A Methodology for Investigating Heat Stress Selectivity Effects on Mental Performance

This paper outlines a methodology that can be used to investigate the selectivity patterns of heat stress effects. The adopted view is that heat stress causes performance to deteriorate because it depletes attentional resources. The term “selectivity” refers to the extent to which certain individual resource pools (the existence of which is postulated by multiple resource theories) are more susceptible to heat stress effects than others. The methodology consists of plotting performance of two time-shared tasks over time on the Performance Operating Characteristic (POC) space. Manipulating the difficulties of the paired tasks under the same environmental conditions (i.e., temperature level and exposure duration) produces a predictable change of the POC path. In particular, if the heat stress effects are non-selective, the POC path will rotate either clockwise or counter-clockwise depending on the task whose difficulty is increased. On the contrary, if the heat stress effects are selective, increasing the difficulty of a task will have no effect on the orientation of the POC path.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Gastrointestinal colonization by KPC-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae following hospital discharge: duration of carriage and risk factors for persistent carriage

AbstractThe natural history of KPC-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae (KPC KP) carriage is unknown. We aimed to examine the duration of KPC KP carriage following hospital discharge and to study the risk factors for persistent carriage. A cohort of 125 KPC KP carriers was followed monthly for between 3 and 6 months after discharge from an acute-care hospital. Rectal swabs and data were collected at baseline and at each visit. KPC KP was detected by culture and direct blaKPC PCR. Acquisition time was regarded as the earliest date of KPC KP isolation. Resolution of carriage was defined as a negative KPC KP test in at least two consecutive samples. Analyses were separated for recent (<4 months) (REC, 75 patients) and remote (≥4 months) (REM, 50 patients) acquisition groups. Risk factors for persistent carriage were examined by survival analyses for the REC group and by prevalence methods for the REM group. The mean age of patients was 67.5 years and 49.6% were male. Forty-six (61%) patients in the REC group and 14 (28%) in the REM group were persistent carriers (p < 0.001). A significant risk factor for persistent carriage identified in both the REC and REM groups was the presence of any catheter (p < 0.05). Unique risk factor groups included long-term care facility (LTCF) residence (p < 0.01) and a low functional status as measured by the Barthel’s index (p < 0.05) in the REC group and high Charlson’s score in the REM group (p < 0.05). Out of the entire 100 patients who had at least one negative sample, only 65 remained negative on subsequent cultures. In conclusion, persistent carriage of KPC KP is associated with catheter use and a low functional status; it is more common in patients with recent acquisition and is related to LTCF stay. A single negative KPC KP test is insufficient to exclude persistent carriage

Metastability in spin polarised Fermi gases and quasiparticle decays

We investigate the metastability associated with the first order transition from normal to superfluid phases in the phase diagram of two-component polarised Fermi gases.We begin by detailing the dominant decay processes of single quasiparticles.Having determined the momentum thresholds of each process and calculated their rates, we apply this understanding to a Fermi sea of polarons by linking its metastability to the stability of individual polarons, and predicting a region of metastability for the normal partially polarised phase. In the limit of a single impurity, this region extends from the interaction strength at which a polarised phase of molecules becomes the groundstate, to the one at which the single quasiparticle groundstate changes character from polaronic to molecular. Our argument in terms of a Fermi sea of polarons naturally suggests their use as an experimental probe. We propose experiments to observe the threshold of the predicted region of metastability, the interaction strength at which the quasiparticle groundstate changes character, and the decay rate of polarons

A domain decomposition non-intrusive reduced order model for turbulent flows

In this paper, a new Domain Decomposition Non-Intrusive Reduced Order Model (DDNIROM) is developed for turbulent flows. The method works by partitioning the computational domain into a number of subdomains in such a way that the summation of weights associated with the finite element nodes within each subdomain is approximately equal, and the communication between subdomains is minimised. With suitably chosen weights, it is expected that there will be approximately equal accuracy associated with each subdomain. This accuracy is maximised by allowing the partitioning to occur through areas of the domain that have relatively little flow activity, which, in this case, is characterised by the pointwise maximum Reynolds stresses.A Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) machine learning method is used to construct a set of local approximation functions (hypersurfaces) for each subdomain. Each local hypersurface represents not only the fluid dynamics over the subdomain it belongs to, but also the interactions of the flow dynamics with the surrounding subdomains. Thus, in this way, the surrounding subdomains may be viewed as providing boundary conditions for the current subdomain.We consider a specific example of turbulent air flow within an urban neighbourhood at a test site in London and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DDNIROM

Towards non-intrusive reduced order 3D free surface flow modelling

In this article, we describe a novel non-intrusive reduction model for three-dimensional (3D) free surface flows. However, in this work we limit the vertical resolution to be a single element. So, although it does resolve some non-hydrostatic effects, it does not examine the application of reduced modelling to full 3D free surface flows, but it is an important step towards 3D modelling. A newly developed non-intrusive reduced order model (NIROM) (Xiao et al., 2015a) has been used in this work. Rather than taking the standard POD approach using the Galerkin projection, a Smolyak sparse grid interpolation method is employed to generate the NIROM. A set of interpolation functions is constructed to calculate the POD coefficients, where the POD coefficients at previous time steps are the inputs of the interpolation function. Therefore, this model is non-intrusive and does not require modifications to the code of the full system and is easy to implement

A parameterized non-intrusive reduced order model and error analysis for general time-dependent nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications

A novel parameterized non-intrusive reduced order model (P-NIROM) based on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) has been developed. This P-NIROM is a generic and efficient approach for model reduction of parameterized partial differential equations (P-PDEs). Over existing parameterized reduced order models (P-ROM) (most of them are based on the reduced basis method), it is non-intrusive and independent on partial differential equations and computational codes. During the training process, the Smolyak sparse grid method is used to select a set of parameters over a specific parameterized space (). For each selected parameter, the reduced basis functions are generated from the snapshots derived from a run of the high fidelity model. More generally, the snapshots and basis function sets for any parameters over can be obtained using an interpolation method. The P-NIROM can then be constructed by using our recently developed technique (Xiao et al., 2015 [41,42]) where either the Smolyak or radial basis function (RBF) methods are used to generate a set of hyper-surfaces representing the underlying dynamical system over the reduced space.The new P-NIROM technique has been applied to parameterized Navier–Stokes equations and implemented with an unstructured mesh finite element model. The capability of this P-NIROM has been illustrated numerically by two test cases: flow past a cylinder and lock exchange case. The prediction capabilities of the P-NIROM have been evaluated by varying the viscosity, initial and boundary conditions. The results show that this P-NIROM has captured the quasi-totality of the details of the flow with CPU speedup of three orders of magnitude. An error analysis for the P-NIROM has been carried out

Longitudinal Momentum Fraction X_L for Two High P_t Protons in pp->ppX Reaction

We present an analysis of new data from Experiment E850 at BNL. We have characterized the inclusive cross section near the endpoint for pp exclusive scattering in Hydrogen and in Carbon with incident beam energy of 6 GeV. We select events with a pair of back-to-back hadrons at large transverse momentum. These cross sections are parameterized with a form $\frac{d \sigma}{d X_{L}}$ $\sim(1-X_{L})^{p}$, where ${X_{L}}$ is the ratio of the longitudinal momentum of the observed pair to the total incident beam momentum. Small value of $p$ may suggest that the number of partons participating in the reaction is large and reaction has a strong dependence on the center-of-mass energy. We also discuss nuclear effects observed in our kinematic region.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, to be published in Proceedings of CIPANP2000, Quebec, May 22-28, 2000, requires aipproc.sty(included