Cotton spinning to climbing gear: practical aspects of design evolution in Lancashire and the North West of England

This article looks at the role of path dependency in the design of outdoor clothing and equipment, from the perspective of changing and overlapping industrial clusters in Lancashire and Sheffield, from the 1960s. It demonstrates that, unlike the fashion market, design in mountaineering clothing and equipment was originally based heavily upon functionality and hence on user innovation. It shows that skills and knowledge which evolved during the industrial revolution, in both industrial areas, were vitally important to the development of internationally competitive mountaineering equipment firms. It was, however, the way in which these sources of knowledge were combined with sporting expertise that contributed to the design of innovative functional products. In addition, fundamental changes occurred in the relationship between manufacturers and their customers and these were vital to the success of this process, marking a departure from past practice

A Fourier transform spectrometer for visible and near ultra-violet measurements of atmospheric absorption

The development of a prototype, ground-based, Sun-pointed Michelson interferometric spectrometer is described. Its intended use is to measure the atmospheric amount of various gases which absorb in the near-infrared, visible, and near-ultraviolet portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Preliminary spectra which contain the alpha, 0.8 micrometer, and rho sigma tau water vapor absorption bands in the near-infrared are presented to indicate the present capability of the system. Ultimately, the spectrometer can be used to explore the feasible applications of Fourier transform spectroscopy in the ultraviolet where grating spectrometers were used exclusively

Self-reported pain severity is associated with a history of coronary heart disease

This study was funded by Arthritis Research UK (grant number: 17292).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Non-Perturbative Theory of Dispersion Interactions

Some open questions exist with fluctuation-induced forces between extended dipoles. Conventional intuition derives from large-separation perturbative approximations to dispersion force theory. Here we present a full non-perturbative theory. In addition we discuss how one can take into account finite dipole size corrections. It is of fundamental value to investigate the limits of validity of the perturbative dispersion force theory.Comment: 9 pages, no figure

Assessment of Psychophysiological Differences of West Point Cadets and Civilian Controls Immersed within a Virtual Environment

Abstract. An important question for ecologically valid virtual environments is whether cohort characteristics affect immersion. If a method for assessing a cer-tain neurocognitive capacity (e.g. attentional processing) is adapted to a cohort other than the one that was used for the initial normative distribution, data ob-tained in the new cohort may not be reflective of the neurocognitive capacity in question. We assessed the psychophysiological impact of different levels of immersion upon persons from two cohorts: 1) civilian university students; and 2) West Point Cadets. Cadets were found to have diminished startle eyeblink amplitude compared with civilians, which may reflect that cadets experienced less negative affect during the scenario in general. Further, heart rate data re-vealed that Cadets had significantly lower heart rates than Civilians in the “low ” but not “high ” immersion condition. This suggests that “low ” immersion conditions may not have the ecological validity necessary to evoke consistent affect across cohorts

Boulder Bands on Lobate Debris Aprons: Does Spatial Clustering Reveal Accumulation History for Martian Glaciations?

Glacial landforms such as lobate debris aprons (LDA) and Concentric Crater Fill (CCF) are the dominant debris-covered glacial landforms on Mars. These landforms represent a volumetrically significant component of the Amazonian water ice budget, however, because small craters (diameter D 0.5-1 km) are poorly retained glacial brain terrain surfaces, and, since the glacial landforms are geologically young, it is challenging to reliably constrain either individual glacial deposit ages or formational sequences in order to determine how quickly the glaciers accumulated. A fundamental question remaining is whether ice deposition and flow that formed LDA occurred episodically during a few, short instances, or whether glacial flow was quasi-continuous over a long period (~108 yr). Because glaciation is thought to be controlled largely by obliquity excursions, a larger question is whether glacial deposits on Mars exhibit regional to global characteristics that can be used to infer synchronicity of flow or degradation

Polymorphisms in the circadian expressed genes PER3 and ARNTL2 are associated with diurnal preference and GNβ3 with sleep measures

Sleep and circadian rhythms are intrinsically linked, with several sleep traits, including sleep timing and duration, influenced by both sleep homeostasis and the circadian phase. Genetic variation in several circadian genes has been associated with diurnal preference (preference in timing of sleep), although there has been limited research on whether they are associated with other sleep measurements. We investigated whether these genetic variations were associated with diurnal preference (Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire) and various sleep measures, including: the global Pittsburgh Sleep Quality index score; sleep duration; and sleep latency and sleep quality. We genotyped 10 polymorphisms in genes with circadian expression in participants from the G1219 sample (n = 966), a British longitudinal population sample of young adults. We conducted linear regressions using dominant, additive and recessive models of inheritance to test for associations between these polymorphisms and the sleep measures. We found a significant association between diurnal preference and a polymorphism in period homologue 3 (PER3) (P < 0.005, recessive model) and a novel nominally significant association between diurnal preference and a polymorphism in aryl hydrocarbon receptor nuclear translocator-like 2 (ARNTL2) (P < 0.05, additive model). We found that a polymorphism in guanine nucleotide binding protein beta 3 (GNβ3) was associated significantly with global sleep quality (P < 0.005, recessive model), and that a rare polymorphism in period homologue 2 (PER2) was associated significantly with both sleep duration and quality (P < 0.0005, recessive model). These findings suggest that genes with circadian expression may play a role in regulating both the circadian clock and sleep homeostasis, and highlight the importance of further studies aimed at dissecting the specific roles that circadian genes play in these two interrelated but unique behaviours

Rewiring strategies for changing environments

A typical pervasive application executes in a changing environment: people, computing resources, software services and network connections come and go continuously. A robust pervasive application needs adapt to this changing context as long as there is an appropriate rewiring strategy that guarantees correct behavior. We combine the MERODE modeling methodology with the ReWiRe framework for creating interactive pervasive applications that can cope with changing environments. The core of our approach is a consistent environment model, which is essential to create (re)configurable context-aware pervasive applications. We aggregate different ontologies that provide the required semantics to describe almost any target environment. We present a case study that shows a interactive pervasive application for media access that incorporates parental control on media content and can migrate between devices. The application builds upon models of the run-time environment represented as system states for dedicated rewiring strategies