Are the attitudes of exercise instructors who work with older adults influenced by training and personal characteristics?

Little is known about the relationship between attitudes and characteristics of instructors and uptake and adherence of older people to exercise classes. This article explores these issues.Methods:The authors surveyed 731 UK exercise instructors with specialist older adult exercise qualifications. A questionnaire investigated instructors’ characteristics and attitudes toward older adults’ participation in exercise.Results:For mostly seated classes, EXTEND qualification (B = 0.36, p = .005) had a positive effect on instructors’ attitudes. Later Life Training qualification (B = −2.80, p = .003), clinical background (B = −3.99, p = .005), and delivering classes in National Health Services (B = −3.12, p &lt; .001), leisure centers (B = −2.75, p = .002), or nursing homes (B = −2.29, p = .005) had a negative effect on attitudes. For mostly standing classes, experience (B = 0.20, p = .003) and delivering in leisure centers (B = 0.46, p = .032) had a positive and clinical background (B = −1.78, p = .018) had a negative effect on instructors’ attitudes.Conclusions:Most instructors have positive attitudes, but training and work context can influence attitudes toward older people’s participation in exercise classes both positively and negatively.</jats:sec

The management of human resources in the Asia Pacific: Into the 21st century

In this introduction, we look at the management of human resources in the Asia Pacific region. We start with an overview of the countries involved, ranging from the hugely populated China to the city-State of Singapore, proposing three categories of economies and the people-management systems, namely the 'developed', the 'developing' and the 'transitional'. After this, we examine the labour markets and employment trends to be found in the region, raising a number of issues relating to future job prospects. We argue that these labour market/employment phenomena and peoplemanagement developments are closely intertwined. A further section sums up the findings of the contributors to this Special Issue. Finally, we present our conclusions

A review of productivity analysis of the New Zealand construction industry

Abstract In recent years there has been a rising interest in the level of productivity and efficiency of the New Zealand construction industry. This interest has meant that there has been an increased use of statistical techniques to determine the productivity and efficiency of the overall industry. The purpose of this paper is to review the various measures that have been used to gauge the levels of productivity and efficiency in the New Zealand construction industry; as well as analyse some of the results to date. Finally, it considers potential areas for future research

Derivation of Economic and Social Indicators for a Spatial Decision Support System to Evaluate the Impacts of Urban Development on Water Bodies in New Zealand

There is mounting evidence that urban development in New Zealand has contributed to poor water quality and ecological degradation of coastal and fresh water receiving waters. As a consequence, local governments have identified the need for improved methods to guide decision making to achieve improved outcomes for those receiving waters. This paper reports progress on a research programme to develop a catchmentscale spatial decision-support system (SDSS) that will aid evaluation of the impacts of urban development on attributes such as water and sediment quality; ecosystem health; and economic, social and cultural values. The SDSS aims to express indicators of impacts on these values within a sustainability indexing system in order to allow local governments to consider them holistically over planning timeframes of several decades. The SDSS will use a combination of deterministic and probabilistic methods to, firstly, estimate changes to environmental stressors such as contaminant loads from different land use and stormwater management scenarios and, secondly, use these results and information from a range of other sources to generate indicator values. This paper describes the project’s approach to the derivation of indicators of economic and social well being associated with the effects of urban storm water run-off on freshwater and estuarine receiving waters.Environmental Economics and Policy,

CAD Model Details via Curved Knot Lines and Truncated Powers

This paper describes a method for adding surface details to existing CAD models. Our approach is based on truncated powers, which allows us to align the added details with curved knot lines on the surface. Additionally, (truncated) powers give us precise control over the continuity of the perturbed surface across the (curved) knot lines. Our representation is compatible with current CAD/CAM practise and standards, and we showcase it on several examples

Simplifying the Development, Use and Sustainability of HPC Software

Developing software to undertake complex, compute-intensive scientific processes requires a challenging combination of both specialist domain knowledge and software development skills to convert this knowledge into efficient code. As computational platforms become increasingly heterogeneous and newer types of platform such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing become more widely accepted for HPC computations, scientists require more support from computer scientists and resource providers to develop efficient code and make optimal use of the resources available to them. As part of the libhpc stage 1 and 2 projects we are developing a framework to provide a richer means of job specification and efficient execution of complex scientific software on heterogeneous infrastructure. The use of such frameworks has implications for the sustainability of scientific software. In this paper we set out our developing understanding of these challenges based on work carried out in the libhpc project.Comment: 4 page position paper, submission to WSSSPE13 worksho

Torsional Rotordynamics Of Machinery Equipment Strings

Short CourseOne of the foremost concerns facing rotating equipment users today is that of torsional vibration. In contrast to lateral vibration, torsional vibration is rarely monitored. As a result, torsional failures can be especially heinous since the first symptom of a problem is often a broken shaft, gear tooth, or coupling. In the past, torsional vibration problems were considered to be rare; however the number of torsional field problems has markedly increased recently with the advent of higher power, higher complexity variable frequency drives (VFDs). The increased risk plus the difficulty of detecting incipient failures in the field makes the performance of a thorough torsional vibration analysis an essential component of the turbomachinery design process. There are three primary objectives to this Short Course. First, it will provide users with a basic understanding of steadystate torsional vibrations, their potential for generating problems, and methodologies that are commonly used to analyze and avoid these problems. This portion of the course is aimed at younger, less experienced users, although veteran users will probably also benefit from the review. Second, it will provide users with some understanding of the more complex issues related to transient torsional vibration and acceptance based on stress analysis. Third, it will educate users on how VFDs work, and why they are a concern from a torsional standpoint. This portion will be beneficial to all users since modern VFDs are not well understood, especially by mechanical engineers. The course will be based on practical examples starting from the simple to the complex with some material based on a tutorial the lead author presented at this very show in 1996, Practical Design Against Torsional Vibration. Among the topics that will be discussed include description of torsional vibration, modeling, undamped analysis, Campbell diagrams, excitations generated by various mechanical and electrical components, steady-state and transient analyses, synchronous motor startups, and fatigue life analysis. At the conclusion of this portion, the user should have a good grasp of the fundamentals of this topic. A significant portion of time will be spent on VFDs. Topics covered will include VFD types, excitation frequencies generated by various VFDs, typical excitation amplitudes, control loop instabilities that can lead to problems, coupled electro-mechanical analyses, and design procedures for preventing VFD-related torsional issues up-front. At the conclusion of this course, all users should have sufficient understanding of the relevant concepts so that they should be able to take the proper steps to prevent torsional vibration problems from occurring in their equipment, even when their system contains a VFD

Occupational stress in palliative medicine, medical oncology and clinical oncology specialist registrars

A cross-sectional complete enumeration postal survey was conducted to compare stress levels between specialist registrars (SpRs) in palliative medicine, clinical oncology and medical oncology. Four hundred and one UK-registered SpRs responded (response rate 63.1%). Levels of psychological distress and depression were measured by GHQ-12 and SCL-D: 102/390 (26.2%, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 21.8–30.5%)) scored >3 on GHQ-12 indicating psychological distress, 44/391 (11.3%, 95% CI = 8.1–14.4%) scored ≥1.5 on SCL-D indicative of depression. Suicidal ideation was indicated by 15 responders. There were no significant differences between specialties. The effect of stress on personal or family life was the dominant predictor of both psychological distress and depression, although dissatisfaction with choice of specialty and feeling underutilised also contributed. One in four SpRs experience stress. These results are similar to studies of general practitioner principals and consultants from other specialties. Stress needs to be managed if doctors are to survive professional life

Transcranial magnetic stimulation to the occipital place area biases gaze during scene viewing

We can understand viewed scenes and extract task-relevant information within a few hundred milliseconds. This process is generally supported by three cortical regions that show selectivity for scene images: parahippocampal place area (PPA), medial place area (MPA) and occipital place area (OPA). Prior studies have focused on the visual information each region is responsive to, usually within the context of recognition or navigation. Here, we move beyond these tasks to investigate gaze allocation during scene viewing. Eye movements rely on a scene’s visual representation to direct saccades, and thus foveal vision. In particular, we focus on the contribution of OPA, which is i) located in occipito-parietal cortex, likely feeding information into parts of the dorsal pathway critical for eye movements, and ii) contains strong retinotopic representations of the contralateral visual field. Participants viewed scene images for 1034 ms while their eye movements were recorded. On half of the trials, a 500 ms train of five transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) pulses was applied to the participant’s cortex, starting at scene onset. TMS was applied to the right hemisphere over either OPA or the occipital face area (OFA), which also exhibits a contralateral visual field bias but shows selectivity for face stimuli. Participants generally made an overall left-to-right, top-to-bottom pattern of eye movements across all conditions. When TMS was applied to OPA, there was an increased saccade latency for eye movements toward the contralateral relative to the ipsilateral visual field after the final TMS pulse (400ms). Additionally, TMS to the OPA biased fixation positions away from the contralateral side of the scene compared to the control condition, while the OFA group showed no such effect. There was no effect on horizontal saccade amplitudes. These combined results suggest that OPA might serve to represent local scene information that can then be utilized by visuomotor control networks to guide gaze allocation in natural scenes

Making sense of real-world scenes

To interact with the world, we have to make sense of the continuous sensory input conveying information about our environment. A recent surge of studies has investigated the processes enabling scene understanding, using increasingly complex stimuli and sophisticated analyses to highlight the visual features and brain regions involved. However, there are two major challenges to producing a comprehensive framework for scene understanding. First, scene perception is highly dynamic, subserving multiple behavioral goals. Second, a multitude of different visual properties co-occur across scenes and may be correlated or independent. We synthesize the recent literature and argue that for a complete view of scene understanding, it is necessary to account for both differing observer goals and the contribution of diverse scene properties