4,052 research outputs found

    An analysis of the duties of general clerical workers in the General Electric Company

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    Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University 1949. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

    On the relevance of chaos for halo stars in the Solar Neighbourhood

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    We show that diffusion due to chaotic mixing in the Neighbourhood of the Sun may not be as relevant as previously suggested in erasing phase space signatures of past Galactic accretion events. For this purpose, we analyse Solar Neighbourhood-like volumes extracted from cosmological simulations that naturally account for chaotic orbital behaviour induced by the strongly triaxial and cuspy shape of the resulting dark matter haloes, among other factors. In the approximation of an analytical static triaxial model, our results show that a large fraction of stellar halo particles in such local volumes have chaos onset times (i.e., the timescale at which stars commonly associated with chaotic orbits will exhibit their chaotic behaviour) significantly larger than a Hubble time. Furthermore, particles that do present a chaotic behaviour within a Hubble time do not exhibit significant diffusion in phase space.Comment: 20 pages, 16 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA

    Psychological interventions for the treatment of depression, anxiety, alcohol misuse or anger in armed forces veterans and their families: systematic review and meta-analysis protocol.

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    This is the final version. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.BACKGROUND: Evidence highlights a high prevalence of common mental health disorders in armed forces veterans and their families, with depression, anxiety, alcohol misuse and anger being more common than PTSD. This paper presents a protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis to identify existing randomised controlled trial (RCT) research testing the effectiveness of psychological interventions for these difficulties in armed forces veterans and their family members. METHODS: Electronic databases (CENTRAL, PsycInfo, MEDLINE, CINAHL, The Cochrane Register of Clinical Trials, EMBASE and ASSIA) will be searched to identify suitable studies for inclusion in the review supplemented by forward and backward reference checking, grey literature searches and contact with subject authors. Research including armed forces veterans and their family members will be included in the review with research including serving personnel or individuals under the age of 18 being excluded. Few RCTs examining the treatment of depression, anxiety, alcohol misuse or anger exist in armed forces veterans to date. The primary outcome will be symptomatic change following intervention for these difficulties. The secondary outcomes will include methodological aspects of interest such as discharge type and recruitment setting if data permits. In the event that the number of studies identified is too low to undertake a meta-analysis, a narrative review will be conducted. Quality assessment will be undertaken using the Cochrane Collaboration Tool and Cochran's Q statistic calculated to test for heterogeneity as suggested by the Cochrane handbook. DISCUSSION: The review will examine the findings of existing intervention research for depression, anxiety, alcohol misuse or anger in armed forces veterans and their families, along with any effect sizes that may exist. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: PROSPERO CRD42016036676.Libor Fun

    Optical diode based on the chirality of guided photons

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    Photons are nonchiral particles: their handedness can be both left and right. However, when light is transversely confined, it can locally exhibit a transverse spin whose orientation is fixed by the propagation direction of the photons. Confined photons thus have chiral character. Here, we employ this to demonstrate nonreciprocal transmission of light at the single-photon level through a silica nanofibre in two experimental schemes. We either use an ensemble of spin-polarised atoms that is weakly coupled to the nanofibre-guided mode or a single spin-polarised atom strongly coupled to the nanofibre via a whispering-gallery-mode resonator. We simultaneously achieve high optical isolation and high forward transmission. Both are controlled by the internal atomic state. The resulting optical diode is the first example of a new class of nonreciprocal nanophotonic devices which exploit the chirality of confined photons and which are, in principle, suitable for quantum information processing and future quantum optical networks

    The Caterpillar Project: A Large Suite of Milky Way Sized Halos

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    We present the largest number of Milky Way sized dark matter halos simulated at very high mass (\sim10410^4 M_\odot/particle) and temporal resolution (\sim5 Myrs/snapshot) done to date, quadrupling what is currently available in the literature. This initial suite consists of the first 24 halos of the CaterpillarCaterpillar ProjectProject (www.caterpillarproject.org) whose project goal of 60 - 70 halos will be made public when complete. We resolve \sim20,000 gravitationally bound subhalos within the virial radius of each host halo. Over the ranges set by our spatial resolution our convergence is excellent and improvements were made upon current state-of-the-art halo finders to better identify substructure at such high resolutions (e.g., on average we recover \sim4 subhalos in each host halo above 108^8 M_\odot which would have otherwise not been found using conventional methods). For our relaxed halos, the inner profiles are reasonably fit by Einasto profiles (α\alpha = 0.169 ±\pm 0.023) though this depends on the relaxed nature and assembly history of a given halo. Averaging over all halos, the substructure mass fraction is fm,subs=0.121±0.041f_{m,subs} = 0.121 \pm 0.041, and mass function slope is dNN/dMM1.88±0.10M\propto M^{-1.88 \pm 0.10} though we find scatter in the normalizations for fixed halo mass due to more concentrated hosts having less subhalos at fixed subhalo mass. There are no biases stemming from Lagrangian volume selection as all Lagrangian volume types are included in our sample. Our detailed contamination study of 264 low resolution halos has resulted in obtaining very large and unprecedented, high-resolution regions around our host halos for our target resolution (sphere of radius \sim1.4±0.41.4 \pm 0.4 Mpc) allowing for accurate studies of low mass dwarf galaxies at large galactocentric radii and the very first stellar systems at high redshift (zz \geq 10).Comment: 19 pages; 14 figures; 6 tables; Received September 3, 2015; Accepted November 15, 2015; Published February 2, 201

    The inter-rater reliability of the diagnosis of surgical site infection in the context of a clinical trial.

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    ObjectivesThe diagnosis of surgical site infection following endoprosthetic reconstruction for bone tumours is frequently a subjective diagnosis. Large clinical trials use blinded Central Adjudication Committees (CACs) to minimise the variability and bias associated with assessing a clinical outcome. The aim of this study was to determine the level of inter-rater and intra-rater agreement in the diagnosis of surgical site infection in the context of a clinical trial.Materials and methodsThe Prophylactic Antibiotic Regimens in Tumour Surgery (PARITY) trial CAC adjudicated 29 non-PARITY cases of lower extremity endoprosthetic reconstruction. The CAC members classified each case according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) criteria for surgical site infection (superficial, deep, or organ space). Combinatorial analysis was used to calculate the smallest CAC panel size required to maximise agreement. A final meeting was held to establish a consensus.ResultsFull or near consensus was reached in 20 of the 29 cases. The Fleiss kappa value was calculated as 0.44 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.35 to 0.53), or moderate agreement. The greatest statistical agreement was observed in the outcome of no infection, 0.61 (95% CI 0.49 to 0.72, substantial agreement). Panelists reached a full consensus in 12 of 29 cases and near consensus in five of 29 cases when CDC criteria were used (superficial, deep or organ space). A stable maximum Fleiss kappa of 0.46 (95% CI 0.50 to 0.35) at CAC sizes greater than three members was obtained.ConclusionsThere is substantial agreement among the members of the PARITY CAC regarding the presence or absence of surgical site infection. Agreement on the level of infection, however, is more challenging. Additional clinical information routinely collected by the prospective PARITY trial may improve the discriminatory capacity of the CAC in the parent study for the diagnosis of infection.Cite this article: J. Nuttall, N. Evaniew, P. Thornley, A. Griffin, B. Deheshi, T. O'Shea, J. Wunder, P. Ferguson, R. L. Randall, R. Turcotte, P. Schneider, P. McKay, M. Bhandari, M. Ghert. The inter-rater reliability of the diagnosis of surgical site infection in the context of a clinical trial. Bone Joint Res 2016;5:347-352. DOI: 10.1302/2046-3758.58.BJR-2016-0036.R1
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