting cycles become wettable with wetting and water repellent with drying. While this has been demonstrated widely, the results are contradictory when water repellent soils are subjected to a sequence of cycles. Added to this, past wettability measurements were seldom done in batches of samples collected from the field at natural or dry water contents, with little appreciation that slight particle size variations, different drying-wetting histories and fabric (as required by different wettability measurement methods) may alter the results. This note presents soil particle wettability—soil water content relations by means of an index test following staged drying and wetting paths over a period of 8 months for an untreated, oil-contaminated anthropogenic soil (a mixture of slag, coal particles, fly ash and mineral particles) from Barry Docks (UK), a site formally used for oil storage, which is to be remediated and redeveloped for housing. The results revealed a decrease in the water repellency and increasing mineralization and bacterial activity with the wetting and drying cycles.postprin

The lung cancer exercise training study: a randomized trial of aerobic training, resistance training, or both in postsurgical lung cancer patients: rationale and design

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The Lung Cancer Exercise Training Study (LUNGEVITY) is a randomized trial to investigate the efficacy of different types of exercise training on cardiorespiratory fitness (VO_2peak), patient-reported outcomes, and the organ components that govern VO_2peakin post-operative non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients.</p> <p>Methods/Design</p> <p>Using a single-center, randomized design, 160 subjects (40 patients/study arm) with histologically confirmed stage I-IIIA NSCLC following curative-intent complete surgical resection at Duke University Medical Center (DUMC) will be potentially eligible for this trial. Following baseline assessments, eligible participants will be randomly assigned to one of four conditions: (1) aerobic training alone, (2) resistance training alone, (3) the combination of aerobic and resistance training, or (4) attention-control (progressive stretching). The ultimate goal for all exercise training groups will be 3 supervised exercise sessions per week an intensity above 70% of the individually determined VO_2peakfor aerobic training and an intensity between 60 and 80% of one-repetition maximum for resistance training, for 30-45 minutes/session. Progressive stretching will be matched to the exercise groups in terms of program length (i.e., 16 weeks), social interaction (participants will receive one-on-one instruction), and duration (30-45 mins/session). The primary study endpoint is VO_2peak. Secondary endpoints include: patient-reported outcomes (PROs) (e.g., quality of life, fatigue, depression, etc.) and organ components of the oxygen cascade (i.e., pulmonary function, cardiac function, skeletal muscle function). All endpoints will be assessed at baseline and postintervention (16 weeks). Substudies will include genetic studies regarding individual responses to an exercise stimulus, theoretical determinants of exercise adherence, examination of the psychological mediators of the exercise - PRO relationship, and exercise-induced changes in gene expression.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>VO_2peakis becoming increasingly recognized as an outcome of major importance in NSCLC. LUNGEVITY will identify the optimal form of exercise training for NSCLC survivors as well as provide insight into the physiological mechanisms underlying this effect. Overall, this study will contribute to the establishment of clinical exercise therapy rehabilitation guidelines for patients across the entire NSCLC continuum.</p> <p>Trial Registration</p> <p>NCT00018255</p

Rich Situated Attitudes

We outline a novel theory of natural language meaning, Rich Situated Semantics [RSS], on which the content of sentential utterances is semantically rich and informationally situated. In virtue of its situatedness, an utterance’s rich situated content varies with the informational situation of the cognitive agent interpreting the utterance. In virtue of its richness, this content contains information beyond the utterance’s lexically encoded information. The agent-dependence of rich situated content solves a number of problems in semantics and the philosophy of language (cf. [14, 20, 25]). In particular, since RSS varies the granularity of utterance contents with the interpreting agent’s informational situation, it solves the problem of finding suitably fine- or coarse-grained objects for the content of propositional attitudes. In virtue of this variation, a layman will reason with more propositions than an expert

Similarity solutions for unsteady shear-stress-driven flow of Newtonian and power-law fluids : slender rivulets and dry patches

Unsteady flow of a thin film of a Newtonian fluid or a non-Newtonian power-law fluid with power-law index N driven by a constant shear stress applied at the free surface, on a plane inclined at an angle α to the horizontal, is considered. Unsteady similarity solutions representing flow of slender rivulets and flow around slender dry patches are obtained. Specifically, solutions are obtained for converging sessile rivulets (0 < α < π/2) and converging dry patches in a pendent film (π/2 < α < π), as well as for diverging pendent rivulets and diverging dry patches in a sessile film. These solutions predict that at any time t, the rivulet and dry patch widen or narrow according to |x|3/2, and the film thickens or thins according to |x|, where x denotes distance down the plane, and that at any station x, the rivulet and dry patch widen or narrow like |t|−1, and the film thickens or thins like |t|−1, independent of N

Extraction of SSVEPs-Based Inherent Fuzzy Entropy Using a Wearable Headband EEG in Migraine Patients

© 1993-2012 IEEE. Inherent fuzzy entropy is an objective measurement of electroencephalography (EEG) complexity reflecting the robustness of brain systems. In this study, we present a novel application of multiscale relative inherent fuzzy entropy using repetitive steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) to investigate EEG complexity change between two migraine phases, i.e., interictal (baseline) and preictal (before migraine attacks) phases. We used a wearable headband EEG device with O1, Oz, O2, and Fpz electrodes to collect EEG signals from 80 participants [40 migraine patients and 40 healthy controls (HCs)] under the following two conditions: During resting state and SSVEPs with five 15-Hz photic stimuli. We found a significant enhancement in occipital EEG entropy with increasing stimulus times in both HCs and patients in the interictal phase, but a reverse trend in patients in the preictal phase. In the 1st SSVEP, occipital EEG entropy of the HCs was significantly lower than that of patents in the preictal phase (FDR-adjusted p < 0.05). Regarding the transitional variance of EEG entropy between the 1st and 5th SSVEPs, patients in the preictal phase exhibited significantly lower values than patients in the interictal phase (FDR-adjusted p < 0.05). Furthermore, in the classification model, the AdaBoost ensemble learning showed an accuracy of 81 pm 6%and area under the curve of 0.87 for classifying interictal and preictal phases. In contrast, there were no differences in EEG entropy among groups or sessions by using other competing entropy models, including approximate entropy, sample entropy, and fuzzy entropy on the same dataset. In conclusion, inherent fuzzy entropy offers novel applications in visual stimulus environments and may have the potential to provide a preictal alert to migraine patients

Accreting Black Holes

This chapter provides a general overview of the theory and observations of black holes in the Universe and on their interpretation. We briefly review the black hole classes, accretion disk models, spectral state classification, the AGN classification, and the leading techniques for measuring black hole spins. We also introduce quasi-periodic oscillations, the shadow of black holes, and the observations and the theoretical models of jets.Comment: 41 pages, 18 figures. To appear in "Tutorial Guide to X-ray and Gamma-ray Astronomy: Data Reduction and Analysis" (Ed. C. Bambi, Springer Singapore, 2020). v3: fixed some typos and updated some parts. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1711.1025

Axion-like-particle search with high-intensity lasers

We study ALP-photon-conversion within strong inhomogeneous electromagnetic fields as provided by contemporary high-intensity laser systems. We observe that probe photons traversing the focal spot of a superposition of Gaussian beams of a single high-intensity laser at fundamental and frequency-doubled mode can experience a frequency shift due to their intermittent propagation as axion-like-particles. This process is strongly peaked for resonant masses on the order of the involved laser frequencies. Purely laser-based experiments in optical setups are sensitive to ALPs in the $\mathrm{eV}$ mass range and can thus complement ALP searches at dipole magnets.Comment: 25 pages, 2 figure

Randomised trials comparing different healthcare settings : an exploratory review of the impact of pre-trial preferences on participation, and discussion of other methodological challenges

BACKGROUND: We recently published a systematic review of different healthcare settings (such as outpatient, community or home) for administering intravenous chemotherapy, and concluded that performing conventionally designed randomised trials was difficult. The main problems were achieving adequate trial accrual rates and recruiting a study population which adequately represented the target population of interest. These issues stemmed from the fact that potential participants may have had pre-trial perceptions about the trial settings they may be allocated; such preferences will sometimes be strong enough for patients to decline an invitation to participate in a trial. A patient preference trial design (in which patients can choose, or be randomised to, an intervention) may have obviated these recruitment issues, although none of the trials used such a design. METHODS: In order to gain a better understanding of the broader prevalence and extent of these preference issues (and any other methodological challenges), we undertook an exploratory review of settings trials in any area of healthcare treatment research. We searched The Cochrane Library and Google Scholar and used snowballing methods to identify trials comparing different healthcare settings. RESULTS: Trial accrual was affected by patient preferences for a setting in 15 of the 16 identified studies; birth setting trials were the most markedly affected, with between 68 % and 85 % of eligible women declining to participate specifically because of preference for a particular healthcare setting. Recruitment into substance abuse and chemotherapy setting studies was also notably affected by preferences. Only four trials used a preference design: the proportion of eligible patients choosing to participate via a preference group ranged from between 33 % and 67 %. CONCLUSIONS: In trials of healthcare settings, accrual may be seriously affected by patient preferences. The use of trial designs which incorporate a preference component should therefore strongly be considered. When designing such trials, investigators should consider settings to be complex interventions, which are likely to have linked components which may be difficult to control for. Careful thought is also needed regarding the choice of comparator settings and the most appropriate outcome measures to be used