The narratives of Hardship: : The new and the old poor in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis in Europe

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Hulya Dagdeviren, Matthew Donoghue, and Lars Meier, ‘The narratives of hardship: the new and the old poor in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis in Europe’, The Sociological Review, vol. 65 (2): 369-385, May 2017. The final, definitive version of record is available online at doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.12403. Published by SAGE.This paper examines poverty and hardship in Europe after the 2008 crisis, using household interviews in nine European countries. A number of findings deserve highlighting. First, making a distinction between ‘the old poor’ (those who lived in poverty before as well as after the crisis) and ‘the new poor’ (thosewho fell into hardship after the crisis), we show that hardship is experienced quite differently by these groups. Second, the household narratives showed that while material deprivations constitute an important aspect of hardship, the themes of insecurity and dependency also emerged as fundamental dimensions. In contrast to popular political discourse in countries such as the UK, dependency on welfare or family was experienced as a source of distress and manifested as a form of hardship by participants in all countries covered in this study.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Proposed experiment to produce and detect light pseudoscalars

We propose a laboratory experiment to produce and detect a light neutral pseudoscalar particle that couples to two photons. The pseudoscalar would be produced by a (real) photon from a laser beam interacting with a second (virtual) photon from a static magnetic field; it would be detected after it reconverts to a real photon in a duplicate magnetic field. The bounds on the coupling constant that could be obtained from a null result in such an experiment compete favorably with astrophysical limits and would substantially improve those from direct measurements

Thermal fission rate around super-normal phase transition

Using Langer's $Im F$ method, we discuss the temperature dependence of nuclear fission width in the presence of dissipative environments. We introduce a low cut-off frequency to the spectral density of the environmental oscillators in order to mimic the pairing gap. It is shown that the decay width rapidly decreases at the critical temperature, where the phase transition from super to normal fluids takes place. Relation to the recently observed threshold for the dissipative fission is discussed.Comment: 12 pages, Latex, Submitted to Physical Review C for publication, 3 Postscript figures are available by request from [email protected]

Migraine headaches among university students using id migraine test as a screening tool

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Migraine is a significant health problem, especially for the young people, due to its frequency and accompanying morbidity, causing disability and loss of performance. In this study, our aim was to determine the prevalence of migraine headaches among university students in Edirne, a Turkish city.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this cross-sectional and descriptive study, study population was composed of students registered to Trakya University in the academic year of 2008-2009. Out of these, 3694 of them accepted to participate. Participants who had two or more headaches in the last 3 months formed the headache group. Afterwards, two preliminary questions were applied to the headache group and participants with at least one affirmative response were asked to perform the validated ID-Migraine™ test.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The mean age of 3694 students participated in the study was 19.23 ± 1.84 (17-39 years), with adolescents:adult ratio being 2.5:1. 1613 students (43.7%) did have at least two headaches in the last three months. Migraine-type headache was detected in 266 subjects (7.2%) based on the ID-Migraine™ test. Of the migraine group, 72 were male (27.1%) and 194 were female (72.9%). There was no significant difference in migraine prevalence between adolescent and adult age groups.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>With a prevalence similar to adults, primary care physicians should be aware of the probability of migraine headaches in university students in order to maintain a successful school performance.</p

Disposable sensors in diagnostics, food and environmental monitoring

Disposable sensors are low‐cost and easy‐to‐use sensing devices intended for short‐term or rapid single‐point measurements. The growing demand for fast, accessible, and reliable information in a vastly connected world makes disposable sensors increasingly important. The areas of application for such devices are numerous, ranging from pharmaceutical, agricultural, environmental, forensic, and food sciences to wearables and clinical diagnostics, especially in resource‐limited settings. The capabilities of disposable sensors can extend beyond measuring traditional physical quantities (for example, temperature or pressure); they can provide critical chemical and biological information (chemo‐ and biosensors) that can be digitized and made available to users and centralized/decentralized facilities for data storage, remotely. These features could pave the way for new classes of low‐cost systems for health, food, and environmental monitoring that can democratize sensing across the globe. Here, a brief insight into the materials and basics of sensors (methods of transduction, molecular recognition, and amplification) is provided followed by a comprehensive and critical overview of the disposable sensors currently used for medical diagnostics, food, and environmental analysis. Finally, views on how the field of disposable sensing devices will continue its evolution are discussed, including the future trends, challenges, and opportunities

Single-molecule techniques in biophysics : a review of the progress in methods and applications

Single-molecule biophysics has transformed our understanding of the fundamental molecular processes involved in living biological systems, but also of the fascinating physics of life. Far more exotic than a collection of exemplars of soft matter behaviour, active biological matter lives far from thermal equilibrium, and typically covers multiple length scales from the nanometre level of single molecules up several orders of magnitude to longer length scales in emergent structures of cells, tissues and organisms. Biological molecules are often characterized by an underlying instability, in that multiple metastable free energy states exist which are separated by energy levels of typically just a few multiples of the thermal energy scale of kBT, where kB is the Boltzmann constant and T the absolute temperature, implying complex, dynamic inter-conversion kinetics across this bumpy free energy landscape in the relatively hot, wet environment of real, living biological matter. The key utility of single-molecule biophysics lies in its ability to probe the underlying heterogeneity of free energy states across a population of molecules, which in general is too challenging for conventional ensemble level approaches which measure mean average properties. Parallel developments in both experimental and theoretical techniques have been key to the latest insights and are enabling the development of highly-multiplexed, correlative techniques to tackle previously intractable biological problems. Experimentally, technological developments in the sensitivity and speed of biomolecular detectors, the stability and efficiency of light sources, probes and microfluidics, have enabled and driven the study of heterogeneous behaviours both in vitro and in vivo that were previously undetectable by ensemble methods..

Ontology based access control derived from dynamic RBAC and its context constraints

In this paper we model and test a Dynamic Ontology based Role-Based Access Control (DO-RBAC) model. This dynamic RBAC model was originally written in Prolog, and applied to and tested on multiple hospital databases. Our work demonstrates that the mapping of Prolog facts, rules and context constraints imposed on them into ontological modelling constructs of DO-RBAC is feasible, and that the DO-RBAC model can be extended if new roles are added to the RBAC. Our principle is to (a) model Prolog facts and rules within the DO-RBAC schema using OWL modelling constructs, and (b) reason upon the DO-RBAC schema using SWRL rules mapped from dynamic RBAC context constraints. DO-RBAC serves as an input to a generic authorisation engine which can control access in various contexts of pervasive computing environments

The association between cagL and cagA, vacAs/m, babA genes in patients with gastric cancer, duodenal ulcer, and non-ulcer dyspepsia related to Helicobacter pylori

Introduction : As a component of the cag T4SS, the cagL gene is invoked in the translocation of CagA into host cells and is essential for the formation of cag PAI-associated pili between H. pylori and gastric epithelial cells