Cognitive Bias in Clinical Medicine

Cognitive bias is increasingly recognised as an important source of medical error, and is both ubiquitous across clinical practice yet incompletely understood. This increasing awareness of bias has resulted in a surge in clinical and psychological research in the area and development of various ‘debiasing strategies’. This paper describes the potential origins of bias based on ‘dual process thinking’, discusses and illustrates a number of the important biases that occur in clinical practice, and considers potential strategies that might be used to mitigate their effect

On The Use Of Polyurethane Matrix Carbon Fiber Composites For Strengthening Concrete Structures

Fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite materials have effectively been used in numerous reinforced concrete civil infrastructure strengthening projects. Although a significant body of knowledge has been established for epoxy matrix carbon FRPs and epoxy adhesives, there is still a need to investigate other matrices and adhesive types. One such matrix/adhesive type yet to be heavily researched for infrastructure application is polyurethane. This thesis investigates use of polyurethane matrix carbon fiber composites for strengthening reinforced concrete civil infrastructure. Investigations on mirco- and macro-mechanical composite performance, strengthened member flexural performance, and bond durability under environmental conditioning will be presented. Results indicate that polyurethane carbon composites could potentially be a viable option for strengthening concrete structures

Conditional preparation of states containing a definite number of photons

A technique for conditionally creating single- or multimode photon-number states is analyzed using Bayesian theory. We consider the heralded N-photon states created from the photons produced by an unseeded optical parametric amplifier when the heralding detector is the time-multiplexed photon-number-resolving detector recently demonstrated by Fitch, et al. [Phys. Rev. A 68, 043814 (2003).] and simultaneously by Achilles, et al. [Opt. Lett. 28, 2387 (2003).]. We find that even with significant loss in the heralding detector, fields with sub-Poissonian photon-number distributions can be created. We also show that heralded multimode fields created using this technique are more robust against detector loss than are single-mode fields.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, reference added, typos corrected, content update

Cruise Report prepared by INFOMAR and the Marine Institute, Galway, Ireland to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund and the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

A requirement exists to quantify the abundance and distribution of offshore biogenic and geogenic reef habitats in Irish waters to fulfil Ireland’s legal mandate and to generate baseline data from which appropriate monitoring systems can be established. To address this an extensive offshore reef survey of Ireland’s Northwest Continental margin was commissioned by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), funded by the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF), and coordinated and led by INFOMAR (Integrated Mapping for the Sustainable Development of Ireland’s Marine Resources) and Ireland’s Marine Institute. The objectives of the survey were to implement the EMFF’s Marine Biodiversity Scheme - Natura Fisheries by mapping offshore reef habitats with a view to protecting them from deterioration due to fishing pressures. The reef project aligns with sub-article 6.2 of the Habitats Directive (EC 92/43/EEC) which requires member states to take measures to avoid deterioration of protected habitats. A survey, Sensitive Ecosystem Assessment and ROV Exploration of Reef (SeaRover), took place in July 2017 aboard the ILV Granuaile equipped with the Marine Institute’s remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Holland 1 and a multidisciplinary team of scientists to observe seabed features and biological associations along the northwest continental shelf. The Holland 1 employs high-definition (HD) camera, various composite video feeds and a robotic arm to facilitate sample collection. The primary scientific objective was to map the distribution and abundance of geogenic and biogenic reef habitat along the northwest shelf edge of Ireland’s continental slope with HD video. Secondary objectives included the collection of biological samples for genetic and population analysis and the collection of sediment cores for ground-truthing seabed mapping data and analysis of micro-plastics within deep-water sediment

EMFF Offshore Reef Survey, Sensitive Ecosystem Assessment and ROV Exploration of Reef - SeaRover 2018 Cruise Report

This report presents preliminary findings of a 2018 offshore reef survey of Ireland’s Northwest continental margin and Rockall Bank. The survey is part of an extensive three year project, beginning 2017, that is coordinated and led by Ireland’s Marine Institute and INFOMAR (Integrated Mapping for the Sustainable Development of Ireland’s Marine Resources) and funded by the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF) Marine Biodiversity Scheme and the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS). The objectives of the project are to implement the EMFF’s Marine Biodiversity Scheme - Natura Fisheries by mapping offshore reef habitats with a view to protecting them from deterioration due to fishing pressures. The reef project aligns with sub-article 6.2 of the Habitats Directive (EC 92/43/EEC) which requires member states to take measures to avoid deterioration of protected habitats. The overarching aim is to quantify the abundance and distribution of offshore biogenic and geogenic reef habitat in Irish waters to fulfil Ireland’s legal mandate and to generate baseline data from which appropriate monitoring of Reef habitat within Special Areas of Conservation (SAC) can be established. The initial survey in July 2017 (O’Sullivan et al. 2017) primarily focussed on the Continental margin west and northwest of Ireland. The second survey leg took place in July 2018 aboard the ILV Granuaile. The survey vessel was equipped with the Marine Institute’s remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Holland 1 to observe seabed features and biological associations along the northwest continental shelf and the eastern flank of the Rockall Ban

The Rate of Homogenous Nucleation of Ice in Supercooled Water.

The homogeneous freezing of water is of fundamental importance to a number of fields, including that of cloud formation. However, there is considerable scatter in homogeneous nucleation rate coefficients reported in the literature. Using a cold stage droplet system designed to minimize uncertainties in temperature measurements, we examined the freezing of over fifteen hundred pure water droplets with diameters between 4 and 24 μm. Under the assumption that nucleation occurs within the bulk of the droplet, nucleation rate coefficients fall within the spread of literature data and are in good agreement with a subset of more recent measurements. To quantify the relative importance of surface and volume nucleation in our experiments, where droplets are supported by a hydrophobic surface and surrounded by oil, comparison of droplets with different surface area to volume ratios was performed. From our experiments it is shown that in droplets larger than 6 µm diameter (between 234.6 and 236.5 K), nucleation in the interior is more important than nucleation at the surface. At smaller sizes we cannot rule out a significant contribution of surface nucleation, and in order to further constrain surface nucleation experiments with smaller droplets are necessary. Nevertheless, in our experiments, it is dominantly volume nucleation controlling the observed nucleation rate

Vertebral Bone Mineral Measures and Psychological Wellbeing Among Individuals with Modic Changes

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The Work-Rate of Elite Hurling Match-Play

This study describes the global work-rate of elite hurling match-play and the influence which positional difference has on workrate is considered. The movement of ninety-four players was recorded using global positioning system, sampling at 4 Hz in a total of 12 games. Data were classified according to the positional line on the field and period of the match. The total and high-speed distance of match-play was 7,617 6 1,219 m (95% confidence interval [CI], 7,367–7,866) and 1,134 6 358 m (95% CI, 1,060–1,206), respectively. The maximum speed attained was 29.8 6 2.3 km.h-1 with a mean speed of 6.1 6 1 kmh 21. The second {271 6 107 m (p = 0.001; effect size [ES] = 0.25)}, third (278 6 118 m [p = 0.001; ES = 0.21]), and fourth quarter (255 6 108 m [p = 0.001; ES = 0.31]) high-speed running distance differed significantly from that of the first quarter (330 6 120 m). There was a significant difference in total (p = 0.001; ES = 0.01–0.85), high-speed running (p = 0.001; ES = 0.21–0.76), and sprint (p = 0.013; ES = 0.01–0.39) distance across the positions, with midfielders undertaking the highest volume of work, followed by the half-forward and half-back lines and finally the full-forward and full-back lines. A decrease in high-speed running distance seems to occur through out the game and in particular at the latter stages of each half. Distinct positional work profiles are evident. The present finding provide a context on which training which replicates the work-rate of match-play may be formulated, thus helping to improve the physical preparation of elite players

A conservative finite volume method for the population balance equation with aggregation, fragmentation, nucleation and growth

In the present paper, we present a method for solving the population balance equation (PBE) with the complete range of kinetic processes included: namely aggregation, fragmentation, nucleation and growth. The method is based on the finite volume scheme and features guaranteed conservation of the first moment by construction, accurate prediction of the size distribution, applicability to an arbitrary non-uniform grid, robustness and computational efficiency which is instrumental for coupling with computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The treatment of aggregation is based on the previous work by Liu and Rigopoulos (2019). An analysis of the aggregation terms in the PBE is made, and the source of conservation error in finite element/volume methods is elucidated. It is subsequently shown how this error is overcome in the present method via a coordinate transformation applied to the aggregation birth double integral resulting from the application of the finite volume method. The contributions to the birth term are delineated and their corresponding death fluxes identified. An aggregation map is then constructed for mapping birth and death fluxes, thus allowing the finite volume method to operate in terms of fluxes and achieve conservation of mass. The method is then extended to fragmentation, for which a map is also constructed to represent the birth and death fluxes. In the implementation, the aggregation and fragmentation maps are pre-tabulated to allow fast computation. It is also shown how the method can be coupled with a total variation diminishing (TVD) scheme for the treatment of growth with minimal numerical diffusion. The method is validated with a number of test cases including analytical solutions and numerical solutions of the discrete PBE for aggregation (theoretical and free molecule/Brownian kernels), fragmentation, aggregation-fragmentation and aggregation-growth. In all cases, the method produces very accurate results, while also being computationally efficient due to the pre-tabulation of the maps and the simplicity of the algorithm carried out per time step