An exploratory study investigating factors associated with adherence to chest physiotherapy and exercise in adults with cystic fibrosis

Copyright @ 2009 European Cystic Fibrosis Society. This article is available through Elsevier's Open Access Archives and covered by Elsevier's user license: http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-policies/oa-license-policy/elsevier-user-license.This study explored the relationship between psychological and demographic variables relating to chest physiotherapy (CP) and exercise in adults with cystic fibrosis. The main results were that adherence to both treatments was low and analysis of variance indicated that severity and gender were associated with exercise adherence, importance and burden. These results suggest potential areas for interventions to improve exercise adherence

Wetlands and coastal water quality: Should wetland size matter?

Generally, wetlands are thought to perform water purification functions, removing contaminants as water flows through sediment and vegetation. This paradigm was challenged when Grant et al. (2001) reported that Talbert Salt Marsh (Figure 1.) increased fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) output to coastal waters, contributing to poor coastal water quality. Like most southern California wetlands, Talbert Salt Marsh has been severely degraded. It is a small (10 ha), restored wetland, only 1/100th its original size, and located at the base of a highly urbanized watershed. Is it reasonable to expect that this or any severely altered wetland will perform the same water purification benefits as a natural wetland? To determine how a more pristine southern California coastal wetland attenuated bacterial contaminants, we investigated FIB concentrations entering and exiting Carpinteria Salt Marsh (Figure 2.), a 93 ha, moderate-sized, relatively natural wetland.(PDF contains 4 pages

A multidisciplinary coastal vulnerability assessment for local government focused on ecosystems, Santa Barbara area, California

Incorporating coastal ecosystems in climate adaptation planning is needed to maintain the well-being of both natural and human systems. Our vulnerability study uses a multidisciplinary approach to evaluate climate change vulnerability of an urbanized coastal community that could serve as a model approach for communities worldwide, particularly in similar Mediterranean climates. We synthesize projected changes in climate, coastal erosion and flooding, watershed runoff and impacts to two important coastal ecosystems, sandy beaches and coastal salt marshes. Using downscaled climate models along with other regional models, we find that temperature, extreme heat events, and sea level are expected to increase in the future, along with more intense rainfall events, despite a negligible change in annual rainfall. Consequently, more droughts are expected but the magnitude of larger flood events will increase. Associated with the continuing rise of mean sea level, extreme coastal water levels will occur with increasingly greater magnitudes and frequency. Severe flooding will occur for both natural (wetlands, beaches) and built environments (airport, harbor, freeway, and residential areas). Adaptation actions can reduce the impact of rising sea level, which will cause losses of sandy beach zones and salt marsh habitats that support the highest biodiversity in these ecosystems, including regionally rare and endangered species, with substantial impacts occurring by 2050. Providing for inland transgression of coastal habitats, effective sediment management, reduced beach grooming and removal of shoreline armoring are adaptations that would help maintain coastal ecosystems and the beneficial services they provide

CERN Accelerator Strategy

The CERN strategy for future accelerator projects is outlined and the role of the HE-LHC inside this strategy is described.Comment: 1 page, Contribution given to the EuCARD-AccNet-EuroLumi Workshop: The High-Energy Large Hadron Collider, Malta, Republic of Malta, 14 - 16 Oct 201

End sums of irreducible open 3-manifolds

An end sum is a non-compact analogue of a connected sum. Suppose we are given two connected, oriented $n$-manifolds $M_1$ and $M_2$. Recall that to form their connected sum one chooses an $n$-ball in each $M_i$, removes its interior, and then glues together the two $S^{n-1}$ boundary components thus created by an orientation reversing homeomorphism. Now suppose that $M_1$ and $M_2$ are also open, i.e. non-compact with empty boundary. To form an end sum of $M_1$ and $M_2$ one chooses a halfspace $H_i$ (a manifold \homeo\ to ${\bold R}^{n-1} \times [0, \infty)$) embedded in $M_i$, removes its interior, and then glues together the two resulting ${\bold R}^{n-1}$ boundary components by an orientation reversing homeomorphism. In order for this space $M$ to be an $n$-manifold one requires that each $H_i$ be {\bf end-proper} in $M_i$ in the sense that its intersection with each compact subset of $M_i$ is compact. Note that one can regard $H_i$ as a regular neighborhood of an end-proper ray (a 1-manifold \homeo\ to $[0,\infty)$) \ga_i in $M_i$

Stance-taking and public discussion in blogs.

Blogs, which can be written and read by anyone with a computer and an internet connection, would seem to expand the possibilities for engagement in public sphere debates. Indeed, blogs are full of the kind of vocabulary that suggests intense discussion. However, a closer look at the way this vocabulary is used in context suggests that the main concern of writers is selfpresentation, positioning themselves in a crowded forum, in what has been called stancetaking. When writers mark their stances, for instance by saying I think, they enact different ways of signalling a relation to others, marking disagreement, enacting surprise, andironicising previous contributions. All these moves are ways of presenting one’s own contribution as distinctive, showing one’s entitlement to a position. In this paper, I use concordance tools to identify strings that are very frequent in a corpus of blogs, relative to a general corpus of written texts, focus on those relatively frequent words that mark stance and analyse these markers in context. I argue that the prominence of stance-taking indicates the priority of individual positioning over collective and deliberative discussion