Staying Positive in a Negative situation:Applying the positive health strategy in preventing distress in lung cancer patients

Background Timely signaling of distress in cancer patients is important. Due to the focus on medical treatment, patients and healthcare providers often overlook other options for leading a higher quality, meaningful life with this critical illness. By shifting the emphasis to resilience and well-being (rather than ill-health), the patient can be empowered and distress may be prevented. Aims To compare the Distress Thermometer and the spider-web diagram, a visualization tool that represents patients’ assessments of different aspects of their lifes. Method A quantitative study was carried out among lung cancer patients (n=112) at the Albert Schweitzer hospital in the Netherlands. They all completed the Distress Thermometer as well as the Spider-Web diagram (Dialogue tool 1.0 of the Institute for Positive Health), and a satisfaction questionnaire (min 1 to max 10). Results The spider-web does not represent an external norm, it reflects the personal evaluation of the situation. Patients' satisfaction scores of the Spider Web exceeded the distress thermometer (8.0 ± 1.3 vs 6.9 ± 1.2). More specifically, they felt more able to state problems and concerns (t (- .67), p Conclusion Satisfaction and preference among patients was in favor of the Spider Web. It is recommended that oncology teams start a conversation about deploying the most appropriate instrument for prevention of distress, preferably aimed at mapping mental well-being and enhancing positive qualities

On the validity of tidal turbine array configurations obtained from steady-state adjoint optimisation

Extracting the optimal amount of power from an array of tidal turbines requires an intricate understanding of tidal dynamics and the effects of turbine placement on the local and regional scale flow. Numerical models have contributed significantly towards this understanding, and more recently, adjoint-based modelling has been employed to optimise the positioning of the turbines in an array in an automated way and improve on simple, regular man-made configurations. Adjoint-based optimisation of high-resolution and ideally 3D transient models is generally a very computationally expensive problem. As a result, existing work on the adjoint optimisation of tidal turbine placement has been mostly limited to steady-state simulations in which very high, non-physical values of the background viscosity are required to ensure that a steady-state solution exists. However, such compromises may affect the reliability of the modelled turbines, their wakes and interactions, and thus bring into question the validity of the computed optimal turbine positions. This work considers a suite of idealised simulations of flow past tidal turbine arrays in a 2D channel. It compares four regular array configurations, detailed by Divett et al. (2013), with the configuration found through adjoint optimisation in a steady-state, high-viscosity setup. The optimised configuration produces considerably more power. The same configurations are then used to produce a suite of transient simulations that do not use constant high-viscosity, and instead use large eddy simulation (LES) to parameterise the resulting turbulent structures. It is shown that the LES simulations produce less power than that predicted by the constant high-viscosity runs. Nevertheless, they still follow the same trends in the power curve throughout time, with optimised layouts continuing to perform significantly better than simplified configuration

The Optical Model Analysis of 200 MeV p + 16-O Elastic Scattering

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Grant NSF PHY 81-14339 and by Indiana Universit

Polarization in Medium-Energy Proton-Nucleus Elastic Scattering

This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grants PHY 76-84033A01, PHY 78-22774, and Indiana Universit

The Optical Potential for Medium-Energy Proton Scattering

This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant PHY 76-84033 and Indiana Universit

Optimized quantum nondemolition measurement of a field quadrature

We suggest an interferometric scheme assisted by squeezing and linear feedback to realize the whole class of field-quadrature quantum nondemolition measurements, from Von Neumann projective measurement to fully non-destructive non-informative one. In our setup, the signal under investigation is mixed with a squeezed probe in an interferometer and, at the output, one of the two modes is revealed through homodyne detection. The second beam is then amplitude-modulated according to the outcome of the measurement, and finally squeezed according to the transmittivity of the interferometer. Using strongly squeezed or anti-squeezed probes respectively, one achieves either a projective measurement, i.e. homodyne statistics arbitrarily close to the intrinsic quadrature distribution of the signal, and conditional outputs approaching the corresponding eigenstates, or fully non-destructive one, characterized by an almost uniform homodyne statistics, and by an output state arbitrarily close to the input signal. By varying the squeezing between these two extremes, or simply by tuning the internal phase-shift of the interferometer, the whole set of intermediate cases can also be obtained. In particular, an optimal quantum nondemolition measurement of quadrature can be achieved, which minimizes the information gain versus state disturbance trade-off

Phenomenological and Microscopic Optical-Model Descriptions of 99 MeV 6-Li Scattering

This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grants PHY 76-84033A01, PHY 78-22774, and Indiana Universit